Sunflower

Credits, especially the opening ones, are never not boring; Tommy picks up the remote and fast-forwards, so the scripted title of “Sunflower” is a near-missed flash. Despite Sam and Joey’s insistence that he not skip more, he does; there’s very little action, just mostly story that they can’t catch because it scurries forward at Tommy’s command. Sam finally takes the remote away from Tommy and presses play. The screen fuzzes, and then—something! But not husbands and wives teaming up to seduce the virginal, just-turned-eighteen babysitter or pizza boys fucking lonely housewives or so-called MILF teachers giving out “extra credit” to their lucky male students or any derivative thereof. No. Not even close. There’s punishment. A dungeon. Paddles. A Mistress and her Slave. Leather. Masks with zippers. And about fifteen minutes in, Mistress takes Slave’s hood off and whips him until his face is a bloody labyrinthine mess of skin, his baby-blue eyes turned to swollen tumors. She tells him that she’s decided to do him one last favor.

Thank you! he shouts, as she lays him stomach-down on the dungeon floor and drives her stilettos into his back, up his spine, each vertebra audibly popping like bubblewrap, until she grinds one heel into the base of his neck and the hoarse shouts of gratitude are cut short and Slave’s just a human puddle; and the camera pans in a quick homemade jerky motion to Mistress, who bends down, dips her gloved fingers in the growing pool of Slave’s blood and beams a perfect Vanna White smile at the camera as she licks her fingers, after which the VHS whirs to a stop, and Tommy and Sam and Joey just sit there with their mouths agape, wondering what the hell Tommy had found in his dad’s closet.

Okay, algebra homework is…done. It’s half-assed, but finished nonetheless. Sam crams it into an overflowing folder and checks her planner, where, in her paradoxically-neat left-handed cursive, she finds that Mr. Kirkberg (“Mr. Jerkberg” to her and Tommy and Joey) expects the everyone’s biology projects to not be done in two weeks but one week?

God. Of course. Hard ass. She gives her planner the finger and goes supine on her bed, pulling her copy of Ubik off of the nightstand and trying, for the nth time in the last six months, to wade through it. It’s no go, though—that project’s got her on edge. And let’s just not even talk about whatever that was they’d watched yesterday. Just…ugh. Too many issues to even begin to think about.

She checks the time—it’s almost nine. Any minute now a knock on the door will come, and her mother’s voice will find its way through the cheap pine: it’s time to go to bed, Samantha. She gives up now, and begins to get ready for bed, perfect celebrity-like grins and blood stilettos haunting her thoughts.

Principal Iglesias, mustachioed, his saffron coat dense and wooly and yet not protective enough, either by choice or circumstance, to prevent his crucifix from popping out and dangling for all to see, is stopped by Tommy’s father on the way out of the service, and taken aside for some muttered words. Every so often they look over at Tommy, but he can’t hear what they’re saying. More and more of the congregation piles out—he can see Sam and Joey in the mix, looking bored with their respective families—and the conversations layer and fill the air, and Father Polatski’s even shuffling into the fracas with his beatific smile that sends a tingle of weariness down into Tommy’s insides every time he sees it. Finally they break, and Tommy’s father’s back, and Iglesias just waves and walks away, though not before Tommy can see the hardness in the man’s eyes, something off, something…skeptical.

What was that about? he asks, as the family piles into the minivan.

Nothing. 

Just nothing?

You…you need to get extra help in math.

I do?

His father refuses to meet his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Yes.

Tommy keeps insisting that they have to do do something, tell someone about it; so after school the next day they walk to the Stoneville PD, and sit in the lobby until one of the officers receives them. He feeds the tape into a free TV, and watches Mistress, dressed in a sort of Bride of Frankenstein-style, chase Slave all Scooby-Doo-like through a darkened basement, complete with a Carl Stalling score and a cringe-inducing doink when Slave turns so quick that Mistress slams into a concrete wall, cracks radiating from her twitching form. The officer skips forward some, watches for a few minutes longer, and sighs.

Next time, don’t waste the time of the police when you try to share one of your stupid school projects, he says, and takes the tape out, and hands it back to them.

