John realized halfway through Mrs. Huang's lecture that in the shuffle of seats that took place at the beginning of the period, a procedure that occurred whenever she suspected her students of excessive fraternization, he was sitting where Ernest used to sit. The vase of flowers constantly replenished last year had disappeared over the break, and with the custodial work that always happened over the weekends, what were the odds that he was sitting at that same desk which seated a dead man? Any special protection that the vase and Mrs. Huang's watchful eye afforded probably didn't last over weekends. This conundrum did not seem to occupy his group partners' minds, but why would it? They didn't know him. John's unique brand of melancholy clashed with Mrs. Huang's ever energetic temperament; he was one of the few students who had stuck with Chinese for all four years, most of his classmates being freshmen and sophomores, and so Mrs. Huang relied on people like him to be academic role models. Mrs. Huang had finally learned John's name, and after spending a few weeks trying to discern some identifying trait to create a nickname (Beth was the diligent one, and Juliet was "her little angel"), settled on "the philosopher"; this came from reputation alone, as Mrs. Huang avoided all philosophical talks unless they served to commend Frank: she had overheard Juliet call John that once and thus stuck with it.

But where was Ernest? Mrs. Huang thought it bad luck to keep any of Ernest's old papers, and once had presented all of them in a file folder to his parents with apologies. His name undoubtedly existed still in her gradebooks, not that John would ever be able to access them. It was like he had never existed at all, that he was a convenient fabrication to give John's inner monologue a devil's advocate and convince himself he wasn't crazy. John did not think Ernest had any distinguishing physical attributes; he looked, actually, very much like many of the other students, and while John's train of thought lingered there, he realized that he looked much more like an outcast. It did not help that he still talked with a curious accent that everyone with whom he talked placed as originating from a different part of China. John had hoped by now that he'd have blended in with the crowd, but a few weeks in and he was clearly still the foreigner—and not in a way which inspired pity from Mrs. Huang, one which made him sad he couldn't understand the students gossiping behind his back.

John knew that Frank had most likely gone through a similar experience, and asked him offhandedly before school one day:

"Am I one of them? I'd like to think we're beyond tribalism that isn't school-sanctioned."

"It's a reasonable question, Frank," John insisted. "You took the AP test last year. I see you chat with Mrs. Huang in the hallways. So I think it's reasonable to ask if beyond your comparative fluency, if you feel like they've accepted you as one of them."

"Culturally, besides eating a lot of Chinese food, my family isn't Chinese at all—why would we be? The closest we get to representing any particular ethnicity besides 'cosmopolitan San Franciscan' is having a British flag in a box somewhere. That gap isn't bridged simply because I speak with a good accent. You could ask the same question of Mr. T, who is far more fluent than I possibly would ever be in any reasonably common variety of Chinese—or any language—that you could think of: just because he's an omniglot doesn't miraculously place him in every single culture. He's no more Chinese than either of us."

"So how then would I go about absorbing more of that culture then, so I'm not missing out on aspects of class just because I lack that shared cultural heritage?"

"I don't know, John, go to Chinatown? Eat more Chinese food? Watch Stephen Chow films? This is a question best asked of Mrs. Huang, but I think the answer you'll find is that with greater fluency you'll find you get some of those answers."

"You're contradicting yourself, Frank. Language doesn't lead to culture, yet you understand culture better from language? You can't have it both ways." John was hoping for a magic bullet that did not boil down to studying more. Frank was smart, he knew a solution to everything. Surely there was a "good person" solution to this, like anything else.

"Do you know what filial piety is, John? It's a good vocab word; I'd think it would be in your textbook somewhere. Just because I know what that word is doesn't mean I automatically express a Confucian reverence toward my parents. That's a gross oversimplification, of course, but at least then, even if you don't share the same personal experiences with your classmates, you'll have a greater sense of empathy. Does that make sense?" John pulled out his phone to check his installed Chinese dictionary just in case the word looked familiar. It did not. John traced the characters in the air, hoping that like magic the air would glow around the glyphs.

"I'm not sure if I answered your original question that well," Frank continued. "When I was in Chinese class, nobody judged me for not having gone to Chinese school or not wearing slippers around the house. We eat mooncakes because they taste good, but we don't sweep my great-grandparents' graves, and that isn't seen as a sign of betrayal or inauthenticity. And I doubt they're judging you; why do you think they're gossiping about you and not just talking about their lives?"

"Well, clearly they didn't want me to understand."

"What if they assume that because you're in the same Chinese class, you're able to understand them?" John's eyes widened—he had never considered before that his personal exceptionalism did not automatically extend to others' perceptions. The bell rang, and John ran to class before he would be late. He related this conversation to Harry while they worked when Harry asked him for help with Spanish, a subject John was disappointed to discover he had not mastered via osmosis.

