February turned into March, but snows kept falling. Jack and Kyle had more than one snow day, but they never went out sledding or snowball-fighting or snowman-building. Kyle resented the fact that he could no longer do those things in the same ways he had before, and he stubbornly refused to go outside. He rivaled the winter world in his coldness, but, as dark as he'd become, he was a poor match against its pure whiteness. His mother, too lost in her own labyrinth, didn't have the heart to try lifting her son's spirits.

The passing days began to feel like blocks of stagnancy to Kyle and Mrs. Kemper, changing only when a weekend or a snow day intervened. Matt and David came over a few times to sit with Kyle or work on homework, but his despairing callousness was driving them away. Their visits had lessened since Mr. Kemper left, and Kyle's self-inflicted isolation began to eat at him along with everything else.

While his brother and mother were wandering aimlessly through the dreary days and dark nights, Jack continued to do well. He, too, sensed little change as time passed, but this gave him reason for relief, not anxiety. What to them was another chance to take part in meaningless actions was, to him, just a day. Consistency was what the boy had come to love and need, and it was all he cared about. He truly did not have the energy or capability to consider his brother's hatred of him or his mother's pain and concerns. Their lives were only important when they somehow intertwined with his. Like when he needed a ride to or from school. Or when he had to ask Kyle to get out of the shower so he could take one. And his life moved on just as he figured it was supposed to. He was content. He was at ease.

Some time in mid-March, a few months after Jack had been put onto his medication, Glorion Middle School's nurse was unable to administer Jack his pills. It was easy—the way his medicine worked. Each morning, right at the start of second hour, he'd get a pass to the nurse, who gave him a pill and a little paper cup. He'd take the pill, go on back to class, and everything would be as always. It was as simple as that. Not a complicated process. But this day, when Jack went to see the nurse, she casually informed him that there was no medicine to be taken. Said his mother had forgotten to bring in the new prescription. She'd called! she said, wanting to cover her own actions. But Mrs. Kemper hadn't returned the call, and the medicine hadn't been brought in. So there was nothing for Jack to take. No pill, and no paper cup.

This flustered Jack. For as long as he could remember, there'd been the pill and the paper cup at the start of second hour. It had always been there . . . always. Or, if it hadn't, he couldn't recall what there had been before it. The pill just . . . was. What he'd been told didn't really register in his brain. But the nurse shooed him away. Told him he'd be fine. And he'd gone back to class and behaved normally, although he sensed the offness of the whole thing.

It was during fifth hour when Jack was forced to take note of the strange seed of insecurity taking root in him, because once it grabbed hold, it grew with a rapid vengeance.

Fifth hour was social studies. Grace was in that class, but she sat far away and had stopped annoying him. They were learning about World War I. The trenches, the teacher was discussing. Trench warfare, or something. And Jack always listened with the most attentive ear. Now, though, he found himself distracted. He was missing whole chunks of what the teacher was saying. The lecture moved from trenches to airplanes . . . and then, suddenly, everyone around Jack was beginning to get out pens and papers . . . had something just been assigned? How could he have missed it? What was it? He couldn't seem to hear properly. Time was moving strangely, and there were things by his ears, making noises. Someone from behind or beside him was whispering to him . . . No. Nothing was there. He'd turned side to side and seen all around him only the puzzled faces of the students he'd never been able to remember the names of. Their stares seemed to ask him if he was all right. What was it, then? Where were the sounds coming from? Were they on the outside? Were they . . . were they inside his head? No. That was impossible. Then where were they coming from?

The students were still staring at him. He thought he heard someone saying he needed to get his paper out, but he couldn't be quite sure because there was so much noise in his head. Ferocious, roaring whispers. Whispers so loud he could hear nothing beyond them yet was uncertain of what they were saying.

The teacher was there, suddenly, taking Jack by his shoulders. Jack saw his moving mouth, his widened eyes, but couldn't hear him. Saw only the enormous features of his face before they were swallowed up by the shadows creeping out of the corners of his own eyes that turned everything black.

His consciousness was regained about fifteen minutes later. Eyes opened in a dim room where the ceiling light was off and the only source of illumination was the gold coming in through the door crack dividing the sick room from the office. He listened to his own breathing. Laid on his back, watched his chest slowly rise and fall. Waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. A table was against the wall across from him. There were things on it: a glass jar of cotton balls, a box of tissue, other first aid supplies. An open door led into a bathroom where the dark outlines of a toilet and sink were visible. But he was alone. Alone in the cool darkness; his mind was empty of everything other than the immediate observations he was making about the room around him.

