Inverasdale High was three quarters of a mile from the Anselms' modest garrison colonial on Ayershire Circle, which wasn't the most stylish part of town—nothing like the Palatine neighborhood to the north of the golf club, with its secretive streets named for Roman emperors and low-numbered estates that hung back behind great buffers of "grounds"—but made up for it with convenience. Mr. and Mrs. Anselm had snapped the house up during a rare buyer's market the year Jake was born, imagining that he might walk to school when he got older. He could've even taken the woods abutting the back yard, which would've spat him out somewhere on the margin of the school's soccer pitch without his ever so much as crossing a street.

But with the addition of Ely, the Anselms knew neither of their boys would be attending the public schools when the time came, not with Courtland Country Day Academy now within their means. Yes, it was a twenty-five-minute drive versus a twelve-minute walk, and they would have to wear uniforms and pretend to be vaguely Episcopalian, but when it came to all those stats colleges found important—GPAs and test scores and, more qualitatively, clout—there was no contest. Once they were old enough, Mrs. Anselm was more than happy to surrender her Prius to their daily commute, bicycling the short distance into downtown Inverasdale to hit up the holistic market for such staples as bee pollen and beta-carotene before stopping by the yoga studio for some mid-morning vinyasa. It was an easy trade.

Rarely did Ely ever think of that other school on the far side of the trees, whose pep rallies they could hear in swooning echoes on windless days. Even on the coldest, darkest winter mornings he didn't begrudge his early alarm and the crawling commute to the next town over (each boy drove M-W-F and T-Th alternate weeks). Only during their boyhood summers, when he and Jake finally sickened of air conditioning and luminescent screens, would Ely find himself peering into the foliage with a sort of thrilling suspicion, bare toes digging into the dense crop of his lawn as though to root himself, safely, against the thrall of whatever parallel world beckoned from the other side. In his imagination, the school ran continuously in a closed loop outside of time, and in it there was a boy who had a handful of good friends and a penchant for pineapple on pizza, but no brother. A boy who looked an awful lot like him.

It'd been several years at least since he'd last had those thoughts, but they returned to Ely as he scowled on the front stoop that Monday in February, awaiting Marco's G-wagon in a low simmer of rage. He'd used to feel a strange cocktail of yearning and fear at the thought of passing through the trees with the liquid ease of stepping into a magic mirror, merging with his reflection, and ceasing to exist; now he would've traipsed right into that alternate universe just to sock his blissfully single lookalike on the nose.

"So he just left? Without you?" Marco yawned. Ely climbed into the front passenger seat and shoved his backpack between his knees.

"Yup."

"You two fighting?" Marco pressed with casual incredulity, rounding the cul-de-sac and turning onto the main road.

"No. We just had a miscommunication." Ely checked the time on his phone. "You could've made that light."

"Chill. We're barely late," Marco yawned again, adding, "Technically, all fights are a form of miscommunication."

"No offense, dude, but I'm too tired to get psychoanalyzed right now."

"Who're you calling psycho?"

They both laughed at the lame joke. They spoke little for the rest of the drive; nothing newsworthy had happened since their sleepover the night before last, when Ely and Jake had snuck out as boys and returned men (albeit men who later woke sprawled across Marco's California king like a litter of milk-drunk puppies). But Marco was never quiet for long.

"I've been thinking—"

"Here we go—"

"—that all classic horror monsters—like vampires, werewolves, and zombies—stem from the same pathological fascination with menstruation."

Ely scrunched his face.

"Dude, that's gross. You're gross."

"Consider it," Marco continued, unfazed. "Vampires turn their victims by draining their blood. The victim, who is usually female, loses all her blood, and then is reborn as an undead vampire. And werewolves—well, that's obvious, isn't it? Transformation into an insane, hungry beast with the lunar cycle every month. And zombies—they're obsessed with flesh, driven by blind instinct to feed, but their efforts are wasted because the only thing they can propagate is the virus, and their bodies waste away like uterine lining."

Ely cradled his temples.

"Really reaching with that last one, aren't you?" he said in a resigned voice. "What about Frankenstein?"

Marco rolled his eyes.

"Obviously Frankenstein doesn't fit the profile. That story was written by a girl. Girls aren't interested in pathologizing themselves."

They pulled into the senior lot between the upper school and the tennis courts. Courtland's campus of crisp white-and-brick buildings—a not unharmonious mishmash of glassy modern and restrained Greek revival—spilled over a gently hilled green overlooking vast athletic fields to the north. The lower and middle schools, which Ely, Jake, and Marco had attended from kindergarten to eighth grade, were segregated from the upper school by a hulking auditorium, whose atrium was crowned with a massive glass beak that angled overhead like the Louvre pyramid's aspirant scalene cousin.

"I'm so late," Ely groaned, jumping out the door before Marco had even put the wagon in park.

"It's still early for me," Marco said—he had finagled his schedule to have first period free—but Ely was already dashing across the lot, so he added in a carrying voice, "We'll continue this conversation later!"

"No we won't!" Ely called back over his shoulder.

His footfalls echoed off the walls as he sprinted to his French classroom; a sophomore flourished his hall pass like a racing flag and sang the first few bars of the Chariots of Fire theme in his wake.

◊ ◊ ◊

"What the fuck."

"Oh, you're fine. Stop being dramatic."

