I stop by your grave today on the way to school.

I wasn't sure the MIBs would allow it, but what do you know, they pull the limo off the freeway. I'm sure you'd come here before for the death of some relative, seeing as there are a few 'Rivers' scattered around the area. (I had been looking forwards to meeting your family when we returned. The reception was cold.) I don't have flowers on me, so I pluck a few weeds and lay them across, my nostrils revelling in their cut-plant pain. The earthier, quieter scents are almost masked by it, including an unseasonal amount of mud- the grass hasn't grown in over the tomb yet, and the stone is so shiny I could see my face in the reflection. The injury is even fresher than the pain.

"Mr. Renard? We planned to get you to your destination no more than ten minutes early, for orientation purposes, and we are rapidly approaching ten minutes now. We understand your plight, but we need you to get back into the limousine to escort you to school." suggests a woman in a dress suit and shades. She speaks in the cryptic, calculating tone all the MIBs have. I withdraw from your side, sensing again the keen lack that always comes with giving up on you, and enter the car.

They don't bother asking questions. I know they haven't run out of things to ask about our incident, about CorpInd, or any other number of interesting facts in the two-year trainwreck my life has just barrelled through. This is a pity I've been given as a treat for being cooperative.

The country whirls past in a blur of color. My eyes are drawn at once to the motion of trees and highway signs, which provides all the excitement color no longer gives. The window is clear, so much so that I can see the half-reflection of my face, which offers copper hair messy enough to match the jagged texture of the fall leaves. I try to draw my wandering eyes away from the ears, the one thing besides my hidden teeth that doesn't pass for normal, but as I look at myself I notice all the subtle things that will tip people off by instinct. The corners of my eyes are almost black, my nose is curled, and there's definitely something wrong in the pupils.

I drum my fingers on the side of the limousine. Better public school than another day in the empty house, my parents eyeing me like I'll snap at any minute, but better hell than public school.

Speaking of public school, I find myself in a moment of brief reprieve: even with four entrances, the whole road is stopped up from traffic. The slick black car looks comical as it cuts in between minivans, and I am unceremoniously shuffled out in front of the building, whose massive rafters and glass front tower overhead.

The Brooks School.

Brooks and Rivers. Feels like home already.

I don't think I need to detail your own school to you, even though the school itself was making a show of it. There's not one corner not touting student awards, progressive ideals, or sweeping architectural gestures. I'm less impressed by the magnitude and more that I'm quite possibly standing in your footsteps today. These are the bushes that were here when you were. Likely, despite the grandeur of it all, some of these corners and tackboards have remained uncleaned since. I might pass some stray lint from your clothing at some point. It unsettles me to know we're going to be passing each other multiple times today, in spirit.

I shuffle into line for orientation, but my eyes pick out an empty line for me, with a red marker sign that reads 'Extra Services'. Next to A-M and M-Z, this line seems far less coveted. People move out of my way as I enter it, and I catch their eyes, keeping my hands close to myself as possible. That singular moment of intuition in the car was practically fate. I was pretty stupid to hope I'd be passing for normal, even if only that most desperate part of my teen heart was hoping at all.

The counselor at the desk, a bored twenty-something brunette clicking a pen, jolts up when she sees me, reviewing a black-folder clad list and passing me some papers. "You're the new Extra kid."

"I'm a new Extra kid. Get used to seeing a few of us around here." I say, playing it off with a quick flash of my finger guns.

The woman stares at my fingernails. With an uneasy smile and far less sass, she says, "Extras are in Room 063. Always." The last word comes out like an omen.

What curled up and died in her hair this morning, anyways?

What curled up and died in Room 063?

I'm ashamed to admit my gut response is children, and then I'm covering my face, thinking of dozens of reasons this would be easier if you were here. Luckily, navigation isn't an issue, seeing as the rooms are more or less numerically ordered and there are signs everywhere to inform those of us not able to walk down a hallway where to go. While most of the rooms on the first floor lead to offices, elective rooms, or the cafeteria, 063 is located far into the building as they can push it, down a hallway where the counsellors with weird names like 'Recreational Activity Outreach Managing Assistant' dwell. The entrance itself is red-doored, imprinted firmly into the wall, and the scuffed paint accompanies a darkened, blurry window into the classroom.

