The energy of Friday's rally had faded over the weekend, especially for the leadership students who had worked themselves to the bone making it happen. Ms. Foster's room was being used as interim storage for the rally decorations that nobody had the heart to throw out, and so Behrooz walked under a balloon arch, pushed his way through hanging paper streamers, and brushed confetti off his seat before he started working. He still had "Uptown Funk" stuck in his head, and just as he was about to reach the chorus, he heard the distinctive clip-clop of high heels.

"Hey, Juliet," Behrooz waved when she walked in the classroom.

"Good morning Behrooz! What's up?" she chirped and sat across from him, immediately pulling out her laptop from her backpack.

"How did you enjoy the rally on Friday? Wasn't it a bit, you know, excessive?" Juliet thought for a moment, not wishing to speak unkindly of the people who were quite responsible for that excessiveness.

"I guess, yeah. But they're always like that. That's the point of the rallies, to have some of that spectacle. At least the cheer team still got to perform, and it was cool how the band got to as well."

"Oh, yeah, of course that was nice. But Tom and Regina were literally dragged screaming out of the gym while everyone was booing them. Tom seriously looked like he wanted to murder Alan."

"I can see where Alan's coming from. He worked so hard to get to this point—we all did—and it was so demoralizing to see people purposely being assholes just to spite them, you know? But I see your point: we should talk to Alan. They should apologize to each other so we don't have any bad blood."

"Well, I wouldn't say that I contributed much to this. You guys already had everything figured out, I'm just here for the ride."

"Don't say that, Behrooz. You're such a generous and warm person. We all look up to you to be levelheaded."

"Anyway, what can I do? If I vote differently from Frank and Alan, I'm in the minority, and any tie will be broken by Ms. Foster, and we all know she's on his side."

"What sides are you talking about, Behrooz? We're all in this together because we have the same goal: to make the school a better place."

"I guess you're right, but still... I don't know..." Behrooz shook his head and changed the topic. Before he and Juliet could grow too comfortable in discussing their impending English test, Alan walked in with a triumphant air, his face coated with streaks of face paint that had somehow intensified in hue over the weekend.

"We are the champions..." he sang off-key, sitting down with a thud and feigning surprise at seeing the others.

"Speak of the devil and he appears," Behrooz muttered to himself; Alan turned toward him, so he laughed as if he intended his remark as a joke. "So Alan, as you've decided to show up; what did you think of the rally? I must say, you really exhibited leadership! Some people in life are destined to be leaders, and some are destined to be followers, and nobody made that more clear than you."

"Where's Frank?" Alan grunted, not picking up on Behrooz's double entendre.

"He has a meeting with Ms. Wolfe. But we're all friends here, we can speak freely. Tell me what you honestly think," Behrooz continued sarcastically, not noticing the security camera behind him swivel to match his head movements.

"I think the rally was perfect. I've never seen such a beautiful, such a perfect, such an epic experience. The third wave has crested, and boy, it's a tsunami! I felt like I was running for president or something. I had so much fun—didn't you, Juliet?" Juliet was about to enthusiastically concur until Behrooz put his finger to his lips.

"Earlier Juliet and I were talking, you know, as friends always do, and we were thinking that what an upstanding gentleman like yourself ought to do is apologize to our mutual friend Tom. You know, you put him through a minor headache, back there, and well if I were him I'd be hopping mad. So what do you say, why don't we try to break the ice a little?" Behrooz needed no encouragement to dislike Tom—there was nothing a rich kid like him who didn't at least give back to the community a little deserved more than a kick in the nuts—but there had to be a line drawn somewhere between civility and revenge. Fifteen hundred scowling faces, screaming themselves hoarse, all directed their energy at now "nasty" Tom and "whorish" Regina. There was nothing civil about that, and Behrooz still thought highly enough of Frank to pin the blame on Alan.

"He's an Epsilon. He deserves no sympathy from us. We've won the battle, but we still have a war to fight."

"He wasn't an Epsilon until the rally—look at this from my perspective, Alan: if you were in his shoes, wouldn't you be a little mad too?"

