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to, though. He had to get up and go to his next class—Pre-Calculus, with Ms. Delessandro. Just because someone had tried to kill him, just because a classroom full of kids had been put to sleep and then woken up by barked commands over the public address system, didn’t mean he could skip class. Slowly he started to get up from the desk. Before he could grab his books, however, someone dropped a pale blue envelope to flap onto his desk. It had been another student, but he couldn’t see whom—they were all pushing past him, intent on getting out of homeroom and starting their day of classes, and it could have been any of them,
    Jake grabbed up the envelope, horrified that the test still wasn’t done. That someone else was going to shoot at him now. When he got the card out of the envelope, however, he found that it read PASS.
     

Chapter Ten
    Cody pushed his glasses back up the slope of his nose. When he sweated, the boy’s glasses always slid down until they were hanging half off of his face, and whenever they went out into the desert, he sweated.
    Cody and Jake had been meeting in the ruins behind the school since they were kids. It was a place they both knew perfectly. When Cody said “you know where”, Jake knew exactly where he meant. They weren’t, technically, ruins. Someone had tried to build a house back there, in a clear space free of cacti or scrub bushes, but they had run out of money or materials or something. All that remained of the project was a set of exterior walls, pierced here and there with holes where windows or doors would have gone. There was no floor except fine, reddish sand and no ceiling but blue, cloudless sky. The walls were the uniform grey of poured cement but they had been scrawled on by generations of high school graffiti artists. Names, vows of love, and obscenities were the most common markings but they had been layered over each other so deeply few of them were even legible.
    Lots of kids went to the ruins when they wanted to get away from the school. It was strictly forbidden by the teachers—they said it was unsafe—but kids did it anyway. That afternoon, however, when Jake arrived, Cody was the only one there.
    He quickly explained to his friend all that had happened to him that morning. “And then he just sort of—pointed at my seat. And I sat down and then I got this.” He handed Cody the blue envelope.
    His friend studied it carefully, then handed it back. He didn’t say anything for a long time.
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” Jake asked. “You think I’m crazy. I guess that makes sense. Masked teachers shooting at me. Whole classrooms hypnotized over the PAs. Telephones you can carry in your pocket. None of it sounds real, does it? Nobody heard the gunshots. I say it’s because you were all asleep, but… Maybe I am just crazy—”
    “No.”
    Jake felt like he’d been jolted with electricity. “What?”
    “I said no. I know you’re not crazy. Because when I went to Civics III after homeroom, Mr. Foster wasn’t there.”
    “What?” Jake asked again.
    “We all sat down and waited for him. You know, it happens—teachers are late, sometimes. Eventually, like always, somebody said that if the teacher doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes we’re automatically dismissed, right? Except nobody believed it. Even when he never showed up. Eventually Matt Dewes elected himself messenger and went down to the principal’s office to find out what happened. They said Mr. Foster had a medical emergency and probably wouldn’t be back for the rest of the semester, that we’d have a substitute.”
    Jake stared at a patch of ground directly in front of his feet. He was shivering, though it was a warm day and the sun was on his back. “I saw Mr. Foster get killed, didn’t I? In a way, I’m responsible for him getting killed.”
    “No you aren’t,” Cody told him. “You can’t think like that. You didn’t shoot him. They did.”
    Jake sat down hard on the