The school was a cacophony of mundane dread, a fortress of fluorescent lights and scuffed linoleum built to contain teenage entropy. Lockers slammed, gossip shrieked, and the air hummed with the low-grade anxiety of unfinished homework. It was a universe away from warded gates and the smell of rain on old leather.
Ace slumped at his desk, the ghost of his mother's omelette sitting uneasily alongside the memory of Axl's scars. The classroom felt like a fishbowl—too bright, too loud, too small after the expansive, dangerous quiet of the compound that morning.
The front door swung open, and a hush fell like a executioner's hood.
It was Mr. John. He was the physical embodiment of a sigh. Middle-aged, with a hairline engaged in a slow, strategic retreat, and glasses so thick they magnified his permanently disappointed eyes into great, watery orbs of academic suffering. In his hands was a stack of papers, held like evidence at a trial.
The silence in the room became absolute. Not even the flies, usually daring buzzy acrobats, dared to break the sanctity of the moment. Everyone knew what those papers were. The chemistry test from last week. And Mr. John's face—a masterpiece of profound, weary disillusionment—said everything.
Thud.
He slammed the stack onto his desk with a sound that made half the class flinch. He let out a sigh so long and world-weary it seemed to suck the oxygen from the room.
"I'm sure," he began, his voice flat with the tone of a man who has seen the promised land of knowledge and found you all still wallowing in the swamp of ignorance, "you are all aware of what this represents. These are your test results. And I must say, I am… deeply disappointed."
A brave, or foolish, soul near the front raised a hand. "How bad is it, sir?"
Mr. John didn't answer. He simply shook his head, a slow, metronomic motion of pure, baffled sorrow. It was the look of an archaeologist who had dug for a lost civilization and found a landfill.
"It is… catastrophically bad," he finally pronounced. "The test was not difficult. I ensured this. I even lowered the total marks to a mere twenty, requiring only eight to pass. A concession, I thought. A gesture of goodwill." He paused, letting the magnitude of their collective failure sink in. "And yet, a significant portion of you could not muster even that paltry sum."
Ace's knee bounced under the desk. Eight marks. Pass/Fail. Life/Death. The simplistic, brutal binary of it was almost refreshing compared to the murky, moral greys of his other life. Volatile reactions, Mr. John had said last week. The phrase echoed, and for a split second, it wasn't about chemical bonds. It was the chemical stink of the RV's interior, Axl mixing something that definitely wasn't for a school lab. He blinked, forcing the image away.
The sentencing began. Mr. John called names, handing back papers like a judge passing down terms. The marks were a litany of despair: 2, 3, 1, a spectacular 0.
"Marco."
Marco, sitting beside Ace, winced as if struck. He shuffled to the front, took his paper, and his shoulders visibly collapsed. He trudged back, a man condemned. He slid into his seat and held up the paper for Ace to see: a red, circled 4.
"My mom is gonna kill me," Marco whispered, the sound hollow with genuine fear. "She'll use my own Xbox cord to do it."
"Yeah," Ace muttered, his own gut twisting. "I hear you. I bombed it too."
Marco shot him a look of pure, salty betrayal. "Really? Cuz you always say that, and then you somehow pull, like, a nine out of your ass. It's your thing."
"I'm telling the truth," Ace insisted, the anxiety feeling real now. "I seriously fucked this one up. I spent the whole test trying to remember if CH4 was a carbon thing or if it stood for Chapter 4."
Marco just stared ahead, a martyr to maternal wrath.
Then, the call came. "Ace."
Ace's stomach dropped. He stood, the walk to the front feeling ten miles long. Mr. John's magnified eyes regarded him with zero expectation. Ace took the paper, face down. He turned and began the march of shame back to his seat.
He flipped it over.
13.
He'd passed. Not just passed. He'd crushed it, by the dismal standards of this courtroom.
He slid into his chair, the number burning in his vision. How?
He didn't have time to process it. An eraser, hurled with surprising force, pinged off the side of his head.
"Ow! What the hell, man?"
Marco was staring at him, his expression a perfect canvas of hurt, betrayal, and utter disgust. "You said you'd fail, you lying piece of shit."
"I thought I did!" Ace hissed back, a bewildered smile tugging at his lips despite himself.
"Yeah. Whatever." Marco turned away, sinking into his chair. "Fuck you and your… your competent brain."
Ace looked back at the 13. A strange, quiet victory in a world of grading rubrics. He'd escaped one execution. He had no idea how. But in the grand, terrifying chemistry of his life, this was the one benign, inexplicable reaction.
