Ted crossed his arms and tried his hardest to look contrite while Ms. Stevens yelled at him and Tom. He didn't see what they had done wrong—they were just a bit chattier than normal that day as they ran laps. The only people they were distracting were each other. She must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Tom chose instead to appear aloof, especially as Ms. Stevens was directing most of her attention toward Ted. He stepped away for a moment to grab a drink of water, which Ted noticed and immediately thought disrespectful, but Ms. Stevens did not seem to notice.

"Ted, detention during lunch! Tom, 20 pushups!" she concluded, then turned away to inspect someone else. This wasn't fair.

"Tough break," Tom said, and shrugged as he dropped down to start doing pushups, slackening his arms whenever Ms. Stevens turned away.

"What did he do wrong that I didn't?" Ted asked Ms. Stevens, who refused to make eye contact with him.

"Life's not fair. Today isn't your lucky day," she responded with a sigh, as if to indicate that she knew she was saying something stupid but didn't want Ted to call her out on it. Tom finished his pushups and brushed off his hands, before ambling to another group of his friends. Ted didn't think he was crazy here for thinking that irrational. He went to ask Jason for his opinion, who said something similar:

"You win some, you lose some. It's a hot day anyway. You'll be cooler inside."

Jason clearly had never gotten detention before in his life. Ted assumed it was inevitable: Jason had many habits Ted suspected would lead to his ultimate downfall. Jason was defiant, extremely willing to say no to unreasonable requests. When Ted did this, he was being snarky and talking back to his superiors; when Jason did this, he was being innovative and demonstrating leadership. Jason patted others on the head as a form of greeting, particularly girls Ted thought, although he reconsidered his initial hypothesis when Jason did the same to him. Nobody considered this behavior normal, and eventually, someone would topple the first domino in the chain that would lead to consequences for Jason and maybe something positive for himself. Ted had no choice but to finish class that day without taking any sort of decisive action. In the locker room, nobody commented on what had happened; Ted believed this was because he was being ostracized, but in reality, nobody else had noticed.

A second hypothesis came to Ted as he sat inside, watching the clock tick away and the future juvenile delinquents around him carve their initials into the desks: Tom had bribed Ms. Stevens. Tom's father was a lawyer, and apparently a litigious one too; he was nicknamed "Bulldog" by his peers, which Ted found quite evocative. Tom certainly had the wealth to slip Ms. Stevens a check at some point to keep her on his good side, which was a step too far even for Ted. Ted was not opposed to unethical behavior, but he did not view his teachers as investments. Jason was right, at least: the classroom where detention was being held that day was air-conditioned. Ted looked at his sandwich, which suddenly did not seem that appealing—he needed better food. Ted also did not like being a spectacle; other students walked by the door and stared inside, just like he had done in the past, undoubtedly thinking what scoundrels were imprisoned in there. Ted considered himself better than a scoundrel, and he did not deserve to be embarrassed like this!

While Ted stewed in his own misery, John wandered the hallways searching for somewhere to sit. Occasionally, some spot in the school would draw John's attention, as if there were a neon sign above telling him to come and relax a little. Beth walked by to see John sitting facing a wall; even for him, this was unusual.

"Are you OK, John?" she asked, and John turned around, appearing like he had just woken up.

"I'm fine, yes. How are you?"

"I'm enjoying life. Louis isn't here today, so I was looking for something to do. Mind if I join you?"

"Go ahead, I never mind the company."

"Should I be facing the wall, too? Is there something here I'm not seeing?" John chuckled, and Beth sat down next to him. She turned to look at the wall one last time, just to be safe, and then took out her lunch.

This was the first John had heard of Beth and Louis being together. After some casual inquiries, which Beth responded to eagerly, he discovered that at a friend's birthday party, Beth ran into Louis and chatted a while. The next day at school, they talked more, and this initial warmness escalated into friendship and then romance. They shared few interests and had dissimilar temperaments, but Louis was nice to her, and she was the same to him. Freshman year was early, John assumed, for a relationship; Beth was clearly extremely precocious.

"What do you do at parties?" John asked quizzically; his idea of a birthday party involved party hats, cake, and candles, nothing more.

"Fair is foul and foul is fair. We fly around on witch's brooms, dance naked in the woods, and mix magic potions in cauldrons. If we're feeling especially frisky, we lick toads," Beth joked, and when she saw John was staring at her with horror, she clarified: "Of course we don't do that, except on Halloween. We chat, eat food, nothing terribly exciting. You aren't missing out on much."

"Is love a tender thing?"