Joey’s sick, bad, horrible; he stands in the mirror and flexes, but he knows better than to think what looks back is a person. Who’s that flexing? Nothing. Nobody. He’s dust, less than a mote. And he wants—no, needs—someone to keep teaching him that lesson. Someone like Mistress. Someone who wears a mask and carries a whip, who can humiliate and beat him down until he’s fully cognizant of his status as a cockroach, and then go further, pulverizing him until Mistress is all and he’s nothing, until the Other eats the I, until the serpent is force-fed its tail until it disappears for good.

Things’ve been so busy that she’s only just remembered it, but there was a little something extra Sam took from Tommy’s dad’s stash. If only she could find it…she throws aside her Bible study worksheets (which she wasn’t gong to do anyway), whips through the secret side pocket of her backpack, through the tampons and extra stick of chapstick and the prepaid phone card her mom insists she carry on her person at all times (“just in case”), runs her hand through the book pockets that are too deep to visually search, but…nothing. Sapphic Babysitters 7 and all the curiosities that it might hold can’t be found. She sighs to herself. If only…

Stoneville High clears out and lockers shut and the afternoon looks so enticing, and that beautiful unbreakable blue sky you only rarely get during February is just screaming at Tommy to go outside, to enjoy. But no, sorry, not today. He pushes his desk over to Mrs. Jacobson’s desk, its feet squealing on the linoleum.

He waits for Mrs. Jacobson to get out of crossing guard duty. Waiting sucks. This whole thing sucks. It’s like everybody’s out to get him because he doesn’t know what the fuck a polynomial is. Boredom starts up—his own damn fault for forgetting to at least stuff a comic in his backpack before leaving the house this morning—and he notices the minutia around him: the HVAC vent on the wall above Mrs. Jacobson’s desk that looks like it’s never been cleaned, pulsing dust into the classroom; how none of the chalk on the sill of the board is white but instead a very faint yellow; and, most interesting, how Mrs. Jacobson’s desk contains pictures of her with a man with familiar blue eyes and perfectly sculpted black hair—hugging, kissing, one of him scooping cake into her face, her frosting-filled laughter frozen in time; and how Mrs. Jacobson herself looks like someone else he’s sure he’s seen before—

Ready?

His desk squeals as he jumps at the sound, and, as he turns around, the sight, of Mrs. Jacobson striding into the classroom, her crossing guard vest draped on an arm.

Joey asks himself, as he tugs his shorts back up for the nth time today: can one become so fundamentally broken and beaten into reality’s sidewalk, so corrupted and perverted, that there’s no going back? Because God’s mad at him, right? Mad about how he thinks about Sam and even Tommy too sometimes?

The guilt, delicious, ever-present, courses through him, and he reaches and squeezes a testicle, and bends over and grimaces and begins to laugh at the pain.

The mashed potatoes and gravy have mixed together and become mud on his plate, but he keeps stirring, not hungry—anything to not think about how his dad is staring at him, brow set, not questioning as much as judging, knowing, and even after Tommy’s scraped the remains of his dinner into the trash and set his plate in the dishwasher and is in the closed confines of his room, he can still sense the remains of that stare.

The pet store’s odor has this fetidness has Sam wondering if it’ll follow her out and haunt her for the rest of her life. She waits near the entrance and looks at the caged macaw whose talons grip the wire and whose wings flutter with each passing second. Peering in a little deeper, staring into those dumb beady eyes, she finds that the bird recognizes this and opens its beak, but no sound comes out. It does this a few times, those two black crescent moons opening and closing, but its mute cries mean nothing to her.

Ready to go? Her mom says, with her newly purchased bird feeder in hand.

She takes one last look at the macaw, and again it tries to say something that she can’t understand.

Yeah, she says, I’m ready.

Just when he’s about to fall asleep, when everything in his mind is fuzzy and prone to liquify into dreams, there’ll be a bang—a few bangs, actually, like somebody hitting a pipe with a ball-peen hammer—and Tommy will come crashing back down to his bed. His father has told him on multiple occasions that the sound comes from trapped air in the radiators cycling through the house, but Tommy doesn’t quite believe him. He stays awake for just a few minutes longer, wondering what else might be happening in this house, before sleep’s grasps for his mind are successful, and the cycle repeats until morning.