The rustle of failing papers subsided into a low tide of misery. Whispers of despair, the choked sound of someone trying not to cry, the hollow thud of a forehead meeting a desk. Mr. John stood before them, a monument to pedagogical failure. He placed his palms flat on his desk and leaned forward, the overhead lights glinting off his lenses, turning his eyes into two blinding, judgmental suns.
He let the silence curdle for a long moment before speaking, his voice dangerously calm.
"Chemistry," he said, the word hanging in the air like a challenge. "You don't seem to grasp its importance. You treat it as a collection of random symbols, a pointless hoop to jump through. So, I will ask you a fundamental question. One that requires no memorization, only a shred of intellectual curiosity."
He straightened up, his gaze sweeping the room, lingering on each dejected face. "Why? Why do we study chemistry?"
It was the kind of open-ended, philosophical question designed to elicit thoughtful silence or a brave, if simple, answer about understanding the world. The room obliged with the former. Heads stayed down. Eyes avoided his.
Then, a hand went up.
It wasn't the teacher's pet in the front row. It wasn't the diligent note-taker. It was in the back, near the window.
Every head in the room swiveled. Stares of disbelief locked onto Ace Eldren, who had his arm casually raised, his expression unreadable.
Mr. John's eyebrows climbed his forehead, disappearing behind his frames. A flicker of something—not hope, but profound surprise—crossed his face. "Mr. Eldren," he said, the title sounding strange in his mouth. "You have an answer?"
Ace lowered his hand. A slow, stupid grin spread across his face, the one he wore when he was about to set something on fire just to watch the colors. It was a grin that promised chaos.
He didn't shout. He said it with the clear, declarative tone of a student stating an undeniable scientific fact.
"To make methamphetamine."
The words didn't echo. They were absorbed by the stunned silence of the room, a sponge soaking up something toxic. For three full seconds, there was no sound. The clock ticked. A bird chirped outside. The entire class was frozen in a collective state of shock, caught between the urge to gasp and the primal need to laugh.
Mr. John's face underwent a rapid, terrible transformation. The surprise melted into confusion, which then curdled into dawning, apoplectic horror.
Ace wasn't finished. He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial, dead-serious register, the kind used in crime documentaries. He pointed a deliberate finger at Marco, who had gone pale beside him.
"I know the chemistry," Ace stated, as if laying out a business plan. "And he knows the business."
That did it.
A snort—a single, explosive, helpless snort of laughter—erupted from a kid two rows over. It was the pin that popped the balloon.
The classroom erupted. Not in laughter, but in a massive, gasping intake of breath, followed by a wave of muffled shrieks and choked-off giggles. Marco made a small, strangled noise and sank so low in his chair he practically vanished.
Mr. John's composure shattered. The calm was vaporized by a visible, trembling rage. His face turned a mottled red. He pointed a shaking finger at the door, his voice rising to a roar that cracked with sheer, unprofessional fury.
"OUT!" he bellowed, spittle flying. "OUT OF MY SIGHT! BOTH OF YOU! TO THE HALL! NOW! MOVE!"
The command was nuclear. Ace stood up, his stupid grin still firmly in place, a mask of pure, unrepentant anarchy. He grabbed his bag. Marco, looking like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole, scrambled up and followed, not making eye contact with anyone, especially the teacher whose career they had just probably shortened by a decade.
They walked the gauntlet of thirty stunned faces, past the kid who'd snorted and was now crying silent tears of hysterical laughter into his textbook, past Mr. John who was now gripping the edge of his desk as if to keep from launching himself across the room.
The door to the hall never looked so much like an exit from one world and an entrance to another. Ace pushed it open, and the weight of the room's chaos pushed them out into the quiet, sterile fluorescence of the hallway.
The heavy classroom door swung shut behind them with a soft, definitive click, severing the electric chaos inside from the tomblike quiet of the hallway. The sound of Mr. John's furious, muffled voice was immediately swallowed by institutional acoustics. They were alone in a long, linoleum-floored expanse, lit by the sickly glow of fluorescent tubes.
For a moment, the only sound was the frantic, shallow rhythm of Marco's breathing. He slumped against the lockers opposite the classroom door, the metallic rattle loud in the silence. He stared at Ace, his face a masterpiece of shell-shocked disbelief.
"Seriously?" Marco's voice was a hoarse whisper, as if speaking too loud might summon more wrath. "Was that joke worth it?"
Ace didn't answer right away. He leaned his shoulder against the cool locker beside Marco, letting his bag slide to the floor. He tilted his head back, looking up at the pitted ceiling tiles. The adrenaline of the stunt was still buzzing in his veins, a cheap, familiar high. It was a different flavor from the cold focus of a hunt, but it scratched a similar itch—the need to break a tense silence, to shatter an unbearable atmosphere.
