CHAPTER 1

She stood atop the gray dunes looking out across the black sea. 

Don’t groan. It is, quite plainly, just the truth. The Dunes, though, should be styled as a proper place. They aren’t just any dunes. They are The Dunes. At the entrance to the Greyport Public Beach exists one of those mythic small town spots where teenagers congregate to do the things their parents willfully believe they would never do. Greyport, being a coastal community in New England, saw its public beach all but abandoned during the school year and The Dunes provided a kind of cover from the peering eyes of the neighboring houses that made its patrons feel a shroud of invisibility. Once one crossed over that first sandy hill they stepped into a Neverland where the rules and responsibilities of harbortown teenage life no longer applied. Now, just to be clear, this isn’t a world of unrealistic magic. They were never anything less than obvious. One day people might learn that voices carry, especially a group of voices becoming increasingly drunk by the ocean. Oh, and also, fire is not invisible in this world. Everybody can see it. Even from behind large mounds of sand.

To their credit, though, it never usually got “out of hand,” whatever the reasonable limits of that qualification may be. He never heard any scandalously extreme levels of debauchery. The occasional “What’s?” would be thrown around for a tense moment until they wore out. And there were the requisite high-pitched, full-throated screams that would send a shiver and bolt him upright, but inevitably turn into a round of laughter. 

It also didn’t happen too often. Only once every few weeks was it really impactful enough to be considered an event. Like, the kind that people might whisper loudly about on Monday. The kind that would accompany the quaint adage, “everybody was there.” Innocuous enough, but unaware of its alienating implications … or maybe completely aware of it.

There were a few people who were … those people. The in-charge kind of people. Without fail, they claimed the scene on Fridays, but even on the occasional Tuesday or Wednesday, he would smell that familiar smokey smell, hear the rumble of voices and look out to see the glow from behind the sand and the reeds. Shadows darting around it from time to time. Whether it was going to be a quiet hang or venture into the land of the rager was apparently at the discretion of this core crew. Who they were, he didn’t actually know. Not by face, anyway. 

She was the first of them he ever really saw. Like, really saw.

Now, don’t get all weird. He had no interest in being a total voyeur creepo. Really. His bedroom nook, where he spent most nights drawing or reading before bed, just happened to look out over the dunes. Sorry, The Dunes. A room he chose for this exact reason. It was his favorite spot in the whole of the house. It wasn’t until they had been there for a few nights that he learned that many of his classmates considered this a sacred place. At first, he was annoyed. An interruption in an otherwise idyllic scene. The one sliver of a silver lining in this whole mess of a situation he found himself in.

He didn’t want to move, of course. Few teenagers do, right? Not that he had many friends in Madison, but he had grown comfortable in his familiar journey of isolation there. And everybody else seemed to as well. He had painstakingly earned his identity as a Loner and, while maybe not respected for it, at least wasn’t made a fuss about anymore. Moving to Greyport meant he would need to put in all that thankless work again. It could take years to finally be accepted for his lack of acceptance. But what the landlocked Madison couldn’t offer him was the sullen boy's dream of staring out at a cold, dark, vacant ocean every night. And when he was sure that everybody else was asleep and The Dunes had turned to ash, he could slip outside and in just a number of steps … fourteen from the porch to the sea wall and then ten down the stairs, to be exact … he could sink his naked feet into soft, chilly, prickly sand and breathe in a kind of solitude that seemed impossible. Most kids who are yanked out of their perfectly mundane, entirely tolerable lives and thrown into a brand new unknown don’t experience such a luxury, he reasoned, so that was a little bit of a something. 

And then they showed up. Their disembodied voices sullying his quiet compromise, their orange firelight distracting from the still darkness of the harbor and the ocean beyond it. And the screams. The freaking screams. If this is what friends got you - a kind of faux joyful noise pollution - maybe he was better off. 

After a while, though, you do become accustomed to regular annoyances. It was at times, even welcome. His was the nearest house, but it was still a good maybe quarter mile away, so they were rarely loud enough to be more than a distant buzz. And the smell of the fire never reached a point of being overwhelming, especially if he closed his window, which he didn’t love to do, but was hardly a burden. He also learned that the beachside of Greyport died a very sudden death after Labor Day. Without warning, his neighborhood had gone from the bustling, overcrowded personification of an anxiety attack to the apparent aftermath of an apocalypse. Not a messy one like with zombies or explosions, but something maybe more sinister where everyone just evaporates and their houses remain perfectly preserved and only seagulls survive and everyday seems painted in a cold grayscale, sort of proving the town’s name. It was this dismal and dreary peace of the off season that helped him start to fall in love with his new home and during these months, the occasional company of his more socially skilled peers was less icing on an already overly adorned cake and more a brief burst of life and color that, even for him, if he was being tragically and embarrassingly honest, was not unwelcome. At least, not intolerable.

When school started, he did come to know some of the voices. Mostly by means of reasonable deduction. Spend more than a few days in any High School and you start to figure out who might be the types to gather around a bonfire drinking beer. He assumed they were drinking beer, anyway, he wasn’t such a rube to think they were having soda. Zeroing in on those key characters, he could pinpoint some recognizable tones. Mostly, though, he just realized that the majority of that type of teenager all sort of sound the same and they sound a lot like the echoes he heard from his nook. 

Tonight had not been particularly raucous, but drew a larger crowd than was typical for a Tuesday. Maybe she just needed some space. He could respect that, certainly. He knew her instantly. In the breezy moonlight, he saw the long, wavy white blonde hair that stretched almost impossibly far down her back and was a standout in the halls of Greyport High, where the rest of his female-identified or other past-the-shoulders hair growing schoolmates seemed to lack the patience or care or confidence to commit to such lengths. And, don’t start groaning again, it wasn’t like she walked with an invisible fan in front of her or anything cinematic like that. It’s just that in a place like this, little things stand out. Butt-touching hair was a thing that only she had and here it was, actually blowing behind her like the credits were about to roll on a prestigious film he would never see that won all the awards and commissioned an original power ballad that sounded just like all the other sappy power ballads he would never listen to commissioned for all of the other award winning films he would never see, but he suddenly sort of understood because that kind of sound would pair perfectly with the scene playing out before him. She wore only a denim jacket over what, from his vantage point, seemed like an inappropriately flimsy dress for such a cold night. Beautiful, yes, especially as the shine of its white satiny finish glistened in almost unison with her hair, but highly impractical.

