Castlefields Academy.Thetford. 10:30am
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The classroom was on the first floor of the east wing, and at half past ten on a Thursday morning in May the sun came in through the south-facing windows in a way that turned the whole room the colour of weak tea.
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The windows took up most of the south wall. Wide-format, double-glazed, with a thin embedded display layer in the inner pane that could go opaque if Mrs Daley wanted it to. She rarely wanted it to. Mrs Daley liked the natural light. The ceiling lights had been replaced two summers ago with the soft circadian panels that all the schools had now, the ones that shifted hue across the day — cooler in the mornings, warmer toward the end of last period — but she had them turned down low at this hour, because the sun was doing the work.
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There were twenty-nine desks, arranged in five rows of six with one row of five at the back where the radiator stuck out. The desks were the new kind. A single composite surface, a thin worktop that lit faintly under the student's hand if it was holstering a tablet, and stayed neutral if it wasn't. Each student had a tablet. The tablets were standard issue — matte screen, rounded corners, the local authority logo stamped on the back. They ran the maths environment the school used. The teacher pushed problems to the tablets. The students wrote answers in stylus, or in finger if they had lost their stylus, and the answers got captured, and the captured answers got marked or sent back.
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The board at the front was not a whiteboard. It was a wall-mounted display, currently showing a worked example in green type. Below the display ran a narrow ledge with three physical markers in a small magnetic tray. Mrs Daley still wrote on the surface manually sometimes. She said it was for emphasis. The class had learned it meant this is going to be on a test.
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The smell of the room was the smell of any school room. Bodies, deodorant, the low fragrance of a printer that had been running first thing. A bottle of hand sanitiser at the front. The distant, intermittent sound of a P.E. lesson on the field below, two storeys down, audible because the windows were cracked open at the top. Mrs Daley had insisted on ventilation since the H7N4 winter and had not stopped insisting on it.
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Most of the students were paying attention. Some of them were not.
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The window seat in the second row from the back was the seat where the radiator was warm against your leg if you sat angled slightly toward the glass.
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The window seat was where, if you tilted your head to the right, you could see down into the school field — the netball court, the long fence at the bottom, the row of poplars beyond it that marked the edge of the grounds. The window seat was where, if you tilted your head the other way, you could see the small patch of unmown grass between the maths block and the library, where the staff had put a bird feeder up in February and never taken it down.
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Ethan was in the window seat.
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He was not sitting forward. He was angled slightly toward the glass, his right shoulder against the radiator, his left hand resting flat on the desk beside his tablet, and his eyes on the patch of grass between the buildings.
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There was a robin on the bird feeder.
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The robin had been there for about a minute. It came for the suet ball that the staff put out every other day. The robin was — Ethan had decided — the same robin that came every morning. There was a notch in its right wing where a feather was missing, and the robin had had it for as long as Ethan had been watching it, which was three weeks.
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The robin was angled forward on the perch with its head tilted, the way robins tilted their heads when they were deciding whether the suet was going to require effort or not. Its breast was the orange that robins' breasts were. The feather notch was the feather notch. The window above it was open by about three inches at the top, and the air coming in through the gap was cold and smelled of cut grass.
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At the front of the room, Mrs Daley was talking about the relationship between a quadratic and its graph.
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Ethan had absorbed the first thirty seconds of the lesson because the first thirty seconds of any maths lesson tended to be where the actual idea lived, and he had absorbed it the way he absorbed all maths, which was by listening once, registering the structure, and not having to listen again.
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Now he was watching the robin.
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His mum had told him, a long time ago, that when robins appeared the people you missed were near.
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She had told him this in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, three or four months after. He had been eight. He had been on the floor with her because she had not got up off the floor that day, and so he had sat down on it. She had said the thing about the robins quietly. Then she had cried. Then she had not said it again, ever, and Ethan had understood, even at eight, that she had said it because she had wanted him to have something to hold and she had not been able to give him anything else.
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He had held it.
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He did not believe it. He had also been told, by Hannah once, that the robins came for the suet, and that the suet was where the robins came from, and that the rest was a thing people said. He held that too. The two things lived in different parts of him and they did not argue with each other because he did not put them next to each other.
