The second period teacher did not look like what he was.
Steven had learned, in the short time he had been operating in this body and this life, to pay attention to that kind of gap — the space between appearance and reality, between the face a person presented and the thing underneath it. He had needed the lesson approximately twice before it became instinct.
The man who walked into the classroom for second period was broad, soft-featured, with the particular physical quality of someone who had never seen a reason to be intimidating and had arranged themselves accordingly. His name, from Green's memory, was Samuel. He taught — something. The subject would become clear.
He looked, in summary, like the kind of teacher who let things slide.
*He doesn't,* Steven thought, reading something in the way Samuel moved to the desk, the way his eyes moved across the room. *He's the strictest one here. He just doesn't need to look like it.*
Samuel set down his materials and looked at the class.
From the second row, Draken sneezed.
It was a genuine sneeze — the involuntary, full-body kind, the sort that provides no warning and accepts no restraint. It rang out across the classroom with the clarity of something that had not been planned and could not be apologized for.
The class went still.
Everyone who knew Samuel, Steven realized, was now watching with the particular alertness of people who knew what happened next and were deciding how they felt about it.
Samuel reached into his breast pocket. Produced a handkerchief — folded, clean, white. Walked to Draken's desk. And offered it, with the straightforward simplicity of someone performing an obvious and necessary action.
Draken looked at the handkerchief. At Samuel. At the handkerchief again.
"Thank you," he said, "but I'm fine."
Samuel looked at the state of Draken's nose with the patient expression of a man who was familiar with the concept of being fine and had opinions about its application in specific cases.
He sat on the edge of Draken's desk and, with the calm efficiency of someone who had made a decision, attended to the situation himself.
The class erupted.
Not loudly — it was the kind of laughter that starts as suppressed noise and then becomes impossible to suppress, spreading from desk to desk in waves, the specific delight of witnessing something that was both unexpected and completely, retroactively inevitable.
Draken bore it with what dignity he could locate.
Samuel, finished, handed the handkerchief to Draken — the handkerchief, which was now no longer in pristine condition — and returned to the front of the room as though nothing of note had occurred.
From beside Draken, Drikun said: "Why did you give him that?"
"Because his nose made it necessary," Samuel said, opening his book.
"But why give it to him afterward?"
"Because it is now his."
"Why is it his?"
Samuel looked at her. "Ask your brother."
"Why should I ask my brother when you're right here?"
The girl sitting directly behind Drikun — Steven knew her face without knowing her name, knew her from Green's memories as someone who had been loudly enthusiastic in circulating certain stories about certain people — reached forward and delivered a brisk, precise tap to the back of Drikun's head.
"Nobody wants to hear your questions," she said, with the flat certainty of someone used to being agreed with.
Steven looked at her.
He felt a specific and familiar irritation — the kind that comes not from personal offense but from recognizing a type. The kind of person who moves through shared spaces as though their comfort is the organizing principle everyone else has agreed to.
He filed the feeling. Let it sit.
Samuel began to teach.
---
What Samuel taught was, technically, interesting. Steven recognized this in the abstract, with the part of his mind that could appreciate information even when delivered in a register specifically calibrated to make the eyelids heavy. By the forty-fifth minute, the classroom had achieved a kind of horizontal solidarity — heads propped on hands, gazes fixed at middle distance, the collective experience of a room full of people trying to remain vertical through willpower alone.
The bell saved them.
Steven stood and gathered his things and registered, from the corner of his eye, Drikun opening a door that had not been there a moment ago.
He looked at it briefly. The view through it was familiar from Green's memory — dormitory corridor, afternoon light, the particular geography of the residential building.
"That's our dorm," Riner said, from nearby, with the flat observation of someone cataloguing information automatically.
Steven did not comment. He had somewhere to be.
---
The canteen was loud and warm and smelled of food and the specific social energy of a hundred students released simultaneously from the same obligation. Steven collected a tray, found a gap in the queue, and was navigating toward an empty section of bench when something intercepted his foot.
He looked down.
A leg. Belonging to a boy who was large in the way of someone who had always been large and had developed a relationship with it over the years, extended deliberately into the walking path with the relaxed confidence of someone who expected it to work.
Steven stopped.
He looked at the leg. At the boy it belonged to. At the expression on the boy's face, which was the expression of someone waiting for a specific reaction.
He smiled.
Then he stepped, with precise and unhurried care, directly onto the extended foot.
The sound that followed was immediate and considerable.
Steven removed his foot, continued to his bench, set down his tray, and sat.
He was aware, in the way that awareness of these things is unavoidable, that the canteen had opinions about what had just occurred. They were audible. They disagreed with his reading of events, in the way that crowds often disagree with accurate readings of events when the accurate reading is less satisfying than the available alternative narrative.
He ate.
Abhishek arrived, sat down across from him, and said, with the directness of someone who had known Steven Green long enough to skip preamble: "They're not going to see that he stuck his leg out."
"No," Steven agreed.
"Half of them think you just stepped on him for fun."
"I know."
Abhishek looked around at the surrounding noise, then back at Steven, and said with philosophical resignation: "They're all — you know."
"Yes," Steven said.
A beat of comfortable silence. Then Abhishek, apparently deciding the topic was adequately covered, shifted: "So. Anyone new?"
Steven looked at him.
"You know," Abhishek said. "Since everything with — since. Anyone you've noticed."
Steven thought, for a moment, about Shivani. About a girl who had worked in a district that was loud and lit up at night, who had stood and absorbed things that should not have been absorbed, who had not run or fought back because the calculation in that moment had not favored running or fighting back. Who had taken what came and kept standing.
He thought about what it meant to be asked this question from inside the body of a teenage boy, about a theoretical girl, when the theoretical girl was sitting somewhere behind his eyes having this experience with him.
"Females deserve respect," he said, which came out slightly more formal than intended. "Give that to the ones who deserve it."
Abhishek stared at him.
"That's a very different answer than I was expecting," he said.
"Who did you like?" Steven said, because redirection was sometimes the cleanest available option.
Abhishek opened his mouth to answer, closed it, and said instead: "Don't change the subject."
"I'm not."
"You are. Who is it? Just tell me."
The bell rang.
They stood, collected their things, and joined the movement back toward the classroom building. Abhishek continued asking. Steven continued not answering. The question bounced between them like something that had established a rhythm and wasn't ready to stop.
They were nearly at the classroom door when Steven registered, from behind them, the sound of footsteps quickening slightly.
He didn't turn immediately.
But from the edge of his vision he saw Anjila — saw her turn, saw her reach toward him, the specific body language of someone who has been trying to say something for several hours and has decided that now is the moment —
Adrena's hand closed around her arm.
Anjila stopped.
Steven went inside.
---
His desk had been written on again.
He stood in front of it for a moment, looking at it, and was aware of Abhishek arriving at the desk beside him and registering the same thing.
"Here," Abhishek said, and produced a cloth from his bag, and started on one side.
Steven took out his own handkerchief — the echo of Samuel's gesture this morning, unintentional but present — and started on the other.
They cleaned the desk in silence.
Around them, the class filed in. Nobody said anything. Some of them watched.
The desk came clean.
Steven sat down, put his things on it, and looked at the blank surface.
*Again,* he thought. *Every time.*
*Every time, it comes clean.*
He opened his notebook and waited for third period to begin.
---
*End of Chapter Ten*