She skipped down The Dunes toward the beach. Not in an overly precious way, but in that way that when you’re going down a hill of sand, you’re forced to go faster than a walk, but try to avoid slipping into an uncontrollable run. So, you sort of - skip. She skidded to a halt and then walked purposefully toward the Greyport jetty, which was sometimes bathed in darkness, but gloriously illuminated at certain points on full moon nights. He had to admit, it was particularly inviting this evening, but he did not appreciate bearing witness to someone who had potentially consumed alcoholic beverages and was wearing a slippery long dress and who … was she wearing shoes? … No, she was not. And someone with tractionless bare feet, climbing up the very dangerously large and very dangerously wet-from-the-crashing-waves rocks. He did not like that at all.

Surely someone would follow her. They would notice her missing and run after her. This is maybe a thing she does after a few beers. Just wanders off. He willed for somebody to emerge from behind The Dunes. He could see their socializing shadows amid the dancing fiery beams. He could hear the murmur of their conversation. Why was nobody noticing her absence? She’s the only one with hair that long.

She mounted the jetty with miraculous ease. Phew. Ok. Just wait right there and eventually someone will come or you can just hop back down because you’ve got your kicks in … and, there she goes. Hopping foot by foot across each boulder, traveling deeper and deeper out to sea, soon to evade even the moonlight. It was too much to bear, even for someone so committed to avoiding engagement of any kind with any other human. He dropped his sketch pad and bounded from the room. He accidentally skipped the last step on his way downstairs and only just caught himself before tumbling into the front/back door. To clarify, these houses along the water were built so that what would, in any other house, be the front facade actually faced away from the street and toward the ocean. You are welcome for that fun fact.

Anyway, his mother looked up from the living room chair with genuine concern and his sister from her spot on the couch with an eye roll. His father was already asleep, as he would need to be up in just a matter of hours for work.

“There’s a girl on the jetty.” It took almost all of his breath to release it.

“What?” It bordered on accusatory and caused all color to drain instantly from her face. For parents, it seems, the idea that any young person could be in peril was for their own young person to be in peril.

He didn’t have the ability to break his momentum to answer her, he unlocked and unbolted the door and flew out into the night. He knew she would implicitly understand and follow behind him. Only when his feet hit the cold and crunchy grass did he realize that in his haste he, too, had forgotten his shoes and, most regrettably, his pants. For people before and past certain ages, when faced with the potential for imminent danger, shallow vanities may be rightfully disregarded, but for a teenager, being in one’s underwear in a space outside of your own bedroom or bathroom is a devastating humiliation. He nearly tripped over himself as this reality hit and his ego began pulling on the reins before he mounted the stairs to the beach.

“You look fine. Go.” A mother always knows.

And he did, right? He had, after all, thankfully, graduated to boxers by now so he could probably reasonably argue to anyone attempting to mock him that they were … shorts. Not underwear, no. Shorts. Pajama shorts. Is that embarrassing? Jeez, it’s hard to run in sand.

It took maybe longer than it should have for him to focus on the landscape he was pummeling toward. Noticeably absent from the outstretched arm of rocks reaching into the ocean was a girl. Any girl. Any person. He stopped suddenly. He never knew panic could grow panic. 

“Where is she?” 

“I swear, Mom, she was there. Walking out”

He pointed as if that were proof, but began mistrusting his own brain. She was there. Definitely, he thought. And there’s no way she could have made it down in that amount of time. She’d at least still be climbing back up The Dunes. He shook off the doubt and took off running again. He could hear his mother panting behind him. 

“Be careful,” she cautioned as he leapt up onto the lowest rock.

Even if one wanted to, it was impossible to move swiftly on such a cold, slimy surface. It felt like walking along melting ice. He scoured both sides of the jetty - into the canal leading to the harbor, into the ocean that stretched out in front of his house and off into forever - as he maneuvered his way along the perilous obstacle course. A moment of relief came when he remembered there was a drop, a sort of trench that, during high tides, would allow for a small channel to flow through creating a break in the jetty and at low tides would clear out so you could, if you so desired, continue your journey on to the very last rock. His family had stood there to fish one particularly cloudy morning. None of them enjoyed it, but it was a valiant attempt at appreciating their new surroundings. She must be sitting in there. It was low tide now, so she could be sitting on one of those same rocks they had planted themselves on that endlessly short morning. She just wanted to get away for a second. To hide. That was it. There she would be. He felt that Christmas morning kind of anticipatory rush. The kind that is only blissful because you know it will be rewarded. 

But, there she was not.

He stopped, leaning over the cliff into this now seemingly monstrous abyss. He watched the waves crash into and drain from it. Crash. Ebb. Crash. Ebb. She was nowhere. The moon was bright, her dress was white, and the ocean was relatively calm. Even if she had fallen into the water, he would have seen her in the shallow tide. He looked all around the immediate vicinity and then out at the infiniti of the sea. Had he dreamt it? He took the deepest breath he could muster to try and remind himself of his own sanity. Icy. Salty. Clean. Alive. Awake. Asleep. Dying? The sharp sting of the impending winter on his bare feet was now catching up to him. Adrenaline waning. 