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He looked at the robin.
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He thought, in a way that was not quite a thought, the way most of what Ethan thought wasn't quite a thought —
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Hi, Dad.
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He didn't say it. He didn't even mouth it. It happened somewhere lower than language, a small movement of recognition that did not require him to commit to anything. The robin tilted its head the other way. The robin was deciding about the suet.
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Behind him, Mrs Daley was saying something about the discriminant.
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The robin took the suet. It hopped twice, lifted off, and as it lifted off it came briefly toward the gap in the window — close enough that for half a second Ethan could see, through the glass and the open inch above it, the actual texture of a wing in flight. The orange of its front. The black of its eye.
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He was about to —
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He was not about to do anything. He never did anything. But the small involuntary movement of his face that happened when something hurt was happening, and his hand had lifted half an inch off the desk without him asking it to, and his lips were —
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"Ethan Clarke."
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The robin scattered. It was gone before Ethan could turn his head.
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He turned his head.
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He turned his head, and he turned his shoulders, and the room was looking at him. Twenty-eight faces. Mrs Daley at the front, hands flat on the lectern, eyebrows lifted in the particular way she lifted them when she had been watching a student not pay attention for some time and had decided to make a moment of it for the room.
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The window seat became, suddenly, the front of the room.
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Ethan thinking, quietly, in the place underneath the surface — the bird, the bird is gone, I missed it.
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"Ethan."
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"Yes."
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"Can you tell us what I just said?"
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He could. He had heard the last sentence. The last sentence had been about the relationship between the discriminant and the number of real roots. He could repeat it back to her word for word.
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He did not.
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"Sorry," he said. His voice came out smaller than it usually did. "I didn't — I wasn't —"
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"You weren't listening."
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"No."
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"Where were you, Ethan?"
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"The window."
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"What was at the window."
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"A bird."
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A small ripple of laughter from the back. Conor's laugh on top, half a beat late, louder than it needed to be. Ethan registered the laugh. He did not turn around.
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"A bird, Ethan."
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"Yes, miss."
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"I see."
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She did the long pause. Mrs Daley believed in the long pause. She had read a book about it.
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Ethan felt the room. He felt it the way he always felt it, which was acutely, in the back of his neck and the tops of his ears and the place in his chest where the Kosura feeling lived. He felt the looking of twenty-eight people on the back of his head. He felt the warmth of the radiator and the cold of the window. He felt, in the corner of his attention that he could not entirely close down, the absence of the robin.
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Mrs Daley let the pause finish.
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"Right. Ethan — and the rest of you — listen to me. You can have the best brains in the country. You can have the best teachers in the country. None of it is going to do you a single piece of good if you cannot put your eyes on what is in front of you for forty minutes at a time. The exam in May is forty-five minutes per paper. Forty-five minutes. Of looking at a piece of paper. Without looking out of a window. Without thinking about a bird. Without thinking about your phone. Without thinking about your lunch. Forty-five minutes. If you cannot do forty-five minutes here, in a warm room, with no consequences, you will not be able to do them in the hall, in May, with all of your futures riding on it. Do you understand?"
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A general low murmur.
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"Do you understand, Ethan?"
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"Yes, miss."
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"Good. Eyes front."
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She let the moment hold for one more beat. Then she went back to the discriminant.
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She also, before she went back to it, looked at Ethan a second longer than she had needed to. She looked at his shirt, which was buttoned wrong under his jumper. She looked at his hair, which was sticking up at the back. She looked at the small dark crescent of dirt under the nail of his right index finger which he had not noticed and which had been there since he had reached up under the kitchen sink at half past seven to turn the stopcock back on. Ethan saw the look. He did not understand it. He registered it as the kind of look adults gave him sometimes, and he stored it in the place adult looks went, which was deep enough that he would not have to think about it again unless something else made him.
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The lesson resumed.
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Mrs Daley pushed a problem set to the tablets.
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Twenty problems on the discriminant. Calculate, classify by number of roots, sketch the parabola. Standard practice. She gave the class twelve minutes.
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Ethan put his stylus to his tablet.
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The first problem appeared. 3x² – 7x + 2 = 0. Calculate the discriminant. State the number of real roots.