"I don't see why it isn't," Beth responded declaratively. That was a good enough answer for John. Simply by not flirting with him at every opportunity, Beth seemed like a kinder, smarter, and cooler person. She could act as an insulator, John thought, against the malign influences of Regina, who began to seem a diametric opposite. If Regina was what was wrong with high school, Beth must be what is good. Especially after the Regina incident, as John noticed, Beth seemed a bit more friendly on the bus, returning his waves and occasionally going as far as to say hello. Just as she did not recoil from his presence, she also did not immediately turn toward him and inch toward his seat, as Regina did when she took the bus one day and along with Beth, decided to sit with their mutual friend John. What else could he ask for? John also realized this was awfully poor timing for any sort of revelation, seeing as Beth was now with someone else.

John had been urged along to consider more of these thoughts yesterday during English class, when Ms. Baldwin triumphantly announced the culmination of their study of Romeo and Juliet: the class was split up into small groups, and together they would each perform their own scenes and cumulatively the entire play. Ms. Baldwin had a wicked sense of humor and some unusual theories about how to turn her unwilling students into actors, and had paired John and Regina together as Romeo and Juliet in multiple scenes. This was not entirely driven by a desire to play matchmaker: John and Regina excelled at reading scenes in class, both understanding not only the arcane language, but how to act dramatically. John was not nearly as enthused as everyone else at his table when the pairings were announced; in fact, he felt uncomfortable. While Regina was trying to sell him on the idea of a stage kiss as being extremely pivotal to their scenes, he was juggling words in his mind on how exactly to frame his complaint. He couldn't call Regina a sociopath, as much as he thought that an appropriate epithet. Then again, was it really a big deal? It was only a scene, in a play, one played out on the tiled floor of a brightly lit classroom and not on a stage in London. And with Beth now out of the question, it was too late for second options. It was ironic, indeed: John's only love was sprung from his only hate.

They practiced outside that day in the central courtyard, Regina and John sitting under a large tree in bloom and Beth and Ted, who were performing another scene, sitting a few feet away. Regina and Beth took every opportunity they could to chat with each other, and Regina felt no shame in drawing John in as well:

"Eugh, some pollen or whatever fell into my bra. Hey, John, have you seen a bra before?" John nodded and said yes, when shopping with his parents, he had passed through the lingerie aisle. Regina appeared amazed, and Beth laughed.

"Shouldn't we be practicing our lines?" John responded with a hint of exasperation—this pattern had repeated itself ad nauseam for some time, Regina testing John on some sort of trivia and him responding in turn that they needed to get back to work.

"Don't be silly, we have plenty of time for that. We perform on Monday, remember?"

"But if we use up all our class time now, when would we rehearse?"

"You can always come to my place after school, or I can come to yours; I've seen you on the bus before, I kind of know where you live." John did not think this was a particularly professional response, and he indicated as such. Regina laughed again and begrudgingly read some of her lines. To John, school was school and fun was fun: never the twain shall meet. Even when riding the bus with his classmates, he felt uncomfortable because eventually he would slip up and do something untoward. Now, if Beth and Regina were swapped in their pairings, and she had proposed they rehearse after school, he would have been more willing to say yes. She was in a relationship, the ultimate sign of discretion: it would be impossible then for her and John to read any lines with subliminal intent.

John tolerated this amusement for the rest of the period, then left class in a desultory mood. Frank spotted him as John began his daily trek toward the bus stop.

"What sadness lengthens John's hours?" Frank asked with a smile that then turned caring; Frank could only speculate what was wrong, but seeing as it was after English class, Regina was surely to blame.

"Not having that which having makes them short," John responded, still with a minor frown. "Rehearsal was a disaster. Regina was distracted the entire time. How are your scenes going?"

"Our teacher put it up to a class vote after she saw only a small minority wanted to perform romantic scenes, so now we're in groups performing our choice of something classic. My group's doing Willy Wonka."

"Is that really classic though?"

"Our teacher thought so," Frank commented, and started humming "Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure imagination..."

"You can sing?"

"Oh God no, I'm not singing, Adrian is. I'm Augustus Gloop. But something is clearly bothering you besides just Romeo and Juliet. Do you want to talk about it?"

"What do you do when you like someone, but that person's in a relationship already?"

"I can't say what I would do, but for what you should do, you can simply be friends for a while. And maybe, if things go just right, you will have an opportunity to strike. By then, they'll have warmed up to your presence where it will feel natural to say yes. And even if they don't say yes, you will be happy enough already that you won't mind."

"Thank you, Frank. It's nice of you to be so helpful. Wisdom is a virtue."

"It certainly is," Frank concluded, trailing off as soon as he saw John's eyes turn toward Beth, who had beat them to the bus stop. Oh what a tangled web we weave, Frank thought to himself as he walked onward.

