“NO! You don’t get to tell me it’s all part of the process. That everyone’s fighting a battle and all that crap. I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to feel sorry for Molly and her stupid falling-apart family. Or freak-show Alice, who by the way, is carrying around a bunch of giant Sharpies like the ones that ruined my work! Did you know that? Yeah. I don’t know what the story is with any of you losers. We’ve been here all week, and you know what I learned? NOTHING. Someone hates me. Someone thinks it’s a real joke to ruin the art I made. To—again and again—destroy MY ART. And maybe they had a troubled childhood or a traumatic summer but I. Don’t. Care.” I pick up the stupid fake candle, which Alice put on the windowsill, and fling it toward the front of the room. It bounces once and rolls away, not even giving me the satisfaction of breaking.
Ms. Lewiston looks even sadder. “But you do care, Theo, and that’s a good thing. I know you don’t want to hear it, but everyone is fighting—”
“An unseen battle. Yeah, whatever. You’re wrong. I don’t care about them, or about your ramalama-ding-dong Justice Circle, which just wasted a lot of time and made us all play nice for a few hours before everyone went back to their corners and I’m left exactly where I started! My stuff is ruined! But you know what?” I walk away from her, because I’m so mad I can’t stand still, can’t look at her stupid worried face another second.
I stare out the window. “The worst thing isn’t even that my photos were trashed. The worst part”—my voice cracks and I want to punch something, want to take a hammer to the whole display of dioramas and poster boards on the windowsill—“the worst part is that one of these losers hates me enough to do it. Again and again. And that, thanks to you and your STUPID idea, I get to think that whoever did it might actually be a decent person. So knowing they hate me feels even worse.” I shut my mouth, hard. Big ugly snot-filled sobs want out, but there is no way I’m crying here.
“Oh, Theo,” Ms. Lewiston starts, but I shake my head.
Erik comes toward me, his big meathead face concerned. “Hey, buddy—”
But I put up my hands. “Stop talking. STOP TALKING! Seriously, you’re one sports metaphor away from being a crappy Nike ad. God, you’re an idiot! No one cares what you have to say except your stupid friends, and you guys deserve each other.”
Erik steps back, his face as red as if I slapped him. But I don’t care. At all.
I look around. “All of you! You think you’re such special snowflakes, with your own unique stories. But you’re just boring and average and sad. And honestly, shame on me, because for a hot minute, I thought you were something more too, but you’re not! You’re exactly what you seem: an Overachiever, a Jock, a Weirdo, a Nerd, and a Screwup.” I shake my head. “Just. Go. Away.”
Alice moves first, quietly picking up her bag and heading for the door. One by one the others follow her out.
Ms. Lewiston walks toward me, but whatever she sees in my face stops her from coming closer. We stare at each other for a second, and I turn back to the window.
“I’ll give you some space,” she says.
The last shreds of my rage flare up. “Give me ALL my space!” I shout. “Davis is right. You made it worse. This whole thing was your fault! From now on leave me alone!”
It feels good to say it, like I fed the beast that was so, so hungry. Ms. Lewiston puts her hands over her stomach, like she got punched. But she nods and tries to smile, and all the good anger drains out of me so fast I’m dizzy.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she says quietly, walking to the door. “For everything.”
* * *
—
I’m left by myself.
* * *
—
I cry for a while. Big loud noisy hiccupy sobs that I don’t even try to hide. They don’t last long. After my dad left, I learned to cry as fast as possible, getting out the bare minimum so I could look normal before my mom saw me. By the time she asked, I always said I was fine. That was when she started me on allergy medicine, because my nose and eyes were always red. But my voice sounded normal, and she didn’t have to keep dropping to her knees to hug me and hold me and try to keep her own tears in, so it worked, I guess. Even now it’s probably barely two minutes before I’m wiping my nose on my sleeve and looking around.
