The upper left quadrant, Derrick had lately considered, should be the thing everybody knows about you, because it’s the first one the eyes land on; but he also knew most people considered him a nice guy first and foremost, which was fine, but not exactly the sort of thing you hold up against a renegade knight in battle. So he was working on images of speed: wings, horses, lightning bolts.
He could work for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before he’d need to leave for school. Each of these minutes felt like stolen treasure. Time to work in the quiet: free of obligation, free of future plans. Free of questions that needed answers. When he finished, he thought idly about leaving his notebook behind; maybe he’d be more certain to come back later if he didn’t. But he didn’t like to be without his supplies, so he packed everything away, reset the alarm, and left the way he’d come. There was still nobody around. The world felt like a movie set, or like a carbon copy of itself with fewer people and cars gumming up the works and getting in the way.
THEY’RE BUILDING A TOWER
Derrick’s last class of the day was Spanish 2, which he considered easy; he’d taken Introduction to Spanish freshman year and aced the weekly tests without studying much at all. Some students were struggling with verb tenses in second year, but for Derrick it was simple stuff: memorize five endings, tack them onto the roots, half of which gave you a pretty good guess at their English equivalents.
Derrick sat in the back to keep Seth company; Seth sat in the back because he probably should have repeated Spanish 1. He was a mess today. There’d been pizza in the cafeteria for lunch, and the cooks had burnt two pans’ worth of it and then thrown them into the trash before lunch period ended. At any high school in the U.S., this is an error in judgment unless the school’s trash bins are housed behind a locked gate. At Milpitas High, the cafeteria’s trash bins stood on a concrete dock; it had a gate, but it usually wasn’t locked.
The pizza fight had been short—somebody saw a proctor coming and everybody scattered in time to avoid getting caught—but Seth had been at the center of it, lobbing slices rapid-fire like a medieval soldier flinging half-pikes. His insistence on landing as many clean shots as possible meant there’d been no attention left for defense, and in just a few minutes he was coated from head to mid-chest in tomato sauce and sticky, coagulating cheese. He stopped by the bathroom—it still said BOYS on the door, which felt weirder every year—to soak his shirt with water and wring it out in the sink, but it hadn’t really helped. Seth hunched even lower than usual at his desk, avoiding the radar.
“Man, what is wrong with you?” Derrick whispered while Mr. Martínez was writing down irregular verbs on the blackboard, his back to the class. Seth didn’t answer verbally but punched Derrick sharply in the thigh. Derrick smiled with his mouth closed, trying not to laugh.
Martínez turned around. “Derrick, could you conjugate volver in the preterit for us just to get us started?” he said.
“I can do that,” said Derrick: “Yo vuelvo, tú vuelves, él o ella vuelve, nosotros vuelvemos, ellos vuelven.”
“Pretty close,” said Martínez. “It reverts to the stem for the first person plural. So.”
Derrick scanned the list of verbs on the board. “OK, so, volvemos?”
“Volvemos,” nodded Mr. Martínez, turning back to the board just long enough for Seth to hit Derrick in the leg again.
In the hallway, after class, Derrick quickly claimed his payback, connecting a sharp, straight jab to Seth’s upper arm. “Ouch,” said Seth, and then: “Fair, though.” They’d known each other since junior high; they’d grown apart. Derrick didn’t know what Seth did with his free time these days. But in class their old bond held firm. Like Derrick, Seth drew in his notebook when his mind started to wander: lines with sharp edges, monsters with claws. He gripped his pencil so tightly that there was a permanent callus on his middle finger; over the years, they’d seen each other’s styles grow into formed aesthetics, and known the pleasure of growing together, of becoming adept at a craft they valued. They’d grown together in this nearly invisible, almost private pursuit. Derrick felt physically protective of Seth, whose body seemed stunted, like a tree afflicted by some mild blight, and he knew that leaving for college would fix Seth in his past, maybe permanently. But in the pages of their notebooks, they were equals.
They walked across campus together. They talked about people they knew, and people they used to know who probably weren’t going to graduate; Seth mentioned Alex, but Derrick didn’t like to think about Alex. Alex was considered “missing.” “Missing” is a hard word to hear said about somebody whose friendship had been, in your younger days, a great joy. People drift, even friends who used to go to the matinee together every other Saturday when they were kids; that’s just how it is. But after you lose track of them, Derrick was learning, it hurts.