Episode 1: The Girl With the Hazard Label
Monday mornings run on a system. My system, specifically, because nobody else at Northbridge High seems to understand that a day can be managed if you just respect the schedule enough to build one.
I keep three. The first is academic — classes, deadlines, the slow grinding machine of my GPA. The second is the convenience store two blocks from my house, where I restock shelves after school for six dollars an hour more than minimum wage, which my mother pretends not to be proud of and definitely is. The third is the festival build schedule, because somehow, despite having zero interest in theater, I ended up as interim class president, which means I am contractually — if not legally — obligated to make sure the multipurpose stage doesn't fall over before Northbridge's Fall Festival.
I had all three schedules cross-referenced on a single laminated card in my backpack. I want that on record, because it's the last morning I believed a laminated card could save me from anything.
"Cole. You're up on the ladder or you're down here holding it. Pick one," said Mr. Denny, the shop teacher who'd been drafted into "structural oversight" the way I'd been drafted into everything else — by default, because nobody else raised a hand fast enough.
"Down here holding it," I said, because I value my life and also because I'd read the manufacturer's weight rating for that ladder and it made me nervous in a very specific, very correct way.
That's when the bolt fell.
It wasn't dramatic at first. It was just a small metallic tink against the stage floor, the kind of sound you'd ignore if you weren't the kind of person who catalogs every sound within a fifty-foot radius as a potential incident. I looked up. The lighting rig — four hundred pounds of aluminum truss holding six spotlights nobody had bothered to test-fire yet — swayed. Not fell. Swayed, in that slow, considering way large unstable things do right before they stop considering and start falling.
I had exactly enough time to think this was not on the schedule before something crashed into my side and knocked the air and every rational thought clean out of me.
We hit the prop storage room floor together in a heap of limbs, spilled sawdust, and what I'm fairly sure was a discarded papier-mâché pumpkin from three festivals ago. Above us, muffled through the wall, the rig came down with a sound like the world's least melodic gong.
I lay there for a second, replaying the sequence of events to make sure I hadn't died, and then I became aware of two things simultaneously: one, I was breathing; two, someone was still gripping the front of my shirt with a fist like a vice.
I turned my head.
Iris Vale was staring down at me with the calm, faintly annoyed expression of someone checking a receipt for an overcharge, not someone who had just tackled a boy across a room to save his life.
I should explain who Iris Vale is, in case you've been living under a rock, or more accurately, in case you go to a different high school and have therefore been spared. Iris Vale had been suspended twice — once for picking the lock on the equipment closet to rescue a stray cat that had wandered in and gotten stuck, and once for reasons nobody could agree on, which is somehow worse for a reputation than a reason everyone agrees on. She once mailed a box of rubber spiders to a junior who'd been bullying her friend. She could fix the vending machine with a bobby pin. She kept a crow. The crow's name was Pickle, and Pickle had, at various points, stolen three sets of car keys, a retainer, and — allegedly — a AP Chemistry exam key, though that one was never proven.
They called her the Chaos Queen. Not to her face, generally, because generally people were scared of her face.
"You're not dead," Iris said. It wasn't a question. It was more like she was confirming data.
"I'm — no. I don't think so." My voice came out higher than I would have liked. "You just tackled me into a wall."
"I tackled you away from a falling four-hundred-pound truss," she said, with the mild indignance of someone being blamed for doing math correctly. "You're welcome."
I sat up, brushed sawdust off my sleeve with hands that were shaking slightly more than I wanted to admit, and looked at her properly for maybe the first time in three years of technically attending the same school. Short black hair, one streak dyed a deep, defiant purple. Amber-brown eyes that didn't blink nearly as often as I felt like they should. A jacket with more pockets than any jacket needed, unless you were planning to survive an apocalypse or fix a car on short notice, which — I would later learn — she frequently was.
"Thank you," I managed. "That was — yes. Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." She was still gripping my shirt. She hadn't let go, and I don't think she'd noticed. "I need something from you first."
"...Okay?"
"I need you to date me."
I want to be clear that I laughed. Not because it was funny — it very much was not funny, given the circumstances — but because my brain, faced with a sentence that made no immediate sense, defaulted to the response it uses for all inputs it can't process: nervous laughter, followed by an apology for the nervous laughter.
"Sorry. I don't — sorry, what?"
Iris let go of my shirt, sat back on her heels, and folded her hands over her knees like she was about to deliver a business proposal, which, as it turned out, she basically was.
"The administration is reopening my disciplinary file. There's someone on the student council who's been pushing for it for weeks, building a case that I'm a liability the school can't afford to keep enrolled. If that goes through, I don't graduate with my class. I need something that makes me look — " she paused, visibly hunting for a word that didn't come naturally to her — "safe. Normal. Not a threat to community wellbeing."
"And I'm — "
"You're the guy every teacher in this building trusts unconditionally. You've never been late to anything. You have a permission slip face." She said this like it was simultaneously the dumbest and most useful trait a person could possess. "If I'm dating you, it's harder to argue I'm dangerous. Thirty days. That's all I need. By then the vote on the council will be over and there won't be anything left to reopen."
I opened my mouth to say no. I had the "no" fully loaded — reasonable, calm, footnoted with at least four supporting arguments about how dating someone as a defensive maneuver against a school disciplinary committee was, at minimum, deeply strange, and at maximum, a plan with roughly nine hundred ways to go wrong.
That's when Nolan Price appeared in the doorway of the storage room, took one look at the collapsed rig through the gap in the wall, and said, in a voice pitched exactly loud enough for the two teachers now hurrying over to hear:
"Guess it finally happened. I always said something like this would happen with Vale still enrolled."
