Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

I wish I were dead and in hell, Laurence thought.

Laurence didn’t sleep much. The next morning, he felt too sick for school, but he knew better than to ask to stay home. He barely noticed when kids threw erasers at him or refused to let him sign their petition to save something or other, because if he signed it then nobody else would.

When Laurence got home that afternoon, he found the form sitting on the kitchen table, signed by both parents. Neither was home. At dinner, he tried to thank them, but they just shrugged and looked at the table. The three of them ate in total silence.

The next day, Laurence just stood in the hallway, watching it drain of people. He realized his buttons were buttoned wrong, so his jacket was askew.

Patricia came up to him in the hallway. “You’re going to be late,” she said. “They’re going to kill you.”

For the first time ever, Laurence noticed that Patricia was pretty. Her skin had a brightness underlying its faint tan. Like an airbrushed picture he’d seen once. Her neck was really smooth and graceful, and her wrist pivoted as she held her backpack on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell almost over one gray-green eye. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders. He wanted to run away from her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to scream.

Instead, he said, “Do you want to ditch school?”

“Why?” she said. “And go where?”

“Let’s go to the woods,” he said. “I want to see your magic Tree.”

He no longer cared if this girl was crazy. He was a bad person, and what was worse, being crazy or being evil? Plus she might be the only girl who would even consider kissing him before he turned thirty. And he was growing more conscious that he had been a dick to her.

“You want to go to the woods with me,” Patricia said. “Right now.”

Laurence nodded. He needed to fidget. He didn’t.

He thought about how dull the tiles underfoot were. Someone waxed them every day, leaving them shiny for an hour until they dried and hundreds of kids walked on them, and then the floor just looked sticky and gray with wax scum. The floor probably looked dirtier than if nobody ever waxed it.

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “I can’t. I have to stay on at this school, after you’ve gone on to your math paradise.”

“Sure,” Laurence said. “Okay.” He wanted to say something else, like maybe apologize, but he didn’t. And then the moment had evaporated, and they were walking to separate classes.

WHEN THEODOLPHUS ROSE was fourteen, he’d slept on a bunk of mossy slate. He had mastered a hundred ways to kill a woman without awakening the man sleeping next to her. Every morning, an hour before dawn, the fourteen-year-old Theodolphus had gone for a ten-mile run with a ceramic urn full of his teacher’s urine on his head, and if a single drop spilled or he failed to complete the ten miles within an hour and a half, he would be forced to stand on his head until he saw a river of sunfire. His only meals had been the not-quite-lethal mushrooms and berries he’d been taught to pick in the thickets near the cliff-sheltered school fortress. And yet the Nameless Assassin School was a country club compared to Canterbury Academy. For one thing, he had been learning things, skills that he still used in his vocation, and he had taken pride in them. For another, nobody had forced him to answer multiple-choice questions on battered notebook computers. If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day. (Theodolphus made a mental note to hunt down Lars Saarinian, the psychologist who had studied the slaughterhouse behavior of pigs and come up with an educational regimen for human children, when he finally got out of here.)

Theodolphus had spent weeks spying on these two children, listening to all of their conversations, at home and at school. He’d parked across the street from their houses and eavesdropped on the two of them, together and separately. He’d racked his brains trying to come up with a death that didn’t require his hands-on involvement — thus complying with the letter of the child-murder ban — but would still tell a good story. Something artistic. He had this notion that the children would go into the woods together, where Laurence could be bitten by a snake and then Patricia could try sucking the poison out of him and accidentally poison herself. But no, because Patricia was forbidden to go into the woods and she was the only child on earth who obeyed her parents . Theodolphus kept hoping Patricia would have a moment of rebelliousness, and being brutalized by disappointment.

By now, after weeks of slouching on purpose in his office chair, listening to Brad Chomner talk about his body-image issues, Theodolphus just wanted this over with. This was the longest he’d gone without killing someone in years, and his hands kept getting ideas. He sat in faculty meetings and imagined just how much of Don Gluckman’s insides he could show the math teacher while keeping him alive.

Worst of all was when Theodolphus had to give advice about puberty, something he had never personally experienced.

Lucy Dodd got a stomach flu — not Theodolphus’s work — and they needed someone to teach English for a few days. Theodolphus volunteered. It would give him another chance to study his prey, since both Laurence and Patricia took that class.

All of the kids had clearly been looking forward to having a sub so they could goof off. When they saw it was Theodolphus, wearing a crisp black shirt, matching black pants, and a red tie, they all sighed with disappointment — for some reason, Theodolphus had become the most popular faculty member at this school, and nobody felt like screwing with him. “Most of you know me,” he said, making eye contact with each surly dough face in turn.

Laurence and Patricia sat at separate tables, not talking to each other, not even looking at each other, except that the girl kept giving the boy wounded little glances. The boy glared at his secondhand Scarlet Letter .

Traci Burt read out a passage she’d memorized, with perfect diction and a smile full of ceramic braces. Then Theodolphus attempted to get a discussion going about Hester Prynne and whether she was unfairly treated, and got back a lot of canned answers about Puritan morality, and then he called on Laurence. “Mr. Armstead. Do you think society needs to burn the occasional witch for the sake of social cohesion?”

“What?” Laurence jumped, so that three legs of his chair left the ground. He dropped all his books on the floor. Everybody else laughed and texted. “I’m sorry,” Laurence babbled, gathering up all his stuff. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Oh yes, Theodolphus said to himself. You know perfectly well.

“I see.” Theodolphus made a scritch on a paper, as if writing the boy off. “How about you, Miss Delfine? Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?”

Patricia lost a breath. Then she found it again and looked up, regarding Theodolphus with a steadiness that he couldn’t help admiring. Her thin lips pushed out.

“Well,” Patricia said. “A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

With that, Theodolphus knew how he would finish this mission, and redeem his professional self-respect once and for all.

THE SNOWSTORM HIT a few weeks after Laurence more or less stopped talking to Patricia. She woke up with Berkley curled between her bent elbow and her shoulder, and looked out her window without getting all the way out of bed. The ground and the sky mirrored each other: two sheets of white.