Chapter 2:

# CHAPTER TWO: A PERFECTLY AVERAGE TUESDAY

The thing about school was that it was the same every day, which Kaden did not consider a complaint.

Same walk. Fourteen minutes if he didn't rush, which he never did. Past the house with the broken gate that had been broken since fourth grade, past the convenience store where Mr. Halim was always arranging the same bottles in the window with the focus of a man defusing something, past the empty lot on Creer Street where the gravel was pale and interesting and he'd found the blue glass two weeks ago and a perfectly good hex nut before that.

He paused at the lot without meaning to.

Scanned the gravel.

Small brown button, two holes, the kind that comes off a coat. He picked it up.

Cartographer's compass piece, he thought. The map only works if you have all four—

"You're doing it again."

Alex had appeared beside him the way Alex always appeared — without warning, already in the middle of something, a convenience store bag swinging from one hand with what was definitely chips for breakfast.

"Doing what."

"The staring at rocks thing."

"It's a button."

Alex looked at the button. "Why."

"I don't know yet."

Alex accepted this the way he accepted most things Kaden said, which was completely and without follow-up. He opened the chips. They walked.

"Did you watch it."

"Some of it."

"And?"

"The first episode was okay."

Alex made a sound like a man who had been personally wronged. "The *first episode.* Kaden. The first episode is literally just setup."

"I know. That's why I said okay."

"You have to watch at least three before you have an opinion."

"I have an opinion."

"You have a *wrong* opinion."

Kaden pocketed the button. "Then I have a wrong opinion."

Alex ate his chips and considered this. "Fine. But you're watching episode two at lunch."

"Maybe."

"That means no."

"That means maybe."

It meant no. Kaden was probably going to spend lunch watching the pigeon video again. He'd been thinking about it. The guy had made a good point about the way people decide something is stupid before they look at it properly.

---

The school building was the same school building it had been since he started here, which meant it smelled like floor wax and someone's forgotten lunch and that specific institutional air that had no name but was instantly recognizable as *school*. The hallway before first period had its usual population: people performing the correct emotions for the time of day, talking loudly about things that would matter for approximately seventy-two hours, walking with the energy of people who hadn't decided yet whether today was going to be a good day.

Kaden moved through it without friction. That was his particular skill. He was good at being in places without snagging on them.

He found his locker. Opened it. The inside of his locker had, over the course of the year, accumulated: three mechanical pencils (only one worked), a granola bar he'd forgotten about that was probably still fine, a folded piece of paper with a list of movies he kept meaning to watch, a small flat stone from the courtyard that had good weight to it, and a photograph from last year's class trip where everyone looked slightly worse than in real life except Mia Chen who somehow looked better which was statistically unlikely.

He took out his textbook. Left the stone.

"You know," said a voice to his left, "I heard if you leave stuff in your locker long enough it becomes sentient."

Mia was at the locker three down, which was where Mia's locker was, a fact that had never stopped surprising him slightly. She had her hair pulled up today in a way that looked accidentally perfect. She was looking at his locker interior with the expression of someone doing a cheerful assessment.

"That's just the granola bar," he said.

"What's it thinking about?"

"Probably nothing. It seems pretty at peace."

She laughed. It was the real kind — short, a little surprised by itself. He'd catalogued the difference between Mia's real laugh and her social laugh within the first month of knowing her, not because he was paying unusual attention but because the difference was large enough that missing it would have taken effort.

"I keep meaning to ask," she said, pulling out her own books with the efficiency of someone who had a system, "do you have notes from Wednesday? I missed the second half."

"Yeah. I'll send them."

"You're a lifesaver."

She said it the way people say it when they mean it and also when they don't, which made it hard to know which this was, and he decided it probably didn't matter. He sent the notes during first period from under the desk with the practiced invisibility of someone who'd been doing it for years.

---

Lunch was the courtyard because the weather was still good and wouldn't be for much longer. The particular smell of September — not summer anymore but not cold yet, something in between that had no name — came through the courtyard in slow movements.

Alex was explaining episode two of the show to a Kaden who had not watched episode two. This was an arrangement that suited both of them.

"And then the guy just — he doesn't even explain it, he just  does it, and you're supposed to figure out why — "

"What did you find?" said Mia, appearing with her lunch tray and sitting across from Kaden with the ease of someone who had assigned herself that seat a long time ago.

Kaden looked up. "What?"

"You've been doing the thing." She gestured at his hand. He hadn't noticed he was doing the thing. He was turning the button over between his fingers.

He held it up. "Coat button."

"From where?"

"The lot on Creer."

She took it and looked at it with more genuine attention than most people gave a random button, which was one of the things about Mia that he'd also catalogued. She turned it over. "It's a nice button. Good shape."

"Yeah."

"What is it?"

He paused.

Nobody asked that. Usually they asked why (Alex) or they didn't ask anything (everyone else). The question of what it was— the second question, the made-up one — caught him without a ready answer.

"I don't know yet," he said. "I just found it."

She handed it back. "Let me know when you figure it out."

"Okay."

Alex, who had been waiting with the patience of someone who had none, continued explaining episode two.

Kaden listened with half his attention and used the other half to watch the courtyard the way he watched gravel — not looking for anything specific, just letting things surface. A girl near the fountain crying into her phone quietly, hoping nobody noticed, three people noticing. A kid eating alone with a library book propped against his water bottle, completely unconcerned. A pigeon investigating something near the vending machine with tremendous seriousness.

He thought about the pigeon video.

They navigate by magnetic fields, the man had said. They carry messages across wars. We decided they were garbage birds and stopped looking .

He watched the pigeon.

It found whatever it was looking for. Ate it. Left.

"— and that's why the ending actually makes sense if you paid attention to the first scene," Alex finished. "Right?"

"Sure," said Kaden.

"You weren't listening."

"I heard the ending part."

"That's the worst part to just hear, that ruins everything."

"Then tell me the first part again."

Alex told him the first part again. Mia stole three of Alex's chips without asking, which Alex allowed without comment, which was its own kind of language. The September smell moved through the courtyard.

Kaden put the button in his pocket.

CarthotCartographer's compass, he thought. One of four. The map only works if—

Somewhere across the city, though none of them knew it yet, a man had stopped walking in the middle of a bridge and was staring at the water below with an expression no one around him could name. His reason for living had been thin for a very long time. It had just gotten thinner.

The pigeon did not return.

The afternoon was fine.

---