The Second Wren

Chapter 1: Roll Call

Mr. Vance had his back to the room, which meant the room was allowed to talk.

Fourth period precalc, second week of the year. The ceiling fan turned like it got paid by the hour. The AP track had put Ethan Hale in this room with the same thirty-one people he'd been sitting with since freshman year, and the seating chart had put him front row center. He had his pen balanced between two fingers, going for the half turn other people did without looking, the one where the pen went around the thumb and came back like it lived there.

It went around once, jumped, and hit the floor by his shoe.

Becca Lund, on his right, didn't turn her head. She did the eye roll with her shoulders, which was worse than turning.

He picked it up. Not the pen — a person who could spin a pen was a person other people looked at and assumed things about. Ethan was a person who could sit very still, which was also a skill, one he'd been working on since the sixth grade, and—no. That was the skill of a chair. That was the skill of a houseplant.

Although. Most people couldn't spin a pen. That was probably just true, statistically. There were more of him than there were of them, and being one of the many was — fine. It was fine.

He would have told you this was realistic. He'd been telling himself so for a year and a half, which is long enough for a thing to start looking like a position.

Down the room and two seats left, Cora Bennett sat by the window with her chin on the backs of her hands. The sun came in flat and lay across her face and she let it. She was watching the parking lot like something out of it might be worth the walk.

Two girls in that room got talked about. She was one of them. The other one had been gone since Tuesday, and the room still said her name once a day. Ethan had done the arithmetic on what it cost to be one of the ones saying it.

He checked the board. He checked the fan. He checked the board.

If she caught him looking, it was a look. If it was a look, it was a thing. Things in this school got carried for a year, like a cold.

She turned her head.

He was already looking at the board. His neck hurt from how fast he was looking at the board.

"Hey."

Becca's voice barely moved her mouth. She wrote in the margin of her notebook and turned it toward him with one finger. I KNOW YOU'RE INTO CORA BENNETT.

He took the pen. Under her line, in letters he tried to keep small: Don't. People can hear.

She took it back. Nobody can hear anything. It's precalc.

He wrote: It's only bad for me. Bad is still bad.

She wrote: What's there to affect, though.

His ears were going red. She would look at the ears, and then the note would be a thing that had worked.

He put his head down and read the same paragraph four times without taking in one word of it. Out of the corner of his eye, she slid the page back toward him until the corner of it touched his elbow. He didn't look.

"Seventeen."

Mr. Vance said it without turning around. Chalk, board, the fan.

Nobody stood up.

"Seventeen." He turned the sheet around like the paper had done something to him. "There's a number on this line and nothing after it. Somebody tell me seventeen's a person."

"Wren Lennox," Marc Boyd said, from the back row, legs out into the aisle, taking his time. "She's at the theater program. She's been gone since Tuesday."

"Boyd. You've got a classmate's absence down to the day."

"I pay attention."

"To her."

Half the room made the sound.

"Watch it," Marc said, to the room in general, and then, because Mr. Vance was still looking at him: "This class is bullshit."

The room got very interested in its own hands.

"Mr. Vance," Deacon Ruiz said, hands folded on his desk. "Boyd said a word."

"I heard him."

Mr. Vance turned back to the board and wrote the next problem out without saying anything, which was worse than shouting.

"Twenty-seven."

Ethan's chair scraped. It scraped the whole way up. Thirty-one people and the fan, and every one of them, he was certain, had a good view.

"Board," Mr. Vance said. "This one. Show your work."

The problem was in Mr. Vance's handwriting, small and slanted. A point P moves so that its distance from (8, 0) is twice its distance from (2, 0). Find the equation of the curve.

Ethan read it twice and something in his chest sat down and got comfortable. He could do this one. He had done versions of this one in his sleep.

He wrote the distance condition. He squared it. He watched the x terms fold into each other and cancel, which was his favorite part, and then it was there: x² + y² = 16. Under it, small: center at the origin. radius 4.

"That's right," Mr. Vance said. He sounded almost disappointed about it. "Talk us through it."

The room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when they're waiting for something they can use.

Behind him, from the last row: "Hale doesn't do explanations."

"Man of mystery," somebody said.

"He's not mysterious," somebody else said. "He's just—"

The chalk hit the corner of a desk and bounced into the tray. Mr. Vance's arm was still up.

"Nobody in this room is funny," he said. "Back row. Three-fifteen, my room. Practice being quiet."

"Mr. Vance—"

"Boyd. Ruiz. Front office. Now. You and I aren't done from earlier."

They took their things. Marc came up the aisle the long way, past the front row, and let the clip on his binder catch the corner of Ethan's desk as he went by. The desk jumped. The pen rolled.

"Sorry," Marc said, to the room.

At the door he stopped. "Hale. Track. After school. Somebody's got to get the trash off it before Friday."

"He's got study hall," Deacon said.

"So?"

The door shut.

"Sit down, Hale," Mr. Vance said.

Ethan sat down. His hands were flat on the desk and his heart was going and he didn't know why, because nothing had happened, and that was the problem with him.

"Thanks, twenty-seven," somebody said from the back row. Quiet. Mr. Vance didn't turn around.

Ethan didn't either.

.

The track at 3:20 smelled like hot rubber and the dumpsters behind the gym. Ethan had a broom with half its bristles gone and a black bag that had already split at one corner. Marc and Deacon were up on the bottom bleacher with a bag of chips and a soda, side by side, not helping.

"Ten feet," Deacon said. "He's got a system."

"Don't interrupt him."

Deacon's phone buzzed. He read it. "Rae says her brother's got the house Friday. Parents are in Sacramento."

"There's the thing at the Annex Thursday. Four bands."

"Any of them good?"

"Two of them."

"Which two?"

