Novel-Tea had been deemed too conspicuous of a location for Priya's grand reveal: people spoke freely there, as much of an indulgence as the boba. It was deemed that Pavilion Park was also too close to prying eyes, and so in a concession to how far Marco had journeyed those past few weeks, they met at Foghorn Park under a willow tree, Marco, Jessica, and Priya.

"The weather's so great today," Jessica remarked, unfolding a picnic blanket she had brought with her in a remarkable bit of foresight. "It reminds me a bit of a painting, I'm forgetting the name. With all the picnickers by the water."

"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," Priya said in her best French accent. "I saw it in Chicago once—at least I think it was Chicago."

"Wow, you're so artistic," Jessica said. "So anyway: what's the deal?"

"So I was on Wattpad the other day, as any high schooler does—"

"What were you doing on Wattpad?" Jessica laughed.

"Reading Minecraft YouTuber fanfic. But anyway, there was a book that was recommended to me on my front page, called Pale Embers, and that's not really a special name or anything, but the username was 'onewongmakesawriter' and her location was set as the Bay Area, and because I know that I am a puppet for the gods' amusement and everything is predestined, I thought that was interesting enough to click on. And I think it's best if I just read you some of this."

Priya began reading out loud in the most valley girl voice she could muster: "'Hi, my name is Mary Hsu (you can pronounce that like shoe or Sue if you want but it's a Chinese name, OK), and I am so excited because today is my first day of high school! So I woke up and went to my dresser and put on some clothes and looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing skinny jeans and this cute blue shirt and I—'"

"Don't tell me..." Marco muttered.

"'—combed my hair because I wanted to look great for my first day of high school and make a good first impression! Then my friend Lisa called me (we have been friends for like so long you wouldn't believe) and I picked up the phone while putting on makeup and brushing my teeth. 'OMG Mary, my friend since kindergarten, I'm so excited for my first day of high school at Teller High School, the fanciest most competitive school in our district!' Lisa gushed vigorously.'" Priya paused after the dialogue tag, seemingly unsatisfied with her own attempt at gushing vigorously while reading the line.

"Yep," Priya said. "Any brainiacs in the room want to guess who wrote this?"

"This is private," Jessica protested. "We shouldn't be reading this. We've found her anonymous account on Wattpad, where she's probably just posting her own little stories in her corner of the internet as a way to blow off steam. It's unfair we're digging up her dirty laundry."

"It's not quite private," Priya said. "She has a lot of reads."

"How many?" Jessica asked. "A few hundred?"

"Thousand."

"A few thousand?"

"A few hundred thousand. And this goes on for a while too, it's at like eighty chapters right now. Still gets updated every few weeks."

"President Frank did say literature is important for a healthy body and a healthy mind," Marco quipped.

"If he saw how he was depicted in this—I mean, how 'Romeo' is depicted in this—he'd scream. Let me read on."

Priya continued, once again adopting her valley girl voice: "'His hazel orbs bored into me with the force of a thousand suns. "My name is Romeo," he purred deeply. "I would be most enthused if I could perambulate with you toward the assembly," he said in a sexy British accent (I like British accents) and held his hand toward me. I took it and Lisa screamed and fainted and Romeo and I walked toward the assembly.'"

"Why are you telling us you like British accents?" Jessica asked.

"That's a parenthetical aside, but y'all are missing the point. Isn't this funny?"

"Send me the link, I want to read this start to finish," Marco said. "What are the comments like?"

"They're all very supportive of Vice President Juliet—'OMG I like British accents too!,' that sort of thing where they're treating this as fiction and not reality."

"I like British accents too..." Jessica said softly. "But I still think all of you are being too judgmental. Vice President Juliet's prose command may not match Austen's, but she gets the point across. She uses different prose styles to differentiate the interestingly-named Mary Hsu, whom I'm sure definitely does not become a Mary Sue at some point across her magnum opus, and the fetchingly British Romeo. She eschews traditional punctuation to create a sense of urgency in the action, and she has great character descriptions that really help me visualize what's going on."

