Ernest died today. Or yesterday maybe, John didn't know. They got a message from Ms. Wolfe: "Ernest dead. Funeral Sunday. Condolences." That didn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. Mrs. Huang was still sad. She made Juliet gather flowers and put them in a vase. Alas, poor Ernest, John knew him well. Nobody talked much. Mrs. Huang did not give the scheduled quiz. John wished to know how Ernest died. Beth did not know. She was still sad. She did not know Ernest well. Ms. Wolfe watched the class for the period. She cried too. John tried not to cry. That would be weak. But John saw Juliet cry and so he cried too. Many tissues were used. Some spilled from the garbage can. John asked Mrs. Huang if the quiz would be rescheduled. The bell rang and John was still sad.

"How could he have had a heart attack? He's skinny!" Regina commented. It wasn't as if she knew Ernest personally, but she didn't like the idea that something similarly unfortunate could happen to her.

"The worst things happen to the best of people. I wish it didn't happen, but now it has, and we can only move forward from here," Frank assured her. It was rare that they talked one-on-one, but they both heard the news of his death simultaneously.

"Did you know Ernest?"

"I knew him well enough. Ernest and I had our disagreements. He called me 'evil' frequently. He opposed everything I stand for: my methodologies, my attitude, my good cheer. But I respected him greatly. They say not to speak ill of the dead, and I would never wish to do so. I can say that Ernest was a man of principles who kept to himself, wisely distancing himself from our own social circles over time. I have great respect for that. They say not to dishonor the dead's legacy, but I do not know what legacy Ernest will leave. I consider him my inner conscience—I think, 'what would Ernest do,' and then resolve to do exactly the opposite."

"You should deliver his eulogy, that was well said."

"No, it would be too hypocritical—besides, I'm not attending. I think affairs like that are best saved for family, or people who don't have any risk of bad blood. Maybe I'll visit him privately at the cemetery afterward." Regina was astonished to see Frank so pensive; he didn't cry, as far as she saw, but he spoke with thought behind his words, and that alone was revealing.

"Why would it be hypocritical?"

"You see, the very first fragments of How To Be A Good Person were spawned from a conversation with him. He believed me to be manipulative, only concerned with my own interests above all others. I argued my point that a person ought to make their own happy endings, make their own brighter futures, and do so with efficiency and zeal not weighed down by inconvenient things like morality. All to make the world a better place, mind you, a world you would prefer to live in. He believes—believed that sort of initiative abominable. So understandably, when I came out with my personal guide to all things good, he was a bit peeved. Even more so when it defied his expectations to become mainstream."

"Hold on, I thought you said that Juliet was the inspiration behind all of this? Didn't you say that her unfettered kindness and desire for self-improvement drove you to guide others along the same path?"

"That's not wrong either. Ernest planted the idea in my head of doing something, Juliet turned that idea into the form it took today. If not for her, I would be the captain of an underground movement, manipulating everything from the shadows. Instead, I captain a public movement, manipulating everything in plain sight. But anyway, Ernest. He hated all of this, and he's going to hate even more what's going to happen next."

"What's happening next, Frank?"

"Well, I guess here's your sneak peek: I'm going to run for student body president, and Juliet and Alan will run for other positions as well. That should give us enough authority."

"Well, you aren't guaranteed to win, right, but I do think you have a good shot."

"That reminds me of a funny little coincidence: anyone with a disciplinary record this year isn't allowed to run for office, for instance being implicated in that little drug scandal recently. And wouldn't you know my good luck, but quite a few potential rival candidates happen to be on that little list!"

"Ernest is right: you are evil," Regina declared, "but it's the good sort of evil. Ambition isn't evil, and I don't want you to ever think otherwise. Best of luck."

Behrooz was excited to, after three years of slaving away in leadership serving the whims of those above him, finally run for office. He would at last be able to represent his friends and fight for what would give them the best experience, not those out-of-touch leadership flunkies with their heads in the clouds. Ms. Foster was glad to see Behrooz taking some initiative, and explained to him the remaining options:

"Well, the current position you'll have the best chance at is treasurer. It's a very respectable position, very important."

"Why only treasurer?"

"Well, Behrooz, if you know Frank, Juliet, and Alan, they're running for the other positions, and if I say so myself, they'll be hard ones to beat. Nobody else is running for treasurer, and if you were to go take that position, I can promise that at the end of the day we'll have a ballot I can respect." Behrooz's heart dropped. He respected the club greatly, still making good on his original promise to watch lectures even if he never attended the meetings, but something about that entire crew rubbed him the wrong way. He promised Ms. Foster he'd get back to her by the end of their brunch period, but he wanted to consult Beth first.