He could hear his name echoing foggily in the distance as if on a delay. He turned to see the high beams of flashlights moving toward him. Red and blue streaking the sky beyond the peaks of The Dunes. She must have told his sister to call the police. Moms tend to do the right thing. But, now he wondered if he had imagined it all or even just exaggerated the situation in his head. Was she back sitting around the fire drinking beers? Had he just ruined the night for everybody? The cops had broken up gatherings at The Dunes countless times before, but not usually on a night as tame as this one. 

He began his walk back in shame. He flipped up the protective layer of his hoodie in an effort to remain as anonymous as possible, certain that he would be greeted by the group of them, all staring at this lunatic narc in his underwear. They wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of his presence. He would have been perfectly outside the scope of their radar. Not a Nothing, not a Nobody. Nothing’s and Nobody’s are so because they are acknowledged as such. A non-entity. A person never to be seen, never to be remembered. Who can slip through without so much as a whisper. But, he would no longer be afforded such a luxury. He had to go and give himself a very visible identity. That guy. Who did that thing. That time. Remember him?

About halfway along, he met the police. One of the officers stopped and escorted him back along the jetty to the beach, while two others continued on. They’re looking for her.  And because of him. He went to turn his head back, but felt the hand of the officer guiding him forward.

“Let’s go, buddy.” 

Buddy. Gross. He hated well-intended patronizing. Any intelligent person does. He imagined this man had probably spent a good amount of time among The Dunes himself. He, then, regretted this judgment when, with startling empathy, he was being pulled to a stop and a jacket large enough to cover anything embarrassing was being tied around his waist. 

“Thanks.”

“Just in case there’s a crowd.” 

But, there wasn’t. They got to the beach to find a fourth officer talking to both of his parents. His just awoken father was looking particularly befuddled, but had been blessed with enough forethought to toss on a pair of jeans and a sweater. His sister was walking down the beach with a pair of sweats and some sneakers for him, looking surprisingly benevolent. 

The two beached officers took him aside to have him recount the story. They occasionally looked at each other inquisitively, sometimes suspiciously, but he wrote this off as just the way cops probably feel like they have to look at each other while someone is talking. Their way of asserting their upper hand and maybe tripping up someone with their feet less truthfully stable. They had no such person in this instant and he relayed his account for them with remarkable clarity and ease. It was a moment of pretty empowered self assurance. He couldn’t have remembered something so vividly if it had all been an illusion, right? There was a rush of relief. He had given this away now. His job was done and these people could take it from him. And none of his peers saw him in his underwear. 

“It doesn’t seem like anyone was in The Dunes tonight, though, son.”

Ugh. Son. Wait, what?

“What do you mean? Of course there were people in the dunes.” 

“Didn’t see so much as an empty beer can.”

“I saw them. I saw the fire, I heard the voices.”

“If there was a fire, there’d be smoke.”

It was only just now that he realized the flashing lights of the police cars had pulled focus from the now glaringly absent familiar flicker. And the man was right, right? When you put out a fire, especially that quickly, there would be a trace of it floating off into the sky …

“I swear, it was …”

“I had a pretty wild imagination myself when I was kid, son. Let’s just say you did the right thing by alerting your mom and running over here when you thought you saw what you thought you saw. But it must’ve just been the full moon playing tricks on you.”

He shivered to shake off the rehearsed pretension that was just oozed all over him. That might work on a prepubescent ignoramus, but he didn’t think he saw what he saw, he saw it. He could hear those voices, he could smell that smoke, he could see her hair …

“Megan Thatcher.”

“What?”

“That’s who it was. Megan Thatcher. She goes to my school. I know who she is, I know she was there. Can’t you just go to her house or call her parents or something?”

“It’s a little late …”

“Then, I’ll drop it. I’ll know that you were right. Just moon tricks or my imagination or whatever.”

“Of course we will.” The jacket-lending cop had now officially, officially made up for that unfortunate, but now very forgivable buddy moment. He reasoned it must be a term they were trained to use on a potentially hysterical young person. “You go home, though. Go to bed. It’s in our hands now.”

“I will. Thank you.” 

The grumpier cop trailed off in a naturally suited huff as he lumbered through the sand, making sure to punctuate his discomfort with a variety of beleaguered sound effects. The kinder one lingered for a moment. Maybe to be generous, but also possibly to avoid walking with his disgruntled coworker.

“We’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

“I really did see her out there, I wouldn’t make that up. Maybe she walked back before I got to the beach, I don’t know -”

“I believe you. Ok? It’s not yours to worry about anymore.” He patted his shoulder in that way he imagined a baseball coach might. He lacked the experience, but understood the reference. And he felt comforted by it. He trusted this statement, whether it was genuine or not. The only real problem was his wavering belief in himself.

It was a living dead kind of walk back up to the house. A numbness. A haze. His mom offered to make him tea or hot chocolate. He didn’t feel like his stomach would welcome even the simplest of things, so he politely declined. He floated unconsciously upstairs and showered the sand and the cold off his body. The hot water was relieving, but the calm brought questions. He couldn’t shake the very real memory of Megan on those rocks. There one moment, gone the next. He couldn’t challenge himself to make it anything less than something that was really really real.

He sat back in his nook looking out over The Dunes and the jetty and the sea in a replay. But they were no longer familiar. They had started anew. The moon no longer lit up that same spot, but it might as well have because he could see every inch of it. He could see her. He could feel himself seeing her. He could hear them. He could smell the smoke. But it was all now coated in a glaze of confusion. Every one of his senses couldn’t be betraying him, right?

Right?

What just happened?

Chapter 2

“We’re No-Names!” She said it with an earnest mix of relief and, even, pride.

 “We’re what?”

 “We’re No-Names.”

 “No. I heard you. What does that mean?”

 The first few days of Freshman year had been a blur. That is not to imply that the experience of entering High School being an overwhelming whirlwind of emotional stress and physical panic is unique, but to acknowledge that, though not special in his plight, Huey was not breezing through the journey. 