"We aren't laughing because she's written the next My Immortal, Jessica. We're laughing because this is such a mockery of her school," Priya chided. "The rest of Chapter 1 is rather ordinary: Romeo saves the principal's life like he's Wesley in The Princess Bride, is immediately entranced by humble Mary Hsu, Lisa faints again, and then we get to Chapter 2. Ready for me to keep reading?"

Marco and Jessica nodded.

"'"OMG there is a kitten stuck in the tree! Someone needs to save it!" Lisa exclaimed woundedly before fainting. Then our classmate Karl came and walked toward us. He was wearing glasses and a sweater and had a suitcase (such a nerd, right?) and his name isn't actually Karl it's Robert but everyone calls him Karl because he talks about Karl Marx too much. "The kitten represents the subjugation of the proletariat in our society. It is poor and despicable, like the factory worker or office drone," Karl droned dully but then I slapped him because he was so boring and talking too much and everyone cheered.'"

Priya looked up from her phone at Jessica. "Does this remind you of anyone we know?"

Jessica's face blushed as Priya and Marco's orbs bored into her with the force of a thousand suns.

"Jason doesn't wear glasses anymore."

"Who said anything about Jason?" Priya asked teasingly.

"I will admit this sounds a bit like an unflattering portrayal of my brother. But Vice President Juliet doesn't really mean it, I'm sure. This is all satire, I think you two are missing the point."

"We already live in a satire, and nobody's laughing. If Vice President Juliet doesn't need it, why in future chapters is Karl chased by a swarm of bees, shot at with a paintball gun, run over by the presidential motorcade, attacked with lightsabers, pushed through an interdimensional portal into the world from the video game series Five Nights at Freddy's, made to attend an Ayn Rand conference..."

"That last one is clever. See, she knows what she's doing, she means it as satire." Jessica harrumphed to emphasize her point.

"What do you think, Marco? You've been quiet," Priya asked.

"There's a kernel of truth to every satire. I think Vice President Juliet is just like Jane Austen: she's an acerbic societal critic, misunderstood by those in her time but destined to be studied by scholars for ages to come."

"You really think that?"

"No," Marco laughed. "This is so bad it's funny. Keep reading. After Karl gets slapped."

"Before or after Juliet—ahem, I mean Mary Hsu—kicks him in the balls?"

"After."

"You're skipping all the action scenes, Marco. But anyway... sorry, I need to get back into character... 'I was walking in the hallway another day (by myself because Romeo and I only talked during lunch and after school so people didn't know we were dating because he worried people would be too jealous and they would bully me because they were so jealous of how awesome I was) and then Chad walked up to me. Chad's family owns a bank and they are very rich and Chad had Louis Vuitton sunglasses that cost $790 (I searched the price of this online and I was so surprised it was this expensive! Maybe Romeo will buy me a pair with his money that he earned from the pharmaceutical industry and while serving as the ambassador to Saudi Arabia) and a Tommy Hilfiger dress shirt that cost $80. All the girls at Teller liked Chad because he was so rich and so cool but I'm not like the other girls and I don't like him much.'"

"Chad?" Marco exclaimed. "We have Romeo and Chad, when's she gonna name someone Abs McHunkmeister and finish desecrating the realm of literature?"

"You're missing the point, Marco, there's some important character development for Mary Hsu here. After seeing her attack her classmates with impunity and bewitch Teller's most eligible bachelor with her coquettish wiles, we learn, surprise of surprises, she is not like the other girls," Priya said sarcastically.

"I like her. She's everything I'd want to be, except I'm less violent," Jessica observed.

"Who is Chad supposed to be?" Marco asked.

"Probably Jason's classmate Tom Langley," Jessica explained. "Remember at that big assembly when he and his girlfriend protested the dress code? Jason never liked him much. He never likes rich people who don't like him back. Tom reminds me of President Timon sometimes: they're both rich, and have names that start with T."

"Like Trump," Priya quipped. "You'd also think that someone as radiant as Mary Hsu would be popular, but it sounds like she walks around by herself a lot. Her only named friend so far is Lisa, and she doesn't do much except scream and faint."

"But that's what a good person does. You're forgetting our principles, Priya: a good person walks alone in the rain and sulks about how they can't possibly hang out with lesser people," Marco chided.