Anyway, no one hears, because there’s no one around. Our group, if we were ever a group, is scattered—Jax to the doctor, the others to “real” detention, and now Ms. Lewiston to wherever teachers go when everything goes wrong. Her face—frozen and trying to smile—flashes in my mind, and I curl up in the chair. What will happen now? Will she get fired? Will she ignore me in the halls on Monday? Am I supposed to apologize?
A flare of anger starts back up. This was all her fault, though. I was fine being a loner in this school. I was fine not hanging my art on the walls where people could see it and make fun of me. I was fine not feeling sorry for Molly or laughing with Alice or thinking Erik was actually a pretty decent guy or cracking up with Jax. I. Was. Fine.
And now? Now, thanks to Ms. Lewiston, I’m not fine. I was lying, just like they lied to me. Because after this week, despite what I said, I know they’re not just the Overachiever, the Jock, the Weirdo, the Nerd, and the Screwup. They’re actually fairly cool. They’re good people. Except that someone, or maybe everyone, is lying. Someone destroyed my art again and again, and lied about it. And if sort of cool people do that to my photos, what does that make me? I’m not fine at all.
I don’t say anything to my mom in the car, and when we get home, I go straight to my room. I flop facedown on my bed, smushed into my pillow. I don’t know if I’m there fifteen minutes or an hour before there’s a quiet knock on the door.
“Theo, love? You okay in there?”
I grunt.
“Can I come in?”
I’m tempted to say no, to tell her to leave me alone, and I know if I do she will, at least for a while. She’s good like that, mostly, once she’s convinced herself I’m not in here trying to build a bomb or something. But I give an affirmative grunt, and the door opens.
“Hey,” she says, carefully crossing my skateboard-and-laundry-strewn room. “How did things go today? You okay?”
I shrug, still facedown. Part of me wants to tell her what happened, but another part doesn’t want her worry and pity and sadness to sit on top of my own. Mine is bad enough.
She sits on the edge of my bed and rubs my back. “Sweet son…,” she starts.
But I sit up fast and move away, to the back wall. “Don’t,” I say. “Just…don’t.” I wrap my arms around my knees and let my hair fall down.
“Was it really bad?” she asks, her voice almost a whisper.
I shake my head, then shrug. “Yeah.” That’s the only word I get out before a sob tears out of me, so deep and hard I feel like I’m ripping in two.
I snortsobcrysnortsob all over my knees, soaking my jeans with tears and snot. I don’t know how long I cry, but when I pause, I realize my mom has both arms around me, holding me tight.
I look up, trying to catch my breath. “It’s just…” I hiccup another sob. “WHY? Why do they hate me? Am I that bad?” I bury my face again and wish I could disappear, that I could curl up into something so small that it could get lost, rolled down a gutter or vacuumed up without anyone even noticing.
“Oh, Theo,” my mom says, and her voice is so sad that I cry harder.
I don’t say what’s pulsing through my brain:
I have no friends.
My dad doesn’t even stay in touch.
Kids at school go out of their way to torture me, to laugh at me, to make the most me part of myself, my photos, the ground zero for humiliation and pain.
I’m alone and so lonely no one even likes me.
I’m about as pathetic as a person can be.
I do
n’t say any of this. I sob and sob until I don’t have anything left.
After, my mom tries to get me to get up, shower, and go get dinner. She offers Thai food as an enticement, but I’m not interested. Finally, after trying a few times, she pulls up the blankets and tucks me in. When she turns out the light, I realize how tired I am—how deep-down-to-my-bones tired. I have no idea what time it is, but I fall asleep.
I sleep like a dead person and wake up with a headache that feels like my brain is fighting its way out of my skull. Also, my stomach is all kinds of messed up. I need the bathroom. Fast. When I finally zombie walk to the breakfast table, my mom looks worried.
“How are you?” she asks. “You feeling okay?” She knows all too well that when I get nervous, it mostly shows in the appalling smells that come out of the bathroom.
“Totally fine. Must have eaten a bad clam,” I answer, avoiding her eye.