 The same could also be said for a majority of his peers, which was slightly comforting. Being that he was known more for not being known than for making himself a presence, he tended to take on more of an observational role in the greater social schematics of the class. He watched his fellow Freshmen as they all took their first steps out of the comforts of their Middle School existences and stepped into this, once mythic, now very real ninth grade world towering around them. 

 Some seemed to be in a state of perpetual fog. Managing to get around, but with a shaky daze like someone who had just been woken up too early. Others seemed to be teetering constantly between a brisk walk and full out run. More keenly aware, assumedly, of their new purpose, but less confident in their abilities to achieve success. The worst, from Huey’s perspective, were those who looked on the verge of collapse, evidenced by both their pained, close to tears expressions and the buckling of their knees under the weight of their full-of-every-book backpacks. 

 Huey, regrettably, had been such a student on his first day

And maybe the second. 

This new school, in addition to being full of shockingly large, very confident humans, who he could not even begin to believe were only one to three years older than him, was also structurally defined as what one calls a campus. That’s right. Campus. A blurry word when you say it too much, campus, and that might partly be because of it being too overwhelming an idea to focus on. Gone were the days of navigating one corridor of a single building. He would now be traveling between various floors of three different buildings because the High School was not arranged by the grade level of the students, but by department. That’s right. Department. Not even subjects. Departments. A campus consisting of three buildings, cleverly named A, B, and C, respectively, housing various departments. What was this? A job office?

Huey’s sole priority on his first day of High School was to get to every class, without struggle, on time. So, he, like many of his classmates, kept every book he accumulated throughout the day in his backpack until, at the end of the day, he could barely zip it shut. His goal on his second day was not different, which meant all of those books from the previous day stayed with him, but this time from the very beginning of the day until the very end. It was only halfway through this second day that he started to notice the number of times throughout the day he passed directly under and, once even directly past, the apparently prime location of his B building locker. That night, he drew up a plan to navigate his way between classes without needing his backpack. That’s right. Not needing it at all. Not just keeping it light enough to not cause back problems for his future self, but to be able to slip it into his locker at the beginning of the day and carry all his necessities under his arm like James Dean might do were he in this situation.

Much of the success of this plan hinged on a single folder. No notebooks, no binders, no clutter. One folder. He would keep loose-leaf pages of lined paper in it at all times for in-class note taking and all the essential leaflets and paper paraphernalia from every class tucked away in one spot. This meant the only hand-offs from class to class would need to be textbooks. 

And it worked. 

He felt godlike on that third day as he walked between buildings with only a single book, a folder with a pen clipped on the edge of it, and a calculator tucked under his arm. His pencil for Math was slid behind his ear, which felt especially Dean-worthy. Did a few upperclassmen who had not yet mastered the art of a backpack-free high school lifestyle even glance up and down at him as he passed breezily by them in the parking lot on his way from History to Math? Maybe they did. And maybe he would be ok at this High School thing, after all … maybe.

Nobody would be quite as ok at it, though, as those people.

You know who they are.

While most struggled to find their footing those first few days or weeks or, for some, years, there was that certain group of people who were not just very, but very, very good at it very, very quickly.

Huey knew he had a certain ingenuity that allowed him to briefly hack the system, but for a select few students the whole thing was just … easy. It was as if they had been there the whole time. Born and bred in High School. He knew this wasn’t the case. He had spent the past three years in Middle School with them and some had known since Kindergarten. They, too, were Freshmen. This was an undeniable fact. But even he at times, with a quick glance, mistook them for Sophomores, Juniors, even Seniors. 

They walked slowly, if at all. Never in a rush. Often just effortlessly posed by a locker at a seemingly random spot along any corridor. Maybe not even theirs. Never right in the middle, never too close to a classroom door. Just anywhere, but also exactly right there. Always sure of where they needed to be and without fear that they might not make it in time. There would always be a seat waiting for them, always a bell ringing at the exact moment they walked in the door. 

They never traveled with more than one textbook, delicately wrapped and smaller or larger somehow than anyone else’s, depending on their size, like they had been measured to fit their unreasonable symmetry. They would carry a single notebook and unlike Huey’s folder, which was clumsily bulging after just a few days, these were as slim and crisp as an unread children’s book. There was rarely a writing utensil in sight, unless it was a statement pen operated primarily as an accessory for attention-getting. You weren’t even allowed to use pens in Math. But, then again, maybe these were the kinds of people who were beyond the need to erase. 

“No-Names.”

“Just because you keep repeating it doesn’t mean I suddenly understand.”

“Two girls in my Gym class were talking about it.”

“I haven’t had Gym yet. What did you have to do?” Huey was dreading Gym (another blurry word, by the way) and he would have to finally face it first thing the next morning.

“It was just attendance and you get your locker and a tour and stuff and then it’s a study. Nothing real happens this week.”

“Another locker?”

“In the locker room. Just to use for class, only the sports people get permanent lockers.”

Robyn didn’t realize this, clear by the nonchalance in her tone, but she could not have made a more spine tingling statement to Huey. Gym was one thing for someone with no athletic prowess and a penchant for being picked last, but a locker room? He wasn’t even totally sure those were real. Yet another thing Junior High had left him woefully unprepared for. Huey felt the warm, familiar blanket of panic start to curl around him, but was swiftly snapped back to the apparently more pressing matter at hand that Robyn, unaware of his having dazed off, had plowed on with.

“... obvious Nerds, right? Like the ones who are super smart and good at school. You’re kinda like that, but I think you have to be in the highest Math level to actually earn that classification.”

“Are you saying I’m not good enough to be a Nerd?”

“And then there are the Dorks, who seem like Nerds, but aren’t good at school so they’re, like, a little below them and they include the Spookies and the Goths and basically anyone who isn’t a Nerd, but looks like they smell bad.”

“Could a bad smelling smart person still be a Nerd?”