I turn the handle, opening into an equally drab classroom, with dark walls and low-quality screenshots from the old "Living With Extras!" videos we watched in middle school, when this was something to imagine yourself being, idly, even a power fantasy, instead of a reality with all the empowerment of hitting a brick wall at fifty miles per hour. A desk sits askew in a corner, next to a whiteboard, while the twenty desks and a variety of cupboards are arranged behind that.

Everyone in the room is watching me, including the teacher, who is standing a few feet away. She has straggly hair, almost ginger but lacking a certain commitment to the hue, and dark, menacing eyes. Her gaunt expression and thin lips are matched by a lithe body and pockmarked skin.

I flick up the lapels of my trenchcoat. "Hey."

"Are you a fox?" gasps an auburn-haired girl, bolting up so fast that her desk slams forwards into the person in front of her. She's slim, but tall, and she stands on the balls of her feet, which gives her a good few inches, as do the big copper ears extending off either side of her face like earmuffs. "I'm a wolf! We're like twins!"

No, before you ask, not everyone in our group this year's a shifter. I'm not even a shifter. Apparently there was one year where there were no less than ten werewolves and vampires. (That must have been an adventure.) Most of the kids look normal, at least to some extent- they all look disheveled, frumpy, and unhappy to be here, but I'm eighty percent sure that's how public school works.

"I'm not a fox, I'm..." I fold my arms, trailing off. They're all watching me. I don't think I've ever been in a room with this many people, barring government interrogation and family gatherings.

"You can sit down now." The teacher informs me, placing a hand on my shoulder. "The effort was commendable, though."

There's an open seat in the second row, next to wolfgirl, and one in the back, in between a kid who can't be over ten and a girl with hair like a dark cloud. Both of them look like they're about to pass out from the effort staying awake is taking on them. I settle, swinging my backpack around and landing it behind the desk, where it tilts forlornly. It's three years old, riddled with scratchmarks, and belongs to a dead middle schooler who shares my name, address, and phone number.

The teacher taps her fingers against the wall and my head jolts upwards out of instinct, my attention averted from my sad backpack and the rattle of the dying air conditioner. "My name is Erza Shinke, and I'll be your teacher this year."

In the front row, a dark-haired girl's hair flies up. Her ponytail bounces as she cranes her hand skywards, waving it back and forth, and the teacher adjusts herself to look around her.

Clearing her throat, the girl asks, "What subject?"

"All of them." Ms. Shinke mutters.

As soon as she's done, the hand swings out again.

Ms. Shinke folds her arms. "Yes, Brittany?"

"That's unfair."

Ms. Shinke's eyes narrow, and she crosses her hands into a weave, steepling them around her chest. "Quick getting to know you survey. Who here feels personally victimized by life right now?"
I raise one hand for the both of us, several kids in the middle raise theirs as well, and soon two-thirds of the class has lifted their hands.

"This is not the worst thing that's ever happened to you, lass. I don't make the rules, I just perpetuate them by allowing myself to become a cog in the machine. Now. Can someone define for me, in what words, what an 'Extra' is in the context of supernatural occurrences."

The entire class, Brittany included, is still as the walls. The air conditioner judges us in the background, still hacking up its guts.

"For f-" Ms. Shinke kneads her forehead together. "Raise your hand if you're awake."

Two-thirds of the class raise their hands again. The other third is presumably both content with life or asleep. Potentially both. I envy that.

"Good enough. By the end of this year, you'll have explained this to your loved ones and curious onlookers enough times to recite the full history and classification of Extras from memory. Now, I know a kindergartener could at least give me some semblance of a definition, so for the Lord's sake, someone tell me why any of you are here."

The girl next to me raises her hand, although she doesn't even wait to speak. "Because someone got stabbed a few years ago?"

There's a round of whispering, a few aggravated mumbles, and Brittany slams her hand on the table. A blonde, broad-shouldered boy in the front stands up. "We are not dealing with this conspiracy crap today. Who the hell-"

"Sit down, Arthur, or we'll be contacting your father."

Arthur sits down, rolling a pencil across his desk with his shoulders raised until they almost meet his ears.

