I'm so happy to have Mr. Harring and Ms. Haven back. They're still tired when they enter the car, shoulders slouched, expressions hidden behind dark glasses and a perfect poker face, but Mr. Harring ruffles my hair affectionately when he comes to the door, and my own father does not look up from the newspaper.

"I have something to tell you," I say, more seriously once we're in the car.

Mr. Harring nods. Ms. Haven backs out of the driveway. "Go on."

My throat locks up. I could spill everything, right here. I need to say something eventually, especially if any of my more unsettling hypotheses about the nature of the Eye are correct. I grit my teeth and say, "When you guys weren't here, the agent they sent wasn't really an agent It was this woman whose face was full of eyes. She asked me if I was enjoying the ride and when I looked up, it was just a normal agent."

"That's a fairly complicated rift, if what you're describing is real," Ms. Haven says. "They're growing as insidious as they are frequent."

"What if they were happening in some kind of pattern?" I ask. "Maybe a spiral?"

Ms. Haven turns, then slaps Frederick and puts both her eyes back on the road. "He knows," she says, teeth grit. "How--"

"He can hear. That one's not much of a mystery," I say. "You guys are loud."

"Derrick, who told you about the Reema Spiral?"

Tricky, tricky. "I found out on my own. No one's complicit. I just want you to know that my classmates and I can help. We've been tracking down anomalies on our own and we helped deal with all the chaos at the zoo, at least according to the other groups. I know we're not supposed to be involved, but we can help. We have helped. It affects us more than anyone, and if we don't do something, then we might as well be leaving our quests undone."

"I'd be hard-pressed to interfere with a mission statement like that," Mr. Harring says.

"Other people might not be on our side..." Ms. Haven responds, hands heavy on the wheel. "How can you not understand that we're not heroes anymore, Frederick? We can't just do whatever our gut tells us to do, that's how you get killed. That's how we get innocent people killed."

"Ana." Mr. Harring says.

"Not--" she says, voice tensing with venom. "--in front of Derrick. We settle this later. Is that understood?"

The car purrs beneath us. My stuff jostles around in my bag as we hit a speedbump going at least thirty. All the while, we all have our eyes on the road, deathly still.

Ms. Haven pulls up to the school after what seems like a thousand years of silence. Her glasses shield her eyes from me, and her hair is down out of its usual ponytail, so it lies haggard around her neck. "Mr. Harring and I are going to have a talk."

"I'm sorry," I say. "It was forwards of me."

I wish I could see her eyes, because right now, I can feel them narrrowing. "You better believe it was."

I drag myself into class. Mikayla and Finn are working on their shit, Finch is selling something that looks like a blunt to Lilith (okay, if anyone in our class was going to be a stoner, I'd have to guess her, sorry), Arthur and Brittany are leaning on each other like a straight couple (gee whiz), Alya is on her computer (it's so covered in stickers that you can't see the original shell) typing a few hundred words per minute, Ms. Shinke is ignoring all of this, same old, same old. I situate myself far in the back and run my hands through my hair.

"So," Mikayla says. She looks about as well as I do.

"I talked to my guardians about recent rifts. I think they're angry at me."

"Thanks for tipping off the cops, Derrick."

Oh, fuck you. "Foreclosure happening?"

"Friday."

"Derrick!" barks Olive from the corner. "Hi, Derrick! How are you doing?"

"Big kids are talking." I yell to Olive.
Olive's ears fall. She goes back to furiously doodling. I still don't think she can hold a pencil, but whatever.

"At least we're all on the same side now," I say. "Kind of."

"I don't need or want their help," Mikayla says. "At least, not all of them. Don't trust Arthur, Owen's a liability, Brittany's..."

"You're so mean," I say.

Mikayla rolls her eyes.

Ms. Shinke clears her throat. "Classes will be irregular today. The school graciously gives us a small sum for the purpose of electives, with which we were able to buy approximately two sketchbooks and some watercolors. Since I'm not done finishing the tests, seeing as your errors were so outrageous across the board that they necessitate me to get up regularly and take aspirin, we have a full day to devote to art. I can teach you any one of twenty-eight languages or how to outrun a mountain lion in the sleet, but I can not teach you how to draw a circle. Artistic talent is given like Extradom, as a slap on the face to previously healthy youths who must then dedicate years of their life to something beyond their control. I'm going to assume none of you are especially talented, but knock yourselves out." She gestures to a row of nice watercolors and some decent paper, along with some water-filled plastic cups. D'aww. My lack of artistic talent trembles silently within me, but I make sure to sneak into the middle of the line and inconspicuously pick up a pack of watercolors.