"I see no need to engage in hypotheticals. If we were on Mars, or if everyone were buck-naked, or if instead of a three-legged race we simply hacked each other to death with swords, all of those would be very interesting situations to consider. But we're in the present now, and what happened happened. Que sera, sera."

"You're missing my point entirely; you can't just propose some sort of outlandish counter-example to everything I say and claim victory. Now if this stupid rally had never happened, Tom would still be a Beta, we wouldn't be fighting, and life would go on like normal. That's a hypothetical worth considering." Alan's social skills ran the gamut from obsequious to psychopathic, and in an instant he had calculated that some humor, some classic hyperbole, would diffuse the situation:

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" Alan began laughing like a hyena, and Juliet chuckled slightly before turning to Behrooz and mouthing "He's joking," like that brought any comfort to him. In all of Behrooz's idle thoughts about Alan getting some sort of moral comeuppance, with Behrooz playing the lead role as the masked crusader, he had never thought that Alan would consider making the first move. It wasn't just the flippant nature of his death threat, no matter how facetious, but that Alan had trained himself to think "excessive" and "obsolete" marks of high praise. Somewhere in his mind, he had learned to associate the same rallies he alternately evaded in the library and screamed his lungs out at with everything and anything equally ostentatious. "Excessive" wasn't then a sign of poor judgment, it was proof that there was never too much of a good thing; "obsolete," similarly, was the manifestation of the good person ethos that said beyond the threshold of madness, somewhere far off in the distance, lay method.

Behrooz replayed that conversation in his mind, "you ought to be taken outside and shot... and shot... and shot..." reverberating with the echo of a bullet casing dropped on a linoleum floor, during lunch that day with Beth. They sat on the grassy green on a blanket that was an Alpha privilege; a string quintet played from a speaker nestled in a bush, and a freshman poured them lemonade from a pitcher, having somehow missed the memo that it was fall and not summer.

"I've been doing some soul-searching, Beth, and I was thinking that—"

"It's time?" Beth finished with no trace of sadness in her voice.

"For the last few months we've been in such infrequent contact that it's not like we're dating at all. I'm completely swamped with work, so it's not like I have time even though I wanted to, and those sparks of joy are completely gone. I'm sorry." Beth put down her glass of lemonade—nothing sweet seemed appropriate for the moment—and nodded sagely.

"I suppose this is now a working lunch," Beth smiled, and they stayed the rest of the period unburdened, talking freely of what a sad thing it was for love to die; that rebellious bird which nobody could tame needed to be euthanized.

Surprisingly for one of Beth's breakups, it was Regina who approached Beth first; Beth did not want to make a show of her separation, thinking it rather undignified, but Regina could smell her disappointment.

"I guess now I must say fifth time's the charm, right?" Regina teased, lightly elbowing Beth.

"Oh, stop it. You sound like Tom now. You know, he said something similar to me at the lake. I thought he was just being a jerk then, but maybe he was right," Beth said pensively. "Anyway, I need time to think. Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it."

"What are you now, a philosopher?"

"You know it's true." Regina pointed out John from the other end of the hallway, who was leaning against a wall reading a book she couldn't identify, but that appeared thick.

"Look, one of your kind!" Regina gestured, and was about to shout at John to come apply some of his wisdom to cure Beth's heartache that she could not possibly not be feeling, when Beth preempted the gesture by walking toward him. Regina followed from a safe distance, ready to coo with admiration if needed; by her math, it had only been an hour since lunch, and if Beth were to acquire a new boyfriend now, it would set a personal record.

"It's her," John groaned, not even bothering to point weakly at Regina.

"We're all friends here, John, you know that. Now's not the time."

"What do you want, Beth?" John asked far more cheerfully.

"Just advice, as always. The usual, you know."

"Cut to the chase—our time on this planet is finite." Regina silently clapped in the background; her job here was done, and she could sleep well knowing that John had met his match.

