Chapter 3: All The Small Things

The steps were already full when Eliana got there. Hannah had the third one, Tessa was a step below with her phone out, and Vivian was holding hers up to the group like a lantern.

“Forty-one thousand,” Vivian said. “On a vigil. That’s genuinely insane.”

“That’s a weird thing to be proud of,” Emily said, but she was smiling.

“I’m just saying,” Vivian said.

Eliana took her usual place, one step below and to the left. Hannah’s hand came back without her looking and passed down a paper cup.

“Have some marshmallows,” Hannah said.

“Thanks,” Eliana said. Hannah went back to her phone. She had been on it since Eliana arrived, and Eliana watched her thumb move and tried not to count how long it took.

“So how was the dentist?” Tessa asked, loud enough that the people above them went quiet. “You were gone for hours.”

“A cleaning, then a cavity. Lower left, second from the back.”

“Tess,” Hannah said, still looking at her screen. “Drop it.”

Tessa dropped it. Hannah waited a moment, then said quietly, not looking up, “You could’ve just said you needed a day. I would’ve covered.”

Eliana’s stomach went cold. She waited for the rest of the sentence, the part that would come with a condition, and it didn’t come.

“Saturday?” Hannah asked.

“I’ll bring the sour candies. The ones that Melanie likes.”

“Good.” Hannah’s mouth did something small. Eliana couldn’t classify it.

The bell rang. She finished the latte on the way to class, the way she always did, and dropped the empty cup in the bin outside the lab door.

The chemistry lab smelled like matches and floor cleaner. Eliana took her stool at the third bench. Lisa was already at hers across the room, lining up three pens in a row. They didn’t look at each other.

Mr. Bayer stood at the front with a candle, a lighter, and a glass jar.

“Watch,” he said. “Then tell me why.”

He lit the candle and set the jar over it. Eliana counted. Under the bench, her thumb worked the cap of her pen, on and off, on and off. The flame shrank to a blue bead and went out at eleven seconds.

Lisa’s hand shot up. “Not you, Lisa,” Mr. Bayer said. “You’ll spoil it.” He scanned the room, and Eliana’s hand came up before she’d decided.

“The jar’s closed,” she said, “so it ran out of something.”

“Of what?”

“Whatever it was burning besides the wick. Air, I guess. Part of the air.”

“Mostly right. Which part?”

“I don’t know, but some gas, right?”

“Close. It’s called oxygen.” Mr. Bayer raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you didn’t already know that, Ms. Barker?”

“I’m sure,” Eliana said. “I just watched.”

“Hm.” He wrote something on his clipboard and moved on to the next bench.

He went back to the board and wrote a word in messy but legible letters: REDOX.

“What happened to that candle is a transfer,” he said. “The wax gives up electrons, and the oxygen takes them. Chemists call that a redox reaction. Burning is the fast version. Rust is the slow one. Same thing, different speed.”

Eliana wrote rust = slow fire in the margin of her notes and underlined it twice. The pen cap sat forgotten on the bench.

“So everything that’s rusting is burning?” she asked, before she’d decided to.

“Slowly, yes.” Mr. Bayer looked pleased. “Nobody sees it, but it’s the same reaction.”

Lisa didn’t turn around, but Eliana saw her shoulders shake once with a laugh.

When the bell rang, she packed her bag slowly. Lisa packed hers more slowly. By the time the room emptied, they were wiping down the same bench.

“Mostly,” Lisa said, low and solemn, in Mr. Bayer’s voice. Her eyes went to the pen in Eliana’s hand, then away. “He always says it like he’s disappointed in you personally.”

“He didn’t sound disappointed in me?”

“Maybe it just sounds nicer when it’s you.” She wiped the same spot twice. “I was up till two reviewing for today’s class. Almost forgot it all, it’s been so long.”

“You said you’d stop doing that.”

“I said I’d think about it. Anyway, the candle trick is baby stuff. Air isn’t even the only place oxygen is.”

“Where else would it be?”

“Anything with an O in its formula, really. It’s kind of hiding in there.”

Eliana turned that over. The pen cap stopped. In the hallway someone laughed, and one of the voices was Vivian’s. The pen cap started again, quietly, and she picked up her bag and left first, the way they always did.

Sean was leaning on the locker next to Lexie’s, which meant he’d been there a while. He wore a navy blazer over a hoodie and the expression of a man about to say something brave.

“Lexie. A word.”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“Respectfully, that’s a reflex, and reflexes are what the establishment installs.” He steepled his fingers. “Everyone in this building is a conformist. Same hashtags, same candles, same opinions. If you genuinely wanted to go against the machine, you’d be against all the woke propaganda the mainstream media is trying to push on us.”

“Respectfully,” Lexie swung her locker door open so it clipped his elbow. “Stop talking to me.”

“Real rebels question the narrative,” Sean went on, undeterred. “Imagine, hypothetically, a heron applying for a mortgage.”

Lexie said nothing. She glared at him until he stopped.

“Oh, he’s doing a new one,” a voice said behind him. “Let him finish. I need material.”

