I hop in the car looking like a hobo and neither Glasses Lady nor the man with the trenchcoat (I'm calling him Matrix Man, at least until I figure out his real name) are especially friendly. "I think we've learned a valuable lesson about placing our faith in you, Derrick," says Glasses Lady, revving up the limousine.

"I didn't run off and burn down a city, therefore, no problem." I shrug.

"Would you care to explain what the problem was, then? Because we attempted to call you ten times after your parents reported you'd never come home to no response and we've had agents swarming the area since midnight. If it had been five hours more, we would have to issue Rogue Codes. Do you understand the kind of mass hysteria you could have caused?"

I glare directly into the rear view mirror. "It wouldn't have been panic for me,"

Glasses Lady almost serves off the road. "You little--"

"They'd be scared because of me. If I was two years older and they had the slightest pretense available, they could shoot me and claim I attacked them. I have just enough fox in me that I look the part, too. I looked up those statistics. I know what my survival rates are."

The road continues to blur past, the green shapes made even less coherent by my uncooperative vision, which goes in and out without my consent. I can feel my body ache with the hollowness where adrenaline filled every vein last night, and I want nothing better than to collapse into the seats.

His voice a little softer, even tinged with pity (immediately I feel an intense guilt for provoking it), Matrix Man asks, "Look. Can you at least tell us where you were?"

"My back porch." I breathe.

"You didn't ask your parents to let you indoors?"

There are scarier things than nights alone, and foster care is one of them. My stomach curls, thinking about a happy family clustered around a television, laughing about some obscure program, or the way they used to ruffle my hair and chide me on my sedentary lifestyle or general lack of hygiene or fashion sense. "Animals sleep outside."

"Derrick," he asks.

I cut him off, more than aware that I'm making a mistake. "Did they call about me?"

The fluttering of Glasses Lady's breath, just audible, says enough. "We called them, Mr. Renard."

"At what time?" I demand.

"The mandatory time for filing a report."

Impartial. I lower my head to the window, which is tepid as the air both inside and outside of the car, and we pull up at the school. I jerk back, drowsily, and realize the last twenty minutes are a gray scrawl across my memory. Unsettled, I clutch my backpack to my sides and hustle out of the car. The limousine stays parked a while longer than usual, the headlights casting a white glare in my general direction. Above, the sky is a hazy, dusky silver, preparing for a storm, but the air is unusually dry for such conditions. It's the type of weather that stirs up vague memories and persistent deja vu, but even weeks in, there's little familiar about this place.

I ease into my seat in Room 63 and my head almost immediately hits the floor. Olive, who is just far enough away from me that I can almost block her head with Mikayla's, is watching me with her mouth agape.

Oh no they can't know. No, no, no...

"You smell like trees," she says, and I catch snickering from the front row.

"It's because I live in the woods. I was doing yard work this morning," I inform her, the easy lie slurred and unconfident.

"At 4 AM?" asks Mikayla.

"Good to know you left early because you had something important to do." Finn says.

Stop, I think. I'm so tired I can feel my heart beating in my chest. I'm imagining your hands around my shoulders, better excuses, and I visualize holding my own eyes open, as if propped open by sticks. None of this is helpful in the slightest. By the time Ms. Shinke has started talking, the ticking of the radiator has lured me to sleep. I'm soooo dead, my mind moans as I lapse in and out of consciousness. Ms. Shinke's fierce gray eyes catch mine, but I'm viewing them through a kaleidoscope of sleep deprivation and the apathy that comes with it. Trying to raise my head is like trying to jerk my head through solid concrete.

To my horror, Brittany passes her seat and walks over to me, where she crouches by my desk. When she knocks on the desk, I finally bolt upwards. I feel my ears and nose twitch and another wave of embarrassment rips through me. "What do you want?" I snap. Wow, Derrick! Shut your trap! There's no one to stop me. You're not here to make excuses for me. Today I die on my own merits, and all I can think of is going down burning.

"Derrick Renard? You're wanted at the Extra's nurse," says Brittany, narrowing her eyes. "Again."

"It's a routine check." Mikayla suggests, folding her fingers over her phone. "All you're missing is Biology."

I pull myself out of my desk, and the effort almost floors me--enhanced strength, my ass. Animals must get an obscene amount of sleep in the wild, because I've never felt sleep deprivation like this since I was... there. "So that's what subject we're in." Incredible. I think that might have been even worse than your last line.

Man. It's noisy in the morning.