I sit down at the table, stare at the blank page, and feel a great emptiness blossoming within me. This must be what the artistic types call 'the muse'.

You're my muse, probably, or at least the closest thing to it, assuming as I have for a while that a muse is some kind of socially acceptable schizophrenia: I saw that on a t-shirt once, so we're going to roll with it. I don't know how socially acceptable I am, but I manage to get down a circle that could probably become a human face.

Ms. Shinke flips through YouTube on her teacher computer, a sleek, black, angry thing that is several years too old, like everything in the room, and crackles and hums with unfortunate noise. She settles on Relaxing Forest Noise for Enhancing Creativity and stares grimly down at us as she judges our blank canvases. Most of the Portal-classes are sharing water and talking in hushed voices about how ridiculous this is.

"I think I'm going to try to draw Ms. Shinke," whispers Arthur, in a voice that is not even remotely conducive to whispering. "Look. She's standing stock still."

Ms. Shinke is meting out divine judgement from her deathly stillness, folding her arms and being Not Mad, Just Disappointed. The human face on my page gets a few eyes and the ugliest nose I've ever seen. I lean towards Mikayla, who is also drawing a human, but the human's face is spiderwebbed and cracked in the way broken glass might be. She looks ruefully at the water, then to me.

"I just need to clean my brush," I say. "No biggie. No one else really wants to share water, so-o-o..."

Mikayla raises an eyebrow. "Derrick, you haven't used the watercolors once yet. You're sketching."
I cover my drawing. "You looked?"

"You are peeking at my drawing right now. You have no right to be offended that I peeked at yours whatsoever."

My fingers tap my lapels.

"Don't you dare flip your lapels at me. Bad dog."

I tactfully, if resentfully, remove my hands from the lapels. Mikayla's dark eyes are flickering with something between a warm, teasing kindness and something a little crueler, but all the warmth dries up when she looks back at the paper.

I pretend my own is fascinating, but I eventually just end up prying at other people's artworks. Everyone in the classroom is at varying levels of skill, but what really sets people apart is confidence. Owen can barely hold a pencil. Lilith is going straight into watercolors instead of sketching. Alya, who is here for once in her life, has already coated half the paper in a black that twists as it goes downwards into a menagerie of blues and pinks, like the pictures from the Hubble telescope. It's our universe, but not as we know it.

Hoshi's drawing a cherry blossom. She catches me looking quicker than Mikayla did, and she waves. "Derrick, what are you drawing?"

"Something edgy," Brittany says, "Definitely."

"I have personality traits outside of being sad, guys. I'd just like to put that out there," I snipe, although, unfortunately, she almost has a point. Here I am, drawing you, my dead girlfriend who I've recently taken to hallucinating, and everyone is drawing something that has nothing to do with their quest whatsoever. You were completely right about this subsuming our identities.

In the distance, cheesy music plays, the gentle sound of fake trees brushing over a fake forest (and the bird calls are atrocious. Not one thing about this forest is calming, I'm going to call an ornithologist in to explain that half these calls represent two different coasts of the continental United States) settling gently over my bored classmates. I look grimly around at my colleagues and back at the pencil outline. I take my brush and place a diluted yellow into the center.

The tone is ugly. The water is everywhere.

Art.

I practically slide down onto the table in defeat, and then I turn slightly so that I'm viewing Mikayla out of the corner of my eye. She looks towards me, and I catch a brilliant russet in the corner of her drawing; a hairline. The man she's drawing can't be much older than us, but he looks older in the way that handsome people tend to present, with a little bit of stubble. His skin is olive, or at least Mikayla's best approximation of olive... it's amazing how well the intent comes across, even though Mikayla's barely used any color at all. She colors right next to the lines, so it gives the impression of where color should be. The eyes are a haunting gold, lined slightly. My eyes.

Mikayla stares at me as long as I stare at her drawing, running a finger over the dried paint. She shrugs.