"I don't see why you wouldn't want to do this. This has been what you've been working toward for three years now. Don't end this halfway," Beth exhorted him.

"Yeah, I know I've wanted this forever, but I just worry that they'll already have everything taken care of and there will be nothing left for me to do. And if that's the case, what's the point in doing anything at all? I'll just let them get someone else from the club to be treasurer. That will make everything easier."

"This lack of self-confidence is quite unlike you. You run a business, you're just as qualified as any of them to be treasurer, and they've already told me that they would love to have you on the team. Alan greatly respects you, he says you've been like a mentor to him."

"Tell him I appreciate the compliment—but wait, since when have you been such great friends with them? I saw the photos from that fancy dinner you went to; it looks like you've been having quite a great time."

"I suppose in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I discovered Alan's celery juice plot and Frank brought me into the operation to help out. I really felt like I was being charitable, you know? Sure, there may have been a bit of carnage, but have you been inside the restrooms recently? So much cleaner. The air feels fresher. It smells like victory." Behrooz leaned against a wall to process the new information. His loyal girlfriend had been a double agent the entire time! Maybe. Or maybe not, actually. Behrooz's initial reaction to the detentions was one of horror: they were grotesquely overreacting to what really was a personal choice! But then he remembered Beth, who had cured herself of that same habit and in the process became a far nicer person. Surely it was a good thing that more people were able to follow in her footsteps. The purpose of school wasn't necessarily to make its students happy, then, but do what was best for them in the long run.

"That actually makes me feel a bit better. I have some ideas for other ways to help fix this school up, that maybe won't border on the questionably legal but hopefully will be just as effective. I'd much rather work with ambitious people who know how to take initiative rather than a bunch of spineless dolts. I'm going back to Ms. Foster's room, I'm doing this. Tell them to leave a seat open for me at the table."

John had stumbled through that day, as many did, in somewhat of a fog. He saw reminders of Ernest everywhere: the vase of flowers that protected his desk in Mrs. Huang's room, the glasses he wore when he worked, and the faint outline of his face on the wall. John had read an interesting article about pareidolia in a magazine, once, where a lady claimed to see Jesus in a piece of toast. John had thought it preposterous then—why would Jesus choose a piece of toast to make His grand entrance and not something more majestic?—but he, too, saw a face in that piece of toast, and that day he saw Ernest's face everywhere. Death was a nasty thing, and its language was not in John's vocabulary. He relied on euphemisms, saying that Ernest "was no longer with us" or that Ernest "drew his terminal breath." The word "death" was verboten now that it was linked to a real concept and not something in a book.

John remembered that Ernest had written such a sweet poem about his grandfather's passing back in freshman year, one that made Ms. Baldwin cry. The imagery was poignant then, and John could imagine the same table in a blackened kitchen lit by one lightbulb that swung back and forth, back and forth, like a clock's pendulum. His grandfather's face was at one moment ghostly white and one moment not there at all. Back and forth, back and forth, until suddenly, there was no face at all. So Ernest knew death intimately, and that shadow followed him everywhere he went. John had not thought much about Ernest before, but in a way he seemed more real in his absence because John recalled his memories that much more vividly. John knew Ernest as a philosopher, one who like many philosophers was doomed to die prematurely.

"Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" John asked himself as he drove home. He was really asking Ernest, though, who John imagined sitting in the passenger's seat. As John often did, he took an inefficient route home, weaving through hills of hedge-lined roads with vast front lawns and packed-together apartments connected by chain-link fences. He drove slowly and with purpose, just as he imagined Ernest would drive. Ernest would never have been the sort of person to head from point A to point B without taking in the scenery in between; John got out of the car once to smell somebody's roses, and John cried because Ernest would never smell roses again, or any flowers. Nothing at all, not even the flowers on his grave. The weather that day was windy, and it pulled John's tears off his face into the flowers he was admiring. "What sort of wicked day is this, that tears shall drown the wind?" John exclaimed toward the sky, ignoring the concerned glance he received from someone walking on the other side of the street. John had complained enough for one day, and he resolved to head home immediately before he could get distracted again. His sadness turned to joy when he entered his drowsy neighborhood and knew he was going to go to bed and take a nap. His parents had heard the news too from an email, and wished to know if their darling son was indeed all right, but by the time they thought to check on him, John was already asleep on top of his blankets, snoring loudly; John never snored.