"So do you think when Vice President Juliet wrote this, she was trying to indoctrinate the masses? I don't think her Wattpad commenters are getting it."

"I actually do mean it, from the bits and pieces of what you've read to us. We have this ordinary girl, an especially ordinary girl, beginning her first day of high school. A new beginning, a blank slate. She doesn't want anything that strange, all she wants is to hang out with her friends and live out her dreams. Like we are now. But the thing is, she's an outcast in this society she observes: she might be an ordinary girl, but everyone around her is either far wealthier than she is or obsessed with communism. We should sympathize with her point of view."

"Ms. Baldwin would be proud. Shall we read more to see if your analysis holds?" Priya asked.

"Read on."

"Let's see... '"OMG it's Chad, the richest student at Teller and the baddest boy!" Lisa proclaimed shockedly. Chad was the baddest boy at Teller because he painted graffiti on the teachers' cars and did cocaine in the bathrooms. Everyone besides me finds this very attractive but I'm too good of a kid to want to date Chad, that skank. "You betcha, buckaroo," Chad smiled seductively and Chad pulled a bottle of Champagne from his backpack and gave it to Lisa as a gift because Chad had the hots for Lisa even though he wouldn't say it but not as much as he has the hots for me I think (Lisa is a good friend since we've known each other since kindergarten but I hope people like me more).'" Priya took a deep breath after that last sentence.

"And I'm telling you again, this is promoting moral values!" Marco exclaimed. "Chivalry, traditional gender roles, a satire of the immoral behavior that once plagued our school and now plagues where all the cool kids hang out after school, natural teenage envy... there are some relatable themes in here."

"You sound like Karl. What are you going to say next, she's depicted the 'hedonism' inherent in capitalistic society?" Priya asked sarcastically.

"I think Marco has a point here," Jessica commented. "This is a reflection of the society we live in, or what it used to look like—what Vice President Juliet remembers. Even when we weren't all Alphas and Epsilons, things weren't all right."

"I think I've read enough to convey the point. So what do we do with this intel? If we shared it, Vice President Juliet's reputation would be ruined, and who knows, maybe the entire club would collapse. Her credibility's strained as is because nobody believes she's as hardcore of a leader as she claims to be, but what happens when they learn all of her classmates have become puppets on a stage? She'd be toast."

"We aren't going to share this, Priya. It's going to stay between us," Jessica said sternly.

"Aw come on, not even Isaac?"

"Especially not Isaac. He's too innocent—what if he learns that the club leaders he idolizes are human? Let's all swear on it."

They put their hands in the center, following Jessica's lead, and did their best attempt at a three-way pinky promise.

"So what now, now that reading time is over?" Marco asked. Priya and Jessica looked at each other, then at the grass twitching in the breeze. Two young kids were tossing a Frisbee around.

"It's a nice day, we could do something outside," Jessica suggested. "Do you have a Frisbee or something, Marco?"

"Let's find out," Marco suggested, and they walked to his house. Marco brought them sparkling waters from his fridge, and a minute or two later he'd found a box of dusty sports equipment in his garage. He unceremoniously passed out his loot to his friends: two baseball gloves, no baseball, a hockey puck, and a volleyball that needed air.

"Do you have a pump for that?" Priya asked. "It looks sad."

"I don't know."

"I could ask Kenny. Except he's annoying."

"Aren't you two still dating?" Jessica asked.

"Yeah, so?"

"Let me see if I have something," Marco said, and he let them glare at each other on his front porch while he returned to the garage. It was a bit dustier than he remembered, though if he said anything about it, it would become another summer renovation project where the physical burden fell on him. Last summer's task was repainting the fence, which was successful enough, one ruined shirt later. He found a bike pump and a toolbox of attachments for it, and a few minutes later they had one tautly inflated volleyball.

"I'm sure I have sports stuff at home somewhere," Priya said. "If I'd known we would be doing something outside, I could've brought some."

"You knew we were meeting at a park, of course you could've," Jessica said.