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He did the problem in his head.
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49 minus 24 was 25. 25 was a perfect square. Two real roots, both rational.
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He wrote it down. He wrote it at the speed Mrs Daley would expect a thirteen-year-old to write it at, which was about twenty seconds slower than the speed he had done it.
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He had been doing this since Year 6, when the maths teacher at primary had stopped him in the corridor and asked him, in a voice he had not understood at the time, whether anyone at home was helping him with maths. He had said no. The teacher had nodded and said all right then in a voice that had a thing underneath it, and the teacher had not spoken to him about maths again, and Ethan had decided — in the part of him that decided things without telling him about them — that whatever the teacher had been worried about was a thing it was better not to worry her with.
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He had been doing it that way ever since.
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The reasons were not clean. He could not have given them in a sentence if anyone had asked. They sat in him in layers.
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The first layer was his mum. If he came home with a school report that said anything special about him, his mum would cry. She would cry because her son was special and she had not known. She would cry because she had been failing him and the school had seen it. She would cry because his dad would have known, and his dad would have been proud, and his dad was not there. She would cry for several reasons and the reasons would not be separable. He had seen her cry. He did not want to see her cry. He did not want to be the reason she cried.
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The second layer was the room. If the room knew he was good at maths, the room would have to make a decision about him, and the decision would not be the decision he wanted. Some of them would treat him differently. Some of them would treat him worse. Conor would have a reason, which Conor had been looking for. Mrs Daley would put him in a different group, and the different group would be a group he did not know, and the group he was in was already a group whose rules he had spent two years learning. He did not want new rules. He did not have time for new rules. The rules he had were already costing more than he had to spend.
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The third layer was the part he could not have articulated. Being seen was a thing that had always cost him more than it had cost other people. He had absorbed, somewhere along the way, that being noticed and being safe were on opposite ends of the same thing. He had not been told this. He had not been taught it. He had worked it out the way an animal worked out where the predators were. The thing he was best at was the thing most likely to make him visible. The thing he was best at was the thing most likely to break the surface of being not-quite-there, which was the surface he lived inside, and the surface he lived inside was the only thing that worked.
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He did the problems. He did them at thirteen-year-old speed. He wrote his answers neatly. He was not going to get full marks. He never got full marks. He would get two or three wrong on purpose, the way he always did, and he would pick the ones to get wrong from the ones in the middle of the set so that the wrong answers were distributed in a way that looked organic.
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He was good at being a person who was not good at maths.
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He had got good at it the way other people got good at maths.
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Conor was sitting two seats over and one row back. He had been watching Ethan since the bird incident. Ethan could feel it without looking, the way you could feel a person's attention on the back of your shoulder.
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A folded piece of paper landed on Ethan's tablet.
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Ethan did not look up. He looked at the paper. The paper had been folded into the small tight square that bullies had been folding pieces of paper into for as long as there had been bullies, possibly back to the priory days.
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He unfolded it.
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It said, in Conor's handwriting:
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tweet tweet ethan
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Ethan looked at it.
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He thought about it.
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The thought did not arrive cleanly. It arrived as several smaller thoughts that did not, at first, organise themselves. Tweet was the noise birds made. The bird had been at the window. He had been watching the bird. Conor had seen him watching the bird. Conor had written tweet tweet. Tweet tweet was —
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He looked across at Conor.
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Conor was watching him with an expression that Ethan did not understand. It was the expression of a boy waiting for something to happen. Conor was waiting for the something. Conor was watching Ethan's face and waiting for it to do something specific that Conor wanted to see.
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Ethan did not know what something was supposed to do. He did not know what reaction he was supposed to have to tweet tweet. Was it an insult? It might be an insult. It was, presumably, a reference to the bird, and the reference to the bird was supposed to be a thing he had been told off for, and being told off was a thing that was supposed to be — embarrassing? Was this Conor reminding him he had been embarrassed?
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Ethan looked at the note for another second.
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He folded it back up.
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He put it on the corner of his desk.
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He went back to his tablet.