This is an ongoing joke between us, from a vacation when I was ten when my dad spent the whole five days vomiting spectacularly loudly in our tiny hotel bathroom. He was convinced it was “just a bad clam,” though my mom eventually had the local doctor shoot him full of penicillin for the massive bacterial infection he was fighting.
She side-eyes me, then slides over a bowl of oatmeal. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Theo, about last night—”
“Mom, I’m fine. Sorry I was so emo and angsty. I mean, I was legit upset, but that was over-the-top. I’m fine.” I look right at her, trying to convince her, despite what she saw and heard, that I’m not a quivering mess.
She shakes her head. “I’m glad you feel better, but we’re going to talk about it. Theo, you have to understand, just because something happened to your photos doesn’t mean people don’t like you.”
I look up, and the expression on my face makes her back up.
“Okay! Okay, it seems like someone doesn’t like you, but that’s one person! Not everyone! Theo, you are a very aloof kid! There are times I’m intimidated to talk to you, and I’m your mom!”
I ignore her and keep spooning honey into my oatmeal.
“Look.” She falls silent.
She’s quiet so long I look up and wind up dripping honey all over the table. “What,” I finally say, in a voice that’s as uninviting as possible.
“I think you should go in today. NO! Hear me out,” she says as I open my mouth to tell her all the reasons that’s a spectacularly bad idea. “Listen. You made real progress with that Justice Circle, and Ms. Lewiston has given a lot of time to the process. You agreed to go even though you didn’t have to— Hear me out!” she says again, because I’m not having any of this. “You did, Theo. You agreed to do it, and I think you should go down there and finish the job.”
I nod slowly, then say, “No. Nope, no way, but thanks anyway. I did my part. I did everything I could, okay?”
“Did you?”
They are just two little words, but they stop me.
Did I do everything I could?
Well, no. Not really. I didn’t actually want to know. I didn’t tell Erik I saw his phone. I didn’t push Alice for answers. I went along with it, but honestly, I never really wanted this Justice Circle to work, because if it worked, I’d have to stare right at whoever did it.
But still. I did enough. I did all I’m going to do.
“Well?” she asks. “I feel strongly about this. I can drop you off this morning, and you can know that no matter what happens today, you stuck with it.”
I look down at my food, and my mom reaches over and lifts my chin, brushing my hair out of my face.
“It is that bad?” she whispers.
I swallow hard and move away. I don’t want to be Theo-the-pathetic, Theo-the-weak, Theo-the-pitied.
“Fine,” I say, shaking my hair back down. “Fine, I’ll go.” What I don’t say is that I’ll go hang out in room 201 and read until it’s time for pickup. Because while I don’t want to fight with my mom on top of everything else, I know, with total certainty, that this is over.
“Really? You’ll do it? Do you think you might be willing to talk a bit more with people there, and maybe share more with them?” She sounds ridiculously pleased, which makes me equal parts glad I lied and deeply ashamed of it.
“Yeah, well, I’ll think about showing…erm, I mean sharing, more of my…More. Self. Stuff.” I say this through a huge bit of oatmeal, which I think helps the situation.
My mom looks like she’s trying incredibly hard not to pry my mouth open, Hulk-style, and make me talk actual words that make sense. But I guess she’s learned something in twenty years of being a librarian, because she nods like I said something reasonable, and not something that sounds like it came out of Google Translate’s Ukrainian-to-English app.
“Well, I know you know this, but I’ll tell you again. I’m really proud of you. It would have been easy to refuse to engage, but you didn’t. You’re my brave son.”
She kisses me on top of my head, then wrinkles her nose. “Did you manage to get honey in your hair? How? Seriously, how do you do that?”
I shrug and she laughs and points to the shower. “Make it fast. I can’t be late.”
* * *
—
As I planned, when my mom drops me off, I avoid the office and head right to room 201. It smells weird now that it’s empty. The clock ticks in a bizarre insect-buzz way, and the radiator makes a faint clicking noise every few seconds. It was never this quiet in here, even when we were supposed to be working. Someone was always shifting or scratching or whispering or tapping their feet or something. Now it’s just me, and I don’t move.
