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My brother is gone.

I scan the crowds to check if this is some joke, then look beside me as if he might appear, unimpressed by my forgetfulness (like a scornful pair of glasses that had been situated on your head throughout the five-second heart attack their absence caused). He is neither visible from the crowd nor is he on either side of me, which means amongst the pulsing, chanting mob of ninth graders, I am entirely alone.

Hand shaking, I lift my phone, which has a digital copy of my soon to be routine schedule. All the room numbers mean nothing to me, but I'm going to assume they're in some kind of order, and the main office is about twenty off from my first class. I could always solicit help from the older teenagers set up in corners (like gargoyles... the school thus far is giving me more prison vibes than gothic castle, but we can roll with whatever), but the crowds around the upperclassmen are even more concentrated, and right now the priority would be getting away from people.

I take one last look out at the crowd, then down to my phone. Adam and my mom are the only two people I've texted within the last week. I open the conversation to text him, but nothing seems sufficient. I stand there for a moment, reflecting, but after I almost get hit by a kid who has somehow attained the superpower of phasing through solid objects, like crowds, I just put the phone back away. Adam and I can talk later. He'll probably apologize for ditching me within the hour.

Now, the art room. I'm up against the wall, but I can see a stray student painting down the hallway, and then another. There's a sharp bend in the hall where they've clustered, which, if I've judged right, and I think I've judged right, should be the hidden oasis that is the art area. I scoot down, trying not to disturb the plaques for "academic excellence" my new home away from home is littered with, and at last find the wall falls away behind me.

The roar quiets to a din as I'm greeted by portraits on either side, faces whose composing brushstrokes are just ascending past novice hood into professionalism watching me with mismatched eyes. I follow them to a room number that seems familiar-- 1022, right? Right.-- and push the door open.

The air smells like pottery and fresh paint, which already reminds me of middle school. It's much larger, though, and the amicable cream walls are almost hidden behind untidy cabinets of supplies strewn across its perimeter, which makes it feel like someone's studio. Teacher's name is on the board, so I don't have to ask, even if I'm late-- Mr. Green. Yeah, I can definitely handle this. All I need to do now is sit down. Right now, I'm plastered up against the wall again, scanning for seats, which is fine, but I don't see any empty tables, so I guess I'll have to--

"Will Rosenbloom?" asks the teacher.

My backpack swings around before I do. Just as I say, "Here," and turn in his direction, I bludgeon several cans of acrylic paint with my brand-new, fifteen-pound book bag, and the resulting clatter ends with a rainbow crime scene and me still standing in the corner, not red-handed, but at least red-backpacked.

"Sit down," says the teacher, with intense, forced calm. "This happens every year."

"Yes, but-- I mean, I could-- do you need?" I almost bend down to pick up the paint can, but what am I doing? It's a paint can. I'd need towels. My hands are shaking violently. They're definitely still all watching me. Where are the towels in this room?

"Sit down," says the teacher, his voice constricting with his patience.

I sit at the nearest table, fearing his eyes on me, and put my head down. There's a round of giggling, which I'm used to, and then there's a hand on my back, which I'm not.

"Tough break," says a voice that I can hear through my skull. I peer up from the desk to find a blonde girl standing over me. If not for her Scott Pilgrim Vs The World shirt, I would have assumed that she was a jock and not a total nerd. She looks like she makes her own stone statues... with her hands. She looks like she could crack my arm open and paint with it. "Amanda, by the way. That's Sally, with the dark hair in the corner, and that's Rebecca, right next to her. You chose a good table."

I manage some kind of painful "Hello," then realize they're waiting on my name. "I'm... Will?"

"That's... good?" Amanda mimics. "Anyways, bro, first assignment of the year's simple, we're just drawing our inspiration or whatever. I always draw--"

"She always draws Mercia from We Didn't End The World," Rebecca cuts in, her ginger-brown hair springing up in curls. She has a vicious smile on her face, but it's friendly vicious. "It's a magical girl webcomic. Don't let her start talking about it, because she'll never stop."

My heart pulses. I've read We Didn't End The World eight times over, and it's a comfort food, but does it ever comfort. I've dreamed of dressing up as one of the characters at a convention, just doing such a great job that no one would be able to tell it was me, but if my brother didn't menace me out of the idea before I even legitimately considered it, my father, who would have to buy supplies and tickets, definitely did.

