Marco's hair had grown longer since its buzz cut, though it was unclear if it would go curly or instead drape over his head like a lampshade. Generally he didn't let it get long enough to find out, in the summer months—it sounded like a natural cycle when he put it that way, like he was molting—or better yet, going through a metamorphosis. The pendulum of summer swung at its petty pace; the willow branches at Foghorn Park hung pendulously; email notifications from President Haneul rung portentously. His neighbors had raised their flags for the impending holiday, and flies buzzed around him and took sips of sweat.

It was too late to call the summer queer and sultry, since Pride month had passed and Marco had not found The Bell Jar electrifying at all—far too unrelatable, unlike the dystopian fiction like Brave New World they had also read for class. He chose instead to recall Jessica's favorite book from the curriculum and its associated truth: it was universally acknowledged that any story about students at Heller must devolve into romance when the club was involved, not because of the man of great fortune who was in want of a trophy girlfriend (and if they could keep up long-distance through college, since he was going to Harvard to be a proper Harvard man and she would have to settle for a public school like Berkeley, perhaps a wife?), but for those who dwelled in his shadow, scuttling away like spiders when light was shined on them. Isaac loved spiders, but he was too cuddly to be one: nevertheless, the story had turned back to him, and Jessica was proven right again that there was nothing better to talk about. There were only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

Marco's family did not often go to fancy dinner, but it was his parents' wedding anniversary, so they dressed themselves up and went to one of the many restaurants downtown with pretentious names. Typically Marco wouldn't have been invited, but his parents had seemed under the impression that if they did not take him out once in a while to experience high society, he would rot like a vegetable indoors for lack of light. And so they arrived to feast on "contemporary Italian-Japanese fusion" or whatever it was, and Marco steeled himself for the duty of politely telling his mother when she had too much wine.

They weren't the only ones there: Marco's mother observed a familiar face at a candlelit corner table:

"Marco, isn't that your friend Isaac?" she asked, and while Marco didn't want to turn his head to look, he knew it was true.

"You never told me he had a girlfriend," she continued, and Marco deigned to look and see Isaac and Vice President Cynthia gaily talking and drinking sparkling water from wineglasses.

"They aren't dating, but she likes him, and, well, he's Isaac, so he probably thinks this is all a lark."

"You're very certain in saying that, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." his father said patronizingly.

"Let's not interrupt their special moment, and enjoy our family dinner," his mother said, knowing perfectly well that her husband was the sort to force Marco to "socialize" and say hello to his "friends," and they continued waiting for their food.

The time in between ordering food and receiving food was always an awkward liminal space, Marco thought, because as soon as the food arrived, you were supposed to interrupt your conversation to appreciatively comment on its scent and sizzle. And especially at restaurants with this sort of service, where someone dressed like a parking valet would ceremoniously place down the plates and say "Buon appetito!" Good service was invisible: stained napkins bleached themselves white, glasses refilled themselves with nary a splash. His parents were arguing about something adult—one of his mother's friend's sons or something like that had begun attending an evangelical church, and this was either the first step toward moral degradation or a welcome opportunity for a troubled kid to turn a new leaf—and if they were allowed to argue about adult business, maybe he was allowed his time to engage in social pettiness.

Marco excused himself to go to the restroom, and walked in the chandeliers' shadows well out of sight of Isaac and Vice President Cynthia, but still where he could see them. To see without being seen—he could hope for nothing more. He couldn't hear them over the low roar of the restaurant, but he could see a faint dab of tomato sauce on Isaac's chin. Vice President Cynthia had a green drink that certainly wasn't absinthe, and hopefully was not celery juice, though it wouldn't be unprecedented: La Grosse Pierre, another of the fanciest of the fanciest options in town, had expanded their mocktail menu considerably in the years since the club's rise. The only reason Marco knew this was because his father had sent him an article from a bemusedly snooty food reviewer who asked the silly question, "Why are there so many kids in this Michelin-starred restaurant?" Isaac and Vice President Cynthia looked happy, but he couldn't read anything in the same posturing two club members hashing out business would have if they sat at the same tables. At least the restroom had monogrammed paper towels.

Whatever had or hadn't happened the previous night didn't stop Isaac from sending the group chat the latest gatesofheller post the following morning. This time, though, it was something Marco had seen before: a screen capture of a certain "onewongmakesawriter" on Wattpad and the first paragraph of her magnum opus with "Teller High School" circled, captioned "is this one of you?" But this was the usual doublespeak one had to use when under tyranny, where those in power could hear all but understand little: if one were a literary scholar, one might call it "masked narrative," but Marco was more familiar with the Orwellian term. Those club officers who turned into monsters with the school bell, but still gossiped with their friends at Novel-Tea about the latest memes and whether Vice President Cynthia was being presumptuous by thinking she could enact reforms before her term officially began, wouldn't know. And it was lost lore, too, that Vice President Juliet had ever been more than her portrait.

