Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“I’m asking you.”

“Why are you asking me?”

She couldn’t get to sleep for ages, even with Berkley scrunched along her rib cage — but then she finally slept, and dreamed she was carving Laurence open with a big knife. His skin parted to reveal a shining portal to a magical land full of kind wizards who gave her a wand of her own. She dreamed she lured him to the Wadlow River cliff, where the high-school kids partied, and shoved him off the edge onto the sharp, slippery rocks.

She woke up crying and shaking and holding on to Berkley for dear life.

SOMEONE THREW A rock at Patricia’s head before school started. Not a snowball with rocks in it, just a plain chunk of granite. Patricia ducked, but slipped on the path. Laurence grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. He steadied her, and seemed to be trying to say something. Then he walked away, like he usually did these days whenever he was about to speak to her.

First period, Patricia reached in her backback for her textbook and something else spilled out: a pair of panties, with a stain she couldn’t identify and didn’t care to examine further. She was sure they hadn’t been there when she left the house. The other kids at her table, including Macy Firestone, started laughing and taking photos.

“What’s that commotion?” Mr. Gluckman asked from the board.

“Someone has put … something unspeakable in my bag.” Patricia tried to sound dignified, not like a victim but not like a troublemaker, either.

“Emo bitch,” someone hissed from the corner.

“That’s no excuse for disrupting my class.” Mr. Gluckman frowned, between gray sideburns. “You are taking time away from all of the children who are here to learn something.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Patricia said. “Somebody else—”

“If ‘someone’ has been storing inappropriate items in ‘someone’s’ bag, I suggest you take it up with the principal or Mr. Dibbs.”

Patricia looked around. A roomful of pure entertainment. She caught Laurence’s eye and he gave her a blank, helpless look.

“Fine,” Patricia stood up. “I will. May I be excused?” She didn’t wait for an answer. The door crashed shut behind her, failing to block out the cheers and applause.

She made it halfway to Mr. Dibbs’s office before Mr. Dibbs charged around a corner and grabbed her arm. “You”—he grabbed her arm with one meaty hand—“have some explaining to do.” She tried talking to him, but he hauled her right into the girls’ room, where she saw, written in blood on the wall:

It wasn’t human blood. It wasn’t fresh blood. It was definitely blood, though — whoever had done this had left plastic containers from the butcher shop in the trash. The “paint” was dripping, the message still melting on the wall. Someone had gone into the girls’ room and painted this right after first period began, without anybody noticing. You would have to be a ninja.

“What…” Patricia felt frostbitten from the inside out. The stench was punishing: a noxious slaughterhouse odor, the dying distress of cattle immortalized in smell form. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it.

Mr. Dibbs’s jaw twitched under his dark, thick beard. He gestured at the wall with his free hand. “You are going to clean this up and then we are going to call your parents to come and have a conversation about civilized behavior and barbarism and the vital! The crucial! Difference between the two.”

“I didn’t … Please let go of my arm, you’re hurting me.” She couldn’t hear herself talk. He jerked her closer to the wall, so she was inches away from it. “I don’t know anything about this. Please let go of my arm, corporal punishment is illegal in school and you are hurting me, please LET GO OF MY ARM!”

Mr. Dibbs let go of her, but he was already turning to go call Patricia’s parents. They wouldn’t listen to her either. There would be three adults screaming at her, instead of one.

“Listen,” Patricia said. “Whoever did this, they did it during first period. Lots of girls went to the bathroom before first period and there was no blood on the wall then. And everybody saw me in first period, I was the first to arrive at Math class. There’s no way I could have done this. So excuse me, sir, I am going back to Math class now.”

Her “victory” left Patricia with soiled panties still to dispose of and a classroom full of kids who kept trying to take photos of her to post on Instagram with mean comments.

The blood graffiti stayed on the bathroom wall the rest of the day. The school janitor refused to go near it on religious grounds — nobody knew what religion he was, exactly, and he wouldn’t say.

Patricia kept feeling as though she was going to blow chunks, as she sat in classroom after classroom listening to the other kids whispering and the teachers trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. She couldn’t throw up if she were willing to, because the whole school had just a dozen toilet stalls for girls now and the lines were forever. She did wait in line once to pee, and girls kept shoving her “by accident.”

Patricia tried to talk to Laurence once or twice, but he kept slipping away.

As she reached the doorway, she noticed Mr. Rose studying her from inside the school. He’d gone back to normal size. She remembered what she’d been trying not to think about: He’d told her she’d be going away soon from this terrible place. Her training would begin. She would be free and luminous, a real witch. She only had to complete. One small task.

LAURENCE LOST TRACK of how many conversations he overheard about the scandal of Patricia. People had nothing else to talk about as they suited up for Track and Field (Laurence was Field, sort of), or studied for the big exams, or waited for gymnastics tryouts, which Laurence was “keeping Dorothy Glass company” for. (She hadn’t yet told him to go away and seemed to appreciate him bringing her stuff.) Dorothy did this thing with her leg as she perched on the bleachers that felt personally significant to Laurence.

Laurence had a line he wouldn’t cross: He would never say anything bad about Patricia or laugh at anyone else’s burn. He wouldn’t sycophant his way into the outskirts of anyone’s group by burning his onetime friend. Mostly, he tried not to think about the Patricia thing. She could look after herself. He was in a cocoon, pupating and incommunicado. There was nothing he could do either way. Six months from now, if everything went to plan, Laurence would be a freshman at the math-and-science school.

And in the meantime, Laurence poured every spare minute into upgrading CH@NG3M3, which claimed more and more space in his secure closet, until he had to throw out most of his clothes. Every time he added more processing power, the computer seemed to chew it up right away. Laurence had built a neural network with just a handful of layers, but somehow this had grown on its own to over twenty layers, as CH@NG3M3 kept refactoring itself. Not only that, but the serial connections had gotten more confusing — instead of sending data from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, it was going from A to B to C to B to C to A, creating more and more feedback loops.

One day, Patricia was in line next to Laurence at the cafeteria. She looked messed up — dark hair falling into her face, circles under her eyes, uniform disarrayed, socks mismatched — and she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She didn’t even notice what sort of crap they slung onto her tray. Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

Laurence had a powerful conviction he should say something to Patricia. Nobody would notice. He wouldn’t stand up and shout that he was on her side or anything.