“Yeah, of course,” she said with a level of duh that was physically painful to absorb. “Then there are the Geeks. Basically all the artsy people. Drama Geeks, Band Geeks, Choir Geeks, AV Geeks, Art Geeks … I think that’s all of them. They’re, like, a step above Nerds, but obviously some Nerds are also in those groups, so then they get to be in that group instead of being a Nerd. And above them is us.”

“Us?”

“No-Names.”

“How are No-Names above people with names?”

“Because we aren’t associated with any of the Geeks or the Nerds or the Dorks.”

 “But we don’t have names.”

 “It doesn’t matter. Plenty of them don’t have names either, but they stand out for their association with something Geeky or Nerdy or Dorky.” The three words melted together in a way that sounded like she had slipped into some kind of baby talk, which made Huey giggle, but had completely eluded Robyn’s awareness, so she confidently continued.

“We don’t. We dress ok, we don’t have bad hair, we don’t smell, we don’t look like we smell and we don’t do anything connected with one of the groups below us.”

 “I might do Drama, though.”

 “Yeah, I was worried about that. Please consider not. It would be super helpful.”

 Huey decided that he would honor her request. At least for now. High School was tricky enough as it was, he thought, and maybe this No-Name social positioning could benefit him in some way. Maybe it wasn’t worth giving up until he had a clearer idea of what the cache was worth.

 “Well, so who’s above us?” He asked. “Just everyone who’s popular?”

 “It’s not that simple.”

 “Of course not.”

 “Right above us are the Stoners.”

 “The Stoners? Why aren’t they the lowest? They don’t do anything.”

 “Because people who are popular use them for, you know -”

 “Oh. Yeah. That makes sense.”

 “Then, it’s the Dumb Jocks.”

 “Are there Smart Jocks?”

 “Of course. Don’t be so closed minded.”

“Sorry.”

“They’re usually the ones who get elected for Class Office and stuff and who actually have a chance of getting into a good college, so they’re, like, a little higher up than the dumb ones, but they obviously still all intermingle.”

“Obviously.”

“Collectively, above us is basically everyone who goes to the same parties together.”

“Sure, of course.”

“But there are still factions that break out among them.”

“Right.”

“Above the Smart Jocks are the Populars.”

 “Just, generally?”

 “Well, yeah. Everyone who’s kind of just Popular for being Popular.”

 “Don’t they have, like, a catchy name or something?”

 “They aren’t known for their creativity.”

 “Got it. Well, thank you for that very informative and enlightening journey through the class system on this Titanic that is our High School. Glad we aren’t in Steerage.”

 “I think technically we might be Steerage. But we’re not in the engine room!”

 “It’s good to be us. Let’s go so we can sit next to each other in Algebra.”

 “I’m not done.”

“Oh. There’s more?”

Her face and voice changed to a chilling sincerity. “Above the Populars -”

 “There’s something above Popular?”

 “The Sexy Seven.”

 “The what?” He sort of laughed out, incredulously.

 “The Sexy Seven.” She said it in the exact same tone, which sent a shiver up his spine and melted his face.

 “What - What is that?”

 “The seven most popular or, no, not even popular. Right? Literally beyond popular. The seven most coolest, most smartest, most fashionable, most -”

“Sexy?”

“I mean, yeah. The seven most influential people in the whole school. Probably the whole town. The Seven.”

 “Ok. So, who are they?”

 “I don’t need to tell you.”

“Oh my god.”

“No. No. Now that you know, you’ll just know.”

“That is the weirdest thing you have ever said to me. Which, you know, is saying a lot.” 

“Mhm. And each grade apparently has, like, a list of potential recruits that they’re, like, training. And those are the people they pick from to join the ranks.”

“Recruits? Ranks? What is this, the High School Militia?”

“No. That’s JROTC, they’re a weird cross section of Nerds and Dumb Jocks.”

“Good to know.”

“The Sexy Seven is … everything.”

 He could see the earnest mysticism in Robyn’s eyes. She had decided she wanted to be a part of this elusive septet, but given their current social standing as she had laid it out for him, it seemed an impossible feat. He didn’t want to trample on his friend’s dreams, though. Everyone should be able to hope for the best High School experience they can possibly have and if this is what she wanted, he would support her wholeheartedly.

“So, how do they choose people to train?” 

“It’s unknown to anyone outside the organization, but I imagine it’s based on your level of notoriety at the end of each year.”

“So, I guess we don’t have a shot, do we?” Unfortunately, despite his best intentions, Huey was a compulsive cynic.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought about it.” She tried to mean it. “I guess not.”

“I mean, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but we’d have to jump over a lot of groups to get ourselves there, right?”

“Right. Yeah.”

“And become Stoners and Jocks along the way.” He meant it as a joke, it didn’t land. 

It’s not that Huey didn’t also feel the sparkly tug of whatever this The Sexy Seven fantasy was. It must be nice to be spoken of with such wonder and intrigue. But he had fun with Robyn and Sammi, the other member of their best friend triad. He had spent plenty of years with friends of convenience who he didn’t really like and who didn’t seem to really like him, either. And then there were the other, even darker ages, with no friends at all. So, to have two best friends who he had a genuinely good time with was, to him, far greater than whatever riches The Sexy Seven or any other level of High School popularity could bring him. More importantly, though, he didn’t want to have to sit next to Eric White, a member of the aforementioned Dumb Jock enclave, during Algebra again because Robyn couldn’t get it together to be on time, so social climbing aspirations would just have to wait.

“Look. We have a whole year to figure out who we’re gonna be in this place. Let’s go to Math now, ok?”

“Ok.”

Robyn was obviously crushed and it was obviously his fault. He wasn’t even a week in and High School was already proving to be a very tumultuous and unpredictable journey.

Chapter 3

“Do you have a pencil?”

 “No.”

 “What about that one?”

 “The one I’m using?”

 “Yeah.”

 “I’m using it.”

 “So?”