"It's cool that you're not taking Spanish. It makes you more unique," Harry remarked.

"Too unique, really. Do people look at you differently in your class because you aren't Hispanic?"

"It's an intro class, why would they? Chinese is too hard to learn, that's why I'm taking Spanish. I knew I couldn't handle it."

"That's a completely baseless assumption, Harry. You're a Beta—of course you could handle it!" Ms. Liu shot him a glare across the room; she was worried that the Deltas and Epsilons in the class would pick on Harry if they knew he was ranked above them. Ms. Liu believed enforcing inequality was not in her job responsibilities and treated all her students equally regardless of class; when her students struggled with food stability and familial obligations already, it would only be cruel to punish them more. The new caste system was a double-edged sword in that regard: with such a great emphasis placed on overcoming factors outside individuals' control, it was technically easier for those with surrounding socioeconomic factors to translate those into success at Heller, more so than the Lululemon-toting gossips who believed themselves entitled to special treatment. This created friction among those who sought to play the game, attending optional tutoring sessions and volunteering their time at approved off-site community service, and those who had started an Epsilon after the first assembly and resolved to never be anything else.

"I think it's more because I go to the club meetings than anything else. You know, I don't really like those people, the club people. It reminds me of Scientology."

"Scientology's a cult, though. It's completely different."

"You say that because you're a veteran member. I'm new, and everyone's a nice speaker, of course, but I wouldn't put my life on the line for them. They're asking a lot of freshmen to be so mature, you know; it's only been a few weeks. We're busy making our own friends and connections without the club doing it for us."

Regina watched John and Harry somewhat warily. Harry talked just like John, intellectually and without the vibrant charm that made Frank more clearly normal. Her biggest worry was that John would convince Harry to think exactly like him and be exactly like him; Harry would then be set up for years of psychological anguish that nobody truly deserved. Regina was extrapolating, of course—they had not gotten to the term in statistics yet, and thus she did not know why that was improper—but even in a new social hierarchy that prized such verbosity, it was still not something to be encouraged. Regina personally thought the other students a lot more relatable; they talked coarsely, but they talked of celebrities who had not died in the previous century, and that was enough for her. What Regina knew of mentorship told her that making a genuine emotional connection was the first step to progress; it did her no good to act with alien severity like everyone else normal thought John did. John had asked her once why she tried to become friends with "the Epsilons," as if they were not people at all—by the same logic, why would Regina want to build an emotional connection with Harry, who looked like he probably quoted Shakespeare daily?

"They're freshmen, though. They're younger than us, less wise. With a few exceptions, I'll admit," John argued.

"Age is just a number," Regina laughed; John looked at her condescendingly, clearly not detecting her sarcasm. "You were a freshman once. Don't act like you don't have any empathy, why else would you be tutoring?"

"It all boils down to, just like we've always been told, strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action. Those are the traits we're trying to teach here, and you'll find that universal empathy isn't among them."

"You're such a downer," Regina groaned, and she walked away before John could apologize for his conduct and promise that it was just a slip of the tongue—he really was an optimistic person! John kicked himself again: he had forgotten to ask her about filial piety.

Alan was a man of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. A division of labor began to arise out of circumstance as much as necessity when work began to accumulate. Frank primarily concerned himself with planning club meetings and dealing with administrative paperwork for other clubs that despite his grand plans, still needed to be done. He was willing to recycle old texts if they proved especially interesting, and the varied casts of the discussions ensured that the repetition bothered nobody; this eased his work somewhat, but he still pored over his old notes, annotating them with cryptic reminders and insights that even for him, were written in chicken-scratch. Juliet shadowed him, reviewing his tentative lesson plans, pretending she could read his handwriting with ease, and assisting with the bureaucratic drudgery that he did not need to leave for himself. These overlapping responsibilities ensured they mainly needed to talk with each other, after two years having developed some semblance of a rhythm.

