The classroom was almost full when he walked in.

The buzz was the kind mornings had when something had happened outside — louder than usual, more keyed up, with that particular vibration the room gave off when half the heads were still physically a half hour behind. No one turned to look at him. Dante went to his desk in the back right corner without a word, putting his feet exactly where he always put them, instinctively avoiding the crooked leg of Marco's chair at the fourth desk that always jutted into the center aisle.

He sat. Took out his pencil case. Took out his notebook.

From his vantage point — back row, right corner — the room was a map he knew by heart. Front center desk: Leon. Not in class yet; probably still in the corridor having his hand shaken and his shoulder slapped by boys from other sections. To his right, empty but *reserved*: that was Conrad's seat, and Conrad sat there by satellite right rather than teacher's assignment. To his left, the same: Miles. Those two orbited the front center desk like planets around a star, and pity the teacher who'd ever tried to move them.

Two desks ahead of his own, on the left, the three girls. Diana, Sophia, Aurora. Already there, already deep in a conversation that looked urgent and that, in all likelihood, none of them would remember the next day. Diana was talking with her hands. Sophia was laughing behind her fingers. Aurora was silent, watching the other two with the expression of someone taking notes for later.

(The headlines committee. Everything that happens in school passes through that table first and into the world second.)

Dante had no strong opinions about them. He wasn't important enough to.

He opened the notebook.

Not to a fresh page, not to yesterday's lesson. To one of the margin pages, the kind where he kept the things school wasn't for and that no one would ever take from him. In the bottom right corner there was a drawing. He'd started it two days ago during history and hadn't finished it: a creature halfway between a wolf and a bird, black-furred, wings folded along the body like cloaks. He hadn't drawn the eyes yet. Eyes were the hard part. The eyes of something that didn't exist were always the hard part — get them wrong and the whole creature stopped being believable.

He took out his pen and added two lines to the curve of the left wing. Then stopped. Studied the drawing for a few seconds. He no longer felt like drawing — not in the middle of all that noise, not with his head still tangled in the morning. He closed the notebook unfinished.

(Later. Maybe in history. The history teacher never notices anything.)

"Drawing in class, nerd."

Dante looked up.

Grace was standing next to his desk, backpack hanging from one shoulder the way she always wore it, brown hair tied in a low ponytail crooked the way it gets when you don't have patience for the mirror in the morning. She had on the green long-sleeved shirt Dante had seen on her at least twenty times and that she insisted on calling *my lucky shirt* even though it had never brought luck to anything in particular. Freckles scattered across her nose, few enough to be invisible unless you were looking too long. Brown eyes always slightly amused, as if she'd already heard the punchline and was waiting for you to get there.

"I'm not drawing. I closed the notebook before you even got here."

"Too late, I saw. It wouldn't kill you to show me one of your Picasso pieces every once in a while."

"You'll see them when they're hanging in a museum, frog."

The nickname came out with the same ease as it had nine years ago, when Dante was seven and had ended up in a shoving match in an elementary school hallway with three boys from another class who'd been laughing and croaking *gra gra, gra gra* behind a girl with a crooked ponytail. He hadn't even known who the girl was, only that she was crying. And when it was all over — over badly, with a torn backpack and a note in his agenda — the girl had sat next to him on the step outside the classroom and said *my name is Grace*, and he had said *too bad, I'd have called you frog*, and she had laughed for the first time that morning. The nickname stayed. It changed sign over time — from insult to code — and now, nine years later, no one else on earth was authorized to use it.

"Yeah, sure. Move over."

He shifted the few centimeters there were to shift, because his chair was one chair and Grace was already deciding to wedge herself in the way she'd been doing since elementary school. She wedged into half a seat with him, half for her and half for him, one knee against his, backpack dropped to the floor with the dull sound of badly stacked books. It was a years-old ritual. Neither of the morning teachers paid it any attention anymore — it had happened so many times it had stopped looking like a violation and started looking like a law of nature.

"So," Grace said. "Last night."

"Last night what."

"You left me hanging for two hours. I sent you three messages."

Dante did the math. The phone. Where had he left the phone last night? On the desk, probably, while gaming. With notifications muted the way he always did when he wanted to focus on the match. Three messages from Grace had sat there expiring like the yogurt in his fridge.

"Ah. Yeah. Sorry. Was playing."

"I know you were playing. I sent the messages *because* I knew you were playing. I just wanted to tell you two quick things, not have an existential conversation."

"What two things?"

"Doesn't matter now."

"Frog—"

"No, really, doesn't matter. One was stupid and the other was even stupider, and now in the light of morning they've both gotten dumber, so thank me for sparing you the conversation."

Dante looked at her for a second. It was one of those moments where he was never sure if Grace was joking for real or joking *not to* tell him something. With her it was always a bit like that. The line between the two was thin and she was the only person he knew who walked it gracefully.

"Whatever you say."

"Whatever I say. As always." She smiled. Then flicked his forehead, sharp, the kind of flick you give someone who's been staring into space too many seconds. "How are you, anyway? You look tired."

"I'm always tired."

"No, like *tired* tired. Like you didn't sleep."

"I didn't sleep."

"Match?"

"Match."

"You're a problem."

"I know."

"And your mom? Back soon?"

Dante felt the note in the inside pocket of his jacket against his chest. A very small weight, very precise — like a pebble in a shoe when you know exactly where it is and have decided not to take it out.

"Few days. Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"Work got extended. I'm not sure. She keeps in touch."

