Chương 12: Back To School

I was glad to discover we were seniors, as going through that "new kid" treatment on top of my bad memories of high school was not something I wanted to relive. Especially because that was the part I'd only ever gotten to experience. By tenth grade, I'd dropped out of school to take care of Mom full-time. After crunching the numbers, I realized Dad's insurance wouldn't cover the cost of living and twenty-four-hour home care. It was me or no one.

During what would have been my real senior year, I spent prom night scrubbing the couch after Mom had an accident while every normal kid was out getting wasted. Being in a fake high school meant I wouldn't have to stress about grades, boys, and body image issues. Plus, I didn't have to lie about why I was always exhausted, like I did in Freshman year. This time around, my biggest worry was a sadistic masked murderer. Simpler, honestly.

Everyone continued to treat Tre like he was a quirky kid with an unusual aesthetic. No mention of him being a doll. Nothing out of the ordinary about that. Nope. The longer it went on, the funnier it became, though the humor had an uneasy edge to it. A pair of Juniors we passed were having a conversation so staged it felt like they were animatronics.

"Are you going to the big party tonight?" one asked.

"Everybody goes. It's tradition," the other replied. Okay, not so weird on its own. But then we turned the corner and passed a different pair of kids having the exact same exchange, down to the delivery of "Everybody goes. It's tradition!"

"Gee, I wonder if we're supposed to ask about a party tonight," Tre said. The LifeLine shook with a new notification. CLASS SCHEDULE AVAILABLE IN JOURNAL Tre and I had been enrolled in the same classes, something we had always dreamed about in high school, but it never worked out. I ran down the list of classes with Isabel to get her opinion on the teachers.

"We're in the same science class," she said.

"Mr. Thornton's actually a decent teacher. But he's got zero tolerance for bullshit."

"Bullshit like...?"

"Like, don't be late for class, or he will lock you outside in the hallway." Tre gave her a thumbs-up.

"Good note. Thanks, Isabel." In English class, twenty or so seniors arranged themselves in friend clusters, intentionally avoiding the no-man's land around the teacher's desk. We grabbed desks near Sameer, who was already seated in the third row from the back. He was the only familiar face in the room. His bangs hung over his eyes as he hunched over his desk. He had his notebook open, pen on paper, but just stared at the blank page. As we sat down, his expression shifted to something just shy of relief.

"Hey. That's cool that we got a class together."

"It is," Tre said from my shoulder, cheerful for a guy who had been listing all the ways the Grindhouse could kill us only moments ago.

"What other classes do you have?" I ran down the list for Sameer, who sadly confirmed we had no more classes together.

"Bummer," he said. The teacher was a tired-looking woman with reading glasses pushed up on her head. She forgot they were there twice over the course of the forty-five-minute class.

"Everyone, grab a handout from my desk and find a partner. You have fifteen minutes to discuss and answer all the questions, then you will share your answers with the class."

"I'll grab three," Sameer said as he stood and walked to the teacher's desk. Sameer wove through the desks. A massive whiteboard took up the wall behind the teacher's desk, catching the overhead lights in a way that made my eyes ache." A Separate Peace," I read the words aloud. Tre studied the board.

"What's that?"

"Old book. Never read it. I think it's about World War II," I answered. Sameer returned with the handouts.

"Not really. It's about this guy Gene and his best friend Phineas. But I read it as a sort of gay love story in disguise." I read the first question. In A Separate Peace, Gene never fully explains why he shook the branch. Do you think he understood his own motivations? How much does intent matter when the damage is already done? Tre read over my shoulder.

"That's doing a lot of heavy lifting."

"Quiet, you," I whispered. Sameer watched me with a small grin, enjoying my perplexed look.

"I got you guys, don't worry."

"So what's the answer?" Tre asked. Sameer didn't answer right away, turning over his pen with his fingers, running it across his knuckles.

"I think..." He paused.

"I think sometimes you do something and you don't know why until it's too late and you can't take it back." He crossed his legs under the desk.

"And at that point, it doesn't matter why you did it. Just what you did."

"Look at you, reading the books and shit," Tre laughed.

"Nerd alert."

"Says the guy who wants to be an Entomologist," Sameer volleyed back. It was a solid answer, and I had nothing to add, so I wrote it down. For the rest of the period, Sameer helped fill out our answers and explained enough about the book that I feel like I got the gist. He was attentive, answered questions when asked, and clearly did the work. But there was awkwardness layered under it all. Social anxiety, I decided. Had to be.