I leave as discreetly as I can, which involves only shutting the door on my trench coat once. I shove my hands all the way into the pockets of said coat, ignoring its cruel betrayal and what it has cost me, and stride the halls out of our twisted corner and back into the school proper. You can almost feel the air change when we're out of the superfluous-administration-and-abomination area. I wonder if you've ever come back here. We have a water fountain and one of the administrators leaves Life Savers on her desk. I resolve to steal one on the way back. Mmm. Life Savers.

I open the nurse's door and declare, "I didn't beat anyone up this time."

"I'm well aware, Mr. Renard," says the 'nurse', with a smile. "That sounds like an accusation, and we don't make accusations here. You've been informed that this is a routine check, haven't you?"

"Good day for a routine check." I say, settling in the desk. I steeple my hands."So, what are you checking?"

She steeples hers as well, her elbows tilted so her own folded hands are just higher than mine. I lean my elbows together, which, given how disappointingly short I am, causes me to lean into the table. She raises an eyebrow. "Is that a comfortable position, Mr. Renard?"

"S'fine," I manage.

"Hm. You know, there are a lot of rumors about unusual fever and bloodlust amongst shifters long after their quests..."

"Not a shifter," I say. "Mutant. Jeez." If I ever end up in the same bracket as Olive I'm going to personally withdraw from public school and live in the woods. Wait. No. That totally proves her point. Ugh.

"You seem to possess all the usual signs. Bloodshot eyes, disheveled hair, slight agitation, loss of mental function... but unusually enough, if I had to make a professional diagnosis, I'd say you're suffering from a much more common teen affliction."

"English?" I ask.

"Sleep deprivation." she concludes. Her hands are steepled so high they're touching her mouth. Frankly, it's an obnoxious gesture. I want to personally reach out and lower her hands, or hide under the table, but neither of those options are going to stop the uneasy sensation that comes with being watched. I hate the smell of this room--you can smell the clean and sanitizer underlying everything, choking the room in citrus--and the lighting is even worse. 

(I'm hungry, too, owing to the fact that I never had breakfast. I think I might actually kill a man for that Life Saver.) 

"Somehow I'm beginning to believe that was the goal you went into this examination with. Not very scientific of you, Ms.... Ms...." I stop.

She turns around a name plate on her desk, which reads Asiya Reema.

"Yes."

"Would you like to explain what possessed you to stay up so late, Mr. Renard?" she asks.

Adrenaline hits me like a brick, so fast I almost clamp down on my tongue. It is the only thing smart enough to get out of my way, and potential excuses swell up like water before my eyes before dissipating into a singular mistake. "I was up watching explicit videos on YouTube," I announce. "Really dirty stuff." I want this down on some kind of record. "I can pull up the history if you'd like." I feign reaching for my phone.

"Go ahead." Ms. Reema says.

Ice seizes me body. A mistake has been made. O, Derrick, you foolish mortal, you... goddamnit. "You don't want me to pull this up. I don't think the school wireless network is allowed to display the URL."

"I think I'll get the point." she says with the slightest of smiles.

I bite my tongue, hard, and the ensuing jolt of pain is enough for me to fully process that oh, geez, maybe letting the worst, most impulsive part of me call all the shots may have been a poor idea. Slowly, I slide the phone over, pulling up my Safari history. "Wow! Guess I must've... deleted it..." This would have been a great alibi a few minutes ago, if I wasn't running on twenty minutes of rest and my brain wasn't the size of a raisin.

She looks up the empty history. "Derrick, admittedly, this chat has been amusing, but I'd appreciate it if you were honest with me from now on. I know about the Rogue Code."

"Does everyone know?" I ask, surprised by how much fear the sentence manages to drag out of me.

"No. Nor will they, but you are beginning to build a reputation." Ms. Reema looks me dead in the eyes. "It was three years ago that Gerald Caitiff physically assaulted another student on school grounds--this far surpassed the beating you gave a certain student. In fact, the student Mr. Caitiff attacked ended up in the emergency room. This was not an isolated incident. To be entirely frank? You are fighting an uphill battle. It is not one I'd advise you continue, and I don't think it's one you want to continue either. If you'd like, I can send you home now..."

"No. I'm fine, and I'm going back to class." I say. My fists tremble. I hoist myself towards the door, and my entire body shaking, finally ask, "But... about the fighting. What if... what if I can't stop?"

Softly, she says, "You're free to visit me at any time."

A better person would have thanked her, turned around, set a date, a better person would have done something by now but the air is suffocating. All of the lights are watching me and I nod stiffly before walking out and back down the hall. I can't go to the bathroom again. I refuse to work through all these epiphanies again. This is ridiculous. This is petty. There's nothing here that can hurt me.

Wait.