Ah, gym class: the sheer aesthetic of it, the skin stretching over taut muscles, the short shorts that everyone, regardless of gender, is forced to wear, much to Joey’s delight…Mr. Lorens is obviously hungover; he waves a hand at the sack of dodgeballs, and says with a sigh, go do the thing.

They do. In a span of a minute the class has separated into two teams and taken up two sides of the gym, and gun to barrage each other with red rubber. People get it in the elbows, the chest, groin, the head—specifically the face: more than a few students have to go to the nurse’s office holding bloody noses—and Joey stands there in the middle of the battlefield, a willowy figure who simply cannot get hit despite his best attempts to try and see what—given his, let’s just say, “new interest”—getting a dodgeball in the face really feels like.

Pause, frame-forward, look, rinse, repeat; Tommy’s method of research sort of working. More and more he can see the similarities between Mistress’s face and Mrs. Jacobson’s as he holds up her yearbook photo to the TV set in his room—the way their chins slope down in a heart shape, how they sport a birthmark in the corner below the tear duct of their left eyes, how one crooked canine pokes out awkwardly amongst the glossy ivory of their smiles…

Cutting through the undeveloped lots no one cares about takes Sam through woods, through copses of wooden families with arms waving in every direction. Swiveling her head up, she notices the little stirring nests of the town’s bird population, little beaks poking out of the twigs and bright colors flickering through the branches and little flutters here and there of wings and—well, silence. A silence like she’s never heard before, a powerful muting. The branches, even the ones with leaves, waggle in the wind, but no sound comes from them. The birds stare and refuse to converse, though she’s keen-eyed enough to see their beaks open and shut.

Leaving the forest, Stoneville High’s mass of buildings greets her from across the street. She doesn’t look in time, and nearly gets clipped by a sedan that honks as it disappears into the horizon.

Lick, she says, pointing down. Joey obeys. It’s all he knows, and all he loves. He bends down and cleans Mistress’s boots of all the grime and dirt and what could be a pebble lodged in the crevasses of its sole and it’s disgusting and stomach-churning and he loves it, it’s the only thing that matters to him anymore; but then she looks down and tells him he’s missed a spot, and she reaches for her whip and instructs him to turn around—

And the digital scream of the alarm clock wakes him, its LCD screen flashing hazy red through his closed eyes.

The halls are empty, the night seeps in through a few windows above the lockers, always out of reach. Nevertheless, Tommy turns his head like an owl, surveying both sides of the hall, and then, letting only the smallest of amount of rubber sneaker sole he can touch the linoleum, tip-toes to the door, and puts his ear to the crack at the bottom, noticing the accumulated grit and debris the janitors have missed throughout the years. Whispers come through, some in his father’s baritone, but only in bits and pieces as his head wavers and his muscles clench: I’m just worried about Tommy—think he know—something outside—

Wait, outside?

Mrs. Jacobson opens the door, pokes her head out, and gives him a smile as he tries to regulate his breathing and pretends to read a comic book in the chair, before popping back in and leaving him to sit with his thoughts.

Joey makes a reality out of his perverted musings when the bell rings, taking a left instead of a right on Main Street and heading downtown, telling Sam and a tired-looking Tommy that his mom asked him to pick up milk and eggs from Tralphor’s. In a clunky old building behind the grocery store and down an alley that reeks of garbage (though no dumpster or receptacle can be spotted), Joyland’s buzzing neon greets him. The inner walls of the store are lined with the familiar gamut of skin tones in various poses on magazines, and the VHS tapes sport cartoonish logos in contrast to the graphic images imposed below them, every; and at one end marital aids of every possible color, shape, length, and girth hang, each in their own plastic case.

 The woman at the register, upon looking at his driver’s license and listening to his request, points a tattooed finger in the right direction, to a particular sign on the wall of tapes featuring cartooned whips and chains and what might be one of those zipper-masks, and the letters “BDSM” written in scripted Sharpie.