 Eric White had been a nemesis of Huey’s since seventh grade. He appeared in Huey’s life not unlike the Wicked Witch did in Dorothy’s. A terrifyingly loud burst of smoke one day and there was Eric White laughing in his face. Literally. A person Huey had never known existed in the world was all of a sudden standing in front of him, locked in his gaze, just laughing. At him, clearly, but without discernible cause. 

Huey had spent most of his life being an embarrassing person. It’s not an uncommon condition and he had learned to live with it. Falling, spilling, saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong thing, looking the wrong way, stepping in something gross, sitting in something gross … all very familiar to the day-to-day of his life. It is because of this that he had developed an acute sense of when he was being embarrassing and when he was not. He knew when he was being laughed at or whispered about and he generally knew why. It’s true that sometimes it was not for a good reason, but it was rarely without some semblance of a root. Eric was the first person to introduce Huey to the notion that you can sometimes be laughed at for just existing.

A bleak reality, yes, but one that is better to acknowledge than to ignore.

This dynamic continued throughout Middle School. Others would push, trip, call names, ask demeaning questions, you know - the norm. Eric would laugh. Anytime he saw Huey, he would make sure they made eye contact and release. From the bowels of his soul. A hearty and satisfying and almost enviable spewing of hilarity. It was a brand new kind of evil for Huey. The senseless kind. Only once did Huey ask Eric what exactly he was laughing at - a rookie mistake, sure, but he had been driven to insane desperation. Eric, of course, laughed. Even harder, even more maniacally. I mean, duh. What did you expect, Huey? A reasonable conversation?

The only salvation had been that they never overlapped in classes. Only during lunch, when the entire grade was together in the Cafeteria and occasionally in the halls would Huey be subject to Eric’s hysterical torments. This was High School, though. A world where consistency was thwarted and chaos reigned. Where anyone could be anywhere at any given time. Where classes fell one slot on your schedule each day until they dropped off completely, only to return in first position a day later. Where people chewed gum and wore hats without admonishment. Where people drove cars. Actually drove them. 

In High School, Huey had classes with Eric White. 

It was a shock, to say the least. 

The jump from History to Algebra was the most significant on Huey’s schedule. History with Mr. Mendoza was on the top floor of A building in the classroom at the far end of the hall. The corner pointing in the exact opposite direction of C Building. Algebra with Mrs. Bird was on the top floor of C Building at the far end of the hall pointing, yes, that’s right, in the opposite direction of A Building. Now, technically it could be worse because the top floor of C Building is actually at ground level. It is a building that descends as the floors go on. Math is at the top, on the first floor, level with the ground floors of Buildings A and B. Science is on the second floor, one floor below the first floor and below ground level. The third floor, colloquially referred to as “The Dungeon” is as far down as you can get, maybe ever, and is where the Shops are. Wood, Auto, AV and Photography, to be precise. Huey hadn’t yet journeyed to the Dungeon, those were electives for the upper grade levels, but if Algebra had been in the Dungeon it would have been a far more harrowing trek.

Breathless, Huey lept into Algebra and scanned for Robyn, who had promised to save him a seat in preparation for his inevitable knick-of-time arrival, when, suddenly, his stomach hit the floor. There was Robyn, shrugging apologetically, sitting next to Ashley Dunbar. The whole room became a blur of faces and bodies and full desks. He considered just leaving. Just walking out and giving up right then and there. He didn’t live too far away from the school. He could walk home and start a new life.

“There’s a seat right there.”

It wasn’t a kind voice, despite its helpful intention. Mrs. Bird was a severe looking woman with alabaster skin and inky black hair that fell in curls down her spine, but the front of which she slicked back tightly just to remind you she meant business. She spoke with a gruff, gravelly tone that, while intimidating, actually sort of warmed up her chilly exterior, if you can imagine.

He spotted the seat and set off, nodding an urgent thank you to her on the way. He could feel heat from the eyes of all his classmates burning into him like he was an ant under a magnifying glass. He rushed to avoid bursting into flames and then he froze. 

Eric White. He would be sitting next to Eric White.

He took a deep breath, braced for laughter, and went to sit down. It was the kind of desk you slip into from the left side, but because it was the desk on the right side of a pair, it meant Huey would need to squeeze in uncomfortably close to his sworn enemy. He was also still going through the early days of full-of-every-book-backpack wearing, but had been too disoriented to remember his oversized turtle shape and nearly beheaded the people in the desks behind him. He reversed out from between the seats like a car pulling out of a tight parking spot. He veered right to get himself back into the aisle, where he could extricate the bag from his body. He let the backpack fall down his arms, trying, but failing to catch it with his right hand so it dropped with a shocking thud to the ground. Someone even gasped. He opted to let it sit there and wait in the aisle until he could situate himself in the desk.

He briefly caught the gaze of Robyn and Ashley Dunbar’s pitiful stares, one significantly more compassionate than the other, as he pondered which side of his body should face Eric White as he maneuvered himself into his seat. He landed on trying to remain as forward-facing as possible, hoping to avoid any further awkwardness by unmentionable parts facing in Eric’s direction. And as he felt his left thigh ever so delicately graze along Eric’s right arm, he knew he had made the wrong decision. 

Huey finally fell into the seat and yanked his backpack over to his side. Mrs. Bird had already begun speaking, Huey knew this, he could hear the crunchy pulsing of her voice exfoliating the room, but the fog of the moment hadn’t cleared yet. It wouldn’t, really, for the rest of the day. Once one thing goes wrong on your first day of school, High School no less, recovery is a long and tumultuous journey. 

The third day would be his chance. Going backpack-less had been a huge boon for his ego and he felt like his luck was changing. Seats hadn’t been assigned yet in most of his classes. A strange thing happens in high school where some people switch up their schedules after the first few days, so very little gets set in stone until after the first week. Today, Algebra would come after lunch, which meant that he wouldn’t be rushing from History, but could calmly saunter from the Cafeteria in B Building, and could sit next to Robyn and Ashley Dunbar could fend for herself. The plan seemed air tight.

