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do you know with green eyes?” It’s hard to believe. He’s looking right at me. He’s looking right into my eyes and he doesn’t notice their color. “Anyway, Alina thinks I’m an idiot,” he goes on. Alina. The name sounds familiar. I try to retrieve an image of this girl in my mind, but I can’t. Our school serves a couple thousand students, and it would be impossible to know every one of them.
    “Sometimes you are an idiot,” I say. I am trying to tease him, maybe I’m trying to flirt, but he’s so dejected all he does is nod in agreement.
    “It was Ferris and Riley. They’re never around when you need them, and when you don’t want to be bothered by them, they show up. God, I’m glad I didn’t invite them camping.”
    “You were going to invite them camping?”
    “Ferris never shuts up about you. Why don’t you give him a chance?” Now he’s the one teasing. Last week Ferris tried to put his hand up my skirt, and it was all I could do to stop Quinn from pulling Ferris’s arms from their sockets.
    “Give Ferris a chance to what? Humiliate and ridicule me?”
    “Poor Ferris,” Quinn says with a laugh. “He’s just so—”
    “He’s a pervert and an ignoramus,” I interrupt.
    “That’s harsh,” he says, but he’s still snickering, so I know he doesn’t mean it. He’s as repulsed by Ferris as I am.
    “What about the time he snuck into your house so he could do whatever he wanted with that girl without his family getting an excess oxygen charge? I don’t even want to think about that ,” I say, though I am already thinking far too much about it.
    “Don’t be jealous. You can use my room any time you like.” He winks playfully and I blush, not sure what he means.
    “Quinn!” I slap him gently. He holds his stomach like he’s mortally injured and begins to moan. Then we both crack up and only stop tittering when a woman in the seat in front turns and shushes us.
    “I’m trying to listen to the news,” she complains, nodding at the screen. We both look up. It’s another terrorist report. Someone has been caught trying to interfere with the air-recycling system. This is the worst thing anyone can imagine. If the pod ran out of air, we’d be stuck, and we’d be dead. I shiver.
    The news report continues:
    “Suspected terrorist Abel Boone, a member of the Rebel Army Terrorist Sect, was found dead today. It is believed he ran out of air attempting to cut through the rubber tubing that connects the Air Recycling Station East to the pod. Various RATS arrests are expected to be carried out within the coming days. The Pod Minister has asked for calm.”
    Right on cue, a solemn Pod Minister appears on the screen with a journalist beside him. “Luckily we avoided a major tragedy, and I am grateful to the stewards for their haste in dealing with this matter. The Ministry will continue to work around the clock to provide safety for all people. We will not allow mindless acts of terrorism against tens of thousands of innocent civilians to go unpunished. I urge all citizens to remain alert.”
    “And your message to the terrorists, Pod Minister?”
    “To the terrorists, I say run. Run.” He looks straight into the camera and grins because a running citizen is an arrested citizen, unless the runner is a Premium with a tank, of course, and the journalist laughs, too, and even the woman sitting in front of us laughs. But I do not. I do not like the joke.
    With that the screen goes black before a typically interminable commercial break begins.
    When the tram reaches our stop, Quinn stays in his seat. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go speak with the professor?” he says.
    “I’m sure,” I say, knowing it would be pointless to speak to anyone: once academic decisions have been made, they are impossible to reverse. We get off the tram, walk up to the camping shop, and choose a bright blue tent and two extra-warm sleeping bags for our trip. Quinn tells me I’ll need boots, a coat, a