And then, slowly, he began to realize that things were moving in the dimness, although there were no other people in the room. Shadows—pieces of the shadows hiding in the corners—they were moving. Moving out of the corners. Sliding along the walls, scuttering along the floor and in and out of the bathroom. They weren't really around the doorway leading to the nurse's office, Jack noticed, but they were everywhere else, and while this was strange, what was even more bizarre was that the boy was not afraid of them. He knew them, he felt. Had always known them. They were as familiar to him as the clothes hanging in his closet at home or the schedule he had at school. They had always been there. Always. Except . . . they'd been gone for some while, now. Or, at least, they'd been hiding. Or he'd been missing them. Where had they been for . . . Jack didn't even know exactly how long the amount of time had been. Days? Weeks? Months? Years? What was going on, actually?

He sat up. The movement was too abrupt. His head swam, began to feel dizzy, started to ache. The pain was dull, throbbing deep inside his skull, where the things he'd forgotten or chosen not to think of over the past few months had been boxed and stored away. It was a pain that, strangely, he knew was good. Was something he needed to endure. So he stayed sitting upright, let his mind begin to sort through its files, and tried to recall what had happened most recently.

The social studies teacher's face. The man's eyes. His open mouth, saying things. That was the image playing through Jack's head. He'd been in class, he knew, and . . . and the sound! All of a sudden, he'd been bombarded with noise. It had all rushed into his head as if several trains were coming to a crashing point in his brain. So much noise . . . all at once . . . and he was still hearing it now, he noticed, though in a much quieter, more bearable form. Light whispering was all around him. Just above a deep, droning lull somewhere beyond the reaches of his eardrums' capacity yet resonating throughout his scrambling thoughts. It, too, had always been there, and Jack wasn't startled by it. Only, moments ago . . . the sounds had come on so strongly. As if his senses had become drastically heightened and overly sensitive. Which had to have been why he'd nearly gone crazy in class. But why had that happened? He'd always known such noise . . . always seen such movements. Sensed such imbalances in the atmosphere around him. Why had it so suddenly burst upon him and caused him to go into shock?

The nurse's voice suddenly became quite clear and audible from the room next door. "Yes Mrs. Kemper, glad to get a hold of you. This is Laura Coleman, Glorion Middle School nurse . . . Yes. Jack's had a bit of a breakdown because he didn't get his dosage today . . . Well, if you recall, I phoned you twice last week to try and . . . yes . . . All right. I understand that, but . . ." Her sighs were becoming more evident each time she broke her conversation in order to listen to Mrs. Kemper. At last, the nurse said, "I think he needs to go home until we can get him back on his medication routine . . . You'll come pick him up, then? . . . All right. I'll see you shortly."

There was a click, and Jack knew the phone had been hung up. His mother was coming to get him. Good. He needed to go home and think things over. What was that the nurse had said about medication? His dosage? The boy's brain raced. Pieced the puzzle together.

Little white pill . . . paper cup . . .

He'd not taken his medicine.

That was it! Jack felt a wave of relief. He'd been taking medicine. He hadn't taken it today, and that was why he'd suddenly been overwhelmed in class. There was no frightening reason. He was fine; he just needed medicine.

Why?

Frowning, the boy ran his hands through his hair. What was he taking medicine for? Why was this so hazy to him all of a sudden? He felt as if his life had a veil over it. The nurse had just said he needed to be back on his medication routine . . . Glorion Middle School nurse . . . that was right. He was at a new school. Kyle was still at Webster Day . . . Kyle! Kyle's fall . . . they'd blamed him for that. Blamed Jack. Thought he wasn't entirely right in the head . . . That was why they'd put him on medicine! And now . . . what was it? February? No—it was March! And this was the first time in over two months that he'd been off the medicine! But for some reason, all that time seemed as if it had never even existed. What had happened in the past weeks? It was as if he'd slept for a long night and woken up in this nurse's office . . . but at the same time, his brain knew that a good deal of time had passed since he'd been himself.

He wasn't sure what he'd been, then, for the past months, if he hadn't been himself. The thought unsettled him more than the blots of shadows clustering in the corners of the room.

The boy forced himself to think of what he'd been like. Vague memories arose. His grades had been better—he knew that. His grades had been better and he'd been taken out of the resource room. Work. Math, science, social studies, language arts, gym: those were the things he remembered from the past months. Not events, really, just subjects he'd been working on. And what about his family? Kyle . . . Kyle seemed the same. He'd been angry and bitter before his brother was on medicine, and Jack was pretty sure that was still how he was. The hole was still in the backyard, no doubt. Snows, though, had covered it all up. That was no different. But no other things had really happened. Nothing interesting in school. Nothing strange at home . . .

Or had there been? Something felt wrong inside. He was missing something. Maybe his mother could tell him; she was coming to pick him up.

And then, suddenly, as he sat there thinking of his mother driving to the school at that precise moment, the devastating recollection hit him:

His father had left. Was gone. Just like that. Was just . . . gone.

Something deep down, beneath the cot Jack was on, beneath the floor under the cot, beneath the floors of the school building, shifted and groaned. The foundations of his world had crumbled, and he'd been previously too medicated to realize it.