It wasn’t.

There was a lot to love about Robyn. She was silly, easy to talk to, non-judgmental and more herself than anybody Huey had ever met. She was also a certified space cadet. And that’s being overly polite. Sometimes Huey would be on the phone with her and she would just forget. Like, she would just stop. He would hear her eating chips, hear the tv in the background, hear her laughing at it, hear her talking to her cat, all while holding the receiver to her ear, completely unaware she was on the phone with someone. He would use these opportunities for his own amusement, calling her obscene and R-rated names, saying she did obscene and R-rated things and had crushes on Spookies and Goths and Dorks and people he knew she would be embarrassed. She heard none of it. Eventually he would hang up and they would both move on with their lives until it happened again the next day.

The walk from the Cafeteria to Algebra wasn’t a long one, but Huey knew it would take a long time. Robyn wasn’t great at walking and talking. If she was in the middle of something she was particularly passionate about, she would stop wherever she was to give it her everything. Even in the middle of the hallway, while people were walking behind her. Stop short. Wouldn’t even phase her when she’d cause a pile up and get bumped and nearly knocked over. It was too much, maybe, to be able to focus on walking and give the story the platform it deserved.

Huey respected this. He thought he’d rather have a friend who spoke with such passion that she couldn’t focus on anything else and then would become so exhausted by speaking that she would just slip away into temporary nothingness than a friend who didn’t do that. It made her weird. And he felt weird. And he liked that they shared that.

Except sometimes he didn’t.

Robyn and Huey were the last ones to Algebra that day. Robyn had stopped to talk to three different people, two of whom he wasn’t convinced she even knew. She tied her shoes. She got a sip of water from the fountain. She needed to stop at her locker for something, but then when they arrived she forgot what it was. And that is all on top of her requisite stops to emphasize plot points in her stories.

At least Huey no longer had his backpack and had learned that facing his butt in the direction of Eric White was better than his thigh making direct contact with Eric White. And both were preferable to the other option, which he had attempted the day before and wished to erase from his memory.

“Just use a pen, it’s not a quiz or anything.”

Pens were expressly forbidden in all Math classes, as previously discussed, but it didn’t seem to Huey that Mrs. Bird would care if Eric used one just for taking notes.

“Do you have a pen?”

“You have a pen.” Huey gestured to the pen sitting on the desk in front of Eric.

“It doesn’t work.” Eric scribbled in his notebook to prove the futility of the utensil.

Huey begrudgingly slipped his own pen out of his folder and handed it to Eric.

“Thanks.”

It dawned on Huey that this was the first conversation he and Eric White had ever had. There had been two years of one-sided laughter and two days of silent, next-to-each-other Algebra learning, but this was the first time Huey had ever heard Eric speak words. And where was the laughter?. Was Huey suddenly not funny? That first day of school he had been at peak levels of embarrassing and Eric hadn’t even cracked a smile. Barely acknowledged him, even. And now he was saying, “Thanks.” What undiscovered level of cruelty was this?

And then.

At the end of class.

Eric handed the pen back. Unprompted. Huey was sure he’d steal it. That the kindness was all a ruse to kidnap Huey’s pen and keep it forever. He had already resigned himself to this reality and was part of the way through his grieving process and planning a stop to get a new one from his locker.

“Thanks, Hennessey. See you tomorrow.”

“Uh. Yeah. Ok. See ya. Eric.” Huey was never great at the whole calling people by their last names thing, but the way he said Eric’s first name was still far from casual.

He sat in a buzzy, paralyzed stare until Robyn broke his daze.

“Did he say anything about me?”

“Huh?”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“Who? Eric?”

“Yeah.”

“You like Eric White now?”

“No. I’m just asking.”

“No, he didn’t.”

 “Well, if he does, you’ll tell me, right?”

 “No.”

 “Why not?”

 It happened at that moment, for whatever reason, we can’t plan these things - a shift in the universe and a wave of something glittery washed over him. He snuck his pencil behind his ear, then single-palmed his minimalist collection of High School essentials and in one fell swoop, slid from the desk and tucked his book, folder and calculator to his side as he spun himself into the aisle, and began a graceful glide out of the room. It wasn’t a move he was sure he could pull off when the desire to attempt it struck him, but even Robyn seemed impressed.

 “Where’s your bag?”

 It stung a little to know that despite ditching the monstrosity for the entirety of the day, he still presented as a backpack user, but he wouldn’t let it break his stride.

 They stepped out into the curved, cavernous hall of C Building. It was a puzzling design choice. Huey might have even thought they designed the halls to match the letter. Make it a C. But it was clear to him that B Building was the newest of the three. Not to say it was new, but it was cleaner and more modern than the other two. So, that would mean at one point C would not have been named C at all, being just one of two and so the hall shape wouldn’t have been relevant. Strange, though, to be standing at one end of a long hall and be unable to see the other side. 

Huey started to instinctively turn right out of the door, when Robyn vigorously grabbed his arm. Her nails dug a little too deep and he lost his casually cool grip on his stuff. The calculator and the book were one thing, but his entire High School life was in that folder, he couldn’t risk it tumbling to the ground and scattering its contents throughout this oddly shaped hallway. He bent forward as he tucked both arms into his body, to sort of cradle his belongings tightly and keep them from falling. It worked. A rare moment of successful equilibrium for an accident prone embarrassment sufferer. The only real casualty was his pencil, which went careening out from behind his ear and onto the slippery linoleum. Instinctually, Huey bent down to go grab it, but felt another tug. Robyn was pulling him back by his shirt. 

 This was not welcome. Huey was not a very body confident High School Freshman, so any action that threatened to too accurately reveal the details of what was lying underneath his shirt was a dangerous threat and he quickly snapped back, aborting the pencil retrieving mission.