Tre had similar energy in middle school, but had grown out of it once we started sophomore year. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Class ended shortly after the class discussion wrapped up, and Sameer quickly packed his notebook into his backpack.

"See you at lunch?" Tre and I nodded.

"See ya then," I said. Our walk between first and second period was hurried because we took a wrong turn and had to backtrack, running dangerously close to the bell. I spotted Isabel and Sameer near some lockers. Isabel leaned against one, arms crossed, talking to Sameer, who was digging around inside his. They didn't see us, and we had no time to stop and say hello. But the way Isabel looked at Sameer when it was just the two of them was different than what I saw this morning.

The deadpan shield she wore was still there, but there was a looseness underneath. Her chin tilted up, and she was actually smiling, the kind that happens whether you want it to or not. Huh, Tre thought.

"Yeah, cute," I replied. By the time I looked back, Sameer was gone, and Isabel's face had returned to its natural, inscrutable state. Tre was consistently in my head via Mindbleed, running theories, making the case for ditching school after lunch to investigate the town. That one-way conversation carried over from the hall between bells into our second-period art class. When we sat down for class, a cute guy in a Nirvana shirt introduced himself as Austin and took the seat next to mine.

He was easy to talk to, charming in an unintentional way, and a way more talented artist. Tre seemed to like him, too, which typically meant we were talking to good people. We were tasked with a still life drawing of a bowl of fruit. I made a depressed oval that barely resembled a bowl, while nodding at some of Tre's stronger points over the Mindbleed. The halls between classes ran on a very similar, scripted loop.

Everyone chattered about the big party, about Evan's dad being drunk, or Sameer's sister partying too much. The gossip filled in for the lack of facts, while everyone figured out who to be angry at for the crash. When we got to math class, Tre insisted on sitting next to Evan and Summer. Evan hunched over his desk, nothing left of the tough guy from this morning. Summer was turned away from him, laughing as she chatted with a redhead and two girls with matching ponytails.

Tre climbed down from my shoulder, crossed the aisle, and hopped up on the empty desk beside Evan.

"Hey, we didn't get a chance to meet this morning. I'm Tre." Evan stared at him for a beat, then blinked.

"Evan." Tre settled in beside him like they'd known each other for years.

"You good, man? You look like you're having a rough day."

"Rough year," Evan muttered. With nothing to add, I stayed silent. Tre did too, which was saying something. Summer was still joking with the ponytail twins, completely sealed off from whatever Evan was burdened by. She didn't look at him once the whole class. Then the bell rang, and we hurried to Thornton's class, wary of Isabel's warning about being late. Isabel was already seated when we arrived, lounging in a back corner seat with her platform boots propped on the empty chair beside her.

She waved us over with two fingers, not quite a greeting.

"Saved you seats," she said, kicking the chair down.

"Trust me, you don't want to get stuck next to Tyler Rudnik. Dude eats tuna sandwiches every day and mouth-breathes while he reads." We settled in just as Mr. Thornton strode through the door. He was younger than I expected, maybe mid-thirties, with the kind of purposeful energy that suggested he actually gave a shit about teaching. His tie was loosened, sleeves rolled up, and he had the faint chemical burn marks on his hands that real science teachers earn through years of demonstrations.

"Alright, let's talk about memory," he said without preamble, writing the word on the board.

"Specifically, the difference between what we remember and what actually happened." This is gonna be one of those teacher monologues that's thematically relevant later, I bet, Tre projected into my head. Thornton faced the class.

"Anyone want to guess what percentage of our memories are accurate?" A few hands went up. Someone guessed seventy percent. Another said fifty.

"Try less than thirty," Thornton said.

"Recalling a memory isn't accessing some pristine recording of the event. You're not watching a Blu-ray of your childhood when you remember the past. What's actually happening is a reconstruction with the gaps filled in by current knowledge. Your brain literally rewrites memories each time you access them." Is this a lore dump? He's really committing to the bit. I flared my eyes at Tre, holding back a laugh at the same time.

"You remember a memory differently based on your current emotional state, new information, and even new beliefs about the past," Thornton continued.