He took his time, letting Marco stew. Then, slowly, he looked over. The stupid grin was still there, etched onto his face like a birthmark. It was wider now, more relaxed. A genuine article.
"Yeah," Ace said, the word simple and final. "Definitely."
Marco just stared. Then, a sound escaped him—a short, sharp exhale that was half laugh, half sob of pure exasperation. He shook his head, running a hand through his hair. "You're impossible. You know that, right? Certifiably. They should study you."
Ace's grin didn't falter. He shrugged, the picture of serene acceptance of his own nature.
Marco's own smile, weak and disbelieving, finally broke through. But it faded as he studied his friend's face. The grin was real, but Ace's eyes… they were doing that thing again. Looking at the hallway not as a place of detention, but as a terrain. Scanning the exits, the sightlines. The mirth didn't reach all the way up.
"You've been… weirdly on edge since first period," Marco said, his voice dropping, losing its theatrical annoyance. "Jumpier than usual. And the usual for you is, like, a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Everything okay? Is it…" He glanced nervously at the classroom door. "Is it leftover Zach stuff?"
Ace pushed off the lockers. The question was a bucket of cold water. Leftover Zach stuff. It felt like ancient history. A simple, human monster from a simpler time. The real answer was parked in his driveway, covered in river-basin mud and eating all the food in his house.
"Nah," Ace said, his voice carefully light. He bent to pick up his bag. "Zach's a ghost. This was just… a really boring class. Needed to liven it up."
He slung the bag over his shoulder. The movement was easy, but Marco didn't miss the way Ace's head turned, just for a second, not down the hall towards the principal's office, but back towards the main entrance of the school. As if calculating the distance.
"Right," Marco said, not believing him for a second. He pushed off the lockers too, falling into step beside Ace as they began the obligatory, slow walk of the condemned towards wherever they were supposed to report. "So, what's the plan? We just hang out here until he cools off?"
"Something like that," Ace murmured.
They walked in silence for a few paces. The distant, droning chant of a history class reciting dates filtered through a door. The squeak of a janitor's cart wheels echoed from a cross-hall. It was the symphony of institutional normalcy.
Ace's grin was gone now, replaced by his usual flat, observant expression. But in the quiet, with only the hum of the lights for company, the grin felt like a ghost on his face. A phantom shield against a different kind of silence—the one where, beneath the school's mundane sounds, he could still hear the guttural rumble of an old RV engine, ticking as it cooled.
The school bell for the next period was the only alarm that mattered in this world.
For now.
The words didn't echo. They were absorbed by the stunned silence of the room, a sponge soaking up something toxic. For three full seconds, there was no sound. The clock ticked. A bird chirped outside. The entire class was frozen in a collective state of shock, caught between the urge to gasp and the primal need to laugh.
Mr. John's face underwent a rapid, terrible transformation. The surprise melted into confusion, which then curdled into dawning, apoplectic horror.
Ace wasn't finished. He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial, dead-serious register, the kind used in crime documentaries. He pointed a deliberate finger at Marco, who had gone pale beside him.
"I know the chemistry," Ace stated, as if laying out a business plan. "And he knows the business."
That did it.
A snort—a single, explosive, helpless snort of laughter—erupted from a kid two rows over. It was the pin that popped the balloon.
The classroom erupted. Not in laughter, but in a massive, gasping intake of breath, followed by a wave of muffled shrieks and choked-off giggles. Marco made a small, strangled noise and sank so low in his chair he practically vanished.
Mr. John's composure shattered. The calm was vaporized by a visible, trembling rage. His face turned a mottled red. He pointed a shaking finger at the door, his voice rising to a roar that cracked with sheer, unprofessional fury.
"OUT!" he bellowed, spittle flying. "OUT OF MY SIGHT! BOTH OF YOU! TO THE HALL! NOW! MOVE!"
The command was nuclear. Ace stood up, his stupid grin still firmly in place, a mask of pure, unrepentant anarchy. He grabbed his bag. Marco, looking like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole, scrambled up and followed, not making eye contact with anyone, especially the teacher whose career they had just probably shortened by a decade.
They walked the gauntlet of thirty stunned faces, past the kid who'd snorted and was now crying silent tears of hysterical laughter into his textbook, past Mr. John who was now gripping the edge of his desk as if to keep from launching himself across the room.
The door to the hall never looked so much like an exit from one world and an entrance to another. Ace pushed it open, and the weight of the room's chaos pushed them out into the quiet, sterile fluorescence of the hallway.