Ely had not been having a very good morning. The "Tardy" was just a tiny blemish on his stellar attendance record, but it clung to him like a stinging nettle, niggling as all minor differences between them had a habit of doing until corrected. Only this one, he knew, would remain, the first of many he would have to learn to endure.

By the beginning of third period, he had a low throbbing headache in his right temple, which exploded upon seeing himself lolling casually at his desk, fiddling with some holographic puzzle game on his phone. English was the first of several periods they shared.

Ely sat down next to Jake as other students trickled in from the hall. Mrs. Pynchon was still absent.

"Fuck you. I'm not being dramatic," he hissed. "You do that again, and I'm telling Mom."

"Yeah, sure, right," Jake snorted. He looked at Ely sidelong, still prodding at his phone. "C'mon. I'm not my brother's keeper anymore, remember? It's time we got serious about things. We're going to different colleges next year—"

"Probably—"

"—and we've been saying 'last time' for months now. It's ridiculous." Jake had lowered his voice to just above a whisper, though their classmates were too caught up in their own buzz to pay them any notice. "I've done my last 'last time,' E, and so have you."

Ely turned away, fishing his tablet from his backpack. "Whatever. Doesn't give you the right to be a total asshole. We still share the car."

He scrolled through a few club notices, threw a gif to their friends' group chat of some celebrity pantomiming suicide by finger gun—from the corner of his eye he saw Jake swipe the message away without opening it—and checked his assignments on the school's online platform.

"You forgot to upload my chapter response for Antigone," he grunted at Jake. "Do it now before Mrs. Pynchon comes. I don't want it marked late."

"It's your response. You do it."

Ely resisted the urge to slap his phone from his hands.

"I uploaded yours yesterday," he said through gritted teeth. "We agreed at the beginning of the semester—"

"What part of 'last time' don't you understand?"

Ely's temple throbbed. Jake continued to play his game, but Ely noticed the holograms piling up as he failed to clear the level. His fingers trembled ever so slightly, smearing the gaudy rainbow lights.

"So you didn't write anything?"

Jake shrugged. "It's just one response, E. Chill."

His phone strobed with idiot desperation—One More Level! One More Level! The pressure in Ely's temple reached a crescendo, and then, just like that, it was gone, liberated, like a pin loosed from a grenade with a barely audible plink. He shoved his tablet back into his bag and stood.

"Where're you going?" Jake asked. "Class is gonna start in two minutes."

"'Snot your business, is it?"

Ely strode out of the classroom, darting into the boy's bathroom to avoid Mrs. Pynchon exiting the teacher's lounge, a mug of hot coffee balanced precariously on her stack of folders. From a stall he listened for the intercom's double brrring signaling the start of third period, loitered another few minutes for good measure, and then strolled out into the hall trying his best not to look suspicious.

There was no reason to feel nervous; as an upperclassman, he was allowed to do anything he wanted during free periods shy of leaving campus, and the odds of running into a hall monitor who happened to have his (or Jake's) schedule memorized were slim to none. Still he felt conspicuous, a fugitive on the lam praying that nobody would recognize his mugshot. His footsteps echoed off the ranks of steel lockers, which seemed to lean at him, padlocks winking as if to say, Chill. Trust us. We're made for keeping secrets.

Only outside, frisked by the February wind, could Ely finally "chill." He slipped out a side exit and followed the path that crossed the green between the upper and middle schools, comforted by the sound of traffic on Blakeney Street abutting the west side of campus, barely muffled by a wall of skeletal London plane trees, which, in the leafy months, did a fair job of shielding the school from its suburban reality, allowing them all to pretend they attended the Courtland Country Day of old, back when Chicago and its environs hadn't bled one into the other and forgotten which was which.

Reminders of the wider world always soothed Ely, tugged him out of himself, but today was a poor day for people watching. There were few other students outside; those he passed seemed in a hurry to get back indoors, bodies braced against the cold. Courtland's campus had an unfortunate grey tinge to it, with December and January's snow aging in dirty, melting berms. February was yet to offer more than a dissatisfactory sprinkling—hardly enough to scrape a snowball from, let alone those marvelous staples of childhood winter, snowmen and igloos—but the month was still young. His parents' generation had supposedly saved the Earth from a catastrophic death-by-warming with their electric vehicles and population curbs, but the northern Midwest, they said, never went back to "normal," one of several pockets to retain a milder climate even as the poles refroze. Privately, Ely was glad his home wasn't any colder; even without the blizzards and twelve-foot dumpings the older generations so fondly recalled, he was no stranger to ice.

Ely squinted; the auditorium's glass atrium glinted like a glacier in the morning sun. An emptiness gnawed at his insides, which irritated him more than anything. Not once in his near thirteen-year run as a Courtland student had he cut class, but his ineptitude at letting loose didn't embarrass him half as much as the sudden loneliness broadsiding him like a gust of wind across the green. The corners of his eyes began to smart—from the cold. Nothing else.

He slowed outside the imposing building. A sandwich sign was propped out front; AUDITIONS! it proclaimed in bubble letters. Ely hadn't acted since he and Jake traded off playing Theseus and Oberon in their sixth grade rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream—he remembered feeling like someone ought to arrest him for saying "ass" on stage in front of an audience of several hundred children—and had no intention of reviving that short-lived career, but it couldn't hurt to duck into the auditorium for a few minutes, just till he got warm again. Maybe he'd even get a laugh out of eavesdropping on a few cringe-worthy auditions. He could be a bit—as Marco liked to put it—"anal retentive," but at least he wasn't a theater kid.