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He did not do this because he had decided it was the dignified response. He did not do it to deny Conor the satisfaction. He did it because he had not understood what Conor wanted, and when Ethan did not understand what someone wanted, his default response was to do nothing and wait for more information. It was a strategy he had developed early. It was a strategy that, by accident, often looked from the outside like composure.
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Across the aisle, Conor's face changed.
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The change in Conor's face was that Conor had been waiting for a reaction, and the reaction had not arrived, and Conor's face did the small unbalanced movement of a boy who had been expecting payment for something and had not received it.
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Conor leaned over.
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"You hear me?" he said, low.
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Ethan looked at him. He spoke quietly. He spoke literally, because literal was the answer he had.
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"I heard the paper land."
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Conor blinked.
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"Did you read it?"
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"Yes."
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"And?"
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Ethan did not know what and was the question to. He thought about it for a second. He landed on the most useful answer, which was the most accurate.
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"It said tweet tweet."
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Conor stared.
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In a different room, with a different boy, the stare would have ended differently. Ethan did not know that. He was looking back at Conor with the level patient attention of a thirteen-year-old who was waiting for the next sentence so he could try to work out what the conversation was about.
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Conor's two friends had been watching. They had been watching with the half-leaning posture of boys waiting for the show. The show had not happened. One of them — Liam, the bigger one — was already losing interest. The other — Ben — was making the face of a person who was finding it harder and harder to keep from laughing at the wrong person.
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Conor opened his mouth to say something else.
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"Conor," Mrs Daley said, without looking up from her own tablet. "Eyes on your screen. Now."
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Conor sat back. He looked at Ethan one more time. The look had something new in it, which Ethan did not have a category for. He logged it. He turned back to his tablet.
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He was on problem fourteen.
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He went on with problem fourteen.
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The class was eight minutes from the bell.
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Mrs Daley closed her own tablet and walked to the front of the room. She tapped through to a blank slide. She picked up one of the physical markers from the magnetic tray. She looked at the room.
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"Right. I want to show you something."
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A few heads came up. Most stayed down. Conor was scrolling something in his lap.
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"Put your styluses down. This isn't on the test."
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The styluses went down. The phrase this isn't on the test was the only phrase Mrs Daley had ever said that produced a unanimous response from a Year 9 class.
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"There is a problem in mathematics," Mrs Daley said, "that has never been solved. There is a man called Lothar Collatz, who proposed it in 1937, and there is a piece of mathematical reasoning he proposed alongside it that remains, today, in 2050, unproved. It is a problem so simple that I am about to describe it to you in two sentences. It is a problem so difficult that the best mathematicians in the world have, in the last hundred and thirteen years, not been able to crack it."
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She turned to the board and wrote.
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Take any positive integer.
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If it is even, divide it by two.
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If it is odd, multiply it by three and add one.
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Repeat.
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She turned back.
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"The conjecture says that whatever number you start with, you will eventually reach one. Try it with five. Five is odd, so three fives are fifteen, plus one is sixteen. Sixteen is even, so divide by two. Eight. Divide by two. Four. Divide by two. Two. Divide by two. One. Five gets to one in five steps."
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She wrote 5 → 16 → 8 → 4 → 2 → 1 on the board.
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"Try it with seven. Seven gets to one. Try it with twenty-seven. Twenty-seven gets to one — eventually — in a hundred and eleven steps."
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A small laugh from the room.
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"Try it with any number anyone has ever tested. They have all reached one. But nobody has ever proved that every number reaches one. There may be a number, somewhere, that doesn't. Nobody has found it. Nobody has been able to prove there isn't one."
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She paused. She had the room. Even Conor was looking up.
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"I am going to write a number on the board. I want you to take that number and run it through the rule. Just one number. I want to know how many steps it takes to reach one. Whoever gets the answer first, and shows their working — gets a Friday off."
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The room stirred.
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The Friday off was a real thing. Castlefields had a gold ticket policy where students could trade certain achievements for half-day passes. Mrs Daley had Friday slots in her allocation. Mrs Daley was offering one.
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She wrote a number on the board.
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27.
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A laugh. We just did twenty-seven, miss.
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"I lied. It wasn't twenty-seven. The example was twenty-seven. The one you have to do is —"
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She erased it. She wrote a new number.
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871.
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The room went quiet.
