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by John David Anderson

  “She actually said that?” Bench said with a whistle.

  We were walking together to lunch, the day Ruby’s phone was taken from her. It was the four of us: Deedee with his Lord of the Rings lunch box that wasn’t retro enough to be cool yet and Wolf with his brown paper sack that was. Me wearing Bench’s last pair of Nikes and a T-shirt that said SAVE THE WHALES—THEY MAKE GOOD LEFTOVERS. My uncle sent it to me for my birthday. He’s kind of demented, but he always remembers, which is nice.

  Bench was leading the way. We always let him take point.

  “Technically she typed it,” I said. “I don’t think you’d ever hear her say those words out loud.” I tried to imagine Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz dropping the kinds of bombs that Ruby did in that text message. Some of the things she wrote would have made the Wicked Witch turn white.

  “She’s going to get suspended,” Wolf said.

  “Or worse,” Deedee added.

  “I still can’t believe she said that about him.”

  Bench shook his head. The him was a big part of the problem and one of the reasons Ruby was sure to get sent home this time. It wasn’t some guy she’d had a crush on or some other kid who bad-mouthed Ruby behind her back. The him was Mr. Jackson. An adult. A teacher. He apparently gave Ruby an F on her last science test because he suspected her of cheating. In response she thumbed a long rant to her friends, calling him several choice names and saying that he could just go kiss a certain part of her backside. With three exclamation points. She only sent the text to two people, but it didn’t matter. Friends have friends. The message made the rounds. Ruby was going to have a really hard time passing science this year.

  “I saw Mr. Jackson in the hall. He looked bad. All sweaty and red,” Deedee said.

  “He always looks like that,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he looked like he was going to have a heart attack.”

  “He always looks like that, too.” Mr. Jackson was not a small man, as many of the crude drawings in the boys’ bathroom could attest to. He was a few hundred pounds, much of it pillowing around his center like a monster truck tire. One of the unfortunate F-words Ruby used in her text was “fat.”

  “Definitely expelled,” Deedee said. “You just can’t say those kinds of things. Not in school. Not about a teacher.”

  Actually, I wouldn’t dare say some of things Ruby said about anyone. Not in any way that could be traced back to me, at least.

  “Why not, though?” Bench asked. “I mean, she’s entitled to her opinion, right? Like, constitutionally?”

  I gave Bench a look. He wasn’t defending her. He wasn’t friends with Ruby any more than I was; he was only playing devil’s advocate. We learned about the Bill of Rights in social studies earlier this year—from a droning Mr. Hostler. I didn’t pay too close attention. Most of the amendments only seemed to matter if you got arrested, which wasn’t in my foreseeable future (Mom would kill me), though Bench’s comment made me wonder if Mr. Jackson could have Ruby arrested for defamation of character or something. Verbal abuse. Assault with a deadly text.

  “The First Amendment says nothing about reasonable consequences for sending texts calling your science teacher a—” Deedee tried to muster the courage to repeat what he’d read, but it was too much for him to say out loud. He wasn’t exactly a rule breaker. None of us were. We weren’t total suck-ups either—we just tried to keep our noses clean. We flew under the radar. It was one of the many keys to survival. “I’m pretty sure it just keeps you from being arrested for saying what you think. Doesn’t mean you can’t get in trouble.”

  “I think she was better off keeping her opinion to herself,” Wolf said from behind me.

  Wolf. The voice of reason. We counted on him for that. Just like we counted on Deedee to find drama in everything and Bench to keep us from getting beat up. And counted on me . . . I’m not sure what we counted on me for.

  “Mark my words—this isn’t over,” Deedee divined. “Somehow or another it’s going to come back and bite us all in the you-know-what.”

  “Are you going to roll for it?” I asked. “Or are you suddenly psychic?”

  “I’m telling you,” Deedee said. “Stuff like this doesn’t go unnoticed.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Wolf countered. “Nothing ever changes around here.”