Holy hell this is a laboratory. I am under the anaesthetic again. I'm going to wake up into the lab and nothing will have changed, this is a fever dream, my body slams against the wall and what if someone walks down the hall right now and sees me here they're going to know I'm crazy she told me about shifter fever what if I have shifter fever what if my DNA is coming undone as we speak--

We made a pact about this at some point. You said you'd stab me before it got bad.

We said the dumbest things when we were in a lot of pain.

I pull into class sans a Life Savers (speaking of ways this day has gone poorly), where Ms. Shinke avoids calling on me all morning, and for the first time I feel a certain kinsmanship with the wrinkled, furious prune we so lovingly call our teacher. Still, I can't say I'm not relieved when we get to lunch, even if this pits me up against my most challenging adversary yet... socializing with other humans.

"You know, I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt earlier, but you really do look like crap." Mikayla says, sipping her soup as she watches me with an expression of abject horror.

Finn snorts, "Guess you can't sit with the Portal-classes now. Congratulations on being relegated to the bottom of the bottom of the barrel by your own hygienal incompetence."

"I ran home and fucking slept outside." I growl. "I was up all night in the middle of some panic-fever-hallucinatory-nightmare thing." Shit. Why did you tell them? They don't care. Shut up, Derrick. They think you're needy. You're so needy. Stop being needy, Derrick.

"What do you mean, all last night?" Mikayla asks.
I cast her a look.

"Either of us could have had you over-" she continues. She's fingering her phone again, and my lip curls.

"No we couldn't," Finn mutters.

"That was almost nice. Thanks." I grumble.

"I don't need your pity," and I snatch her phone up from beneath her. She dives for it, but I'm already holding it aloft. "Funny. Is this the school hotline? No wait," I turn it over. "This is Ms. Reema's personal number."

Mikayla blushes beet red. "I am trying to help you, you utter tool!"

Yeah. Hallway thing. "Thanks," I say, "but I don't think being a snake has ever helped anybody. If you're going to be harping on my every movement, it might be... a little more convenient for both of us... if you just moved out of my way."

Mikayla lifts her soup thermos, screws the cap, and gently places it in her bag. She then swings around to the other side of the table.

"I have no idea why she's so invested in you," Finn admits.

"Me neither." I breathe. "Well, you're leaving too, aren't you?"

"Oh, absolutely." Finn says. "I'm not condoning this, nor am I getting in a dogfight between ninth graders. You're on your own here."

He leaves, and Olive slides right into his seat, almost pressing up against my side. Her eyes, which are her namesake color, are round and wide, like those ornamental owls. Unblinking. Terrifying. If I'm going to be honest, they also complement her hair and freckles, which, combined with the ears, make her cute, but in a puppy-dog way. She looks like she's at least two years younger than the rest of us, and the vagueness of her expression is unsettling.

"What do you want from me?" I ask.

"You look sad all the time." she says. "Plus, we're twins."

"We're absolutely not twins." I say. "You've got to drop this. I'm going to get looks."

"From who?" she asks.

"Everyone's looking at me. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I am highly prone to saying things that attract the attention of the general public."

Olive tilts her head. "If you don't want anyone looking at you, um... do you want to... come over sometime?" she asks.

"No," I say. "I think I'm grounded. Plus, what do Extras... what the heck would we possibly do?"

Alya calls from halfway across the table, swinging herself into the middle so that she can see us, "These Extras are going to the Friday night basketball game. You don't have to come if you're grounded, though."

"What the--"

Alya is behind me before I can make another move.

"How much of my conversation were you even listening to?"

"Probably more than you wanted me to catch." Alya pats my back. "I get the feeling. You stay up late, say some dumb things to your girlfriend... again, you're totally in the wrong, but we all make shitty decisions. That's why we're here. Plus, there's no reason for you to act so... fenced in all the time. You're acting like we're out to get you or something, Derrick!"

All in your head. I breathe a sigh. "I'm just tired."

We're going with that.

(A/N: Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. So, I've kind of hit a roadblock with a few of my books--I wouldn't say that it's really a creative roadblock, it's more of a productivity issue, but there is definitely some issue with how these three books are set up that makes them harder to write. There is a LOT of narrative set up in CRUX and I'm having a hard time with how tenuous these threads are. It's going to take me longer to write these, consequently, but the more I write it, the more I'm sure this story deserves a second draft, so there's that. I'll also say that this chapter took forever because Derrick's voice is hard to get down. Too much or too little and you lose what makes him... Derrick. I think this chapter overdoes it in some places, too little in others, but I want to get something out and I was doing more worrying about the chapter than writing it. Eventually you need to let things go. If you notice anything off or any jokes that doesn't land, please tell me off in the comments. I run off of feedback. Feedback and peanut butter. Have a good one!)