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Mrs Daley smiled, a small private smile, the smile of a teacher who had done this before with previous Year 9s and knew it was going to swallow the next ten minutes.
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Mrs Daley had simplified a thing. Ethan registered the simplification without quite meaning to. She had described the Collatz conjecture, which was unsolved at the conjecture level. She had then asked them to compute a single specific iteration, which was trivial. Any specific number had a specific number of steps, and you got to the number of steps by following the rule. The rule was the rule on the board. There was no trick. There was no unsolved component to her question. She had used the unsolved status of the conjecture to dress up a question that any of them could answer if they had the patience.
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She had not lied. She had just made it sound bigger than it was.
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Some of them might even get there. Eight hundred and seventy-one was going to take a while, but it was not impossible. Ethan estimated, in the part of him that estimated, around a hundred and seventy-five steps to reach one. The number would climb before it fell. It would peak far higher than anyone in the room would expect..
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He did not work it out exactly. He did not need to.
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He picked up his stylus and went back to his discriminant problems. He had three left.
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Around the room, several students had pulled up calculator apps and were starting to grind through the iteration. Conor was one of them. Conor had decided he wanted the Friday. Conor was going to find out that Conor's patience was not equal to the task. Conor would give up at around step forty.
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Ethan finished his discriminant problems.
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The bell rang.
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The room rustled. Bags lifted. Students started packing.
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Mrs Daley raised her voice over the rustling.
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"Nobody got it. I don't know why I expected anything else. Look — the room is going to be open at lunchtime and after last period. If anyone wants to come and have a go at it, the room is open. Whoever cracks it gets the ticket."
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Ethan, packing his stylus into its slot in his tablet case, registered the sentence about the room being open.
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He registered, also, a small unexpected thing in his chest. The equation had not been answered. Mrs Daley had said the equation had never been answered, and even though Ethan knew the equation had a clean answer, the equation in this room — in Mrs Daley's version of the equation, the one she had presented to this room — had not been answered. The number she had written on the board was still on the board. The number had not been reduced to one.
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It bothered him.
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He could not have said why it bothered him. It bothered him in the specific way an unfinished thing bothered him — a tap left dripping, a door slightly ajar, a song that ended on an unresolved chord. The number 871 was sitting on the board with its iteration unrun, and the room had not finished it, and Ethan's brain registered this as an unfinished thing in a way he did not know how to override.
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He pushed it down. The bell had rung. He had to leave.
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"Ethan, can you stay back a minute?"
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He looked up.
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Mrs Daley was looking at him.
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The unfinished feeling about the number got pushed down further by the new feeling, which was the feeling of being told to stay back, which was the feeling of being in trouble.
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He stayed in his seat.
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The room emptied around him. Conor went past with his rucksack on one shoulder. Conor did not look at Ethan, but he made a small noise as he passed — not quite a word, just a breath through his teeth — that Ethan logged and put away.
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The last of the class went out.
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Mrs Daley closed the door behind them.
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She came back to her desk and sat down in her own chair. She gestured to the chair on the other side of the desk — the chair she used for parent meetings.
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"Come and sit, Ethan."
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He came and sat.
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She folded her hands on the desk. The classroom was suddenly very quiet. Outside the door the corridor was filling with the noise of break — footsteps, voices, somebody laughing at something somebody else had said, a girl's voice calling another girl's name, the sound of a fire door swinging shut at the end of the corridor.
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"Ethan. I wanted to have a quick word. Is that all right?"
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"Yes, miss."
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"How are things at home?"
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The question landed.
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Ethan thinking, fast, in the part of him that handled questions about home — no, no, no, this is the wrong question, this is the question that is the wrong question, this is the question you do not answer correctly, you have a script for this question, what is the script.
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He produced the script.
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"They're fine, miss."
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Mrs Daley waited. She had read in the same book that had told her about the long pause that the long pause worked on the answers, too.
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Ethan did not produce more.
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"Are you sure?"
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"Yes."
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She was looking at him. She was looking at his shirt. She was looking at his hair. She was looking at the dirt under his nail.
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"Ethan. I'll be honest with you. I'm a bit worried."
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He said nothing. His script had not given him a next line for I'm a bit worried.
