In the classroom, Marisol was sitting on top of Delaney’s desk, speaking in a low voice to her, their black combat boots planted firmly in Alex’s chair in the adjacent row.
“Wow,” Alex said, announcing his presence to his two friends. “Marisol. Rude.”
“Rude? Me? Never,” Marisol said, grinning. Alex sat at his desk and pushed their feet off.
Today, they had a dark, wispy fake mustache and glittery eye makeup, their short, wild black hair adorned with a matching barrette. A black skirt swished around their knees and a maroon leather jacket with an overabundance of buckles added to the flair of it all.
Alex was used to Marisol’s ability to somehow glide between ethereal bubblegum fairy and Gray American-flavored high school grunge at all times, but he still wondered how much time they took to plan their outfits.
Personally, most of his wardrobe was black and gray, so it made selecting outfits when his brain kept getting distracted by the weekend’s catastrophic events at least manageable.
Marisol spotted Tory, and their eyes grew wide. “You. We’re talking right now.”
Tory took a long sip of his coffee, as if he was preparing himself mentally to spill his soul to Marisol and Delaney, but the teacher passed to the front of the classroom.
“No. No talking, Mx. Hitachi, we’re doing class now.” He got to the front of the classroom. “We’re talking about World War III and not whatever disaster is on the newsfeed this week. We’re doing school. This place has been in a downward spiral ever since they installed the smart walls. Students don’t need more distractions.”
Tory dropped in the seat behind Alex’s, pointedly ignoring Marisol and Delaney’s staring.
It took about three seconds before Tory’s straw was poking Alex’s back. Alex turned around and glared at Tory, who grinned in response.
“You are incorrigible,” Alex mumbled.
“Talk dirty to me,” Tory whispered back. Alex snorted and stole Tory’s coffee. It was his now.
“Alright.” Mr. Garcia touched his tablet, and the smart wall behind him lit up. He opened up a presentation behind him. The slides had clearly been designed by him—they were crammed with information, with cheesy cartoon characters sitting in the margins cut off in the middle. He stared at his presentation with disappointment.
On Alex’s desk, his tablet lit up with the same presentation.
“I’m never going to understand how these smart wall presentations work. Alright. For most of you, today should be a review before we dive deeper into the third world war during this unit. Does anyone remember the year the war started?”
Alex’s eyes flicked to the presentation, drinking the coffee. It was far too loud to slurp in the quiet classroom, so he stopped. The year the war started was in the first bullet point.
Tory must have raised his hand, because Mr. Garcia said, “Mr. Burns?”
“I think it’s 2007?”
Alex could hear the grin in his voice. Mr. Garcia frowned, glanced back at his presentation, and said, “Ah. Excellent reading comprehension skills, Mr. Burns.”
“You got it.”
“Alright. So. In August of 2007, World War III officially started when plans that had been made between an allyship of enemy countries to bomb United States civilian towns were discovered. During the fall, cities across the country began the…” He paused, waiting for the students to fill out the rest of the sentence.
Alex raised his hand. “The DOME project. Defensive Ocular Mirrored Engineering.”
“That’s exactly right, Mr. Hale.”
A message popped up in the corner of his tablet.
“Nerd,” the message read. Alex resisted a snort.
“I thought you liked smart guys,” he wrote back. He heard Tory chuckle quietly behind him.
“Over the next few years, cities began building the domes. They were made to use mirrors to completely obscure large cities from view. They also protected the city from any aerial attacks. For the first two decades after its official beginning, life in the United States went on fairly normally. People were able to travel from city to city well enough—everything seemed normal. Dome construction started to get more lax. Ours finished, but others didn’t. This was called what…?”
He switched the slides, and the students had their answer.
“The Cold Time,” a few students intoned.
Mr. Garcia nodded and turned to the slide, and Alex stopped highlighting important parts of the presentation to dig a paper notebook out of his backpack. He ripped the paper free as inconspicuously as possible, then folded it into a tiny triangle. He turned and flicked the paper across Tory’s desk, then turned back to face the teacher, who was none the wiser.
“It was a nasty sequel to the Cold War, but in 2025, it ended with The Bombing. This event ended life in the United States as we knew it. Every citizen left alive fled to the few completed domes. The authority of the federal government dissolved into the city-state authority we have today in Gale City.”
Alex turned to Tory with his thumbs meeting and his pointer fingers up, and Tory flicked the paper perfectly between Alex’s fingers. Alex glared at him, and he grinned. He couldn’t be good at real sports and fake sports. It was not allowed.
“So, who is allowed to leave the dome and under what circumstances?”
Marisol raised their hand. “Council members of the Paragon Guild, the mayor and her board members, and the president of the Trading and Negotiation Committee. They are allowed to leave the dome for up to fifty feet, and only at a scheduled time with a certain number of official accompaniment. They can only do so for the purposes of trading with other city-states.”
“Very good!” Mr. Garcia nodded, pleased. He went to the next slide, and it contained bullet points that reiterated Marisol’s answer almost perfectly. “Your mother is on the Trading and Negotiation Committee, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.” Marisol smiled, quite proud.