In theory I can get comfortable and read the stack of graphic novels I brought. But even though I wanted to be alone, it feels all wrong. There’s no reason to be here anymore. No Justice Circle. No Ms. Lewiston coming back with Starbursts. No wondering what special effects Alice will have next.
Nope, the SS Theo Has Friends has sailed away, and all that’s left are the inevitable awkward moments when we see each other next week. Once they’re back from suspension, of course. Because they’ll be super excited to see me at that point. Maybe someone will confess today. Who knows? Maybe Davis has a whole system of breaking down tweenbot semi-criminals and will have an answer by noon. But I won’t be in the room to find out.
From outside the door I hear footsteps and a deep whistling tune. The whistling stops, and Mr. Saunders, the janitor, laughs, sounding way too happy.
“I told you, you only have to be here an hour this morning, then Mama’s coming to pick you up. All you got to do is take out the garbage and you’ll be done twice as quick!” he says.
A high giggle answers, and the door swings open. Mr. Saunders rolls in the giant trash can, and behind him runs a kid who can’t be more than four or five.
“Daddyyyy!” he calls. “I told you! I can’t reach.” He races to the big garbage and tries to throw in a candy wrapper, but he’s way shorter than the bin, and the wrapper floats to the ground.
Mr. Saunders laughs again and picks it up. “That’s okay, Li’l Bit. I’ll go extra fast, and we’ll be done soon. And then…”
“Then Mama’s taking me to the MOVIES! And popcorn!” he shouts.
Mr. Saunders catches sight of me and stops short. “Oh, hey there, my man. Sorry to interrupt. I’m doing the easy stuff first today, as I have a VIP with me. This is my son Teddy John.”
Teddy John looks over at me, his eyes wide. I wonder if I look like some kind of blotchy, angsty middle school demon, but he smiles big. He’s missing a front tooth, like he’s a poster for cute.
“Yeah, his mom had to run into work this morning, so Teddy’s hanging with me for a little while, on the down low,” Mr. Saunders continues. “You were a big help the other day, when Mama had to work, and today we’re moving even faster, isn’t that right?” He winks at his son.
Mr. Saunders waves me down. “You’re good,” he says. “We’ll only be a minute.”
He starts emptying the classroom garbage cans into the big container, while Teddy John jumps around, singing something about a bat and a cat. I think. Anyway, I’m about to start reading again when he calls, “Daddy! I found more trash!”
Mr. Saunders and I both turn to find him holding the little electric candle, which rolled under a desk after I threw it.
I stare at the candle, then at the boy, who’s now running it toward the trash and trying to fling it up over the side.
“Hey.” My voice sounds like I’m gargling gravel, so I cough and try again.
“Mr. Saunders? Did you— Um. The other day, when you cleaned this room, did you find some…” Well. What would they look like, if you had no idea? “…some boxes on the floor? One was tin, one was plastic, and another one—”
Teddy John nods, his head moving so fast his face blurs. “I sure did. I found them and I threw them out because I’m helping!”
Mr. Saunders pauses. “What’s all this?” he asks. “What boxes? Li’l Bit, did you throw something away that wasn’t trash?”
“Nope! It was trash. It was on the floor. And the desk.” He looks up at me, all big brown eyes and missing tooth. “Right?”
“Actually…” I sit back down and scrub my face with my hand. I’m So. Freaking. Tired. I open my eyes. Teddy John is still watching me, now biting his lip. His eyebrows are all scrunched up, and he reminds me of Molly.
I try to smile, though I’m pretty sure it looks like I’ve been punched somewhere sensitive. “It actually, um. It wasn’t trash. Believe it or not, those were cameras. Pinhole cameras, they’re called, and I made them myself. But they don’t look like anything special, I guess. They were…I can see that you’d think they were garbage. I mean, if you didn’t know.”
Mr. Saunders straightens up from where he was wiping down the chairs and comes over. He peers down at me. “So let me get this right. Did we throw out something important?”
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