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"I've had it mentioned to me, by a couple of the other teachers — Miss Patel, Mr Andrews — that you've been coming in looking — well. Less put-together than usual. Tired, sometimes. Sometimes you've not had your homework. There was a stain on your blazer last Wednesday that had been there a couple of days. None of these are big things by themselves. I wouldn't normally say anything. But they've started to add up. And it's my job to ask."
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Ethan said the only thing he could say, which was a true thing arranged in a way that made it half a lie.
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"I was late this morning. I had to get up quickly. I didn't have time."
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"Time for —"
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"To brush my teeth. And to do my buttons properly."
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"Did you have breakfast?"
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"Yes, miss."
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"Good."
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She was still looking at him. He could feel her not believing him. He could feel her not believing him in a specific layered way, where her professional face was doing one thing and the part of her behind the professional face was doing another, and the part behind the professional face was the part that was going to act on what she decided.
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"Ethan. Your mum's coming in this afternoon, isn't she. To the parent-teacher meeting."
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"Yes."
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"And I think Hannah's coming with her."
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His face did a small thing he could not control. The thing was not a smile, exactly. It was the thing his face did when it wanted to smile but the rest of him had not decided whether smiling was the right response to the situation.
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"Yes, miss."
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"Are you looking forward to seeing your sister?"
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He thought about it. He thought about it for one second too long, because the answer was complicated and complicated answers took him longer.
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The simple answer was yes. He was looking forward to seeing Hannah. He always looked forward to seeing Hannah. The complicated answer, sitting underneath the simple answer, was that seeing Hannah at school was different from seeing Hannah at home, because Hannah did not come to their home. Hannah came to school and to the school car park and to the foyer of the parent evening, and that was the geography of Hannah, and the geography of Hannah was not the geography Ethan wanted, and the geography of Hannah was also not a thing he was allowed to want different. Hannah was going to be at the meeting because Hannah came to all of his meetings. Hannah took the train from Brandon and met their mother at the school gate and went in with her and sat with her and asked the questions their mother forgot to ask. Hannah was the reason the meetings did not go badly. Hannah was the reason a lot of things did not go badly. The meetings were also the only place he saw Hannah for sure each month, and the place where he saw Hannah was a place where Hannah was being his sister-as-school-handler and not his sister-as-his-sister. He saw Hannah at school. He did not see Hannah at home. The asymmetry of this was a thing he had stopped trying to think about because thinking about it did not change it. Hannah was seven miles away. She might as well have been seventy. She came when she came. He did not get to choose.
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He said: "Yes, miss."
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"Good. I'll have a word with her — and with your mum — about how things are going."
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"Okay."
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"It's nothing dramatic, Ethan. I want you to know that. I just — I think it would be useful for us all to be on the same page. With your exams next year, and — you know — everything. I want to make sure you've got what you need."
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"Yes, miss."
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A pause.
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She was looking at him. He could see her thinking. She was thinking something the script in her head had given her permission to say, and she was thinking about whether she should say it, and she was deciding to say it.
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"Ethan — I know it's been hard. For — for all of you. Since the —"
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She did not say it. She did not have to.
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The room went away.
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A wall of orange, behind glass.
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His own breath fogging the glass and being eaten by the orange before it could fog properly.
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His father's face, very close, the eyes huge, the mouth saying something.
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The smell. Not smoke. Smoke in the wrong way. Smoke and something underneath the smoke that was the inside of furniture being something it was not supposed to be.
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His father's hands on his shoulders. The shoulders being his — he was eight — and the hands being heavier than they had ever been. His father saying his name.
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His father saying his name again.
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Him not understanding what the name was supposed to do.
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The rug.
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The rug had been a present.
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The rug was on fire.
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The rug was on fire at one corner and the fire was moving across the rug in a way that did not look like fire, it looked like the rug developing a different colour.
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The cold of his bedroom window when his father pressed his face against it.
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His father turning him.
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His father picking him up.
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His father carrying him.
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The corridor was wrong. The corridor had always been a corridor with a hall light and pictures, and now the corridor was a corridor with a wall on fire, and his father was carrying him through the corridor saying don't look, and Ethan was not looking, and Ethan was also looking, because he was eight, and the wall was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen.