Grace studied him for half a second longer than necessary — not enough to be awkward, but enough to register. Dante noticed. Grace always noticed the things that weren't right, and she was one of the few people on earth who did it with him. Then she changed direction, because Grace also knew when not to push.

"Anyway. You know what Martinelli told me in the corridor the other day?"

"Math Martinelli?"

"Math Martinelli. Stopped me right outside the bathroom — like, *Grace, can I steal you a second?* — and asked if I ever talked to you."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I said yeah, sometimes. And she told me it's becoming a problem."

"What's becoming a problem."

"You. The grades. She said *three failures in the last month aren't a problem, they're a direct route to repeating the year if this keeps up*. Her words, not mine."

"Wow. I didn't know on top of failing me she was also complaining about it."

"Dante."

"What."

"Seriously. Come on."

The tone had changed. Not by much — Grace never gave real lectures, that wasn't her style — but enough. There was a small, real worry in the way she'd said his name, the kind you couldn't fake because faking it would be too much work. Dante looked down at the closed notebook. On the spine, in blue ballpoint, his name was scrawled in a corner, in handwriting that six months ago had been neater.

"I'll try, frog. I swear."

"Don't try with me. Try with Martinelli."

"Right."

"And maybe sleep, once, as a scientific experiment. Just to see what it does."

"I'll put it on the calendar."

"You don't have a calendar."

"I'll set an alarm for it. It'll be called *Things Grace told me to do*, and I can ignore it just like the morning one."

She laughed — that small, real laugh she only gave when he managed to be funny by accident. Dante felt the day slide one millimeter in the right direction. Not much. Just one millimeter. But more than he'd expected from a Tuesday morning.

Then the bell rang, and Grace levered herself off the seat with a small jolt, retrieved her backpack from the floor, and was back at her desk in the third row before the teacher had finished setting his briefcase on the lectern.

The first three or four hours of the day were the kind that left no trace. Math, then physics, then a half hour of religion that nobody — including the priest — pretended to take seriously. Dante drifted through them with his usual technique: hand moving across the page, eyes pointed somewhere in the general direction of the blackboard, brain in some sub-basement of itself doing nothing in particular.

By the time the lunch bell rang, he could not have said with confidence what any of those lessons had been about.

The cafeteria was a wide rectangular room on the ground floor, low-ceilinged, heating pipes exposed. Twenty long tables lined up like desks of a larger class, and the constant smell of old fried oil that stuck to clothes even after you left.

Dante took a tray. Tomato pasta that had seen better days, a cutlet that had seen worse. A glass of water. He paid at the till and looked around.

It was an automatic gesture — not to find someone to eat with, but to find a *place to eat* without being too exposed. It always worked the same way. There were full tables and empty tables and half tables. The full ones were the territories of established groups: Leon's table at the center, the Diana-Sophia-Aurora table by the big window, the football boys at the back right. The half tables were the most dangerous — sit there and anything could happen, from total silence to a conversation you hadn't asked for. The empty tables were his.

He found one near the central support pillar. Good position: the pillar partially hid him from the rest of the cafeteria, and you could eat in peace.

He sat. Started cutting the cutlet with the slow distraction of someone who wasn't hungry and was eating because eating was required.

From where he sat he could see almost the whole room. It was one of those observation positions you learned with time, when you'd spent enough hours in cafeterias to know which table let you watch everyone without being watched. Dante had found this one in middle school and never changed.

Leon's table was doing something very loud. The full court was gathered there today — Conrad, Miles, the three girls, and two or three guys from other sections Dante recognized by sight without knowing their names. They were laughing at something Leon had just said, and they were laughing in that orchestrated way groups laugh when the leader makes a joke: all together, slightly too loud, with that synchronicity that was never coincidence. Leon held the fork halfway between plate and mouth, still, with the calibrated half-smile he'd had outside the gate that morning. Enjoying the effect of the joke more than the joke itself.

Further away, by the big window, Dante saw Grace.

She was sitting with two of her third-row friends — the ones she did group work with and whom Dante knew by name and not much more. They were talking animatedly about something, and Grace was gesturing with a fork. At one point she lifted her eyes, swept the room for half a second, and when her gaze passed near the central pillar it found him. Found him for real — Grace had that irritating ability to find things where they were hidden, even when she wasn't looking. She smiled at him.

Dante returned the greeting with a small nod that she probably didn't see anymore, because she was already turned the other way.

He went back to the cutlet.

The noise of the cafeteria was a low, constant tide. Forks against plates. Scattered laughter. The till lady's voice calling someone by name. From a distant table, someone dropped a glass and there was the small ironic round of applause cafeterias always do when someone drops something.

Dante let that noise slide off him too.

(I wish.)

The thought arrived from nowhere, while he was spearing the last piece of cutlet. A single word. No object. No specifics. Just the verb, suspended in his head like a door left ajar that he didn't have the courage to push all the way open.

I wish *what*.

He didn't know.

I wish today were different. I wish I were sitting at that table. I wish I were home with my mother. I wish I had answered Grace's messages last night. I wish I were tired for a good reason instead of for none. I wish something — one thing, even small — would step off the track this day was already running on since seven in the morning.

They were all partial answers. None of them was *the* answer.

Maybe it was just: I wish something would happen.

He finished the cutlet. Set the fork on the empty plate. Stood to bring the tray back.

And in that same moment, for the first time that day, he felt something he had never felt before.

A minimum, very faint tingle on the back of his neck. As if someone had blown on him from very far away.

He turned. There was no one behind him. Only the pillar, empty, and the constant noise of the cafeteria.

(Strange.)

Dante shrugged and brought the tray to the rack.