"All things are finite. Like my relationship with Behrooz." John's interest was immediately piqued—suddenly her sassy wit was, dare he say, attractive? He leaned in, his interest renewed. "Continue, if you wish. Tell me your diamonds." Ever since the beginning of sophomore year, when Beth was no longer his to idolize, John had let his only hate spring from his only love: Beth's dry humor was unpalatable, too pessimistic; Beth's wiry frame was clearly a sign of malnutrition. If John had not been all too happy to loathe himself and let his feelings swing like a metronome, perhaps he could have swooped in at the lake one of those years. But instead, he waited, and waited, and waited, and through some cosmic miracle it was time for history to repeat itself.

"There's nothing to tell, really. Have you memorized your poem for English yet? I haven't decided which one I'll do, but you've always been more into literature—what will you do, Shakespeare?"

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this..."

"So romantic, save it for class," Beth laughed, nudging John delicately in the ribs. She walked off, not thinking much of the conversation nor John's increased heart rate. All that John had ever dreamed of was walking away from him, footsteps in a steady rhythm that matched his heartbeat, and if he reached out to grab something, anything, he could imagine it was her and not empty air. Perhaps another waltz was in order, a delicate, springy, one two three rhythm; John could keep that up as he walked to class.

"I hate that son of a bitch," Tom growled. Regina gave a wan smile.

"Which son of a bitch?"

"All of them." Tom had spent all day being laughed at, talked over, and stared at with a disappointment he had only known from his father before. His first instinct was to throw enough money at his problem until it went away; Tom had earlier given Alan a nice watch, promising it would suit him well, but Alan looked at it, dismissed it with a sneer as an inferior model, and dropped it on the floor. And he, that little rascal, was about to step on it with his hard sole and grind the watch into the floor before Tom lunged down in the nick of time and saved it. What had gotten into Alan to make him turn so spunky, so confident? Tom was not used to thinking of Alan as anything but a kind, if chronically hopeless, sidekick. Intuition warned him that he was drawing close to some immense and inscrutable cosmic climax, and his broad, meaty, towering frame tingled from head to toe at the thought that Alan, whoever he would turn out to be, was destined to serve as his nemesis. There were grand stakes at play now, and Alan had messed with the wrong Thomas Langley III.

Tom's mind whirred like a motor in overdrive, but for all his tingling, Tom was a bit spineless. Knowing that was the mood Alan was in, Tom had wisely decided not to ask him if there was any chance that on account of his previous good behavior, he could be promoted from Epsilon to at least a Gamma. At least Gammas didn't need to pick up trash in bags that were hung from their backs; many played impromptu basketball with their milk cartons and orange peels, and really did not mind at all when their aim was poor and food scraps slid down Tom's neck. Tom would have gone to seek refuge in the club meeting, hoping for some sort of Christian charity, but while they accepted Epsilons, they did not accept his kind of Epsilon.

Tom then tried Frank, who by the end of Monday was still grappling with the issue of Tom as well. Tom's fall from grace was thematic, if anything, but it still wasn't as clean as it could be; Tom and Regina were still on campus—even he couldn't make them disappear. They clearly proved convenient scapegoats for everything wrong on campus and with the school, but the logical antecedent of that was with their disappearance, the school would somehow become infinitely better. And it didn't seem to be so. The school was great, of course, but somewhere out there was an irascible Tom. Tom had a mind, and Frank had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

"Frank, you slimy, little, putrid bastard!" Tom yelled.

"Hello darkness my old friend, you've come to meet with me again," Frank began with a smirk, one which Tom used to think clever. "What's on the menu today, an apology? A misguided speech? Make it quick, please; there's a limit to my boundless wisdom that I share with Epsilons." Frank stared Tom directly in the eyes until he backed away.

"I can make it happen, Frank. I can pull the thread and unravel all of this. Juliet won't ever speak to you again, and quite frankly, nobody else but your cultists will want to even see you in the hallway," Tom snarled.