Narnia held a coffee in both hands and wore a scarf that could have been a costume. Mika stood beside them with a camera bag on one shoulder and a stack of proof sheets under one arm, in a brown corduroy jacket with two different patches on the left sleeve. Mika raised the camera. The shutter clicked.

“Yearbook candid,” Mika said, bright and entirely friendly. “I’m going with ‘Sean, not really a rebel.’”

“That’s not–”

“It’s just a caption.” Mika tilted the camera to check the screen. “You know how it is. People aren’t really what they think they are unless some big strong man says so, right?”

Sean’s face tightened. Lexie’s mouth moved, and she didn’t let it finish.

Narnia lowered the coffee. “Wait, is the propaganda us? Am I the mainstream media? I’d have worn something.”

“I never said that.”

“It’s okay, Sean. I love that you’re on a journey.” Narnia patted his arm, kindly, like a nurse. “It’ll pass. Most of them do.”

“It’s not a journey. It’s a conviction.”

“Everyone says that right before the journey ends. We’re all just rooting for you to get a hobby.”

“I have hobbies.”

“Posting is not a hobby, sweetie.”

“Leave!” Lexie said, shooing him away.

“We’ll continue this dialectic,” Sean said, and went off down the hall, pleased with himself.

“He’s getting worse,” Mika said.

“He’s getting funnier,” said Narnia, but they looked at Lexie, and the humor dropped a little. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

“I slept.”

“Mm.” Narnia’s eyes went to her wrist. “Jewelry. You don’t do jewelry.”

Lexie tugged her sleeve down. “Found it.”

“Found it where?”

“Not your business.”

“So, a drawer,” Narnia said. “Love that for you.”

Mika’s eyes stayed on the charms a second longer than anyone else’s would have. Mika didn’t say anything and hitched the camera bag higher instead. “Come by the yearbook room at lunch. I’m doing the clubs spread, and you still don’t have a band photo.”

“I’m not taking a band photo.”

“You are. I already put it on the schedule.”

“Fine,” Lexie said.

The library had a glass door, and Eliana walked past it with Vivian’s ring light in a tote bag on her shoulder, because it was the shortest way to the robotics wing.

Lisa, Ajax, and Anthony were at the table by the window, the one the librarian pretended she couldn’t see. Lisa was eating a sandwich with one hand and doing a problem set with the other. Ajax lay across two chairs with his eyes half closed. Anthony had his laptop open and his headphones around his neck, and he typed with the flat patience of someone who had been interrupted before.

Through the glass, Eliana caught the end of it.

“—lights,” Ajax was saying. “Behind the bleachers, Sunday night, floating about this high. Think about the bleachers, though. Nobody has ever sat on bleachers to look at bleachers. It’s the only furniture that exists so you can face away from it.”

“Time?” said Anthony.

“Nine-forty, maybe nine-forty-five,” Ajax said. “And that’s the thing, they don’t hold anything. They’re a shelf for people.”

“Write it up,” Lisa said, without looking up from the problem set.

“I’m writing it up.” Anthony typed. “That’s the fourth one since Monday. The alarm panel in the south hall, the vending machine, the gym scoreboard, now this.” He stopped. “It’s a dangling pointer to something that was deallocated.”

“That’s it,” Ajax said. “The bleachers are what’s left after the game. They’re pointing at an event that’s already been freed.”

“What,” Lisa said.

“Nothing,” Anthony said, and logged it.

Lisa looked up then and found Eliana through the glass. She looked back down. Neither of them waved.

Eliana didn’t slow down. Behind her, Ajax was still laughing. The robotics lab was around the corner, where she’d promised Vivian a favor.

The robotics lab smelled like solder. A whiteboard at the front said COMPETITION IN 33 DAYS, with an earlier number crossed out underneath.

Emma was bent over a robot the size of a toddler, one hand on a soldering iron and a coil of solder in the other, with a small clamp holding the wire. The robot had a name taped to its chest in label-maker letters: ALFRED ESQUIRE III.

“Hi,” Eliana said. “Sorry, I was told you could look at this?” She held up the tote bag with the ring light. “It stopped turning on.”

“I’m mid-solder.” Emma didn’t look up. “I can hear you, and I’m mid-solder.”

“I can wait.”

“You’re talking. That’s not waiting.”

Eliana’s thumb found the cap of her pen. Behind Emma, Dylan stood with his forehead against the whiteboard, three empty Monster cans stacked in a pyramid on the desk beside him.

“We’re on rev three of the chassis,” he told the whiteboard. “Everything is a rev… someone sleep for me.”

“Dylan has had two hours,” Emma said.

“Two and a half!”

“Two.”

The door banged. Lexie came in with her hood up and walked straight to the bin of cables by the door. Eliana recognized her from civics. Lexie didn’t seem to recognize anyone.

“Do you need something?” Emma said, to the air in general.

“A quarter-inch cable. Six feet.”

“Bin by the door. Take one and leave.”

“They’re all tangled.”

“I know what a bin is.” Emma lifted the iron, tip pointed at the ceiling. “Both of you, I have eleven minutes of this left, and you’re both talking.”