I felt Iris go very still beside me. Not scared-still. Coiled-still, like she was deciding between three different responses and none of them were going to help her case.
I looked past Nolan's shoulder at the wreckage of the rig, at the sheared bolt lying near my foot, and something in me — the part that reflexively catalogs details, the part that had spent all morning cross-referencing schedules — caught on something wrong. The bolt hadn't sheared from stress. The edge was too clean, too even, cut rather than torn. You don't get an edge like that from a wrench slipping. You get it from a proper cutting tool, deliberately used, well before this morning.
I don't know why that detail mattered to me more than the version of events where Iris Vale had just, allegedly, sabotaged festival equipment ten feet from where I was standing. Maybe because Iris hadn't picked up a wrench all morning. Maybe because the girl currently sitting next to me covered in sawdust had just thrown herself into a collapsing structure to save someone she'd apparently never spoken two words to before today.
"It's not her," I heard myself say.
Nolan's easy smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes recalibrated. "Careful, Cole. Wouldn't want people getting the wrong idea about you, either."
"Thirty days," I said to Iris, before I had fully finished deciding to say it. "But there are conditions."
Iris turned to look at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her yet — not gratitude, not surprise, something more like recalculating. "Conditions," she repeated.
"Rules. A framework. If we're doing this, we're doing it in a way that doesn't end with either of us getting expelled or arrested."
She held out her hand like we were closing a business deal, which, again, we basically were. "Fine. Write your rules, Cole. I'll sign them."
By lunch, word had already traveled — Northbridge doesn't have a functioning fire alarm system half the time, but its rumor infrastructure could outrun a wildfire. I walked into the cafeteria holding my tray like a shield and found Iris already sitting at my usual table, which was new, since as far as I knew she'd never sat at any table for longer than it took to eat standing up near the door in case she needed to leave fast.
She stood up when she saw me. This should have been my first warning.
"Everyone," she announced, to the entire cafeteria, in a voice with absolutely zero self-consciousness in it, "this is Evan. He's under my protection now."
I would like the record to reflect that I did not choose the phrase under my protection. I would also like the record to reflect that a sophomore three tables over dropped his entire tray at the words, food and tray clattering across the floor in the sudden silence, and that every single head in the cafeteria turned toward us with an expression somewhere between fascination and fear.
"That's not — " I started, grabbing a stack of napkins and crouching to help the poor kid mop up spilled gravy, using my most soothing customer-service voice, the one I'd perfected over a year of calming down customers furious about expired coupons. "It's fine, everyone. Nothing's happening. Please continue with your lunches."
Nobody continued with their lunches. Nobody continues with anything when Iris Vale stands up and makes an announcement.
I sat back down, mortified, and found that Iris had, without comment, placed her pudding cup on my tray. The last pudding cup in the cafeteria, which the freshmen usually fought over like it was contraband.
"You looked like you needed it," she said, like this explained everything, and went back to eating her sandwich as if she hadn't just caused a minor cafeteria incident.
I looked at the pudding cup. I looked at her. I decided that today had already exceeded my capacity for processing new information and ate the pudding.
The rest of the day went, relatively, fine — if "fine" includes three separate teachers pulling me aside to ask, with badly hidden concern, whether everything was "okay at home," and a full-length dating agreement I'd drafted between fourth and fifth period, printed at the school library, twelve numbered rules covering everything from no discussing "handling" people in front of faculty to absolutely no lockpicking tools brought to any date-related activity.
Iris read the whole thing standing outside the gym after last bell, expression unreadable, then produced a red pen from one of her many jacket pockets — I still don't know where she kept a pen that specific color on hand at all times — and signed her name at the bottom with a flourish that looked more like a signature on a legal contract than a permission slip.
"Does handholding require its own clause," she asked, entirely seriously, "or is that covered under general physical contact protocols?"
"I — general physical contact protocols. I think. We can revisit if it becomes an issue."
"Noted." She folded the paper and put it in her pocket like it was something to be filed, not felt. Then she turned to leave, and I found myself standing there a beat too long, watching her go, trying to work out exactly what had just happened to my carefully organized Monday.
That's when I noticed it. Scratched — no, drawn, in deliberate, careful strokes — into the underside of one of the folding tables stacked against the gym wall, half-hidden unless you were crouched at exactly the wrong angle helping stack chairs, which I was.
A red eye. Just an outline, filled in with something that looked suspiciously like the same red ink Iris had used to sign my rulebook, though I was fairly sure it wasn't hers — the strokes were too rushed, too recent.
I called Iris back and pointed at it.
She went quiet in a way I hadn't seen from her yet — not the coiled-still from the storage room, something heavier.
"That's June's symbol," she said, finally. Her voice had lost its usual flat confidence. "Red Eye. It's — she used to use that. But June's not here anymore."
"Who's June?"
Iris didn't answer. She just looked at the drawing a moment longer, jaw tight, and then said, "It's nothing. Forget it," in the exact tone of voice people use when something is very much not nothing.
I didn't push. I should have pushed. I filed it away instead, the way I file everything, in a mental folder labeled Follow Up Later, and told myself that was the responsible thing to do.
I was three blocks from home, replaying the entire impossible day, when my phone buzzed with a text from a number I didn't recognize.
Unknown: the chaos queen's boyfriend is next.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, phone in hand, the fading afternoon light doing nothing to make the message feel less real. Somewhere behind me, a crow — I would come to know its call very well over the following thirty days — let out a single, unimpressed screech, as if it, too, thought my carefully laminated schedule had officially become obsolete.
End of Episode 1.