"It's not quite as simple as that, Tom. Nobody else really minds the costume change, and if they have principles that oppose what I'd call a slight reduction in freedoms, they keep quiet. That's the funny thing about principles, everyone claims to have them until not having them becomes advantageous. Is it really worth making a big fuss out of a dress code and the national anthem? They certainly don't think so."

"It doesn't matter what you're doing, it's still wrong. If they will not speak, I will. The truth is what matters here, and Juliet will agree with me. Unlike you, she has principles."

"My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl," Frank smiled. What would he tell her anyway? There was a moral event horizon somewhere already passed as soon as the celery juice scheme had been deemed a great success, and oh yeah, Tom got in trouble for that too, didn't he? As always, Tom would simply appear jealous.

"You're a terrible person, Frank, but I can't say I disagree. Juliet's brainwashed herself anyway, and if I had to guess, this wasn't a conscious effort on your part. God, maybe she's worse than you are!" Frank's expression briefly soured; was he mad?

"Well, nice conversation. Just remember to keep those displays to a minimum in the future, all right? Next time it won't just be detention and demotion."

"You despise me, don't you?" Tom called out with his last shred of ego.

"If I gave you any thought, I would." That one hurt. Tom stomped away, mumbling something under his breath that Frank could not overhear but assumed was incoherent. Tom had no greater fantasy than to be known, to be known by everyone, and occupy at least a good portion of their waking thoughts. He wanted people to think "gee, how is Tom doing today?" and "I sure wish I could be like Tom!", not whatever they thought now, which apparently wasn't much of anything! Ignominy was a terrible fate, but anonymity was worse. That was a good question, actually—which was worse: everyone in the school not knowing who Tom was beyond passing impressions, or everyone knowing Tom as the lowest of the low, the toddler who may as well have started screaming and pounding the walls of the gymnasium.

Mrs. Huang was happy to see Frank's silhouette behind the door, and ran to let him in. Heller only offered five levels of Chinese class, and as Frank had completed his last the previous year, he never had any occasion to swing by. She still saw Juliet in class, at least, who while vivacious felt in her perception incomplete without the other half of the dynamic duo.

"How nice to see you again! Long time no see!" Mrs. Huang smiled, urging him to sit down and scavenge some of the leftover mooncakes from class that day. "What's the special occasion? You didn't bring Juliet?"

"Don't worry, Mrs. Huang, I see plenty of her; one can have too much of a good thing, you know. I was here just to get a second opinion on our latest school controversy, seeing as I just had a tense conversation with one of the people involved."

"You have nothing to worry about, Frank. Now you know what it's like to be a teacher: we have to discipline people every day! I do really like your new system, it makes things a lot easier on my end. If you think dealing with two people is hard, imagine one hundred!"

"I can understand where Tom's coming from, and that's the issue. I've always had this unfortunate tendency of sympathizing with the underdog. Not to say either of them are underdogs, but you know, I can't help wonder if this system isn't helping them out as it should."

"Of course it is, Frank. There are hundreds of other people out there who are behaving exactly as they should. All my students are so well-behaved now, and every other teacher has nothing but nice things to say too. I forget exactly how you wrote this, but I remember you wrote in How To Be A Good Person something like 'be careful of others before they betray you.' I don't know Tom, other than that he must be a very, very bad person, but I know that he would not even think to care about you if he were the one in charge," Mrs. Huang explained as if it were common sense. "Quit worrying and go change the world." Frank thanked her for the ever-practical advice and left her room, deciding if he wanted to mope around campus for a while or go home. Those days, Frank always had something to do on campus, enough that if he wanted, he could work the same hours as his teachers. One disadvantage of living within walking distance of school was exactly that: the journey was trivial, so easy as to be unimportant. Frank felt too tired to change the world, so instead he walked home, waving to Juliet through the chain-link when she waved first at him, patiently resisting the temptation to jaywalk, shivering slightly in the autumnal breeze.

Discussion Questions:

Are John and Beth a good match?

How does Tom's argument with Frank characterize him? Do you think he's experienced any character growth?

Is Mrs. Huang's perspective on the club reasonable? Why is such emphasis being placed on the club's benefits?