Ms. Shinke continues, "According to the public school system, you are here because it has been determined your situations are better acclimated to a specialized learning environment. Of course, this is a fancy way of saying that you, like five percent of Asphodel teens, have found yourself at the tail end of the kind of adventure mankind has aspired to since we first learned to tell stories. Some of you have walked in worlds inside your dreams, others have physically visited other universes, and it seems an unfortunate number of you had supernatural adventures within the bounds of our own planet, but whatever the case, you've witnessed something the other ninety-five percent of Asphodel-- and over ninety-nine percent of the world-- will never understand. For some of you, the journey has been rewarding, for others, perhaps less so, but you've all survived."

My ears twitch at survived, before I bat away the butterflies rising in my stomach and get back to picking this woman apart. There's no way that speech wasn't rehearsed. She looks tired, even already bored with us.

It's an even deeper weariness that rises in her voice when she continues, "Congratulations. That time in your life is over, any skills or abilities you've picked up along the way will likely hinder you instead of help you, doubtless you've experienced more than any high schooler has the emotional capacity to handle, and everyone else in this school will assume by default that you are an unstable and potentially even dangerous. Welcome to Extradom... and high school."

"Sure knows how to let us down easy." I mutter.

"I have my own ideas on how best to instruct you, but we'll begin with a quick icebreaker- I want each of you to choose an item from your backpack that best defines you and how you came to be there. As an added bonus, this doubles as a mandatory, school-enforced backpack search, to ensure none of you are packing knives, or swords." She looks at Arthur, who cringes in the first row. "Before anyone threatens me, be advised that you are underestimating the security in this building and overestimating my own will to live."

The class begrudgingly goes for the bags. I squint at a silver chain in the main compartment, tucked away by my lunchbox. Didn't feel safe leaving it at the house. I sneak it into my pocket, mind racing with sterile hallways, and slip out my math textbook as well, wry fox-smirk across my features. The girl next to me holds nothing, instead, she's watching the wall like the force of her gaze could bore through it.

"Hey," I say.

"This is bullshit." she mumbles as Ms. Shinke takes her backpack. Her skin is this sleek sepia color, accented perfectly by the warm colors of her top. Her features are distinctly regal, though she's startlingly thin. Her eyes have a distinct lack of light, like twin black holes, framed by bags that look like manic pencil sketching beneath her eyes. She smells faintly of scented hand sanitizers, a little more like vanilla, and this is pervaded by the sterile scent of hospital buildings. I'm already biting my tongue to prevent myself from mentioning this to her.

"I guess they have a point. You know, some people in here are... a little scary." peeps a girl in front of us, her fingers clutched about the chair in front of us. Her eyes are large, like those of an owl or a lost puppy, and they don't seem to focus on anything even when she's staring us right in the face.

The dark-haired girl diverts her glare from the wall directly to the interloper's face. If she wasn't glaring before, she is now. "Scary, huh? How easy was your mission? Did you portal into a world full of marshmallows where the worst part was that someone insulted your feelings?"

"I mean, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, if that's worth anything. I'm the other dream-class." She holds out a hand. "Sarah."

"Mikayla." the girl's dark fingers twist into Sarah's, and their grip pulls taut. I feel like I'm watching a pact being made, but I have no clue what kind of ultimatum has been reached here.

Ms. Shinke slaps a long pole against the whiteboard and everyone stares back ahead. "Who's ready?" A few hands go up, which she seems to take for a confirmation. Browsing the more attentive students, she taps the stick on the desk of one of the front row students, who presses herself against the back of the desk. "You."

The girl stands. Her hair swings at her back. It was clearly black at some point, but has been bleached and dyed over so many times (recently, too) that it has become a neon and blonde streaked mess, like a small supernova curved around her head. "My name's Alya." She declares, proudly, and there's no mistaking the glint in her eyes as she raises a opalescent crystal up to the class. "I went to space. We think it's our space, so I'll be out a few times this year to work with NASA, but regardless of whose space it was, I'd like to inform you all that space is radical. This is a shard of Ailsite from the Andromeda galaxy- so it's in the neighborhood. They're incredibly powerful conduits of electricity that don't form naturally in our atmosphere. I tried to charge my phone with it once, but then that kind of imploded, so, that's not happening again."

Ms. Shinke holds a hand out.

"It's not dangerous without electricity running through it. What would I do, strap it to an outlet and blow out the whole school?" She bites her lip. "Ah, shit."

Ms. Shinke's hand remains unwavering, and Alya hands her the crystal before sitting down.

"Next?" Ms. Shinke asks.