Amanda smirks. "Well, I have other fonts of inspiration, but they're running dry, lately."

"Yeah," I agree, forcing a smile. "Yeah, I get that." I begin moving my pencil around the empty page, looking for a way to turn this college-application level of vague prompt into some sort of tangible reality. Every few minutes, I catch the teacher still looking my way, primarily as he cleans the table and floor area I accidentally covered in paint, and when he clears his throat, everyone stops.

"Who'd like to go first?" Mr. Green asks.

Amanda's hand rockets up. She strides up to the front of the classroom and announces, proudly, her love for this niche, niche webcomic, and then proceeds to give an overview of the whole plot. She's halfway through the Dominia arc when Mr. Green gestures for her to sit down, and then she hi-fives her friends. I sit in blank silence, waiting for the rest of the class to give canned answers, and turning my face so it looks like I'm paying attention, and so I don't have to keep up the whispered conversation Amanda, Rebecca, and Sally are carrying on in the background, about summer animes they watched.

"Will Rosenbloom?"
I stand up. The front of the classroom is something like a thousand miles away, but then I take one step, and I'm there. I hold up my blank page, knowing I can't say anything, and wait.

It's always been this way. Have to always pushes through can't, holds him down, and makes him speak. "I don't know why I do what I do yet," I tell the class. "I just know that it's something I have to do, something that I've always done, and that it makes my life a little better. Hopefully this class will help me work out why that is."

I sit down.

"Gutsy," Rebecca says.

"Oh, totally," mutters Sally, from her corner.

No thank you. The class ends in near silence, and Amanda gives me a pat on the back on the way out. I pull my backpack around one lanky shoulder, and distract myself from the teacher's gaze with the online schedule. Once I'm out of his gaze, I wipe the paint off with paper towels in the bathroom. I savor them now, because if I know anything about public school, they will never be stocked again.

I'm late to English class, too, and walk right into what I think might be performance art, although I honestly have no clue. The teacher, who has hair like a lion's mane and a grin like a Cheshire Cat announces, "You may ask yourself, will there be cardboard sword fighting? There will. There will absolutely be cardboard swordfighting," she gestures to me. "Would you like to demonstrate? Sword's in the corner."

I look to the sword, then back to her. Her name was on my schedule, right? Ms... Adana. "I'd rather... not?" I ask. "May I please sit down?"

This is met by a full round of boos. Fortunately, this class is a lot emptier than art, which means I can sit down in the back, where there's only one student in my immediate radius. He's got dark skin and darker hair, like an oil slick (but with twice that volume), and his feet are up on the chair in front of him. He watches Ms. Adana with this strange combination of amusement and utter disinterest, oxymoron that that is, as the teacher continues to talk. "We will attempt to answer the deep questions posed to us by classic texts of fiction, and the way prose, in its many kinds and forms, creates habitable worlds, and how those worlds are designed to shape our perception of our own. We will create. We will tear apart. We will destroy."

I suck in a breath. "She's trying really hard."

"Isn't that the truth," says the boy on my right. His teeth spread into a sharp smile, with wickedly pointed canines. In fact, everything about him is sharp. He looks like he might be three-tenths cactus and another one-fifth pit bull.

I return the gesture and hold out my hand. If I'm going to make another acquaintance this morning, I want it to be on my own terms. "Will Rosenbloom."

He looks down at my hand as if I had spit on it, which I hadn't. Casting a disinterested brown gaze back my way, he says, "You're joking, right?"

I draw my hand back.

"Who leads with a hand shake?" he asks, again, looking to the wall as if someone else was there to speak with.

The bell rings not much later, with Ms. Adana's speech, alas, still unfinished. I applaud her for ensuring I didn't have to do any work today, even if I caught half of what she was saying. I manage to get out of the classroom early and turn the opposite way of the guy sitting next to me, then realize, only after a lap around the circular hallway, that my class was literally three doors down the whole time.

Science is just how I remember it. We're going over lab safety videos, and my hand is itching for my sketchbook, but I pick up my phone instead. Adam hasn't said anything. No one else has, obviously, so I go through our mom's overenthusiastic texts from this morning. I turn on Monster League, which is a guilty, guilty pleasure with the production value of a student Scratch game and a player base of a few million (most of whom are overseas), but as soon as I have that on my phone sings, to the whole class, those first heavy metal few chords of the poorly animated intro.