"We'll share after lunch. Leave your drawing on your table," Ms. Shinke says, turning off the music. I sigh, relieved, and grab my lunch out of my bag.

"Thank goodness," I say in the hall, "You know, I'm not really an artist."
"Oh no, we know," Mikayla says.

"Thanks," I respond.

Olive is off to the side, staring down a hallway towards the courtyard. She pauses there for long enough to be separated from the group. Usually, she's not one of the people I watch... alright, it's probably weird enough that I watch people in the first place, but the point is that I don't stare at her. However, even if she's usually skipping while the rest of us are walking, or talking in what might nicely be called an "outdoor voice", she's at least with the rest of the group.

"Hey. You coming?" I ask.

Olive grins furiously, running up to meet Mikayla and I. "Yeah! What did you draw? I drew the coolest landscape. I'm going to share first when we get back. What about you? You're sharing, right? Do you like art? I love watercolors--"

This goes on for a while, sparing Mikayla and I the effort of explaining why I never finished my drawing and why her muse looks like me. I think. I could be misinterpreting everything. What if she has a crush on me? Does she not understand I'm already taken? I don't know how I'd explain a situation like ours to anyone outside of it, how I could justify not being available, but I know in my heart that I belong to you, fully. It's as true as the trees, the sky, or the ground.

As we begin packing up, Olive, who has lost no speed thus far, says, "You know, the birds were all wrong in the music they had playing. I could barely focus. All the calls were spliced together into something from no season and no place... messy."

"They were," I say, incredulous. "How did you...?"

"I basically live in the woods." Olive tilts her head. "Don't you?"

When we get back, I stare at your half-formed face again. I didn't do you justice, but then again, neither does the misty apparition of you I get through the Eye. I think of you in your own classroom, drawing, and wonder if you have an affinity for art. You have to, right?

Olive stands. Ms. Shinke backs away, the classroom still alive with that post-lunch noise. I'm staring at Mikayla's page, the curve of the jawline, brushing my smooth skin where the stubble is on her drawing. "I drew... um..." Olive falters. I can hear the ventilation heaving. The stillness unsettles my mind. "I drew home."

I look up. I can hardly see detail from here, but Olive's drawing is the forest and it is utterly perfect in its rendering. Each rock is shaded such that you can tell where the sun fell on it, as are the trees, and individual blades of grass spring from the earth. There's a slight bit of wind blowing through the area, evidenced by the movement of several branches to the left from where they'd logically be situated, but you can tell that it's wind. You can feel it. I can almost smell the pines from here.

The artist drops her head. "Um," she says, choking up. "Thank you, Ms. Shinke."

She sits down.

"Always nice to receive some appreciation from you lot. Next?" asks Ms. Shinke.

No one raises their hand. Olive is pressed against the desk, ears flattened in a way that doesn't look like any animal posture I've ever seen, but everyone is still watching her like an animal died over there. Maris reaches out a hand to pat her gently on the shoulder, but Olive pushes it back, ears pulling down to the sides of her head as she buries herself further in her desk.

Hesitantly, Maris raises her hand. "I'll go." She proudly displays a house with the same sloppy coloring I got out of my watercolors, suggesting, bashfully, "I might have added a little too much water."

The girls who follow her, the more confident hub of our class, is composed of at least decent amateurs (I didn't know half of our class could draw, but I should have predicted the Extras would be a bunch of angsty creative types), although Hoshi and Alya are actually god. "Van Gogh uses a bunch of turbulence patterns in his skies, so I decided to draw from that for inspiration. I think most of these swirls are mathematically accurate-ish, but I can't promise much on the execution or integration. I'm just a novice," Alya announces to the class, showing off her sky. "Anyways, I think this is a valuable moment to reflect on turbulence in physics. So--"

Fifteen minutes and four diagrams later, Ms. Shinke kindly escorts Alya off the stage.

"And remember, just because something is chaotic doesn't mean we can't use physics to quantify it. In fact, it's believed there might be turbulent patterns involved in Extra dispersion--"

"Thank you, Alya," Arthur says, clapping.

"I think my brain might be broken," Lilith says from her corner.

"As an adult, I understood four words of that at most," Finn says.

Of course I've picked next to nothing up. I've just been waiting for Olive's head to perk back up. It hasn't.