The kid who stands up is so scrawny I can barely believe they're in our grade, and their dark hair is like curtains around their face. They have an androgynous, vaguely rabbity face, and teeth to match. They half-mutter, "I'm Finch, this is a pencil. I can and will sell it for two dollars."

"Do you have anything you ascribe sentiment to," Ms. Shinke asks, "I promise it will not be confiscated if it does not pose immediate threat to the classroom."

Alya raises her hand.

"Scratch the immediate." Ms. Shinke corrects herself.

Finch folds their arms across each other. "Sentiment is for people whose physical possessions aren't inherently useful enough to satisfy their need to feel rich and valued by society at large."

Ms. Shinke strides to their backpack, unzips it, and shakes out several large, cryptic magical artifacts, including a helmet and a dicelike cube embedded with eyes on each side.

"I packed light," Finch said. "What?"

Ms. Shinke huffs, "Next, please."

Mikayla stands up and crosses her arms. "My name is Mikayla. There is no physical evidence of anything I did, save for some residual physical magic bestowed upon my return. However, if I did have anything today, it would be the life support bill that screwed my family over while trying to care for their comatose daughter." She flashes a pointed look at the teacher, who stares back, crooked features daring the younger woman to try anything. Ms. Shinke doesn't even touch her backpack.

The kid on my right raises his hand.

"Yes, Finn?" sighs Ms. Shinke.

The ten year old stands on his chair to reach our heights. With the grim authority of a haunted man, he asks, "I'm an adult. Can I leave now?"

"I've asked the same thing for twenty years. Sit down."

Wolfgirl swings her hand around like she's trying to bat a fly away. Her ears are perked in a familiar way, even though mine aren't flexible as hers nor large enough for their movement to be anything more than a neat party trick (and admittedly, I'm relieved). When she doesn't get a response, she unzips her bag herself and slams a variety of weedy flowers, including dandelions and the white flowers that litter the road verges. "I'm Olive and I have plants! Not from home, the only thing I brought back were these." She flicks her huge ears, which are covered in coppery fur. "The Mother whispered into my ears and promised I would keep my keenness of hearing, and her breath-"

"No one needs to hear how some deity breathed in your ear," mutters Arthur, his head in his hands.

"I think she can still hear me." Olive smiles, oblivious.

Sarah turns around with a vacant smile and asks, "Oh, you had to be a shifter too, right?"

"I'm not a--" I begin.

"What are you supposed to be, anyways?" asks Finn.

They're all watching me again. I breathe in very slowly, trying to estimate how large crowds of teenagers work. Stiffly, I respond, "There was a laboratory experiment. I have fox DNA. At no point was I an actual fox."

"Oh. Yeah, there was a huge group of those... five years ago?" Brittany muses.

"Yeah, they come in groups." Someone else chimes in.

"No." My voice stiffens.

"Really? I heard there was a girl-"

Yeah. A girl. A girl. We'll go with that. I try to imagine you sitting next to me to calm me down, but I can't make the apparition of your face solid enough to distract me from the moment.

Calm down. If you make any noise, they're going to treat you like an animal for the rest of your life.

I suck in a breath.

"There's a lot of noise back there. Derrick, would you care to go next?"

Damnit. "I would care very much." I say much too loud, my hand trembling on the desk and my voice cracking at the ed.

Ms. Shinke clarifies, "Get out your item."

I mull around in my backpack, unprepared, and feel every hair on my arms and back rise. The adrenaline is more of your standard laboratory experiment thing than anything attributed to foxes, but hey, trust the boys back at Co. Ind. to know nothing about biology and everything about screwing me over.

I hoist a textbook onto the desk and stand up, propping it up against the desk. "I'm Derrick. I have this textbook. As you can guess, I'm in high school, and I think that says enough."

I'm greeted by a round of uproarious applause. Ms. Shinke is significantly less impressed. "Derrick."

"Oh, come on! What do you want out of me?" I need to stop it with the voice cracking. I really need to stop it with the voice cracking.
"Honesty."

You know what? I don't know if this is fox adrenaline or teenage boy hormones or maybe both, but at the moment, all I can think about is screwing myself over as hard as possible, so I reach back into the bag and clench something cold and familiar, the metal nestled into my palm. I throw it across the desk haphazardly, upset by how small it is in the light, and declare to the class: "This is a chain Corp. Ind used to keep around the neck of my double, Amy Rivers." I tell the group, my hands shaking on the table. "She's dead."