A cold front had blown in during the night. The first tinges of yellow were appearing on the elm trees around the oval. Autumn was setting in. The wind billowed outside, buffeting scarves, lifting the tails of blazers, blowing discarded chip bags and fallen leaves into the air.

There were a surprising number of people in the rather small first-floor room. The crew who Titus usually hung out with at recess was all accounted for, except for Avi, who had some kind of Science Committee-related one-on-one meeting with Boyle. The bi-weekly sessions were ostensibly only for Year 12s who had their sights set on studying in the US of A, and wanted to brush up on their vocab in preparation for the SATs, but anyone was welcome to join. And so there were a bunch of Year 11s and even Year 10s as well, who were also excited to learn some new words with Ms Vassilikou, and snag some baked goods in the process.

Kevin and Mason were teasing Arthur about his crush. Sabine, who went to Lauriston and got a 43 in Global Politics the year before.

He ignored their antics. He looked out the window, across the yard below, through the glass curtain walls of the Student Centre opposite, to the Year 12 lounge, where Fraser's friends were crowded around the sandwich press they had found yesterday. They seemed to be having a good time. He was laughing, joking. He looked happy.

Contrary to what most high school movies seemed to suggest, what seemed like some sort of very well defined hierarchy to the outside world had always been just a whole lot of shifting sand. There were false pretenders to the throne and overlapping spheres of influence, shameless kleptocrats and brown-nosers, self-proclaimed revolutionaries and anarchists whose souls were long sold off to the to the institution whose shield they wore on their blazer, and countless other mysterious phenomena only understood by those acclimatised to the arcane world of private school cultural practices.

Not to mention that one's perception of it could change according to the perspective one viewed it from. From some places, it could almost look like a democracy. From others it could look entirely apolitical, and that was how most people seemed to view it, completely oblivious to the machinations below, as if there was a blood-brain barrier separating them.

It was nothing like the old novels that had enthralled him in primary school, that that Grade Three girl had imperiously told him that he was not allowed to read, where the institution of the school seemed to be a cutthroat dog-eat dog sudden-death game, punctuated by brief, tantalizing glimpses of a shared humanity.

They all had blurbs that said something to the effect of "In (insert name of school), the law of the jungle rules supreme, and every little interaction that (insert name of main character) encounters is a fight to the death." They invariably put a sarcastic spin on the blurb, presumably to convince people that this was just a case of teen melodrama and not for real, until you realised they were not joking one bit, these characters were genuinely believed their life was in danger, and they were not exaggerating one bit. And that had been scarier to him than any horror story.

That world was dead and buried and had been for some time, at least in this small insignificant corner of the world, and the leadership were just fine with that, many of them had suffered terribly themselves in that world, they wouldn't wish it upon their worst enemy, least of all the young charges whose parents paid them the cost of a mid-sized car every year to look after.

***

He thought back to the night before. They had indeed not done any work. Fraser had given him a proper tour of his house afterwards. He'd also shown him the sound system in his room. They had watched some Russell Peters clips on Youtube. Fraser's mum had returned home early. She had taken a liking to him. Or so he thought. It was hard to tell.

When he had gotten home and gone to bed, they had texted until the small hours of the night.

It came so easily. He didn't feel like he was putting on some kind of perverse performance, and there were none of the usual intrusive thoughts of whether he should be there at all. Now, the day after, he felt rather drained, both physically and mentally. He'd barely spoken a word to anyone since he had arrived at school this morning. But it was a wholesome, fulfilling kind of drained. It was a good feeling.

He pulled out his phone and looked at the picture Fraser had sent him a few minutes before. His hand, doing a thumbs-up in front of the sandwich press. He smiled.

The others had noticed the appearance of the sandwich press too, which was drawing quite the crowd down in the Year 12 lounge. Titus found himself having to shift his position as people pressed themselves against the window to spectate.

"They're learning to use tools," Arthur drawled. Kevin laughed. Several other people sniggered too. Some of the Year 11s laughed along uncomfortably.