“But I’m not talking,” Lexie said.

“You’re making noises with your mouth hole. That’s talking.”

Dylan raised one hand without lifting his head from the whiteboard. “I can fix the light… or pass out. One or the other…”

“Fix the light,” Emma said. “Get Regina George over here out of my hair.”

Dylan peeled himself from the whiteboard, took the ring light from Eliana, and unscrewed the base with a coin. He frowned a little at the glass tube inside.

“Blown fuse,” Dylan said. “Somebody used the wrong charger.”

“Vivian…” Eliana said. “She does that.”

“Do you want it fixed or do you want a science class?”

“Both, if it’s quick.”

“The fuse is the part that gives up so the rest doesn’t. Too much power for a small path.” He pinched the tube between two fingers. “It’s a dollar. I’ve got a drawer.”

Eliana turned the tube over in her fingers. “So it breaks on purpose?”

“That’s its whole job,” Dylan said.

“That’s kind of smart.”

“It’s kind of a dollar.”

Behind her, Lexie yanked a cable out of the bin, and the whole bin came with it.

“I said take one and leave,” Emma said.

“I’m leaving!” Lexie yelled, a six-foot cable already in her fist, and walked out.

Lexie got to civics with the cable coiled in her fist and a worse mood than she’d had at her locker.

Mr. Anderson wrote OWNERSHIP on the board, underlined it, and asked a question.

“What’s the difference between having something and owning it?”

Sean’s chair was tipping back before he’d finished. “Sovereignty, but make it commercial. A man’s right to own a rifle and his right to own a bakery are the same right, and the state’s claim on either is a protection racket with a flag.”

“Devil’s advocate here,” Leonard said. “Who says he owns the bakery? Maybe the bakery owns him. He’s up at four a.m.”

“Servitude to one’s own enterprise is the highest form of liberty.”

“Private property’s fine,” Thea said, without looking up from her notes. “Your couch, your phone, your ‘rifle’. But a bakery’s a business. It should belong to the people who bake. Same for a hospital or a nuclear reactor. Collectively owned, and everybody paid for what they actually contribute.”

“That’s communism with a bake sale,” Sean said.

“It’s money and couches, Sean. I’m keeping both.”

“Regulation is theft with a clipboard. Imagine, hypothetically, a man with a trebuchet, a bakery, and an unusually loyal pigeon—”

“Does the pigeon pay taxes?” Leonard asked.

“Taxation is a subscription nobody agreed to.”

“Honestly, a private reactor would be the safest one,” Leonard said, turning on Thea. “Nobody babysits their own money like a guy with a reactor.”

“Nobody earns a reactor by buying it. You earn it by running it well.”

“Thank you,” Sean said. “And any person, of any background, has the inalienable right to start a business and own it. That is the whole promise of this country.”

“I’m not on your side,” Leonard said.

“Oh please,” Thea said. “The only queer owned businesses you think should be allowed to exist are OpenAI and Palantir.”

Sean’s chair came down on all four legs. “Correct. Obviously. Those two serve the public interest, so they’re the exception. The rest are another matter. Queer people are, as a whole, inherently wealthier, and that’s an observation, not an opinion. Their enterprises should exist, just not in the general marketplace, where they distort it. In a dedicated gendostate, with its own currency. Imagine, hypothetically, a nation the size of a bakery with a very small navy.”

The room went quiet for a second.

“Sean.” Thea put down her pen. “Are you like... a real person? That’s not even… what?”

“Can’t handle some innovative and novel ideas?”

“It’s not even… How do I even argue against that.”

“You might hate me, but you can’t deny that I’m logically consistent.”

“You… you really aren’t.”

Lexie kept her eyes on her notebook. Her mouth moved, and she didn’t let it finish.

Mr. Anderson stood at the board with the marker still in his hand and the look of a man having the best day of his week.

“That’s time,” he said. “Tomorrow, second period, there’s a fire drill. I’d like everyone to take it seriously this time.”

“Nobody takes it seriously,” Lexie said.

“That’s my point.”

The bell rang, and the room emptied all at once. Lexie was almost through the door, the cable still in her fist, when someone said, “Everyone laughed except you.”

Eliana was a step behind her with her notebook against her chest.

“What?”

“Your mouth moved, and you stopped it,” Eliana said plainly. “I guess I just noticed that.”

“Why?” Lexie stared at her. “Were you watching me?”

“Everyone else was doing the same thing.” Eliana’s thumb moved on the cap of her pen. “You weren’t.”

“Well, stop.”

“Okay…”

Lexie had wound herself up for a fight. “That’s it?”

“You asked me to.”

“Eliana!” Hannah’s voice came down the hall, bright, and a hand landed on Eliana’s elbow. “We’re at the table, Vivian’s got the good seats. Come on.”

On the other side, a different hand closed on Lexie’s sleeve. “Practice,” Meghan said. “Now. Why are you talking to the pastel mafia?”

“I’m not.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

Eliana let herself be steered down the hall. When she looked back, Lexie was still standing there, and then Meghan turned her around the corner.