Alan and Behrooz were tasked with implementation and more menial tasks that didn't require the help of upper management; Alan relished these opportunities to crack the whip, which, while metaphorical was increasingly supplemented with hand gestures. Behrooz tried his hardest to temper these flights of whimsy; he found Alan prone to fantastical ideas that at a moment's notice, he'd race off to investigate, only to return a few minutes later with seemingly no memory of his original attempt. While Behrooz tried his hardest to be fair to those under him, who were not particularly different in experience but simply had a different job title, Alan would pick on them individually, giving them nicknames and occasional tongue lashings. Once, one of the sophomores (whom Alan had nicknamed Bubba for some inexplicable reason) had grown tired of picking up beads Alan spilled on the floor, and privately vented to Behrooz; doing the right thing, he relayed his complaint to Ms. Foster, who promised to investigate further but clearly never did. At lunch, Alan would exhibit a convivial spirit that was rarely demonstrated elsewhere, jokingly referring to the other pair as "the bosses"; when all four ate together, this faded to what Behrooz believed to be blind obedience. It wasn't like he had anything to prove, so why did Alan insist on sucking up to Frank? Juliet seemed genuine, but Alan—the line was blurred there. It was not inconceivable, he supposed, that someone of such a mercurial temperament was entirely himself in all those different moments when he wore those different masks. Or that the truth lay somewhere buried inside, a mixture of all. Maybe this was why Frank and Juliet stopped eating with them.

During one of these lunches, once the others were comfortably out of earshot, Behrooz remarked to Alan: "What's gotten into you over the last few weeks? What did they ever do to you? They're just trying to do their jobs and follow your orders so they don't fail the class. It's hard enough as is with all the work we have to do, you don't need to make their lives living hell."

"War is hell!" Alan exclaimed, thinking that explained everything.

"War against whom?"

"Everyone. Everyone who isn't with us is against us, Behrooz, and if the bosses want us to fight the good fight, then I'll be damned if we don't! If we're generals, they're the commanders-in-chief."

"Everyone, you say. Everyone in this school is against us. Regina is. Tom is. Beth is. Ms. Foster is. All of them are against us?"

"I wouldn't slander some of those names, Behrooz. There are good people on both sides. But we have this hierarchy in place to keep the lower orders where they ought to stay, and maybe a few good ones will be filtered through and we can work from there. If we want to stay alive, it's what we have to do."

"Staying alive? Nobody's dying here."

"Open your eyes, Behrooz. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead," Alan fiercely declared, his voice grizzled. "Have you heard of Schrödinger's cat? You have a cat inside a box—it could be dead, it could be alive—"

"I know what Schrödinger's cat is, Alan. But what's that got to do with it?"

"The cat's dead, Behrooz. There's no ambiguity here. The cat's dead, and I'm no expert on cat CPR, but it's going to be a pain to resuscitate. We don't want to be dead either. The fear of death is a powerful thing, and that's the fear we want everyone else to hold, but we've earned the right to live comfortably without that. Because if that's not the case, what makes us any different from them? Am I making sense to you?" Behrooz prudently nodded and said that Alan was making perfect sense, so much sense that the conversation did not need to go on any longer.

While Alan occupied much of his conscious hours spinning elaborate hierarchies of secret surveillance networks and military stratagems out of thin air, Frank chose to dwell entirely in the practical, and there was no one more qualified to think practically than Ms. Foster. When Ms. Foster did not resign herself to the fact that her student council was self-sufficient, she'd walk by and offer suggestions offhandedly, ones which she only occasionally believed in.

"Have you considered expanding formal Fridays to be every day? I'm sure you have the money to cover any students who wouldn't be able to participate otherwise, and I think it would unify us as a student body, make us stand out a little. Heller's a remarkable school as is, but we're a public school with many other rivals in our district alone. I send my son to a Catholic school, and he wears a tie every day. I don't see why we can't do the same." On the spectrum ranging from "why don't we offer extra points to encourage students to see our music performances?" to "how about we monitor students' social media for signs of sedition?" of how much Ms. Foster earnestly believed in her suggestions, this sat somewhere solidly halfway in between the two.

"I'm not sure. The good students already are dressing nicely, and the Epsilons don't care. They already plot how to steal the free stuff the others get, and we don't want to reward that. They'll keep thinking in exactly the same ways as before, even if they look a bit nicer," Juliet advised. Beyond the color coding, formal dress also proved a quick way to distinguish the castes, as otherwise she sometimes had difficulties telling them apart.

"I disagree. I think that the way a person talks absolutely classifies them—our no swearing policy has proven that without a doubt. I don't see why we can't implement a bit of wishful thinking with a dress code. Who is it hurting, really?" Frank saw that Juliet still seemed torn, so he sighed and tried a little experiment: "I mean, haven't you said before that I look quite nice in my suit?"

Juliet's expression immediately turned sunny: "You do look nice in a suit! That's settled then. This is a great idea. I should have never doubted you."

"Well, it was Ms. Foster's suggestion..." Frank trailed off, but by then Ms. Foster had already left to dispense some more wisdom to other struggling students.

