"Looks damaged."

"It's about a town of men who build robots that look exactly like their wives and then they kill the real wives and replace them with the robots."

"Why don't they just keep the robots and get divorced?"

"It's a metaphor." He doesn't hesitate this time.

I have to laugh.

I pause on the sidewalk outside the elementary school and reach out to Ally for a hug. Her arms hang limp at her sides. "Give me a hug!" I tell her.

She extends her arms obediently.

I kneel down and hold her to me.

"I have to act like the other kids," she whispers.

I glance over her shoulder and through the fence. A thousand zombies line up at the entrance to her school. "They're pretty scary, aren't they?"

She nods slowly.

One supervisor hangs out by the monkey bars, gabbing into her RIG. She sees me watching her and takes a photo of me and my sister.

"You do whatever you have to," I tell Ally. "Stay on their good side."

She joins the line of zombies facing front. I can't tell her apart from the rest of them.

"Hey, Connors!" Tyler Wilkins struts up the street, smoking a cigarette. He waves at me with a stained hand. "I saw you at the middle school this weekend."

I nod self-importantly. "I coach their football team."

He snickers. "That's not all you do. I pa.s.sed by at lunchtime and saw you making some art. I never knew you could paint like that. You should go to a special school."

"Funny, I always said the same about you."

He b.u.t.ts his cigarette and holds his RIG up to my face.

I try not to breathe him in as I watch a movie of myself defacing the middle school conservatory. All I can think is, Am I really that short?

"You're bright enough to pick the wall with no surveillance," he says. "But not bright enough to look over your shoulder once in a while. I must have been there twenty minutes."

I sigh. "What do you want, Tyler?"

"What do you mean?"

"What are you going to do with the recording? Are you posting it?"

"I don't know. I just took it."

"If you're going to get me suspended for graffiti, I might as well beat the c.r.a.p out of you first."

He spits on the concrete, leaves a brownish yellow splatter by my feet. "Why do you have to say that? You think I'd run to the princ.i.p.al with your picture?"

"Then why are you showing me? Are you trying to blackmail me?"

"What have you got that's worth taking, a.s.shole?" He scowls and shakes his head. "You don't know anything about me. I don't want to talk to you, unit." He walks away flexing his fists.

He hunches and sways, sad and slow, like a crooked little man, and I suddenly realize that he was trying to compliment me. Someone like Tyler never gets to be anybody else. I want to shout, "Sorry!" but I don't have the b.a.l.l.s, and he's too far away. The word sits inside me like a stone.

I convince Xavier to hack the school surveillance system and take one wall of tenth grade lockers offline. He does it happilya"he likes breaking rules he doesn't believe in. At lunchtime I zoom in on my RIG and watch Montgomery punch in his locker code. Two minutes later, I watch Washington punch in his.

While everyone's in the cafeteria, Dallas and I open the lockers and transfer their contents. Washington's beloved photo of a naked woman with a python snaked around her hips now hangs on Montgomery's door. Montgomery's construction workers and chorus line cover the inside of Washington's locker.

We hover nearby when the boys get back from lunch. Dallas records Montgomery shaking and flapping his hands like he's been a.s.saulted. "Where's my jacket?" he shrieks. "What's all this?" He looks at the locker numbers around him, then back at his own. He removes a blue sweatshirt and holds it between two fingers like it's covered in waste. He sniffs it, cringes, drops it on the tile floor. Then he marches off to find an authority figure.

Washington trips in with Tyler and Jersey, bragging about fourteen-year-old throwaways they've molested. The boasting stops when Washington opens his locker. Jersey laughs and says, "That's some damaged action you're into."

A few bystanders peek over their shoulders. Washington burns crimson as their laughter s...o...b..a.l.l.s and more students gather round the handsome carpenter and chorus line. "That's not mine!" he shouts.

"You have the same jacket as Montgomery?" Jersey cries.

I have to hide around the corner, I'm laughing so hard.

Dallas maintains his composure and keeps recording.

Washington throws everything from his locker onto the floor, shaking and shouting, "This is not mine!"

Dallas zooms in on a vein throbbing in his forehead.

The princ.i.p.al marches over with Montgomery, who gasps and falls to his knees beside his belongings. He seizes a photo of a chorus girl like it's his dead mother.

"Pick those clothes up," Mr. Graham tells Washington.

"What were they doing in my locker?" Washington shouts.

Montgomery huffs to his own locker and throws the rest of Washington's belongings on the floor. He stomps on the snake girl.

"Hey! There's my stuff!" Washington yells. His eyes light up like he's made a fantastic discovery. It takes him another five minutes to comprehend that he and Montgomery are victims of a prank.

Tyler crosses his arms and stares across the hall at me and Dallas, smirking.