  I nodded, sure he was right. I’d never seen Wolf get flustered over much of anything, even the little shoves and digs that come with being in middle school, the needling comments and sidelong sneers. Wolf took them in stride, and he certainly took enough of them. Bench called him “composed,” which made a lot of sense when you thought about it. Sometimes that meant that you didn’t know exactly what Wolf was thinking, not if he was being quiet, which was kind of a default for him. Unlike Deedee, who might as well have billboards above his head spelling out his feelings for anyone who cared to know, which was usually just the three of us, and not always that many.

  “I’m serious,” Deedee said. “You wait and see. We’re all going to pay for this.”

  Wolf gave him a playful shove as we pushed into the cafeteria, Bench and I waiting in line, Deedee and Wolf headed toward our usual seats. The same seats we’d sat in for a couple of years now. Just the four of us.

  My people. The ones I found.

  The ones I counted on for everything.

  THE CRACKDOWN

  I SHOULD STOP AND TELL YOU ABOUT THEM. THE TRIBE. MAYBE IT WILL help you to understand what happened. Maybe not. Maybe there is no explanation. Maybe my dad is right and people are just basically jerks. It certainly seems that way sometimes.

  I have this theory. I call it the theory of socio-magnetic homogeny. A bunch of big words, but it basically says that people gravitate toward people who share their interests and whatnot. Band kids will hang out with other band kids. People with pierced tongues will hang out with people with pierced noses. The basketball players will clump together like cat hair on a sofa. Kids whose lawyer fathers drive heated-leather-seated sports cars hang with other kids whose lawyer fathers drive heated-leather-seated sports cars. There are exceptions, of course, but all other things being equal, you merge with the crowd that reminds you the most of you.

  It’s not that original, I guess. And it’s mostly just common sense, but I took it one step further. My theory has to do with the people who don’t find people just like them. These people—they find each other. And then they realize that not finding people like them is the thing they have in common. That’s what happened to me, I think. I found the people who weren’t quite like other people, and we used that difference as glue.

  There were four of us. All boys. And we were all smart, or at least above the national average according to state-mandated standardized tests, so we had that too. What we didn’t have was a tribe.

  So we made one.

  For me, at least, it started with Bench. Real name: Jeremiah Jones. His parents and teachers call him J.J. but we don’t call each other by our real names. You can blame me for that one. Bench does sports, the big three of football, basketball, and baseball—but he’s not that good at any of them, not good enough to start anyways, so mostly he just moves from bench to bench, waiting for the fourth quarter or the ninth inning, when the game is completely out of hand and putting him in won’t really cost anything or alter the fabric of the universe.

  The cool thing about Bench was that he didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t very good; he just enjoyed being a part of the team. The other players didn’t mind having him around because he was a nice guy (who also never threatened to replace them), and the coaches liked him because he was an A student and never complained. Bench was BMS’s poster boy for student athletes; he brought the cumulative GPA of the basketball team up. It was good for us because being attached to Bench, the rest of us were mostly ignored by the other jocks. We didn’t care that he never scored a single goal. In fact, it was probably better for us that he didn’t. It’s not as if the starting quarterback sat at our table.<
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  Besides, Bench could at least make a free throw, which is more than can be said for Deedee, aka Advik Patel, the third member of our tribe. His dad is Indian, which Bench says should make him genetically inclined to love cricket, at least, but Advik prefers to fight dragons instead. Deedee is short for D&D, which is way too geeky to say out loud, even for us, but he says none of us can pronounce his real name right anyway, so Deedee’s fine with him. Unlike Bench, who has an inch on me, at least, Deedee’s a full two inches shorter than I am, with shorter black hair and an even shorter attention span, and he knows way too much about Tolkien and Harry Potter and Gary Gygax.

  You probably don’t know who Gary Gygax is, and even if you do, you probably wouldn’t admit it. I don’t blame you. There are some things that have to stay among your tribe.