"They should add this to the summer reading list," Isaac quipped, and Marco reacted with a laughing emoji. If President Frank truly loved Vice President Juliet, he'd make her writing a mandatory read, Marco privately mused—it was only fair, since How To Be A Good Person was mandatory for all freshmen.

How To Be A Good Person used to be "How To Be A Good Person" when it did not deserve the same text formatting as Ulysses, and before that it had been How to be a Good Person, a simply titled and humbly capitalized Google Doc that spread too far one fine morning in May, back when they didn't stand for the Pledge and Anthem every morning and freshmen didn't scrape their elbows tumbling down the steps in high heels. Every line had been picked bone-dry by the time Marco came around: did the first, iconic line, "First, computer fonts" imply a "hyperfixation on typography," "satirical contrast with the overpromising title," or "convey President Frank's bounteous charity with an egalitarian suggestion even the lowliest Epsilon could implement"? First lines were important: they stood proudly above all that followed, and many a wandering sentence could erect a faux-Gothic façade or cultivate a thorny garden if left unchecked. President Frank had started strong, though just as one did not let Genesis dictate all of Christianity, nobody let How To Be A Good Person deliver on its promise.

"What post?" Jessica asked when she woke up, and Marco was thankful that he had screenshotted the Instagram post (and sent the screenshot to a device without TigerTalk installed, though that had never stopped the club's security team), since the original had disappeared. The story was still on Wattpad—not that Vice President Juliet would want to relinquish her fame—but there was no post to prove it. And if there weren't an Instagram post commemorating an event, did it really happen?

"They must have deleted it," Isaac responded. "Just some silly Wattpad story someone wrote about Heller first posted a few years back."

"It's not nice of them to shame under-represented authors like that," Jessica said indignantly.

"How do you know she's under-represented?"

"Because I've read it. It makes me scream voraciously."

"Is that good?"

"It's a quote. You'd have to read it to get it."

To this Isaac responded with a half-hearted thumbs-up, and Marco thought it best to not tell Isaac that Vice President Juliet had a legion of rabid fans who screamed voraciously and clamored for more Mary Hsu—and it was never enough. Mary Hsu remained forever young: when she entered her senior year, her fans fretted about the end, the last chapter being synonymous with the death of the truest friend they had ever known. But after Mary Hsu and Romeo finished sitting on the pavilion, watching the ducks go by and talking about how embarrassing it was that last time Lisa was there, she had fainted and fallen in (thank the almighty authorial hand Romeo was there to gallantly rescue her)—and they had talked until sunset, skipping rocks across the water and observing that even though Romeo was perfect in every way humanly possible, he still struggled to skip rocks—the next chapter the school bell rang at Teller and it was all for naught. Nobody seemed to mind.

If it wasn't posted, it didn't warrant discussion: Priya hadn't bothered to say anything. But the absence of a post was in some ways more interesting than the post itself.

"Do you think the club deleted the post?" Marco asked. He was unsure if now that he was a Beta, these sorts of questions were appropriate.

"No, I think the admins felt bad," Jessica texted back. "But if it was the club, that's good. They're looking out for us."

"How nice of them to shield our eyes from writing that might offend Strunk and White," Priya said, entering the fray.

"We're shadows, we can't offend the club," Isaac observed. Jessica sent a fairy emoji in response.

"Like Puck," she clarified after an awkward silence.

"How about we stop texting and meet IRL?" Marco suggested.

"We can't, we're all volunteering for the July 4th parade. We have a huge float this year. Bigger than last," Jessica said.

"Is that the parade where that alt-right guy with the funny name spoke a few years ago?" Marco asked.

"Fireball McGee? It was, but don't worry, we hide our political biases better," Priya joked.

"Have fun," Marco said, and the conversation ended. The parade sounded like the sort of thing he would volunteer for, if he were a better Beta, but the name implied that he was supposed to do less than the Alphas. Isaac was a Beta too, but he tried, so he wasn't a real Beta; Marco was happy he had taken ownership of his new lot in life so quickly.

That left his other club business that President Haneul had been bothering him about. There was this peculiar assumption that as a Beta, he wasn't to shirk his work, and he was behind on his Hobbes metrics—while philosophical, the work was menial, barely a grade above identifying stop signs and addresses in blurry pictures. Hobbes's dilemmas were simultaneously trivial and life-shattering, and while its judgments carried gravitas, it had not earned Marco's trust.

Its latest dilemma was a simple one, though it suggested some preternatural ability to read his thoughts that Marco did not appreciate: "My high school's student government invests significant labor into an annual 9/11 memorial and charity drive. While it raises money for a good cause, coupled with other decisions the student government has made, for instance beginning every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem, I worry our patriotism is turning into an ideological movement. A certain military discipline is creeping into other school activities, and I feel uncomfortable with this trend continuing. How can I advocate for a more measured political position?"