Jason found a less sympathetic ear in Mr. Ivanov, whom he was a TA for; Mr. Ivanov made frequent jokes about the new order of things, saying that if he had a ranking he would be an "Omega Minus" and that the work of exemplary students was "doubleplusgood." Mr. Ivanov's begrudging tolerance of Jason's authority began to fray when one day, Mr. Ivanov complained as he frequently did about his students' poor grades.

"Here, give me a name. Let's see if they're slacking off in other classes too," Jason perkily suggested.

"Uh, Eduardo Lopez." Jason pulled out his phone, typed something, and began reading:

"Eduardo Lopez, Delta Minus, GPA 2.8, email [email protected], password supersaiyan420—"

"Wait, wait, wait! You have his email password? Who told you that?"

"Nobody told me that, it's just data TigerTalk collects. I can see his social media accounts too, his address, phone number, contacts, anything that could conceivably be thought of as essential for security."

"That's just Orwellian! When are you ever going to check any of that info?"

"Of course I'm not going to memorize their Social Security numbers or anything, but it's always good to have this info just in case. We can even do GPS tracking; look here, and it appears that Eduardo is in Mr. Galantine's classroom."

"Who has access to this? Teachers? Other students?"

"The teachers have access to the info, of course, and the few students with admin accounts—mainly the student council and myself—can also look around."

"So if I wanted to look up Frank's birthday and Social Security number, I could just type his name into my computer and find him?"

"No, of course not, we aren't monsters: admin accounts like ours don't share that information. So no, you can't spy on your fellow teachers. Is that any comfort?"

"That's no comfort at all!" Mr. Ivanov exclaimed, tempted to grab Jason's phone from his hand to prevent any other breaches of privacy under his watch.

"I don't really see the big deal. There's nothing malicious behind the software's original implementation; justice is blind. But if there were someone I didn't like, for instance Louis, whom I still hold a grudge toward, with just a few clicks I own him. It takes very little under this system for students to know their place."

"You're a student, what gives you the right to be held to a lower standard? Even in Soviet Russia, you bet that all of Khrushchev's info was in a filing cabinet somewhere just in case a bit of kompromat was ever needed. Even then, everyone in charge lived on a razor's edge."

"The nice thing about history, Mr. Ivanov, is that we can reiterate on it to our heart's desire; while the same themes may hold true eternally, all of their succulent variations allow for some, I guess, flexibility." Mr. Ivanov had had enough, and after one more plead to be responsible, which fell on deaf ears, he returned to his desk. Jason was fortunate to be able to work in the backroom, where teachers kept their lab supplies, away from prying eyes like Mr. Ivanov's most of the time. He could take the network of back doors and end up all the way in the robotics room, which he had repurposed into his lair. Alan's words about war had found an eager audience in Jason, which to him justified many of his actions; Jason had received permission from a beleaguered Mr. Kurtz to monitor all the security cameras in the school, and when bored during class would idly switch between hallways, locker rooms, and the classrooms—there weren't originally security cameras in all the classrooms, but Frank was easily swayed, and who would deny such a small expenditure? As Frank walked by cameras, he would salute them, and they would blink their lights in response if Jason happened to be watching from the other side; he would prank Jason at times too and move the cameras around while he thought he was unobserved, which the two of them found amusingly dystopian. In his reports, Jason tactfully chose not to mention how he could see down shirts and watch girls shower and change; the former required some ingenuity and good luck on his part, but the latter was a reliable occurrence: any PE class, sports team, or even the cheerleaders were fair game. There was no way of telling if any camera's movements were the default random scan or a result of puppetry. Nothing so wonderful as war had ever happened to him before, and he was afraid it might never happen to him again.

The more Alan became sanguine, the more Behrooz became choleric, and this manifested itself in a growing frigidness with Beth. Behrooz sometimes scrolled through his old Instagram messages with Beth, some from before that great mistake and some afterward. It warmed his heart to feel the same warmth he did when they first started dating, when he asked her to homecoming, when they held hands looking at the moonless sky by his house. A winter night, hot chocolate in matching thermoses that Behrooz's mother had lovingly prepared for them, and not a hint of worry that the magic would ever fade. It was a clear transition: he read messages from years past, when he never knew that anything could and would go wrong, and he was happy. He caught up to the present, and his smile thinned. He no longer frantically checked his phone when he heard the little notification ping, typing and editing and rephrasing until he thought he was doing his feelings justice. Maybe this was fine though. He wasn't sad when he was sent funny memes or a casual invitation to grab a bite somewhere chic. He just didn't feel the same endorphin high that always left him racing, but at the same time, he could not bear absence either. Sometimes Beth would send a flurry of messages in rapid-fire conversation with the energy of a tennis match, and then for reasons unknown would go silent for a day. Other conversations proceeded languorously, so much so that they never could quite remember what they talked about. He tried to imagine occasionally what the world looked like on the other end, looking out from her phone screen: maybe she'd be splayed out on her gray bedding or tucked underneath her covers, or in her backyard overlooking the bed of vegetables her mother tended with her heart and soul. Maybe she was thinking the same—he really didn't know. But as long as she was happy, he was too.