It's audible even over the lab safety video. I turn my phone off and wait with my face on the desk for class to end.

When I'm out, I head to lunch, which I remember from our student tour last year. I finally type up something to send to Adam: Late lunch, huh? I think I'm going to starve before I get to it-- LOL

I withdraw the "lol", which Adam has called me out on several times, and then suck in a breath. Period? No period? Should I even have punctuation? Adam always texts in lowercase letters. He'll know something's up if I'm copying him, but I also look like a tryhard right now.

I close my eyes and just send the message.

No response. Read, 1:00 PM. Thanks, Adam.

The cafeteria is also almost full when I get to it. On the left, I can see my twin's blond head amongst a sea of teenage guys, at a table that is so steeped in testosterone it might get disqualified for substance abuse at an Olympic sports event. I walk past, tentatively, to find the whole table is taken. Adam and I lock eyes for a moment. "Hey," he says. "Sorry."

"Yeah," I say. "It's cool. I get it."

We stand there for a moment.

"We should talk after school," he says.

"Yeah," I agree. "We really should. Having a good day?"

Adam nods, his face still a blank mask. "Good as it was ever going to be."

"Hey, Adam! So did you watch--" One of the boys drags him back into the conversation. I shuffle away from the table and out onto the lunch room floor at large, as not to make it awkward, and peer around the massive crowd of situated people. I can find maybe two empty tables, but one is right up against the lunch line, and the other has that kid from English at it, and he's giving me the death glare. Honestly, I might go eat in the hall. I'm just hungry.

"Hey, it's the paint can man!" yells a voice from behind me, so loud I almost drop everything I'm carrying. No one seems to notice above the roar (thank goodness thank goodness), but I turn around to find that I'm two tables away from Amanda and her friends, and the former is waving wildly, an open seat right across from her.

"We're not going to talk about that ever again," I say, situating myself at the very edge of their table, across from Amanda. "Can I sit with you guys?"

"Kind of looks like you are," Amanda says.

I laugh. It falls flat. "You got me," I say. "Well, thanks for taking me in. My brother sorta ditched me."

"Sorta?" asks another girl, next to Amanda. She has goggles so big and round that they hardly look like they should be functional, and dusty brown hair that perfectly frames her face. Her dark eyes peer into mine. "He's the one who looks just like you, right, over there?"

"Yeah," I say, startled as the girl points directly to Adam Rosenbloom. "That's him."

"Sorta," she fumes. "What an ass. He's going to hear it next time we're in class together. I've been seeing him all day."

"Don't worry, Nutmeg, I'm sure there'll be plenty of jackasses in all of your classes for you to leer at," Amanda promises.

"Nutmeg?" I ask.

"Oh, I'm Megan. That's just my--"

"--joke name," Amanda says. "Kind of a squad thing."

"Dang," I say. "You two are in sync."

"Well, we're best friends. It happens," Megan says.

"More than best friends," Amanda adds, with a wink.

Megan pushes the side of her face away. "Amanda, come on! Anyways, the two of us are kind of known to finish each other's--"

"--sandwiches," Amanda finishes, playfully.

Megan moves the hand from the side of Amanda's face to her own forehead with a mockingly dramatic facepalm. "You'll have to forgive her. She's still living in 2012."

"It's a better place to be than here," Amanda argues.

I look down at my lunch. I'm near halfway through with it, but I really hope I haven't been chewing too loud. Should I be contributing more? I haven't said much about myself, besides what amounts to a pity party. They probably already think I'm pathetic. "You're not wrong," I say, at last. Great. That was definitely not what I was going for.

The three of us kind of stare at each other, like we just killed a man and are about to bury the body. It is possibly the worst five seconds of my entire life, or at least the school day, and both of those are high bars.

"Hey Almond!" Someone calls from down the table. "Guess who got that vinyl over the summer? Guess who's bringing it into the Brigade next Thursday?"

"Shoot, that's when the first meeting is?" asks Amanda, throwing her hands on the table with enough force to make everyone's empty cans and containers shudder.

"What's... the Brigade?" I ask.

"Naval Brigade. It's a club from our middle school, Scarborough, but our forebears set it up here, too," Megan says.

"We discuss ships and canons," Amanda says, with a wink.

I nod blankly. "Okay, one more question before lunch ends... what's with the names? I get that they're a joke, but..."