In that moment, John's meditations began anew. John thought back to a few weeks before the revelation, desperately searching his memory for indications of "why him?". He remembered one of the swim days, when Regina spotted his bare chest and cold body in the huddle and said hello. He stepped back off his towel (at this point the boys had copied the girls' technique) and turned toward the balcony, where Regina stood smiling; clearly she had not had PE yet, or else she would have discovered the pool wasn't heated that day. He felt as if he was under a spotlight just then, but he had thought it random chance that Regina called out to him and not someone else. Clearly it wasn't. Beth waved at John with what by now was a standard friendly routine, they sat apart, and John returned home still in his dreamy reverie.

The following day, Frank sat at Ms. Bracknell's desk as had become accepted custom during office hours. By now, the cast of characters had solidified: the eggheads kept doing whatever they were doing, which today was putting together some sort of robot with tools that made loud beeps, Beth and Louis looked in each other's eyes affectionately while they pretended to work, and John looked back at them occasionally while he actually did work. It was more than a bit disrespectful to publicly court in class, as Ernest had told him when relaying the latest hot gossip about John and Regina; apparently, there was a betting pool going on in their class trying to predict the outcome. Frank had assumed Ernest would be above such trivialities, but Ernest said he had put in $10. Frank let out a sharp exhale of breath and decided he wasn't above a bit of gambling himself, and put in $20 against them becoming an item. Life is too short not to take risks, he told Ernest, who by now was conditioned to bristle at any attempts at a philosophical discussion. Ms. Bracknell agreed with Frank:

"Sure, it's disrespectful, but if I draw attention to it by shouting 'get your hands away from each other!,' then I look like the creep. As long as their grades don't suffer, I can only do so much to interfere in their private lives and emotional development."

"Hold that thought," Frank said when Juliet walked in. Something about Juliet disturbed Frank, and he thought Ms. Bracknell noticed the same. They had never talked in any great depth before, sharing words before class on occasion, when he would make some remark about the weather, she would kindly agree, and they would proceed as if they were strangers on the street until class began. Indeed, they were effectively strangers, their conversations arising out of happenstance and not desire. Frank did not think it surprising that Juliet had asked him for help, almost running after him at the end of class to ask, and he appreciated her punctuality when she arrived at Ms. Bracknell's classroom. Yet, despite this unfamiliarity, she walked to meet him at their private desks in the corner of the classroom as if they were old friends.

"How are you so smart?" Juliet asked after he walked her through a complex trigonometry derivation, her hands reaching toward his paper and pencil to follow along.

"I'm really not. Discipline is all it is. You can learn anything with enough discipline."

"Fine, fine. How are you so disciplined?" Juliet drew out that last word with a trace of sarcasm, and Frank was mildly offended.

"Discipline, of course."

"But seriously, I want to know how I can be like you."

"If you have a question, you can ask it. I can't guarantee I'll answer though, but you can ask."

"What's your favorite bubble tea flavor?"

"I don't have enough of a sweet tooth for that."

"What if you get it unsweetened?" Juliet was enjoying this battle of wits. It was rare she had a chance to learn so much from such simple subject matter.

"I'm not sure. What's yours?"

"Jasmine."

"Jasmine sounds good to me too."

"What do you do in your free time? Do you have free time?"

"I read, I study, whatever amuses me. I try not to bind myself to needless habits."

"You read books? No wonder why you're so smart."

"Don't we all read books?" Frank asked, seeing Juliet's copy of Romeo and Juliet in her backpack still in pristine condition.

"For fun, I mean. I do have my journal. You should try keeping a diary. It's fun, I promise."

"One should always have something sensational to read on the train. What do you write in a journal? I'm afraid I have few thoughts that would ever be interesting enough to remember."

"I would love to know what thoughts you have. Write them in a blog or something and I can remember them for you. You should share with the world what makes you you. I would follow it intently."

"So you're saying that if I were to write a list of quick tips on how anyone, with enough dedication and perseverance, could become just like me, you and many others would be interested?" Frank's mind was running at full gear at this point; Juliet had no idea what a great mistake she was making. Ernest would be so mad.

"I would love to hear your wisdom of any sort, at any time. Everyone would want to become a good person, just like you."

"Hmm... 'How To Be A Good Person.' I like that."

Juliet smiled again, and looked at Frank with such an expression of innocent glee that he was sure she was a fool. Ms. Bracknell shot them a look when they seemed to be having too much quiet fun in their corner; if they weren't being so productive, she would have considered Frank a hypocrite. The bell rang, and Frank assured Juliet that if she had any more questions about academics (he punctuated that point with some emphasis), she could send him an email or find him in the hallway.

"Email? That's so old-fashioned. Send me a text instead," she responded, and she wrote down her number on a scrap of paper and handed it to him, leaning over to make sure he saved it in his phone correctly.

"I am at your service. Typically I wouldn't do this, but here's my number, so call me maybe." Frank had been saving that line for a long time.