As far as Tommy can learn, the Jacobson household is a normal place; it receives the normal (overwhelming) amount of junk mail, and, for some inexplicable reason, an issue of Video Watchdog; it’s a split-level residence with shutters that actually work and a single-car garage with a slight dent on the right side of the door that’s really only visible if one gets closer, i.e. into the driveway; however, the big tell-all, the real eyebrow-raiser, is that, as far as Tommy can tell, there’s only one person living in it. Only one car can be found exiting the garage in the mornings and entering it at night; and, most telling, all the mail, without exception, is addressed to, simply, Irene Jacobson…

Joey separates his whites from his colors like his mother has told him to do a thousand times; yet he finds his little brother’s red hat amidst the underwear and T-shirts in his now-pink laundry. For a while he just stares at it, wondering how the hell he’s going to get through the next day at school sporting coral as his new color—he’s sure to get some looks, some ridicule…

Some humiliation…maybe he’ll get beaten up in the locker room by one of the jocks…

He grins. He can’t wait for school now.

Tommy’s eyes seem more sunken than usual; Sam almost feels like she has to examine them like a doctor would a specimen under a microscope, just to get at the soul inside.

What’re you looking at? he says.

I don’t know…

He comes close, and whispers in her ear. I saw him.

Him?

You know. Slave.

So, who is he?

Tommy turns around and checks to see that the door and windows are closed, the blinds down, and whispers, Mrs. Jacobson’s husband. 

Even Joey perks up at this, from his perch on Sam’s beanbag chair, flipping through one of Tommy’s back-issues  where Captain America’s just one big muscular cylinder with a painted-on spandex suit. Isn’t he dead? he says.

Tommy’s eyes widen. Exactly. Why do you think you don’t see him? That was his death.

Sam tries not to, but her right eyebrow inexplicably rises higher than her left, and Tommy deflates.

Never mind, he says, as he packs up his stuff.

Look, Tommy, don’t you think you’re taking this a little too far? It was just a stupid movie.

We all saw what we saw, he says as he opens Sam’s bedroom door, and stands in the doorway, the sounds of Sam’s parents watching some rerun downstairs reverberating up the wood floor. Unless you know more than you say.

She laughs. You’re crazy.

Maybe, he says as he turns, or maybe you’re just too close to the truth to see it. He closes the door so softly that it makes Sam shudder.

Why doesn’t Cap just bust his way through walls? Why even bother using a door if you can just destroy it? Joey muses to himself.

The magical ambiguity (and the frustrated, almost defeated way that Sam intones it) of the word “troubles” and a look down at her body produces a hall pass from Mr. Jerkberg at near-lightspeed, and she’s out of Stoneville High  almost as fast. She doesn’t want to—she doesn’t want to do any of this, not even cut school, frankly, but she needs an answer—but she cuts through the woods, and can almost feel the silence of the forest pulsing around her, taunting her with its muteness. Tommy’s house is empty, but, like she expects, Tommy the warm-blooded “macho man” who won’t wear a coat to school until a week before Christmas break has left his window open a crack, and she climbs the trellis attached to the vinyl siding up to it, and lets herself in.

In the loose floorboard that serves as Tommy’s self-proclaimed “hidey-hole”, underneath miscellaneous handwritten notes and comics and pictures of the three of them as kids at someone’s Chuck-E-Cheese birthday party, next to a baggie of what might be pot—Sam sniffs it: it’s oregano? Why, Tommy?—and an assortment of useless two-dollar bills and holofoil trading cards, is the videotape. Tommy’s VHS player gulps it down and Sam scans through the thing, watching Slave being whipped in double-speed, his cries chipmunked—but instead of, well, what they had seen earlier, there’s a burst of sound and flashing red and blue light, and a cut to Slave, cloaked in a blanket given by emergency personnel and sitting on the edge of an ambulance, giving an account of what happened to a nearby detective while Mistress is shoved in the back of a cruiser, and a high-pitched Law & Order dun-dun plays as the credits roll. She takes a quick picture of the scene with a disposable camera she’s taken from her backpack, and tries to rearrange everything and leave it exactly as it looked before she broke in; however, as she begins to traverse down the plastic trellis, there’s a slight cracking sound. She jumps down and feels the shock in her kneecaps, but, upon looking up and finding that it’s still in one piece, sighs in relief, and heads back to school.