"People used to call us crazy, so we decided to be nuts," Amanda says. "Although... we don't have a Walnut right now."

The table falls silent. I get the feeling I've been watched for a while, but now I'm legitimately being watched, and there are girls drumming the table. I say, "Well, I'm not doing anything after school, or, really anything after school ever, so, if you uh... if you're soliciting some walnuts... I'll come around?"

There are wolf whistles, really professional sounding ones, from down the table, and eventually an administrator has to come break up the racket. As lunch ends, I get the feeling I've just been unwittingly adopted. Or abducted. Abducted might be a better word.

This is enough to get me through seventh period, which so happens to be math. Math is the one subject where students are actually set apart according to skill, which is why all hope has been abandoned in my Algebra I Studies class. The teacher, Mr. Brunswick, is clutching a ruler the whole time like he might need to fend us off with a stick. I sit in the way back, open my sketchbook, and start drawing Amanda from memory. I try not to draw real people, but there's something about her expression, especially the way she smiles, which seems almost unreal. I feel like I've walked into something, and maybe I have, and it's never happened before, and I think this sensation might be, (table drumroll, please) something like hope.

I'm still relieved to get out of the school. Adam said we'd be meeting on the corner, not that he's texted me since this morning (thanks, Adam), which leaves me sitting on the edge of someone's backyard, legs dangling over their elevated corner, leaning against the fence. The sky is a deep blue overhead, one of those blues that leaves with summer, and I can already feel it ebbing out. The air smells different today, too, but chief amongst those smells is... smoke.

Something rustles in the bushes. I can feel something walk up my heart, and every muscle in my body goes rigid. It's probably someone's cat, or a squirrel, and I wait for it to show up, but nothing moves. My hand slowly moves forwards of its own accord, but whatever was in the bush next to me, it's not there anymore. Instead, my hand clasps around a blue stone with white lines around it, almost like an eye.

My heart pumps faster. The frigid sensation has abated, but now there's a new kind of fear setting in, just as potent as the first. My whole arm is freezing up. I slide it into my pocket, feeling it cold against my side, and Adam Rosenbloom turns the corner.

I yell.

"Dude," Adam says, holding his hands up. "Please tell me you haven't screamed every time someone's come around the bend."

"No!" I say. "I was just-- actually, you're the first to come this way, and I was just really lost in my thoughts, so--" Why am I lying? "H-how was your first day?"

"It was good. Would have been better if you didn't turn the alarm on at 6:30 like some kind of barbarian," he says, with a glance my way.

I roll my eyes. "I'm sorry for getting you to school on time."

Adam shrugs.

The two of us stand in silence.

"You... wanted to talk?" I ask.

Adam nods.

"So?"

Adam shoves his hands into his pockets, looking up at the sky. I want to believe he's thinking about the same things I was, because it's in the simple things that we actually have anything in common, but it's more likely he just doesn't want to look me in the eye. Our dad does the same thing when he's chastising us, but he doesn't want us to think he's chastising us. It's super obnoxious. "I think things are going to be different this year."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I ask.

"I want to be my own person. You've been avoiding hangouts with my friends for years, so, you know, I kind of feel like you might, too? I guess I'm tired of being Rosenbloom and Rosenbloom, one in the back, one in the front."

I say, "Yeah, I know. I've already made friends and everything." Loose term. They could not want to talk to me tomorrow. "It feels good."

"Shoot," Adam says. "Hey, nice job. I'm happy for you."

"But I'm saying I get it," I say, straightening up. "I can roll with different. Can you not leave me on read, though?"

Adam smirks. "Hey, whatever you say, boss."

"Consider it taken care of, chief," I say back. It's an old, stupid joke of ours, the kind that's not really funny anymore, save for in how it falls into tradition.

"So, are you going to tell me about your backpack?" asks Adam, a genuine smile staining his face. "Looking a little colorful." We talk the whole way home, as I explain multiple travesties, and he just shakes his head like I'm not simultaneously ruining his reputation just because of our cross-twin association. My fingers find their way into my pocket, where the stone still lies, cold as an early onset of winter, localized to my jeans.

"Adam?" I ask, as we approach our door.

"Yeah?" he asks.

It's nothing.

"It's nothing," I say.

This is my problem, now.

(A/N: As a final request to old readers, please don't spoil the story. I want new readers to experience it with the same fresh eyes the original set of readers did.)