The bell rings before Mikayla or I are forced to go, partially because we had to sit through a lecture from Alya, and I spring out of my chair. Olive gathers her stuff and stomps out, clutching her picture to her chest, but when I step foot in the hallway her ears stand straight up and she turns, head cocked. Her face is still a little runny. Shit. She's been crying. Abort abort abort--

"So," I say. "I think I owe you an apology."

"For what?" she asks.

"I've been ignoring you."

She tilts her head further. "But... everyone acts like that. You talk to me sometimes, right?"

"Yeah, but--" She's giving me an out. I puncture my lip with my fox teeth. It would be so easy to concoct a future where I don't have to think about nor feel guilty about her. "Do you... want to hang out sometime, maybe?"

She walks over and gently leans on me, even though she's taller. This is about as comfortable and awkward as it sounds. "I want to walk in the woods with someone," she says. "I spend a lot of time alone at my house, or with my mom. We can bake cookies! It'll be fun!"

My heart twinges for a second, as if begging me, please don't. Brittany, Arthur, and the usual Ground- and Portal- huddle catch my eyes as I pass, and I feel my face sag slightly with either guilt or embarrassment (can't figure which). "Did you talk to a lot of people before... this?"

"I think I might have just always not gotten people," Olive says, "But I... don't know."

I'm sorry, I almost say, but that sounds wrong.

Same? Nope.

"I think it just matters what we want to be now," I say. "It's not like any of them can stop us from being whatever we want to be, right? So whatever you want, you should just..."

"I don't think it's that easy, Derrick." Her eyes are glassy as she stares down the half-lit hall, towards the slowing torrent of people that moves throughout the main hallways out towards the front of the building. "I'll see you later, though! Bye!"

I raise a hand and wave as she goes, still feeling atrocious.

---

You're looking out at a window in suburbia, lights flickering on down the road, and I'm watching the sun rise. You sit on your bed. I'm out on the porch, the cold stone making my legs and backside frigid. I draw my hands around my tucked-in knees to match your posture. You look like the morning mist on the first days of summer, just learning how to coalesce on the leaves.

"I think you did the right thing," you mutter. "Sometimes that's not enough, but it's worth something."

"You don't talk to her much?" I ask.

You bury your head further between your arms, glaring at the pavement. "No, but I don't really talk to anyone. I'm friends by affiliation. It just feels like--"

"--everyone is tolerating you, but it'll never go further than that." I finish for you.

"You too?"

"Just with my parents."

You recoil like you've been hit. "We should talk about something less depressing."

"Mikayla," I decide, and it feels right. Yeah. Mikayla. I need to know. "What's she like?"

"Mikayla's on the council in my world," you say. "Organizing prom and everything. She makes a lot of plans and chickens out at the last moment, or whenever it seems like we might get into trouble. Even through all that, I can't think of anyone who doesn't respect or fear her. She's incredible at getting her way, more than a little terrifying, and when someone does get in trouble, she manages to pull strings behind the scene and get us all out of it."

"No kidding," I say.

"I thought she'd like you," you say. "She talks about this guy all the time... his name was Jack, I think. Had a fox as his spirit animal."

My face twitches. I remember the russet curve of a jawline, all kinds of close calls, an undisclosed kiss, and things begin, after months of emotional hell, to make sense. Instead of saying anything, I nod like this is all news. "Hope his last name was better than 'Renard'." I tease.

You make the cooing noise deep in your throat, the one that makes me want to throw myself in front of an army of crazed scientists for you, and I grab for you to find that you're still nothing but refracted particles in the early morning air. There's nothing solid to grab, and yet your hand reaches out for mine.

"These are usually the best parts of my day," you whisper, with a kind of desperation I once thought was my birthright alone.

"Mine too," I put my hand against yours, letting it hang in midair, trying not to let the unfeeling cold of the normal air around us interfere with the fantasy of human warmth. "You've been outside? Taking your inhaler? Everything's good?"

"Besides the obvious," you say.

"Of course," I echo old sentiments. "Of course."

We both watch the sky together, your suburban pinks (as you've dictated to me) mixed with the piss yellow of streetlights, my salmon crossed by the dark bodies of trees, their branches like human arms, welcoming russet clouds into their reach. Now more than ever, it seems that we're living in two different worlds, and Ground-class becomes several kinds of misnomer.