Beth, in fact, was splayed on top of her gray bedding, deciding if it was quite time to change out of sweatpants into true bed clothing. He had guessed correctly. It was only 11:00. The night was young. Behrooz had been in her room only once, at least as far as she could recall. Probably just a few months ago, July? It was a hot, muggy day, and Beth's parents were late coming back from wherever they were. Beth and Behrooz had just come back from Jamba Juice, and Beth was still sipping on the dregs of her smoothie. It was too hot to linger outside on the porch and think of pleasantries, so Beth took Behrooz on the house tour. He had already seen most of the front floor, and so Beth took him upstairs through a hallway of dazzling monochrome; some doors up there were near-forbidden, even to her. And since he probably wouldn't need to see a bathroom that was very much like the one he had visited before, only larger, her bedroom was the last spot. He looked astonished when he stepped inside and found it quite ordinary. "What were you expecting, shelves of makeup and nail polish?" Beth asked, plopping down upon her bed and kicking off her shoes. Behrooz didn't respond, instead perceiving what surrounded him, including that little teddy bear that sat upon her bed still now. How wondrous it was to be allowed into someone's inner sanctum, a hall of mirrors that reflected every facet of their being! Alas, the only new insight revealed was that the teddy bear was named Cheddar.

Beth had naturally seen Behrooz's house many times before then, before and after his kitchen was remodeled and one of Beth's portraits was hung in the living room. Maybe he was sitting on the sofa looking at that portrait while he drank tea or watched TV with his family; that would be a nice image, wouldn't it? Perhaps she ought to paint a painting of him admiring his own portrait. She had a picture of that portrait of Behrooz saved on her phone, and as she admired its "life," as his mother had described it, she thought it amusing how he would be doing the same. An infinite chain. Behrooz's increasingly irascible temperament bothered Beth; the image of tranquility that had persisted over two years of DJing and schoolwork took only a few weeks to dissipate. He was too much of a gentleman to ever lash out at Beth, even when she offered her support, so he did not know any other way of expressing his emotion besides not expressing anything at all. There was nothing wrong with a little depression—she was no stranger to dismal moods herself—but Behrooz's spiral into discontent was too tragic, as it was so unlike him.

What she thought pained Behrooz most was having to lie. Behrooz abhorred lying in all its forms—that's what drove them apart in the first place, when Beth had denied ever having any feelings for Ted and ever making any promises of fidelity to Behrooz. So having to walk through the hallways every day as an Alpha and regard his former Gamma friends with apathy as they shied away from him, now that would be the worst torture of all! Behrooz had to tell Beth there was an insurmountable emotional distance between himself and everyone else; Behrooz had to lie and say that he and Alan were becoming fast friends, all while Behrooz held secret fantasies of running over Alan with his car if he ever saw him in the parking lot unguarded. Nobody would catch him, it would be the perfect crime: the ever-watchful security cameras were under his control too, and while it would be a challenge to keep them all turned away while the deed was done, the footage could also just disappear. Many things disappeared in those days—ethics, virtue, morality—adding one more to the list would really be a blessing where the pros outweighed the cons. He could never seriously consider murder, only its possibility, and that was almost equally frightening: there were at least three other students at the school, the teachers presumably being without any darkness in their hearts, who had the means to commit nameless crimes and get away scot-free!

One night, Behrooz had out of boredom spent a few minutes scrolling through Heller's security cameras, secretly hoping for there to be some illicit meeting he could disrupt and make himself a hero. The school appeared lifeless, no noises but fallen leaves blowing in the wind; he switched to one of the cameras in the gym and tried speaking through its loudspeaker, and he could hear his own voice reverberate through the room, bouncing off all the bleachers and becoming thunderous. "Let there be light!" he announced, and he turned the lights on with a dramatic flick. The gym was sterile without anyone else inside, the light a glaring white. This spectacle rapidly became uninteresting, so Behrooz turned the lights off and went to bed.

Discussion Questions:

What explains John's curiosity regarding Frank's cultural identity?

Compare Frank and Alan's leadership styles: which appears more effective?

We see Jason becoming a more major character again. What function does he serve? Consider TigerTalk's invasive nature and Jason's previously described penchant for WW2 history.