Mr. Graham shouts, "Whoever did this, I know you're watching! Let me warn you that your antics have been recorded." He points to the disabled camera above his head. "This is the last time you'll be enjoying yourself at someone else's expense."

Expense. What a feeb. Like twenty minutes of confusion is such a cost.

"I know it was you," Pepper whispers in geography cla.s.s. "The locker switch? Don't ever pull that joke on me."

"So I should take my football gear out of your dance locker?"

She laughs, throws her head back and stretches her neck like an invitation. "I'm picturing you catching a ball in my dance clothes."

"I dream of it."

She nudges her shoulder into mine. "There might not be many days left for pranks."

"You think retinal scans are coming this year?"

"I don't know what's coming." She looks me in the eye and whispers, "My parents are talking about moving away."

"No way! Where?"

She shrugs.

Ms. Reynolds calls us to attention and describes the adolescent initiation practices of extinct indigenous cultures.

It could provide good fodder for jokes, but now I'm too depressed to bother.

"Did Pepper tell you she's moving?" Dallas asks in science cla.s.s.

"She told you too?" I whine.

"No talking, Maxwell!" Mr. Thompson shouts. He continues his ill.u.s.tration of the digestive system, step-by-step illumination of a burger turning to s.h.i.t.

In Communications, we read fairy tales in five languages. Frogs into princes, rags into riches, sweet tongues into sharp teeth. Everything in school today is about transformation, but I'm jammed into place, same day every day, with no way out.

Xavier takes over from Mr. Ames and expounds on the psychological necessity of heroic tales.

Tyler interrupts him. "Why aren't you in college, Lavigne? You look like an adult. You think like an adult. Why are you here?"

Xavier looks around in confusion. "I need my diploma. Education is the key to freedom."

"Xavier is fifteen like you, Tyler," Mr. Ames says. "But he spends his free time studying instead of fighting."

"That's not fair," I say. "Tyler studies and fights in equal amounts."

Everyone snickers. Tyler gives me the finger.

"I'm serious," I say. "There are no slackers in this school."

Mr. Ames snorts so hard his gla.s.ses fall off.

"It's true!" I shout. "We know that if we fall below seventy we'll be sent to the school for throwaways."

"Trade school," Mr. Ames corrects.

"Trade. Royal. The trade of dismantling old technology and recycling its parts."

"What's your point, Maxwell?" Mr. Ames sighs.

"My point is that none of us is stupid and no one lets school slide. You might think we mess around, some of us, but not one student here works less than two hours a night."

"Two out of how many?" Mr. Ames asks. "Seven? Eight? Is that really so much homework?"

"Are you serious?" I ask.

He smiles. "Let's take another look at the Big Bad Wolf."

"There aren't any wolves anymore," I mutter.

Dallas leans over and whispers, "Who do you think would win in a fight? Red Riding Hood or Grandma?"

In history we compare the recent Venezuelan flu to the Black Plague in the 1300s.

"Both were times of increasing social control," Mr. Reese says.

Xavier gushes at the magic words social control. He leans into the aisle and leads us all astray with a comparison of our national government and the medieval papacy, neither of which had anything to do with health care. Mr. Reese is kind and neurotica"he gives Xavier a long leash.

Brennan reaches the end of his own rope. "I understand what you're saying, Xavier, but in the modern world, social control is necessary. It's too easy for insane people to unleash disaster on the rest of us."

"Don't tell me the Venezuelan flu was spread by terrorists," Montgomery says with a sigh. "I am so tired of that theory."

Brennan lowers his eyes. "We know the California nuclear disaster was a terrorist move. What if something like that happened in a city? We have millions of environmental refugees from drought and rising sea levels. We can't add to that burden with industrial sabotage and terrorism."

"We should have closed our borders years ago," Washington says.

"No. It's immigration that keeps our economy strong," Xavier says. "Our openness is what made us great."

"The point is," Brennan says, "our technology has become too lethal to allow the same freedoms we used to have. Look at what happened to Freaktown, and that was just an accident."

"That was the Canadians," Washington says.

"It was our own industry," Xavier argues.

"It was an accident that our enemies want repeated,"

Brennan says. "We have to limit civil liberties for our own safety."

"We have to limit corporate liberties for our safety," Xavier argues.

"What liberties are you talking about, Brennan?" Dallas asks. "We're under surveillance on every street of this city and every room of this school."

"We need that in the rest of the country," Brennan says.

"At least they're getting universal ids," Montgomery says. "That's step one."

"They'll never implement that," I say. "The southwest signed on to get their water supply back, but they'll never enforce it. Texas barely has zoning laws."

Dallas laughs and says, "That's where I'm moving."