Frank knew he should have reined in Mrs. Huang when she suggested they spend the period doing arts and crafts, but Juliet seemed so happy and he didn't want to be in the minority. So he went to the leadership room and left with a paper bag of scissors, glue, and markers, and they got to work, pushing the desks apart and working on the floor. It was just like kindergarten again: they cut up butcher paper, trimmed pictures, and wrote slogans in block print. Mrs. Huang leaned over from her desk occasionally to admire their work, and when Frank thought they were almost done, Juliet suggested they make posters for Alan and Behrooz too, and so Frank went back and grabbed another bag of supplies, and they spent another half-hour trimming away and turning what really was a calculated power grab into kitsch.

"Do you do a lot of art at home?" Juliet asked after seeing Frank's complete inability to draw straight lines without a ruler.

"I don't—my mother paints, sometimes, so I have a portrait hanging in my room. I have a photo, actually. Look."

"That looks professional! Mrs. Huang, you have to see this!" Mrs. Huang walked over, looked at Frank's phone screen, and voiced her approval: "She should sell her paintings."

"Does she take commissions? I've always wanted my own portrait. It would be very aristocratic."

"I doubt it, she's very busy these days. Maybe I'll learn how to paint sometime, and if I don't paint a self-portrait, you'll be first on my list. I'm not that bad at taking photos though, if I say so myself, although I prefer taking pictures of scenery and not people."

"You refuse to take selfies, so I don't believe you can take photos. I haven't seen any proof."

"I have principles, Juliet, and those principles tell me we should be focusing on these posters instead of my inadequacies." Frank could playfully banter and deliver witty rejoinders all day, but getting his fingers sticky with glue was too much to ask. He spent a good portion of English class that day pulling thin sheets of glue off his fingers, not convinced the sink had done its job correctly.

"You have a green stripe on your cheek, by the way," Ms. Liu pointed out after class, and Frank immediately ran to the mirrored door to verify. "Not sure why nobody else told you." Frank had learned from a YouTube video once that the alcohol in hand sanitizer could remove ink, and he casually scrubbed his face with a soaked tissue as if that was something normal people did.

"So Ms. Foster told me earlier that you were running for student body president. Do you think you'll win?"

"There's no doubt about it, in my mind. At this point I think it's a natural progression for this social experiment; I've been trapped in an echo chamber so long that I don't know if I will get anything besides bemused tolerance. What do you think?"

Ms. Liu stirred her mug of tea deliberately, as she often did when asked to consider important questions. "I think from a literal point of view, there is no way you can't win; Ms. Foster's effectively said as much, that if your team doesn't win the popular vote that she will find a way to manipulate the results. I know that undercuts the point of this entire affair, to see if you're actually popular or not. But that's not important anyway. From a practical point of view, and you've just said as much yourself: you're trapped in an echo chamber. I think everyone looks upon your club generally positively at this point. Maybe they think Alan is a traitor, but everyone thinks that at least you and Juliet are good people who are smart and capable. You have name recognition—can you say that you actually remember who your other class officers are? I bet you can't, and I also bet that barely anyone knows you're class secretary. So at the end of the day, people who don't know anything about your philosophy, just that you are generally trusted, will be liable to support you over some other no-name person. What are you going to do if you win? Have you thought that through yet?"

"When we look at the big picture, I want to transplant as many club policies to the school at large. Some are undoubtedly going to be impractical. But I've done some informal surveys of your colleagues and I think that some would be open to new ideas. Not new ideas, actually, but just some of those old-fashioned values that we discarded for no good reason. I think the Pledge of Allegiance is unnecessary puffery, but it gives us unity at club meetings, a predictable ritual during times when we can't always rely on predictability elsewhere. Things like that, simple things that are quite doable. Far less extreme than the drug bust."

"I don't know what to make of you at times, Frank. On one hand you clearly shouldn't be trusted with any position of executive authority, yet despite that you've done quite a good job. You remind me of Mr. T, and I guess you are his protégé in a way. I can't wait to see what things you accomplish." Ms. Liu's phone rang, and Frank left the room with a new urgency: if Ms. Liu, one of the sanest teachers on campus, supported him, he clearly could not be in the wrong at all.

As much as Regina's parents tolerated the occasional bout of childhood mischief, going to an illicit party at the beach was too much for them. They did not care that the drugs were fake, and in fact, this made them even more incensed; if it were just marijuana, at least they knew what was in it. Regina naturally defended Tom: Tom was not a bad influence who took too many risks, Tom was a caring person who was attentive to her desires and always knew how to make her feel happy. And thus she and her parents were at an impasse: they were willing to drop any punishment for the party, considering it a valuable life lesson, but they insisted Regina have a serious, heart-to-heart talk with Tom to clear up any major misconceptions regarding what was acceptable in polite society.

"You lied to me, Tom, you always have!" Regina began.

"What's gotten into you today? Didn't drink your coffee?"