Alex internally congratulated his friend for sounding like they knew their stuff. Marisol was keenly interested in their mother’s field of work and took a lot of time getting to know it. He didn’t really know why—as far as he knew, Marisol spent most of their time studying fabric and fashion, and that didn’t seem to mesh well with a career in the TNC.
“Great! The punishment for leaving or attempting to leave the dome is...what, class?”
“Banishment,” every single student intoned.
It was something they’d had ingrained in them since they were kids. Every time a person left the dome, it meant more shiftbeasts might be able to get in. It meant radiation and disease and mutation had a chance to sweep inside and attack civilians. Everything was a risk—especially trading—but a city of two million people needed more than what Gale City’s patchy desert farmland, greenhouses, small factories, and personal endeavors could grant in order to survive.
Alex watched Mr. Garcia turn back to the slides, and he turned around and flicked the paper back at Tory. It flew between his goal fingers and landed right at the edge of the desk. Tory looked impressed, and Alex silently fistpumped.
. . . . .
After the class ended, Marisol pivoted to face Tory and Alex, their eyes steely, like a cat that had finally cornered a mouse. “Finally. Okay. Tory—you haven’t answered your texts all weekend, and you and your mom have been all over my feed. I want a slides presentation explaining all of this.”
Tory didn’t have time to create slides, but he did go into detail explaining what had happened with Vent, Wild Blossom, and his phone.
“Tory, why didn’t you run away?” Marisol interrupted him.
He shrugged, his eyes darting to the ground. “I don’t know. I froze. I thought it was like, a cosplay or something at first, and then he grabbed me.” He puffed his cheeks. “Kind of don’t remember much that happened afterwards.”
Alex didn’t know how true that was, but he watched Tory’s hands clench and unclench on his lap, avoiding eye contact. His knee bobbed under his desk, making the whole thing shake.
“Maybe we don’t interrogate Tory about how he acted under duress?” Alex suggested, and Marisol frowned.
“Well, if I was him, I would have punched Vent in the face until he let go, and then ran away,” they said, stroking their mustache thoughtfully. “So I was trying to figure out why Tory didn’t.”
“Marisol,” Delaney started, her tone turning maternal and chastising. “You can’t predict how your body is going to actually react in an emergency. LIfe isn’t a movie.”
Marisol sighed and had the humility to look chastened. “My body would react with punches.”
Tory laughed a little. “Next time, I’ll punch the bad guy in the face just for you.”
“No,” Alex groaned. “There will be no next time.”
Delaney frowned. “Right, I don’t know about that. Both Wild Blossom and Vent in the same weekend. Both attacked either Tory or his mom. That...is bad.”
“I was watching the interview when it went off the air.” Marisol planted their chin on their knee, sitting scrunched up against their desk. “It all felt so…well…perfectly timed? They did this huge, dramatic reveal of Vent’s identity, and it literally broke the net.”
“I’m just glad you guys both ended up okay.” Delaney said, her gaze turned to her long pink hair twirling around her finger. “Can the three of us agree to wrap Tory up in bubble wrap and keep him safe somewhere until things cool off?”
“I second that,” Alex said.
“I’m thirding that,” Marisol nodded.
Tory considered it. “Bubble wrap isn’t in season. Can’t do it.”
“I wish you would at least consider taking a break from school.” Alex’s hand found its way to Tory’s desk, their fingers hardly an inch apart. “You don’t even like school. All of our assignments are online, anyway.”
Tory’s eyes were glued to his desk. They darted up to meet Alex’s. “Can’t do that either.”
“You’re so stubborn.”
“Oh my gosh. Stop flirting for like, a minute. And then you two can go back to being the worst. It is objectively embarrassing to breathe the same air as you.” Marisol sighed loudly.
“We are not,” Alex squeaked.
“We’re not?” Tory frowned. “Hold on. I need to recalibrate our entire conversation into ‘bro mode.’” He paused for a second, as if he was buffering, then smiled pleasantly. “Right, of course. We were never flirting. Alex is my bro. We were playing desk football in a very straight way.”
“Not straight. You took it too far,” Marisol said, aghast.
“Wait. I hate that actually,” Alex said. “Go back to flirting mode.”
“Can do.”
“Anyway,” Delaney rolled her eyes at their shenanigans. “Boys.”
They eventually had to split up for their second period class, and just before they did, Alex found that his sleeve was being pinched. He turned and faced Tory.
“Al…’” He swallowed. Alex thought he was going to admit to something else going on in his life, the something that filled the spaces between his words, the hesitation and the forced smiles. Instead he said, “I know that you’re stressed out about all of this.”
“Am I?” Alex snorted.
“No, really.” Tory smiled a little. “Do you ever leave time to worry about yourself?”
Alex’s heart stumbled. He wasn’t sure if he could take the force of Tory’s full attention right now.
That was the point, though, wasn’t it? If his mind was on a thousand other things, then he didn’t have time to worry about himself.
Everything he’d lost.
Everything he was terrified of. The future. Failure. His useless potential.
“Seems troublesome.”
Tory chuckled at the dry response. He stepped past Alex to saunter to his next class, glancing back at him over his shoulder with a crooked grin.
“Then I’ll do it for you. I like trouble.”
Tory raised his hand to wave goodbye.
“See you at lunch.”
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