Titus' nostrils twitched. In a more innocent time he had admired that permanent attack mode, being quick on the draw with the most caustic take, the questioning tone of voice. Now he just found it off-putting and kind of overwrought. It was grating on the soul. He knew that seemed an odd way of describing it, but it really did feel like something rough was abrading his sinuses. He wanted to be lying next to Fraser on the roof of his house again.

"That's not very nice." Drew said.

"It's true." Arthur shrugged.

There was a clang as the door was pushed open by two Glad-wrapped trays of triple choc brownies, followed by an aura of perfume, and finally Ms Vassilikou.

"Coming through." she parted a way through all the people crammed in the tiny room, plonking the trays on the round table in the middle. She pulled the Glad wrap off with a flourish. "Some brain food for the brains trust. Come on, brains. Eat up. I'll just be a moment. There's been a slight printer mishap. I just need a minute or two to sort that out." She disappeared again.

"Brain." Kevin wondered. "Who calls themselves The Brain?"

"It's from a movie," Mason explained. There was a running joke that he could watch two movies at the same time, one with each eye. "The Breakfast Club."

"If I was extremely smart and I wanted a nickname," Kevin opined, "I would want to be called The Professor."

"No," Titus said, taking one last bite of his banana. "The intellectual."

"The comrade."

"The landlord." Titus rolled up the banana skin and reached for a rectangle of brownie.

"The bourgeois capitalist-roader." Kevin said, through a mouthful of brownie.

"OK, that's enough communism jokes for today." Arthur muttered, glowering at them. Kevin and Titus shared a satisfied look.

As Ms Vassilikou returned with the day's vocab sheets, Titus looked again at Fraser's friends in the student room. He realised he was looking forward to English next period.

***

"There was a big white-tailed spider," Titus said, as Fraser put his books on his table. "I saw it crawl under the table."

"Was there?" Fraser looked at Julian for confirmation.

"Isn't that right? Titus eyed Julian conspirationally. "We saw a big white-tailed on the table here."

Julian caught on quickly. "Yeah," he said, looking directly at Fraser, in the most sincere tone of voice you could possibly imagine. "You should have seen its fangs. They were massive."

Fraser turned pale. Fraser looked under the table. There was nothing there.

Titus and Julian simultaneously burst into barely suppressed sniggers.

"It's not funny." Fraser said indignantly, as he sat down and opened up his laptop.

"Yes it is." Titus couldn't help but smile. He reached behind him to high-five Julian.

Fraser shook his head.

***

"You know, I expected you to text in full sentences, with perfect grammar," Fraser said, a few minutes later.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Titus looked out the window. Storm clouds were rolling in. A ride-on mower was doing its rounds on the oval. He was thinking about the search for the musical, which seemed to have hit a dead end. He had been focusing his efforts on Wesley Faure, as he seemed to be the main character in this particular saga, but it was like hitting a brick wall. There seemed to be nobody by the name of Wesley Faure anywhere in Australia. He had not gotten around to Zach Righetti or Winston Lam yet.

On a whim, he leaned over to his deskmate's MacBook Pro. "Let me try something."

Fraser brushed him off. "Use your own computer." He seemed reluctant. Titus hesitated. Was it something he had said?

"I left it at home. I didn't think I'd need it today."

"Okay then." Fraser folded his arms on his chest.

Titus reached over. "A touchbar. What luxury. I wish I was a rich kid," he deadpanned, in semi-mocking admiration.

"Just get on with it," Fraser retorted. "I've got work to do."

Titus typed "Zachary Righetti" into the Google searchbar and hit enter. 789,000 results in 0.41 seconds.

"A Google search? That was the something you wanted to try? The ancient art of Google-fu?"

"The simplest and most effective solution." Titus peered at the results. A bunch of Twitter and Instagram accounts. He ignored them. The LinkedIn profile of Zack Righetti, Waste Management Technical Solutions Manager. The photo did not look anything like the one he had seen in the Petrovian. The obituary of Zachary J. Righetti of Joliet, IL, 3.4.1943-3.12.2018, who passed away peacefully in his sleep after a long battle with dementia. That was safely out of the question.