"Not this kind of outside," she clarified. In the time they'd spent searching for things to do, the weather had heated up, and they were all flushed by the time they returned to Foghorn Park. Fitness, like literature, was important to a healthy body and a healthy mind: President Frank's decree about the appropriate walking pace had made it into Heller's PE curriculums, but some claimed that it was inadequate to truly become fit. It was not enough to stave off unhealthiness, like it were a disease or a flock of circling vultures: one had to bike, swim, or do something that challenged the body more than shuffling along with one's head held low. President Frank had rejected this notion, both pointing to Vice President Juliet (conveniently ignoring her own active personal fitness regiment that she'd unsuccessfully introduced to him) and his own zealotry with walking up and down the hills in his neighborhood. Perhaps if they were fortunate enough to live in such a hilly neighborhood, he claimed, power-walking was sufficient—that went especially so for those in the wealthier areas, who could afford to get off their Pelotons once in a while and embrace the world.

They collectively decided they weren't hungry enough for lunch yet, and that a bit of sweat never did anyone any harm, so they hit the volleyball around on the grass until their forearms became sore.

"Look at us, being old-fashioned and playing like our parents did," Marco laughed.

"This is fun," Jessica admitted. "So this is what people did before technology."

"In the Stone Age, yes."

"I'm starting to get thirsty. Let's go to Novel-Tea or something," she suggested.

"This soon?" Marco asked.

"Yeah, let's call it. I'll take you. Toss the volleyball in my trunk," Priya said, and with that, the moment's magic shattered.

That night, Marco's own orbs (he'd forgotten what color his eyes were—maybe brown? They certainly weren't a special color like hazel) were bored enough that they returned to Pale Embers. He re-read the first chapter, savoring every unusual dialogue tag, searching for any insights about the author. He couldn't remember if he had ever interacted directly with Vice President Juliet. He'd seen her at her restaurant the other day, and had seen her on stage from the darkened audience, but it wasn't in her nature to talk to people who didn't want to talk to her. Maybe if he'd had classes with her, he would've had cause to chat. Heller's classes were its most democratic part: one could outrank another in the club's hierarchy, but all were the same in their teachers' eyes, who in a mythological sense could be unblinking angels sent by an ever-watchful god to dispense justice. That was beside the point: what did this book mean? How could embers be pale?

Embers, to him, were what came when a fire died out, the last traces of something glorious. That was a common club narrative in the historical texts, that they were reclaiming their former glory—it was a harder narrative to maintain in the present, but they still found a way to make it work. What was Teller if not a paler version of Heller, one without its charm, one where iniquity lurked around every corner? It may as well have been a world from a musical: their fictional drama teacher even spoke in rhyme, and while rhyming "Juliet" with "chicken breast" did not make oneself a poet, there was texture to this world. It was a romantic world, one where Romeo serenaded definitely-not-Juliet and cats performed dance numbers, and even if all their refrains were "Oh Mary Hsu!," it was at least something.

Teller's single-minded focus on enabling Mary Hsu's adventures was a different tack than Heller's quiet-minded veneration of its leaders, which even if equally disturbing was a lot less exciting. Marco would much rather celebrate Timon McLaren Day than be denied free ice cream because he'd almost failed an APUSH exam. Even if he were selected as court jester (ostensibly by random draw, though more likely because he'd irritated one of his classmates), he'd prefer it to quiet humiliation that wore him down day by day, like a pencil eraser that scrubbed a troublesome mark so obsessively the eraser wore itself down into a nub.

Marco ended his night at the end of the fifth chapter, which like most of the chapters thus far ended on an abrupt note, as if Vice President Juliet had suddenly been called away from the page: "'Someone has covered Karl in paint! My, my, isn't that quaint! From me you will hear no complaint, because Karl is definitely not a saint!' Mr. Bronzino sang gloriously. Then Mr. Bronzino kicked Karl a few times." In a way, it was representative of how Heller treated its students: after who knew what sort of trials and tribulations, there would be an extra dose of punishment just to say punishment had been meted. And then the story would end, without resolution, without justice. Karl had done nothing wrong to deserve his humiliation besides marching to the beat of his own drum; nobody at Heller had done worse.