"This is why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Five people see the same event, and you get five different stories. No one's lying, though that happens, but because each brain processes and stores that information differently, they all remember the same event differently. Then the memory corrupts a little more each time it's accessed." Like what happens to me every time I log onto Pornhub, Tre thought dryly. A snort escaped me; a gunshot in the quiet room.

Isabel glanced over, pen jerking to leave an uneven ink trail. Her eyes came up and held mine for a beat too long before she snapped back to the notebook.

"Can you trust our own experiences when your brain is an unreliable narrator?" Thornton continued, pacing now. The question hung in the air, heavier than it should've been for a high school science class. I was reminded of the impossible architecture of my mother's house, existing inside this suburban shell. About Tre, who everyone saw as normal despite being a living doll. About whether any of these people were real or just memories the game had reconstructed for us to inhabit.

The Old Woman knew things she shouldn't have, like the specific shape of my resentment and the words I'd never said out loud about my mother. Not just the Old Woman, either. The chimp, I could trace, too. I'd read about a woman mauled by her neighbor's pet when I was sixteen and hadn't stopped thinking about it for months. But Strongman, I couldn't place at all. And the neighborhood outside predated me by thirty years.

"If our memories are constantly being rewritten, how do we know what's true?" Mr. Thornton asked the class. Which meant I had no way of knowing how much of what I was seeing right now was real, reconstructed, or something Maltheris had slipped in between the cracks.

"What if you look for external evidence?" a girl in the front row offered.

"Like pictures or videos."

"Good. What else?" A boy with a nose ring called out: "Multiple sources? If enough people remember it the same way—""What if they're all wrong?" Thornton interrupted.

"One person's false memory can infect an entire group." A new clue had been added to the Journal app, though I hadn't heard anything that seemed relevant. CLUE ADDED: THE TOWN SHARES A COLLECTIVE MEMORY Movement caught my eye as Isabel shifted her notebook slightly toward me. Her hand moved across the page in quick, deliberate strokes. She wasn't doodling anymore. I leaned over slightly, pretending to dig through my bag while my eyes tracked her pen. In blocky black letters, she'd written: ARE YOU AWAKE TOO?

Below the words, she'd drawn a simple symbol: an eye with a vertical slit for a pupil, and several lines emanating from behind it. The kind of thing you'd see on conspiracy theory websites about enlightenment or opening your third eye. Isabel passed me the notebook, watching my reaction. She had her eyebrows raised like she was waiting for an answer. Staring at the words, I couldn't remember doing anything to wake up this particular NPC.

Plaxx had mentioned it was possible, so I wasn't totally freaked out, but it was still surprising. It was also enticing, as having another person on our side who understands what we're experiencing would be a huge relief. Isabel watched me process her note, but her face was unreadable. She was probably awesome at poker. Then I caught her leg bouncing under the desk. Was she nervous because she was scared? Or lying? The bell rang, a piercing outburst that made us both jump, killing the moment.

Isabel snatched the notebook back.

"Make sure you sit in the main cafeteria at lunch," she said casually.

"Unless you want to eat with the freshmen in the overflow room. But that's social suicide." She stood, shouldering her spiked bag, and left without ever mentioning her note. I watched her disappear into the hall until the crowd closed behind her. Did you see what she wrote? Tre's mental voice cut through my paralysis. Nora! Tre followed me into the hall.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you," I snapped, then softer: "Yes, I saw what she wrote. I froze."

"Okay, so you choked. No biggie." Tre's little legs hurried to catch up.

"But what do you think she knows? Does she know it's all a game run by demons?"

"I don't know, but I think we should find out."

"Hmmm…" Tre stroked his chin.

"I hear you, and it's interesting, but we just blew two hours and learned nothing that helps us with the killer's identity."

"If Isabel's for real, she might be able to help us unmask the killer." Tre climbed up my back to my shoulder.

"Sure, but what if we're wasting our time?"

"Summer and Isabel both invited us to accompany them to school this morning, and both ended up at school anyway. That's not an accident." Tre scratched his head.

"Okay. You're right. The game wanted us here. Now what?"

"It's gotta be about more than attending classes," I said.

"Evan seems pretty volatile," Tre offered.

"Maybe we should break into his locker or something."

"Oh. Smart. We could also try the school computers or the administration office to look for school records," I added.

"And you're sure you don't want just to ditch this place and explore the town?" Holding out my pinkie for him to grab, I said, "I promise if we don't make any progress here by the end of lunch, we can bounce."