pink. The inner edge of her penciled brow is smeared like she’s been rubbing at it. I have the impulse to reach up and touch it, that bare little arc of skin. I shove my hands in my pockets.
“Are your parents home?” she says.
I tell her no, that my mom is at work. And that my dad doesn’t live here anymore.
“Okay,” she says.
And I’m grateful she doesn’t say, I’m sorry, because then I don’t have to say, It’s okay. Or, I see him on weekends. Or, It’s better this way. Or any other of that divorce-kid bullshit.
“We have until six,” I say. “My mom usually gets home around then.”
Not that it’s against the rules to have Saff over. In fact, I’m pretty sure Mom would be delighted, which is precisely why I don’t want her to find Saff here. It’s too hard to have Mom hoping things about me. She got home before me yesterday, when I was at the park with Saff. Now she keeps looking at me, but she won’t ask where I was, and I won’t tell her. Not just out of stubbornness.
I’ve bought a tube of cookies and a couple sodas from the corner store in case Saff is hungry. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen, of course, but Mom will notice if any of it is missing, and she’ll think (hope) that I’m the one who’s eaten it. I offer the snacks to Saff like I haven’t bought them special. I even left them in the kitchen so that I can pretend to go in and get them from the cupboard. We take the food into my room.
Saff turns in a slow circle. I picture my room through her eyes: twin bed, rag rug, desk-chair-screen setup. No bullshit band posters or Japanese mech figurines to announce my unique storebought personality. I threw all that stuff in a box last year. Now the room is simple (bare, Mom says), pure (monkish, Mom says). The walls are its only distinction. Today they’re set to Victorian wallpaper, an exact replica of the wallpaper in the old BBC show Sherlock. On one wall there’s even the image of a fireplace, complete with ashtray and curling pipe.
I wait to see if Saff gets the joke, but she sinks down on the floor by my bed without comment. She slides out a couple cookies, then shakes the tube at me. When I say, “No thanks,” she doesn’t push it, doesn’t study me with meaningful eyes, doesn’t say, Are you sure? So I return the favor and don’t ask why she’s been crying.
Instead, I say, “Tell me more about the game.”
“Game?”
“The Scapegoat Game.”
She rolls her eyes and bites off half a cookie in one go. “Oh. That fucking thing.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Whose do you think?”
“Ellie’s.”
She nods.
Popularity—who’s cool, who’s not, jocks, nerds, whatever—is, for Saff and me, something that exists only in movies about high school. When you have a class of twelve people, there really aren’t enough of you to divide up into cliques. Sure, there are some best friends, like Ellie and Saff, or like Josiah and me (used to be). There’re some couples, Ellie and Linus for a while, then Brynn and Linus, basically every girl and Linus. Except Saff. She’s never been with Linus. Though maybe she has this past year; I wouldn’t know, I’ve been gone. My point is, mostly everyone hangs out with everyone else.
There is one role, though, one rule: Ellie is always the leader. It’s been that way from our first year, back when Ellie would whip the dodgeball at you and then, when you cried over the burn it’d left on your leg, explain how that was just part of the game, explain it so calmly and confidently that you found yourself nodding, even though the tears were still rolling down your cheeks. That makes it sound like I think Ellie is a bad person. I don’t. In fact, the older I get, the more I think that Ellie’s got it right, that she knew at five what the rest of us wouldn’t figure out until our teens: the world is tough, so you’d better be tough right back.
“And so?” I say to Saff, because there’s always more to the story when Ellie is involved.
“And so, after Ellie comes up with the scapegoat idea, she even volunteers to go first. Which, if you think about it, is pretty smart because at first everyone is, you know, gentle. Warming up to it. Also, if you go first, you haven’t scapegoated anyone else yet, so they don’t have anything to pay you back for.” Saff pauses. “Do you think she actually plans this stuff out ahead of time?”
“I think Ellie has an instinct for weakness.”
“Well, that first week we didn’t do much—tugged Ellie’s hair, kicked the back of her chair in class, made her carry our lunch trays. Nothing really. I think she had fun. Actually, I know she did. The last day, she dressed up as Calla Pax, from that sacrifice-on-the-ice movie we watched. In, like, a sexy white robe. She looked great. Of course. Then, the next week, Linus went. The guys were rougher on him, but not in a mean way, if that makes sense? And you know how Linus is. Easy with it all. It felt like a game. Fun even. Like free. When you have permission to … if you can do whatever … sometimes it’s like …” She taps a thumb against her chest, then gives up trying to explain and takes another cookie. Her third. (I can’t help counting other people’s food.)
“But then it got bad. Each week, each new person. We kept upping it. Meaner. Rougher.”
“When did you go?”
“Last,” she says, smiling bitterly. “Like a fucking fool.”
She looks like she’s going to start crying again. I type some notes into my screen to give her a chance to get ahold of herself.
“‘An instinct for weakness,’” she mutters.
I look up from my screen. “I didn’t mean that you’re weak.”
“I don’t know. I feel pretty weak.”
“You’re not, though. That’s why they gave you zom. They had to make you weak. Which proves you’re not. See?”
She bites on her lip. “I haven’t told you about Astrid yet.”
“Astrid is weak.”
“Yeah, I know. She was scapegoat just before me.”
Astrid’s parents both work as lawyers for big tech, her mom for Google, her dad for Swink. For them, arguing is sport, which maybe partway explains the way Astrid is. If you’re someone who needs to explain why people are the way they are. In second grade Astrid used to brush her hair over her face. Right over the front of it until it covered everything right down to her chin. The teachers were constantly giving her hair bands and brushes and telling her how nice she looked in a ponytail. At Seneca Day, there’s a certain style the teachers are all supposed to use, “suggesting instead of correcting.” But finally one day, Teacher Hawley lost it and shouted, “Astrid, why do you keep doing that!” And all the rest of us looked to the back row where Astrid sat and here comes this little voice, out from behind all that hair: “Because I like it better in here.”
I still think about that. Because I like it better in here.
“We got carried away,” Saff says. “We thought because we’re such good friends that we could say anything, do anything, and it was safe.”
She goes quiet, so I prompt her: “Astrid.”
“I just rode her, Rhett. All week. I didn’t let up.” As she talks, she pushes up her sleeves like she’s preparing for hard work. “I knew it was bad, too. I knew she was going into the bathroom to cry during break. And that made me even harder on her. Talk about an instinct for weakness.”
“You’re saying Ellie put you up to it?”
“That’s the thing. She didn’t. It was me. All of it. I was way worse than the rest of them. Even Ellie probably