No parent ever disbelieves that their child is “studying with friends”, much to Tommy’s relief. He steps out of Tralphor’s Grocery with a box of crackers and a few bottles of water and two rolls of toilet paper just in case, stuffs all of it in his backpack, and books it over to Swarming Meadows and a familiar mailbox where, across the street, in a cluster of hydrangeas that make his allergies flair up, he waits with binoculars and a note pad out.

He pats at his nose with a few squares of TP. The wind rustles through. He pulls out the newest Captain America and reads, every so often glancing up to see if he’s missed anything.

The mail comes and to Tommy’s frustration it’s nothing new, just utilities bills and a notice to tell Mrs. Jacobson she’s been pre-approved for a HSBC credit card. And a few hours later he sees a car pull into the driveway. And another. And another, again and again until the driveway’s filled. Principal Iglesias; a couple of suited adults Tommy thinks he’s seen when Mr. Greene is sick and his substitute makes them watch town council meetings; Father Polatski in his full vestments; even Joey’s father—they all look around before entering the Jacobson residence.

Tommy’s about to leave when a final car pulls to the side of the road and parks. His stomach turns to stone as Sam steps out, clad in a trench coat and what might be heels, looks both ways like everyone else, and enters the residence.

It’s still the crisp beginning edge of spring where the afternoon brings warmth with it but the mornings still put frost on the cars, and Sam tries to dive deeper into her coat while she waits for the drugstore to open, leaning against the sign warning loiterers to keep away. When it opens up some fifteen minutes later she rushes in, and comes out with her photos. She tosses the negatives, pockets the doubles, and flips through.

Nothing. Nothing. It’s just Tommy’s room. Hell, there’s not even a TV set in the photos, let alone one featuring Mistress and Slave, though she knows, she bleeds with the truth that she did indeed photograph a paused VHS tape on a television.

Pacing around Joey’s room doesn’t help, and it certainly detracts from Sam’s concentration to keep turning around and finding Joey pinch his skin, giving a little grimace and then trying to pinch harder.

What is wrong with you? she finally says.

My existence.

How deep.

He takes away his fingers to find that he’s drawn blood, and that gives him a smile, and then a frown.

Almost…he mutters to himself, and then he looks up at her. What do you want again?

Tommy. Something’s wrong with Tommy.

There is?

Haven’t you noticed? The way it looks like hasn’t gotten any sleep? How he avoids us? All that stuff he said about the Jacobsons?

I guess not.

Do you even care, Joey?

He’s back to pinching himself. Not really.

What do you want now? the woman at Joyland says when Joey peeks his head through the door.

Do you have anything more…extreme?

She gestures in the direction of the wall, where, among other things, pairs of nipple clamps and vibrators and silicone replica of various pornstar pudenda are hung.

He takes a look, but nothing really seems right, let alone in his price range. He’s about to give up when, out of the corner of his eye he spots an older couple with baskets full of various items, including a cat-o-nine-tails. The woman elbows her partner, and smiles at Joey like it’s a fucking Crest ad, beckoning him to come closer.

It’s done; after months of a page here and a page there but mostly resting on her nightstand and taunting her, Philip K. Dick’s author photo on the back of the book, full of graying hair and eyes that seem both hard and sad, now stares back at Sam.

So, what was all that? She wants to ask the photo, interrogate it, see if it has something to say to make this damn book make sense. Now knowing what Dick was capable of writing, she thinks it just might. Something about being dead but also alive, or having the boundary between the two become blurred beyond all reason? About reality being available in a convenient spray can? Possibly? Who the fuck knows? But also—and this freaks her out to, the point that she has to place Ubik back-down on her desk and keep that gaze aimed away from her—how would you know either way, when lies look like the truths and vice versa? How do you navigate a maze that sends you into different locations with every footstep? What you do when…when reality becomes anything but real?