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The door at the end of the corridor.
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The door open.
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His mother on the snow. Her face. The snow under her bare feet.
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Hannah's face. Hannah's mouth open. Hannah's mouth open and a sound coming out of it.
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A push. His father's hands. A push that was not a push so much as a throw.
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The cold air. The snow. The ground.
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Hannah's hands, suddenly, on his arms.
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The roof.
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The roof going.
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The sound the roof made.
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His father.
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His father not.
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His father —
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He was in the chair.
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His chest was not working properly. Air was going in and not coming out. His hands were on the arms of the chair and they were cold. The chair was the same chair he had sat down in. The desk was the same desk. Mrs Daley was the same Mrs Daley, except her face had changed.
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"Ethan — Ethan, sweetheart — breathe — Ethan, look at me —"
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He could not look at her. He could not stop looking at the wall, because the wall was the wall, and the wall was a wall, and the wall was not on fire, and he needed the wall to be a wall and not on fire and he could not stop checking.
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He stood up.
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He did not stand up cleanly. He stood up the way a person stood up when their body was making a decision their head had not signed. His bag was on the floor by the chair and he picked it up by one strap and he was at the door of the classroom before he registered that he was leaving.
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"Ethan — wait, please, Ethan —"
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He did not wait.
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The door. The corridor. The corridor was a corridor. The corridor was a corridor with lockers and posters and the noticeboard and a fluorescent panel that was buzzing slightly. The corridor was full of break. People were everywhere. The volume of people was the volume of people.
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He had to get out of —
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His chest was not —
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He stopped at the wall opposite the maths room. He put his back against it. He put his hands flat against it. The wall was cold. The wall was a wall. He was thirteen. He was thirteen, and he was at school, and he was in the corridor, and he was thirteen.
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Mrs Daley came through the door behind him.
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"Ethan. Ethan. It's all right. Breathe with me. In — in — out —"
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He did. He breathed. He breathed in, and he breathed out, and the breathing was something to do that had a structure to it and was not the wall.
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A few students slowed as they passed. Most of them kept walking, because most thirteen-year-olds did not know what to do with another thirteen-year-old having a panic attack in a corridor and the thing they did was carry on.
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One of them slowed.
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She was a girl with her hair in a low ponytail, dark blue eyes, small silver hoops in her ears, the kind of girl who walked like she had decided not to be looked at and was now being looked at slightly because she had decided that. She was carrying a textbook against her chest. She was in his year.
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Her name was Lucy Marshall.
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She had been, for ten weeks of last spring, his girlfriend, in the way that two thirteen-year-olds were each other's girlfriend and boyfriend at school. They had held hands in the corridor. They had sat together at lunch. She had once, on a school trip to Norwich, kissed him on the cheek by the bus.
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She slowed when she saw him. She slowed in the way a person slowed when they recognised something — the panic attack — that they had recognised before. She had been there, in the spring, the one time it had happened in front of her. She had known what to do then. She had sat with him on a bench in the school field and she had not said anything for fifteen minutes, which had been exactly the correct thing to do.
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She did not slow this time. Or she did, and then she did not. Mrs Daley was there. Mrs Daley was crouched next to him doing the breathing voice. Lucy Marshall's slowing, Ethan registered through the part of him that was still registering, was a slowing that did not become a stopping. She looked at him. She looked at Mrs Daley. She made a small decision in her face that he did not see clearly enough to read, and she kept walking.
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She kept walking, but she looked back. Once. Halfway down the corridor.
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He saw the look back. He could not respond to it. He registered it.
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She was gone.
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Mrs Daley was saying something. He came back into the saying.
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"— really sorry, Ethan, I shouldn't have — I didn't mean — it just — I'm sorry, that was the wrong way to put it, I'm so sorry — are you all right? Are you all right, sweetheart?"
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He nodded.
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He nodded because nodding was the answer that would make her stop talking, which was the answer he needed her to give him.
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"It's not your fault, miss."
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The sentence came out smaller than he had meant it to. It was, also, true. It was not her fault. She had not lit the fire. She had said the word. The word had done the thing the word did.