  Deedee’s a polyhedral dice junkie. That’s what you call those dice with so many different faces. He’s got a collection of them tucked away in a wooden box shaped like a treasure chest under his bed. Clear ones and colored ones and ones that look like they’ve been chiseled out of marble. Little pyramids that go up to four and giant, angular eyeballs that go all the way up to sixty. I won’t bother telling you what most thirteen-year-old boys keep hidden under their beds, but I guarantee you it’s not dice. He also keeps one in his pocket, a ten-sider with a dragon in place of the number one. He insists it’s good luck. He uses it to make pretty much all his major life decisions.

  We played D&D with Deedee on the weekends—so long as Wolf wasn’t out of town at a recital and Bench didn’t have some kind of camp or practice (turns out I’m almost always available). Deedee was the dungeon master, of course. Bench was a hulking barbarian with too many swords. I was an elvish thief who went around stabbing everyone in the back.

  Wolf was a bard. He stood in the back and played his music and tried to stay out of the way.

  That’s called typecasting.

  Wolf is short for Wolfgang, which is short for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, because, as Wolf puts it, he could never pull off the nickname Mozart. Of course he can’t pull off Wolf either, but we let it go, mostly because his real name is Morgan, which at some point became much more popular for girls than boys.

  Nothing about Wolf looks particularly wolfish. Maybe starved-wolf-who-doesn’t-get-out-of-the-cave-much—lanky limbs and freckly face and moppish blond hair that he’s constantly brushing out of his eyes. What he is, though, is a piano prodigy. Three-time Falsin County award winner, juniors division. Wolf has been playing since he was five. Mostly classical. Some jazz. He can actually play that bumblebee song—the one that sounds like the piano itself is having a seizure. We keep begging him to put his talents to good use writing rock songs, but his parents don’t believe in good music. They believe in Chopin and perfect posture and two hours of practice a day. Wolf sits on a bench almost as much as Bench does.

  Except we’re all pretty sure that Bench is never going to be a starting wide out for the Lions, despite all his talk of someday winning the Super Bowl. Wolf’s different. Someday we are all going to go watch him play Carnegie Hall. He’ll be wearing a tuxedo and white bow tie to match the keys. And the three of us will have front-row seats.

  Bench, Deedee, and Wolf. The tribe. My people. Not that we couldn’t have tried to fit in somewhere else. Bench had guys he knuckle-bumped in the halls from his various teams. Wolf knew people in the band. Even Deedee had a couple of kids he went to summer camp with. But there was something that drew the four of us together. We just got each other. It was easy.

  We knew where we belonged.

  There were others, sometimes. Nomads. People who hadn’t found their tribe yet. Guys like Nips (superfluous third nipple, on the right, just below his equally superfluous second nipple) and Crash (skateboard versus car, car won), but for the most part it was just the four of us. Bench, Deedee, Wolf, and me.

  My name is Frost.

  Cool, right?

  Trust me, it’s not.

  But at least it’s better than Nips.

  Ruby’s text—seen by Ms. Sheers, and then the Big Ham, and eventually by most of the student body—was (as one concerned teacher put it) “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Though, if I had to guess, I’d say the camel was pretty well dead before Ruby had her phone taken away. After all, there had been several incidents of technology misuse before Ruby’s rant against Mr. Jackson. Facebook posts. Crude pics on Instagram. A whole Snapchat exchange that got two kids sent home for three days. Flame wars. Threats. At least a dozen instances of kids getting caught using their phones to cheat on tests. No doubt Principal Wittingham had hundreds more occurrences written up in his files. More than enough to fuel a crusade. Ruby’s text was simply a spark.

  A catalyst.

  Word spread quickly outside the walls of Branton Middle School. Kids told their parents. Parents told other parents. Wittingham sent out a message to every family, calling for a school community meeting. In the span of only forty-eight hours it suddenly became clear to every teacher, parent, and administrator that cell phones—with their texts and their apps and their electric, buzzy addictiveness—were no longer just a nuisance: they represented a clear and present danger to every student at BMS.