"Shut up about coffee! All this time I've believed your generosity to be charity, done out of affection. But that's clearly not the case, is it? You buy me things because they make you happy, not because they make me happy too. It's like you're gaslighting me."

"That's not what gaslighting means, Regina. Don't get into hysterics."

"I'll tell you what gaslighting means then. Gaslighting means convincing me that dancing around on the beach is fun. You convinced me we were having a good time, but you may as well have taken me to a strip club! Don't you dare try to convince me that all of this is in my best interest."

"You're happy. It shouldn't matter why you're happy. Thinking you're happy is the same as being happy. People try to convince me all the time that I'm not perpetually living in my father's shadow, and I believe that. It's better than facing the facts. So I think the point is, we can all live in our fantasies occasionally, because the real world is a scary place. One of our classmates died, Regina. Someone I respected, not some no-name klutz. Alan's father is dead. That still pains me. We tell the people we love: do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Yes, I have that memorized. I'm not some brute or 'ape,' as I heard you call me once."

"An ape who can recite poetry is still an ape."

"You're missing my point, Regina. We all need to lie to ourselves and lie to each other, otherwise society can't possibly function the way it does. We're all stressed these days. Get some sleep. I know I need it." Tom abruptly hung up the call, and Regina stared at her phone's home screen and cried. How could he be so crude and yet so lovable simultaneously? Tom could be wrong, but he at least thought he was right. Ernest died the other day. Regina still thought that sad. Tom's still alive today, Regina thought. That made her happy. "I'm still alive today," she told herself, "I'm still alive!" That made her even happier. This bout of emotion tired her, and she decided she would go to bed immediately after dinner.

Even if Ernest hadn't died, Ted would still have left Heller. He had acquired his GED, studying harder than he ever had before, just so he didn't need to deal with more high school drama than needed. Ted was told once that all the world was a stage, but there came a point when he wanted to stop acting and simply get things over with. For Ted, that threshold was somewhere after breaking up with Beth, somewhere after getting detention for buying fake drugs, and somewhere after Ernest's death. Ted did not tell many besides his teachers about his impending departure. Why did they need to know in advance? Maybe even a few days after he left, they wouldn't realize anything had changed; he would simply be gone. Tom deserved a special adieu, however:

"I'll miss the good times we had together. You made high school just a bit more tolerable for me, and what else could I really ask for? Wish Regina well. Keep in touch," Ted said with a pat on the back, and that was the end of that. Behrooz happened to walk by during this conversation, held in the student parking lot on that fine border between school and reality, and was immensely sad to see yet another vaunted figure of Heller leave. Truly too soon.

"I know we haven't always been civil with each other, but maybe I'll see you around sometime, Ted. Once a Tiger, always a Tiger." Behrooz looked out at the parking lot to see if he could spot Ted's car, but realized that he didn't know what it looked like; unlike Ted, Behrooz never loitered in the parking lot when he was supposed to be elsewhere.

"Cheers, Behrooz. Good luck with your student council bid. You deserve it, unlike those other jerks." Ted shook his head in consternation, but Behrooz rushed to defend them:

"We disagree on some things, but I respect them as people. I think President Underwood is a psychopath even though he's a Democrat; likewise, I admire their dedication to improving the school even if I disagree with some of their methods. They're reasonable people who are open to debate, and that's what really matters at the end of the day. I'll take them over zealots."

"That's why you're staying and I'm not," Ted laughed. "Besides, I have one more day. You won't see me after the weekend."

On his last day, which to everyone else seemed like any other, Ted didn't make a show of his departure. He told some of his friends and teachers, more out of necessity and a sense of obligation than a true desire, and after class on Friday, he stepped outside, took a deep breath; walked down the steps through a crowd of students scrambling to get to class on time; looked at the bushes and trees garnishing the concrete; surveyed the parking lot with its beat-up vans and brand-new Teslas; the steep, verdant slope that guarded the school from the houses up above behind the fence; the elementary school far more clearly visible across the street and up a few stories that the parents reached by driving along a serpentine path; the few parents already queued in the parking lot on their phones or blankly staring ahead; and extended one final middle finger to the sun up above before walking to his car. Before he stepped in, he spat on the ground and watched the bubbles fade into a dark dot. He drove off in the same direction he always did, and then he was gone.

Discussion Questions:

This chapter begins with an allusion to The Stranger in how Ernest's death is described (while obviously not an original Wattpad novel, it is available on the site, with a link included in the comments). Do you think a comparison of John to Meursault is accurate?

Explain again the dissonance between Frank's idealized persona and reality.

Are Tom and Regina both responsible for the schisms in their relationship?