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boys at this school would all be wearing white shirts, and any colored shirt might suggest something, aside from a sexual prefer-ence.”
    “Unconventional! Not worrying about what people think!”
    Ella, a diminutive blonde, had gotten a word in and she sat back and smiled at her accomplishment.
    “He said it was to honor the bombing of Central Europe,”
    Ben said softly, glancing at Ma’ayan to see whether she’d noticed.
    “But it wasn’t, really,” she replied. “He made that up! Maybe GILLIAN ROBERTS
    32
    Gene wished he could be that way, that . . .” She wrinkled her brow and actually paused for a breath as she searched for the word. “That free?” she asked.
    “You know how you can get angry with somebody because they have—I mean inside, their personality, what you want?”
    The freckled red-haired boy’s name refused to stick in my mind.
    I knew it wasn’t Jack because that’s the name my brain insisted was his. Maybe he wouldn’t mind being called not-Jack . . . “I mean you like that person, but you’re jealous,” not-Jack added.
    “Would you—could you—hate that person if he’s your friend?” I felt like a referee, but they were doing the hard lifting, and I was enjoying the back-and-forth.
    They thought for a while, then Ben of the elbows spoke again. “Maybe more if he’s your friend,” he said. “Because they like you, but you’re having these secret bad feelings about them, so you’d hate them for making you feel that way, wouldn’t you?”
    He always looked at Ma’ayan as he spoke, and I could see—
    even if she refused to—a desperate and heartbreaking lovesick-ness. He was trying to win the fair maiden’s attention through his mental agility, but the fair maiden was in love with her own thoughts, not his, and definitely not with the nonthinking parts of him.
    The dramas contained in one single classroom could fill a li-brary.
    Somebody mentioned the idea of collateral damage—
    unintended consequences—about unthinkingly doing something like shaking that limb, and not considering what permanent damage could radiate from that one wobbling tree branch. They liked that idea a great deal, and went off on a track of things they—or hypothetical people—had done that wound up backfiring. Guns bought for protection injuring their owners was a favorite, and an appallingly high percentage of them knew of such examples.
    I was surprised at how quickly the minutes passed, how enjoyable the hour had been.
    33
    A HOLE IN JUAN
    And then the messenger arrived. “Miss Rummell said to give you this. It came in after you left this morning,” she said, and I nodded, sure it was another of Havermeyer’s inane messages. I was eager for lunch, and I opened the envelope quickly, my mind elsewhere—at least until I read the block letters: SOMEBODY TOOK THE TEST FOR THE SENIOR’S AND
    DUPLICATED IT. ALOT OF PEOPLE SAW IT. THOUGHT
    YOU’D WANT TO KNOW. YOU’RE FRIEND.
    I winced at the apostrophe, at a lot made into one word, and then at the you’re, and hoped the writer wasn’t one of my students. But that was only a holding action against considering the message, which was both upsetting—and impossible.
    Those tests had been locked in my desk drawer since Friday.
    Because of Pip’s arrival, I’d been prepared well in advance for once, and I’d stored the exam there.
    I went back to my desk and tried the center drawer. Still locked. I took out my keys and unlocked it, and there were the tests. I counted them. All there.
    I’d put them there Friday afternoon, locked the desk, and hadn’t unlocked it until now. The key had been with me since I turned it with great satisfaction at the end of last week.
    How about that: a locked-drawer mystery.
    Maybe Reyes had been right, and something was seriously out of kilter with the seniors. I had been able to tolerate the idea when it was directed at him. He was new, he was rigid, he was unconcerned with their welfare, but now the