  The meeting was held. Studies were cited. Statistics were shown. Other school systems were held up as models. Turns out cell phones were to blame for everything wrong in the world. They weren’t just the primary avenue for bullying, though that was brought up several times. They were also eating away at our brain cells. They were almost solely responsible for the decline in test scores in Falsin County in particular and for the failure of the American education system in general. They caused cancer. They could suck out your soul. They were the next step in mankind’s eventual demise.

  Forget the fact that half the adults in the room were using their phones to find even more statistics for why phones were bad for you. The point was, in school anyways, cell phones were a menace. “Confiscating them,” Principal Wittingham argued, “is not simply a matter of sound educational policy. It’s in our best national interest.”

  A vote was taken. The majority ruled. The students got no say. A new school policy was written into the student code book.

  No more phones. Period.

  Not in lockers. Not in pockets. Not in backpacks. They were to stay at home. If you absolutely had to bring one for emergency reasons or for use after school, it would be turned in at the office at the start of the day, placed in a labeled Ziploc baggie, and kept there until the final bell. If your parents called to tell you that your aunt Tilda slipped in the bathroom and stabbed herself in the eye with her own toothbrush, the secretary would take a message and have you called down to the office. Principal Wittingham couldn’t control what was said and done off school grounds, but while we were inside the cinder-block walls of BMS, there would be no texting, calling, posting, playing, or surfing. We were there to learn. Case closed.

  A few parents protested. Complained that their kids had a right to keep their electronic devices on them at all times. The administration reminded them that there was nothing in the US Constitution specifically governing the individual rights of cell-phone-carrying minors. Having a phone was a privilege. And one that the students of Branton Middle School had finally lost.

  When the vote was passed, Mr. Jackson looked like a cat that just ate a three-hundred-pound canary. Ruby just stared at her shoes. They were white Chucks, with red letters to match the color in her cheeks. Everyone blamed her, of course, though it could just as easily have been them who’d gotten caught. Afterward they went online, telling her thanks for ruining our lives and that she should find a tornado and get sucked back to Oz. A couple more eloquent students posted long messages directed at the administration, asking them to reconsider. The Falsin County Gazette published two pages’ worth of articles about it in Sunday’s editorial section—mostly in favor of the new rule.

  Everyone had to get all their online complaining out before Monday, when the school
’s new policy would take effect and we’d all be disconnected for good.

  The new rules were clearly posted on two different signs on the way in (and on several more scattered throughout the halls), informing students that any phones or tablets found in a student’s possession would be confiscated immediately and the student would receive a warning. If it happened again, it was an automatic one-day suspension. After that it got even worse.

  By the end of the week, seventeen kids had been suspended. The administration was in full crackdown. Ms. Sheers looked like a sniper sitting at her desk.

  Not that it mattered to me, of course, because of the budget and all.

  Bench and Wolf both had phones, but Bench just used his to call his father for a ride after practice and Wolf mostly used his to listen to music. The only one of us heartbroken was Deedee. He was a member of several online gaming communities and even contributed to a blog called The Dungeon’s Depths. That first day, I could tell he was getting twitchy. He certainly wasn’t the only one.

  There was a mob at the front office when the last bell rang, kids pouring out of their classrooms, swarming like hornets. A few kids were knocked over. As soon as students got their phones back you could see them turtle, faces suctioned to screens. Deedee cradled his and called it his precious, though not loud enough for anyone but me to hear.

  The bus ride home that Monday was church-service quiet, everyone desperate to catch up on everything they’d missed, even though they hadn’t missed anything because none of their friends had had their phones either. I finished up my math homework while Bench surfed next to me, telling me a whole bunch of junk I could care less about. I heard the kid in the seat behind us mumble something about how unfair it was. “I can’t imagine going the entire year like this,” she said.

  It was clear from the start that this no-phone thing was going to be a problem. The students of BMS would have to find some way to fill the void. Some way to stay connected. I just didn’t know that that something would come about so quickly.