 “What are you doing?” He freed his left hand to pull his shirt back into its comfortable, shapeless position.

 “Her.” 

Robyn stared off, hypnotized, and not looking at him while she spoke.

 Huey followed her gaze. Who her was, Huey didn’t know, but he half expected to see a backlit Goddess flanked by cherubs cascading in slow motion down the suddenly windswept hallway based on her awestruck expression.

 What he actually saw was far more miraculous.

 “Who is that?”

 “Jenny Lo.”

 Jenny drifted down the hallway like she wasn’t even touching the ground. She somehow moved slowly and swiftly at the same time. Huey had never seen a human with skin so free of blemish. Not even in a magazine. Was she glowing? Her hair was as black as Mrs. Bird’s, but soft and shiny as it bounced on her shoulders in perfect harmony with her steps, in perfect harmony with the delicate sway of her arms, in perfect harmony with other parts of her body that softly bounced and also seemed more perfect than any he had ever seen in his life. That is not to say she was showing off any particular part of her body, she was not. And that is not to say it would not have been acceptable or even welcome. She just wasn’t. It would be simply impossible to focus on any one part when everything was so beautifully in tune. She wore a flowery dress with short sleeves that hit a subtle V just below her collar bone. It was a sort of soft chartreuse, a color Huey was especially fond of because he enjoyed colors with overly complicated names, not so much because he considered it to be a lovely color. Somehow on Jenny Lo, though, it was positively glorious. 

 She stopped as she reached them. Not short, as Robyn was prone to do, but with a keen awareness of every possible consequence of this reprieve. Huey became aware of her intention and felt flush. The pencil. It had interrupted her otherwise unobstructed journey through life and school. He felt a mix of horror and guilt and thrill. Would he be in trouble? She wasn’t a teacher, but he felt as though he had done something wrong and Jenny Lo might be the strongest anchor of authority in this and any of the three Greyport High buildings. What would she do? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she would unhinge her jaw, releasing a monstrous lizard demon that would eat him alive in one bite. Both options seemed equally plausible and equally exhilarating.

 As she bent down, he watched her hand, determined, but gentle, whisk up his suddenly extremely ugly and unworthy and humiliatingly chewed up Ticonderoga #2. Her hair scooted off to the left as she looked up and into his eyes. He could’ve sworn her head didn’t even twitch, it was like the strands just knew what she needed and all worked together to free her sightline.

 “Here you go.”

 Huey wished at this moment he were Shakespeare. He wished he could drum up all the most perfect words that this most perfect of beings deserved to have fall upon her ears. Her eyes were a soothing, sincere, cushiony brown leather and she smiled honestly, not with dismissive condescension or eager artificiality. She gave exactly the right measure of what the moment merited. No more, no less. He opened his mouth to clumsily utter whatever thank you he could muster.

 And then she was gone. Swiftly and slowly, just as she had arrived. Huey was left gazing at the curve in the hallway. He didn’t even really remember seeing her disappear along its arc. It could have been a dream. He may have even had a better time believing it if it was, but the experience was all too real. He could feel it tingling all over his skin.

 “Why didn’t you say thank you?” Her words punched with the same aggression as her fist did into his bicep.

 “Ow. What?”

 “Jenny Lo just picked your gross ass pencil off the dirty, f***ing ground of C Building -” She did not have stars in her version.

 “Hey!”

 “Sorry, but it’s Jenny f***ing Lo.”

 “Enough with the F’s, Robyn, jeez.”

 “That was our chance, Huey. That was our in.”

 “Our chance for what?”

 “Duh.”

 “The pencil?”

 “She picks up your pencil, you say thank you, she says, ‘No problem.’ You say, ‘What’s your name?’ She says, ‘Jenny Lo.’ You say, ‘I’m Huey’ and you bat your pretty blue eyes at her.”

 “You think I have pretty blue eyes?”

 “Shut up.” She punched him again.

“Stop doing that.”

“Then, she’s like, ‘Who’s your friend?’ ‘Oh, that’s Robyn. She’s rad.’ And then she’s like, ‘Wow you two seem cool, I should recommend you for The Sexy f***ing Seven.”

 “Oh, is she -?”

 “Are you f***ing stupid?”

 “What has happened to you?”

 “What has happened to me? You just ruined my life, that’s all. All you had to say was, ‘Thank you.’ Is that so hard? It’s what you say when someone does something nice. You’re the nicest person I know. That’s all anybody ever says about you. Being polite is what you do the best and you failed. Hard. What happened to me? What happened to you, I say?”

 “I said, Thank you.’”

 “No you didn’t. You said nothing. Nothing.”

 “I think I did say something.”

 Huey didn’t know what he thought he said, but he was sure words came out of his mouth.

 “You said nothing. And now we will never be in The Sexy Seven because she’s gonna go tell everyone we’re weird and rude.”

 “She seemed nice, I don’t think she’d do that.”

 “You don’t know her.”

 “Neither do you.”

 “And now I never will.”

 “Why does it even matter? If that’s all it takes to not be in The Sexy Seven, I don’t think I want to be in The Sexy Seven.”

 “Of course you do, everyone does.”

 Suddenly, the bell was ringing and Huey and Robyn were still standing in the hall outside of Mrs. Bird’s classroom. 

 “F***.” Robyn blurted as she darted off to wherever her next class was.

 Huey had to get to class, too, but it was Science just a floor below and he reasoned he might be able to squeak by pretending his Algebra book was a Science book today. Sammi would be sitting next to him, too, and they could share. 

As he headed for the stairs, he thought about Robyn. He had heard her use words like that before, but never with this much frequency and so near to teachers seemed very risky. More significantly, though, he had never known her to care so much about what someone she didn’t even know thought about her. Or him. Huey had always been embarrassing, but it never seemed to matter to Robyn or Sammi. Suddenly, he felt wrong.

High School was changing all sorts of people in all sorts of confusing ways.