"You're hilarious," Juliet said, giving Frank a brief hug, and Ms. Bracknell saw Frank's face contort into an expression of befuddlement. "I feel like some of your smartness just rubbed off on me."

"You're welcome? Take as much as you wish, but now I do have places to be and people to see," Frank said with his usual geniality, and he walked off with haste, checking behind him to make sure Juliet was not following with more inquiries. After he left, Beth and Louis walked up to her, and Beth gave Juliet a knowing glare.

"Be careful, Juliet. There's daggers in men's smiles." It had not occurred to Juliet, or to Frank for that matter, that her behavior could have been perceived as flirtatious; Frank simply thought it unusual. Juliet was used to a certain element of friendliness and gratitude that she perceived as being neglected in modern society. People who looked for subtext in everything were weird, and she knew Frank was too altruistic to ever be duplicitous in that way.

Frank had largely shelved any thoughts of that interesting experience until after school, when he ran into Juliet and Regina.

"Have a great weekend! I can't wait to see what you write! If I have any ideas, I'll text you," Juliet said to him, and both he and Regina were astonished.

"What are you writing, Frank?" Regina asked, curious to know what had suddenly drawn Juliet's attention.

"He's going to share his wisdom with the world. I'm very excited," Juliet explained to Regina while Frank took the opportunity to slip out unseen.

"He has wisdom?"

"Too much for any of us to understand."

"But more importantly, he gave you his number? I'm impressed."

"I gave him mine first, but yes. He's so nice. I think we will become great friends. You know, you may have better luck with John if you're a bit nicer too. Frank can teach you."

"If I be waspish, best beware my sting," Regina responded as she climbed into her mother's car. Juliet shrugged and kept walking.

As soon as Frank got home, he opened a Google Doc on his computer, wrote "How To Be A Good Person" at the top, and stared at it for a few minutes. What reasons did he have to be treated as a source of wisdom? Sure, he was kind and, he hoped, accurate, but people trusted him without any particular reason. People wanted to be his friend. They wanted to learn how to be a good person from him, all his thoughts on bubble tea, literature, and society at large. He would give them what they wanted and have a little fun with it too. He saw some room for improvement in the school, and if this improvement meant being the beloved protector of all, Frank truly had nothing to lose but everything to gain. Someone more conniving in his position would start a cult; it was too early for Frank to do the same. He could come up with something if given time, and what did every cult need? A sacred text. Through the weekend, he added new thoughts whenever the mood struck him. He would wake up to a text from Juliet every day that, using far too many emoji, would suggest some new topic that she clearly considered indispensable to being a good person; clearly giving her his number was a huge mistake. Writing his manifesto came easily to him: he had by then quite a few months of stories to lampoon, mannerisms to critique, and kernels of genuine advice to season what was otherwise turning out to be a fairly tongue-in-cheek essay. Juliet came to him Monday morning before school, eager to see what he had come up with.

"I have a draft, but I want to spend one more day editing it. Patience, young grasshopper."

"Fine," she huffed, and she walked away disappointedly. He hadn't lied: he did want one more day, but this was so Pranav could review it.

"This is hysterical, Frank. And they're really going to fall for this?" Pranav asked between bouts of laughter.

"We shall see. Any feedback before I release my creation into the world tomorrow?"

"It's perfect, this is perfect as is."

That phrase did not describe John's state of mind during lunch that day while he frantically read through his lines one last time. While John did not need to memorize his lines, he wanted his delivery to be as fluid as possible. The last thing he wanted was to awkwardly stumble and stutter through his scene with Regina; that would only draw out his misery. Thank God he convinced her that the stage kiss would not be needed—and no, he told her, it didn't need to be a real one for "historical accuracy." He hoped Regina would not embarrass him.

Act II, scene ii. Ms. Baldwin's classroom. Enter John, standing on the opposite side of a balcony constructed from cardboard boxes and chairs. He jests at scars that never felt a wound. Enter Regina, ascending the balcony, her head almost touching the ceiling. She stares out toward the class, looking as if she were in heaven. John begins his monologue, Juliet smiling thinly whenever her name is mentioned, and Regina sighs, "Ay me!". He continues, Regina wishing he would call her a "bright angel" outside of class, and she begins her declarations of love, the class marveling at what they view as natural chemistry. They continue their interchange for some time, a few immature people laughing whenever John says the word "breast," ending when Ms. Baldwin turns off the lights with a dramatic flourish at John's last lines. Exeunt.

Discussion Questions:

What function does the incorporation of Romeo and Juliet serve—for instance, why might Juliet be named Juliet? Consider romantic elements from previous chapters and how they're developed more here.

What exactly inspired Frank to write his manifesto? Can you identify details from previous chapters that might have given him material?

Tom and Ted appear inseparable, but what sets them apart?