The other way from his house to school cut south through Cardoza Park, crossing under the cloverleaf before riding up Escuela Parkway. There was no good reason to take this route; it cost a few extra minutes, risked more stoplights, and didn’t boast better scenery than the quicker path. But he left early for school and rode south from his door all the same, both because the empty streets in the early morning felt free and peaceful in a way that had always appealed to him, and because the longer way around would take him past Monster Adult X. He was curious to see if anything had happened to it yet.
It didn’t look any different. Gates hadn’t even gotten around to putting up a sign. The grass in the useless little side yard was uncut and ragged, and there were beer cans and empty potato chip bags in the entryway. Freeway detritus, eternal. Out of habit, Derrick picked some of it up and carried it around back to the Dumpster. And then, leaning into a different habit, he took the key he still had on his key ring and opened the back door.
It felt weird; Milpitas was a sleepy town, but police sometimes parked under the on-ramp. He punched in the alarm code, which still worked—maybe nothing would have happened if he hadn’t, since he knew Hawley wouldn’t have paid the security company a dime past September, but he didn’t want to chance it. Inside, things were unchanged. If there’d been any prospective buyers stopping by to survey the property, they’d left no trace of their visits.
He sat down in his old seat behind the front counter; it was dark inside, but a little morning light seeped in through the painted-over windows, just enough to sketch by. He got out a notebook, and he spent fifteen minutes working on his coat of arms. It was an idea he’d been sporadically refining ever since first hearing about shields and crests in the fourth grade: trying to squeeze a true representation of himself into a single image appealed to him on an almost basic level. It was a task whose culmination both beckoned and threatened; every new iteration of his crest gave both the satisfaction of having arrived somewhere new and the possibility of greater refinements down the line.
Derrick’s crest as it presently stood had four quadrants, up from three in childhood. The balance appealed to him. The concepts he hoped to depict had grown denser and more abstract over the years, and would have been hard to explain to outsiders, but he didn’t talk about them to anybody but Seth, who, of course, had dozens of crests of his own, each wilder than the last: The Shield of Unbreakable Perfection. The Great Flag of Blood Warfare. Death’s Herald.
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.
“Wanna ride someplace?” Seth asked as they arrived at the bike rack.
“You wanna ride someplace?” Derrick asked, smiling cryptically.
“What do you got?” said Seth.
“Follow me, young warrior,” Derrick said, pedaling back toward Monster Adult X.
MINOANS II
“Yo, I never really went into one of these places before,” Seth said as they entered the darkness of the back hallway. “You sure this is OK?”
“Relax,” said Derrick, laughing. “This really isn’t technically ‘one of those places’ anymore. It’s closed.” He flipped the lights on; the store with the lights on and nobody inside it was one of the strangest sights Seth had ever seen, like the Yellow Brick Road gone degenerate.
“Whoa,” he said.
“It’s weird, right?”