Hobbes responded in its usual manner, unhelpfully but with lush metaphor: "Friend, while honoring those lost is noble, blind patriotism easily leads us astray. Those who seek the gardens of Babylon only find sin. Seek unity, not division; sow understanding, not distrust. Change often comes subtly, through seeds we plant in other hearts. Tend this garden kindly and the rest will follow, but sow with haste and you sow hate. So be the light you wish to see: light a candle within yourself to light the shadows. Gentle light coaxes many a stubborn plant to grow."

There was a catch-22 inherent in Marco's volunteering that wasn't quite volunteering, and that sort of catch was the greatest catch of all: protest too little about Hobbes's errant thoughts and President Haneul asked similarly wandering questions about the quality of his work—but protest too much and he became an expert, and experts earned extra work. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" was a Marxist maxim, but that didn't stop the club from obeying it, and there was always more the club needed. President Haneul's impending departure had not stopped her from being on Marco's case, though recently her emails had become careless, or as careless as President Haneul could ever be: Marco knew it was unfair to judge her because she was a non-native English speaker, but her emails had begun to syntactically resemble Yoda's speech—that morning, he had been told "remember this you must," but all he remembered was that she never typed like that.

"President Haneul is very busy, she might not always have time to proofread," Jessica explained to him as they walked past the iceplants of Foghorn Park, late in the afternoon after the parade work was complete—somehow she had time. "She's an icon. I've barely talked to her, but it's so sad that we're going to lose her to Princeton. It's an old boys' club over there—nothing like we have at Heller. I wish she could stay here forever."

"If the club could keep someone president forever, they certainly would've picked President Frank. It's nice that people have to graduate. It's a natural term limit."

"But I'll miss them. Like I'll miss you and all my other friends."

"We'll always have our social media," Marco said. "I don't know how people handled goodbyes back in the olden days without it."

"They had telephones. You know, the spinny ones."

"And before that they had carrier pigeons. You get my point, though. And I think it will be good for someone like her to broaden her horizons and see how raw the world is."

"'He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.' It's The Great Gatsby. I love that book so much. So many good quotes, and you know how much I love Daisy," Jessica said dreamily.

"You club people quote that book too much. You know that it's only popular because it was given to soldiers in World War II, and it would've been pulp otherwise, at least compared to This Side of Paradise—"

"Hey, let me have my moment!"

"Sorry."

"It's OK. I'm not offended, just wounded."

"Good to know."

"I disagree with what you said, though: there's no reason President Haneul ought to suffer at the hands of sexist men just to make a point that the world isn't all sunshine and roses. She's too bright a candle to snuff out like that—and she's certainly gone through it already. It's more than a theoretical exercise."

"Why doesn't the club do more to combat sexism? Why instead did we have that speech from her about how 'feminism was solved' at Heller? It's like saying that if you have a scientist Barbie and a carpenter Barbie, that suddenly it's forgivable all of them have hourglass figures and bleached smiles."

Jessica turned to Marco with a new sense of recognition—no wonder President Haneul trusted him so much to make moral judgments!

"We're high schoolers, we can't always get everything right."

"But we treat each other like adults, so we should act like them."

"Fair," Jessica said, and they sat down at a bench overlooking the inlet.

"This reminds me of a scene from Pale Embers. They were sitting on the pavilion, Mary Hsu and Romeo, skipping rocks and enjoying each other's company. And it was sunset, too."

"That sounds too tame to be Pale Embers. You need Karl getting his hair burnt off by a blowtorch or six adverbs per paragraph to make it realistic."

"So have you tried skipping rocks before? My dad showed me once. It's all in the wrist."

"Like a Frisbee?"

"I guess. Let's try, if we can find some flat rocks," Jessica suggested, and they went to the waterline to look for rocks.

Marco's parents had insisted they go watch the July 4 parade, and as promised, Heller had the grandest float of them all, a huge papier-mâché tiger clad in orange and black garlands. Jessica and Priya weren't important enough to get to stand on the float: that was a pleasure reserved for the departing club officers, their incoming replacements, and—

"Isn't that your friend we saw at the restaurant?" Marco's mother pointed out, and there was Isaac standing comfortably distanced from Vice President Cynthia's side like he were an ordinary fellow, clad in a suit that drew out the flushness in his cheeks.

"Yeah, that's Isaac. Wonder what he's doing on the float next to Vice President Cynthia."

"That's the girl he was with," his father said, a bit slow to the punch.

"No kidding."

"If the club is so obsessed with setting up people with each other as you claim, why haven't they found you a nice girlfriend? Or a boyfriend—we wouldn't mind," his mother asked.

"I need to stop telling you about school."

"She's just teasing," his father said affectedly. "Though even if you have to lower your standards, you should find somebody. Better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush."

"I'll remember that."

"They're also looking for parent volunteers, and if your mother and I weren't so busy with work, we'd come help. Though they work you all so hard I'm surprised we need us."

"Ever since the incident with the arc-welder, they've been bigger on adult supervision," Marco explained.

"They're all very responsible. You should volunteer more. It will be good for your college applications," his father continued.

"Maybe I will," Marco said, and he silently watched the float lumber by.