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"I'm so sorry, Ethan. If you ever — if you ever need to talk to someone — I'm always here. You know that. My door is always open. All right? Always. I mean it."
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"Thank you, miss."
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She put a hand on his shoulder for half a second and did not leave it there long enough for him to flinch. She knew not to leave it there. She had been on the SEN training. She had been told.
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"All right. Take a minute. Take as long as you need. I'm going to go back inside. Come back in if you need to. Or don't, if you don't. All right?"
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"All right."
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She stepped back from him. She went back into the classroom. She did not close the door behind her.
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Ethan stood against the wall for a moment longer.
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His breathing was almost back. His chest was almost back. The corridor was the corridor. The corridor was at break. The corridor was full of voices and the voices were the voices of people who were not in his head.
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He walked.
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He walked twenty steps.
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The stairs were at the end of the corridor. His friends — the small group he sat with at break, three boys he had eaten lunch with for two years and who were not exactly his friends and were not exactly not — were on the stairs, where they always were. He could see one of them at the top of the flight, leaning against the wall, talking to someone he could not see.
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He walked toward them.
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He got to the door of the next classroom and he stopped.
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The thing was not finished.
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The thing-was-not-finished was a thought that arrived in his head with the same texture as the thought the milk is on the table had arrived in his head this morning. It was not a thought he could decide whether to have. It was a thought that was simply there, waiting for him to do something about it.
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The number on the board.
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The number had been written down and the number had not been resolved. The number had a resolution. The number had a clean ending and the ending was not on the board. Mrs Daley had made the room a promise — that anybody who solved it would get the ticket — and the promise had not been honoured, because nobody had solved it, and the number was sitting in the room behind him like a tap left dripping. A tap that he could turn off. A tap that he was the only person in the building who could turn off, for certain, in the next three minutes.
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He thought about the ticket. He did not want the ticket. He did not need a Friday off. He had Fridays off on the inside, every day. The ticket was not what was pulling him.
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What was pulling him was that the equation was unfinished and he could finish it. The equation was a thing that had been left undone, and he was a person who could do it, and the doing of it would take three minutes, and the doing of it would mean it was done. The only thing the doing of it cost was that he would have to do it without anyone seeing him.
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He stopped walking.
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He stood in the corridor for a full ten seconds, in the specific stillness of a person making a decision.
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Then he turned around.
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He went back to the maths room. The door was still open. He looked through it. Mrs Daley was at her desk with her back to the door, reading something on her tablet, headphones in. The room was empty.
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He went in.
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He went to the front of the room.
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The number was still on the board. 871. He picked up the marker she had left on the magnetic tray. He stood at the board.
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He ran the iteration.
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He did it in his head. He did it the way he did all maths, which was to say with the part of him that did maths, which was a part that did not need the rest of him to be online. 871 was odd. 871 × 3 + 1 = 2614. Even. Halve it. 1307. Odd. 3922. Even. 1961. Odd. 5884. Even. 2942. Even. 1471. Odd. He kept going. He did not write the steps. He wrote, on the board, in small clean handwriting underneath the 871, only this:
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178 steps.
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Then, because Mrs Daley would want to verify it, he wrote underneath:
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peak: 190,996.
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Then he set the marker back in the tray.
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He went to the door. He looked back once, at the board, at the small note he had left under the number. The note looked, on the board, very small.
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He went out of the room.
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He did not say anything to Mrs Daley. She did not turn around. Her headphones were in.
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He walked down the corridor.
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His friends were still on the stairs. The one at the top of the flight saw him come round the corner and lifted a hand and made a small gesture that meant we're going outside.
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Ethan nodded.
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He went down the stairs to join them.
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The number on the board behind him was not unfinished any more. The thing that had been pulling at the back of his ribs for the last fifteen minutes had eased. The Kosura feeling, which had been at full volume since the fire word, was still at full volume. But the small specific pulling of the unfinished number was gone.
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He walked out into the schoolyard.
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The sun was bright, the way it had been bright when the song was bright, and the song had been right that the sun would still be bright even on the days when it was not enough.
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He went to find the bench his friends sat on.68Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmr1oIqVk2a
and then Add to home screen.