He went to Page 2. A newspaper article caught his eye. Whitehorse News. Lights Bring Christmas Cheer. Titus clicked on it.

"It's from 2013." Fraser said. "It might be out of date." He noticed Arthur staring at them from across the room.

"It's better than nothing." Titus scrolled down. "Righetti, 41, says he has spent over $100,000 on lighting fixtures for the highly illuminated front yard of his Chapman Avenue residence, which draws crowds from as far away as Warrandyte. So if he turned 18 in 1990-"

Fraser did the maths in his head- "he would have been born in 1972."

"So in 2013 he would have been 41. So it matches up. It could be him."

"It could just be a coincidence."

"It's all we've got." Titus peered at the photo attached to the article. Righetti, smiling, next to a blow-up Santa. His house, in the background, was out of focus, but he could make out the numbers on the wall next to the front door. A 1 and a 5. "15 Chapman Place. We'll go there. Take a look."

"Where even is it?"

"Well, we know it's in the City of Whitehorse. I'll find out."

At the front of the classroom. Darvall cleared his throat. Titus sat back upright in his seat. Fraser put down his laptop screen, just in case. But his attention was not on them, but at the door, where De Silva had just materialised.

Fraser recognised the look in Darvall's eyes. It was the same look he'd given him once when he caught him walking across the oval in Year 10.

The rest of the room had noticed, too. The usual muted hubbub had turned to silence in the blink of an eye.

"Just a moment, Richard." De Silva brandished his clipboard. He was wearing an electric green tie today.

Darvall put down the glass of water he had been holding with a pronounced thunk. He got up. It was plainly obvious to anyone who had spent any amount of time in his class that every movement of his was deliberately exaggerated. Something was going on. The class looked on with rapt attention.

"Behave yourselves," he addressed the class, and stepped out into the corridor. Hushed voices could be heard outside.

The tension in the air dissipated. Everyone returned to what they were doing.

***

It was his turn supervising the Year 9s after school, again.

The team had narrowed down to four members. Titus knew all of their names now. Ryan. Ibrahim. Declan. Dylan. He already sort of knew Ibrahim as they were both in the same house, but he was in a different homeroom, so they rarely talked.

Somewhere along the line, they had given up on the robot competition, and now had their sights set on something called the Spaghetti Machine Contest. If he had heard right, they had to devise the most complicated machine possible to open a bottle. Mr Boyle had tutted at their sudden change of course, but in the end he'd put his head down all the same and registered them.

They were kneeling over an old mousetrap they had found in a drawer, lying in parts on the floor. They were trying to make the first module.

His mind turned to Fraser once again. He realised that he still didn't really understand why he was interested in him.

He could never really fathom what possessed people to take an interest in him. He was genuinely surprised when somebody would sit next to him and try to make conversation. It wasn't particularly annoying or irritating, it just drained him in a way he couldn't quite explain. But he also felt there was no big deal to it in the bigger picture. He understood. There was no pressure to prove himself.

He had a much better idea of why his friend circle kept him around, but he still did not have a clear idea of how he fitted into all this. After six years, at times he still felt like an outsider looking into their lives. He went to school with these people every day, and yet he still knew so little about them, and vice versa.

Part of him, no doubt influenced by the many movies aimed at his generation that depicted high school as a kind of hormone fuelled cesspit, told him that this was nothing to worry about, that he should just focus his efforts on getting his sorry arse out of here as soon as possible. But another part of him felt he had wasted his chances, wasted his time.

He wondered if they even remembered him when he wasn't there. Most people only knew him from school. A couple knew roughly where he lived. He had not told Fraser that he was the first person from school to have ever visited his house. He had no idea how to tell him that. He wondered if it was even necessary to tell him.

The Year 9s had reassembled the mousetrap now. They had attached a long pole to the hammer, and they were getting ready for a test-fire. He wasn't quite sure where this was going, but he could see the intense concentration in their faces.

At least, for this particular moment in time, he felt like he had a purpose.