"I don't know. One of them."

Marc drank some of the soda, and they watched Ethan work a paper cup into the bag with the broom, which took several tries and looked, honestly, like a magic trick that wasn't working.

Deacon's phone went again. He read it and turned it toward Marc. "Whole back row's in for three-fifteen. Everybody."

"Because of twenty-seven," Marc said.

They both looked at him. Then they got down off the bleacher and started for the fence.

"Hey." Both of them stopped, which was more than he'd expected. "Aren't you supposed to—Vance said three-fifteen."

Deacon looked at Marc. Marc looked at Deacon. Then they both laughed, and it wasn't a mean laugh so much as a laugh that had been scheduled for a different joke and got used on him instead.

"Good luck, Hale," Deacon said, and got his hand on the fence.

"Hey. Hale." Marc had turned around. "You're gonna sweep the whole track. Then tomorrow you're gonna sweep it again, because I'll say so."

The gate banged. They were gone.

Ethan stood with the broom.

"Must be nice," he said, to the bleachers. "Must be real nice."

He sat down in the grass of the infield, then lay back, then sat up again, because sitting up after lying down was the most dignity available in an empty field.

Study hall started at 3:30 in the library, sign-in at the door. He had never missed it. Not the week of the move. Not the week he had a fever and came anyway and got sent home by the nurse. Not once in three years.

"I'm not going," he said. To nobody. To the track.

Saying it out loud made it real, and once it was real he had to move, because it was 3:26, and if he was still standing in that field at 3:30 he would go.

He dumped the bag in the dumpster, carried the broom up the back stairs, and pushed the door at the top open with the end of the handle.

The second-floor hallway in a September afternoon was the one place in the building where the light was worth anything. It came in low and orange and full of dust, all the way down the corridor to the classroom door, which was standing open.

He stopped.

There was a girl at the board with her back to him, her hair pinned up with a pen through it, writing in letters bigger than they needed to be, her arm moving from the shoulder. The whole afternoon came through the windows and lay around her and made a gold line down her arm.

Then he read the board.

HEROES COME BACK!!

"Wren?"

She turned fast, chalk still in her hand, and it was not the face of someone surprised in a classroom.

"Ethan. Hale." And then, before he could get anything else out: "You're alive."

He looked behind himself. Nobody. He looked back.

"Yeah," he said. "As far as I know."

She was across the room before he'd finished, one hand closing on his wrist, warm through the cuff of his sweatshirt. "Don't go yet."

He pulled back. Not hard. But he pulled. She let go at once and put her hands behind her back like a kid in the principal's office.

"Sorry. Sorry, I had a plan for how this went and that wasn't it."

"Okay." His wrist was still warm where she'd had it. "Hi. We've never actually talked. Right? Not once, in three years."

"You know my name."

"Everybody knows your name."

"Then you know mine," she said.

"Theater program," he said. "Boyd said you've been gone since Tuesday."

"Since Tuesday." She said it like she was trying the word on. "Is that what he said."

The broom was still in his hand. He set the bristle end on the floor so it would stand by itself, and it slid, and he caught it. Three twenty-eight in the afternoon, an empty classroom, a broom, and nothing he could think of to do with any of it.

"You wrote on the board," he said.

"I did."

"Do you—" He cleared his throat, because his voice had come out of some smaller room than the one they were in. "Is that Black Kite?"

She looked at the board. "What?"

"Season one. The dub. That's the title of the first opening." His hand was doing something with the broom handle, so he made it stop. "Somebody's about to fight somebody stronger than them, and the song comes in, and—" He heard himself. He stopped. "Nobody remembers that."

"I liked the first two seasons," Wren said. "After that, the people who made it weren't the people who made it. Two stars, and one of those is for the background art."

Ethan said nothing for a second and a half.

There were exactly eleven things in the world he could talk about until somebody begged him to stop, and she had just pulled the third one off the list without looking.

"Two stars is generous," he said, carefully.

"Two stars is generous," she agreed.

"And the guy who did the art on that, he did a book, before. Nobody's read it." His voice had started climbing. This happened; it was a thing his voice did. "Four volumes, out of print. It's about a guy who has to carry a letter across the salt flats before the winter, and every town he goes through takes a piece of him, and the last chapter—"

"Harrow Road," she said.

He stopped.

"Four volumes," she said. "Out of print. The letter's already too late by the time anybody reads it. That's my favorite. No contest. Nothing else is close."

The room had a clock in it. He could hear the clock.

"My aunt left me the set," he said. "Volume three's the one that's falling apart. Nobody's read Harrow Road. Nobody."

"Two people have."

"Who."

"You," she said. "And me."

"How."

"You told me."

The chalk went tap, tap against the metal tray, and the sound crossed the whole empty room.

"Tell me when," he said.

She put the chalk down and lined it up with the edge of the tray, and did not answer for long enough that he heard a car go by outside.

"I wrote that up there so you'd stop walking," she said. "You were going to go right past the door."

"I wasn't—"

"You do that. You leave rooms."

"Answer the question."

"Two minutes," she said. "Give me two minutes and don't walk out."

For a second he just stood there.

He had a whole list. There were reasonable explanations, there were always reasonable explanations: she was doing a bit; she'd been on TV since she was six and could do any bit; somebody had put her up to it; she'd found out about him somehow and this was the kind of joke that got told for a year. He got most of the way down the list and stopped, because he couldn't see her finding that book. Nobody found that book. It had been out of print since before either of them was born.

She was watching him.

"I'm the Wren who remembers," she said. "This year. All of it. It's already happened to me."

He didn't answer.

He put the broom against the wall.

The hallway lights ran on motion. Past the water fountain, one clicked off. Then the one past the next door. Then the one above them. Neither of them had moved in a while.