He doesn’t want to because he knows what he’ll find, yet that doesn’t stop him. Compulsion guides his hand, the blinds, his curious gaze, to peer out. Sure enough, there’s a sedan, light bronze, with its flashers on, parked on the side of the street. Tommy can’t see in; this car has some sort of after-production tinting that prevents his binoculars from seeing its occupants. Yet, his ruffling of the blinds coincides perfectly with the sedan changing gears and its tires screeching for a moment before finding its place on the asphalt, and scooting away, almost saying to Tommy, nothing to see here, as its taillights disappear behind the brush.

Dammit. He forgot to check the license plate and add it to the list.

After some thinking, truth must have some foothold somewhere, and the only thing you can do when all else seems to fail and shift is to simply try—so she takes a deep breath, steps up, and knocks on the door.

Yes?

The man who answers has big blue eyes and hair that, despite the beginnings of wrinkles around his eyes and the corners of his smile, is still a perfect onyx. Sam’s almost gawking at him with her jaw open, almost; she’s forgotten her reasons for coming; her cloud of unknowing has turned into rain, her maze with no end dangles some cheese down one path, the things that don’t make sense, the numbers that don’t add up, the things that aren’t gray but white and…black? Black like his hair?

Sam?

Mrs. Jacobson’s at the door, too now, staring, and she feels herself falling, falling…

This is Martha, and this is her husband George; he’s Joey. Those names are unimportant until afterwards, when they sit on George and Martha’s scotch guarded couches, sticky and exhausted and full of life (or, in Joey’s case, emptiness, sporting more than a few welts on his back), and looking and commenting at all the commemorative plates these two have all lined up on the wall separating the dungeon, the X-cross and boxes full of whips and toys paddles and all sorts of painful fun, from the living room.

See, that one’s from the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks a few years ago…we went to Hawaii and everything—

The weather was awful.

It really was. They say Hawaii has perfect weather, but that’s just not true, it was nothing but rain…

Joey’s trying to get that bleachy aftertaste out of his mouth and nodding and pretending to listen when a title catches his eye on the tower of VHS tapes near a widescreen television.

What’s that? he says, pointing.

George takes it off the shelf, and hands it to Joey. One of our favorites, he says, really great job by the domme here. Really eager to punish. You know it’s not just a job for her.

Mrs. Jacobson’s really a domme? He looks closer at the cover, with its grinning masked dominatrix and script font.

Who? No, that’s Gloria Vandermark. Sunflower was her magnum opus, and her final work before she passed. Tragic really—a heart attack at her age…George shakes his head, sometimes it’s just your time to go, right?

The look on Vandermark’s face—Joey couldn’t possibly say no to its invitation. Can I borrow this? he asks.

Upon awakening, she checks her skull for signs of cuts, wide-open gashes, oozing head injuries that would explain all of this, of being on a leather couch, with Mrs. Jacobson pushing a glass of water towards her, and her husband seated nearby, both peering with worried expressions—but she finds nothing, no contusions worthy of a hospital visit.

Sunflower, she says, without thinking about it.

Mr. Jacobson eyes her. What about it?

She starts to explain the whole thing, about finding it, watching it, and not knowing what to do about it.

Mrs. Jacobson smiles. We’re big fans of horror. That was just a fun thing we did.

But what about the BDSM parts? What about your husband being killed on screen?

They both look at each other, and then back at her. What are you talking about?

Tommy has realized too late that one can indeed know too much, that the depths of the rabbit hole one falls into can never be fully understood without risking annihilation. From where he’s chained up, his head affixed in a sort of vice, he’s forced to stare into the unblinking eye of a video camera, the tiny red recording light blinking and announcing the seconds as they pass, as the whips come down, as he screams and cries and blubbers.

The faces, standing behind the camera, laugh at him: Sam, Joey and their parents, Principal Iglesias, Mr. Jerkberg, even his dad. They point and grin and treat it all like a party, and then there’s a solid click. And another. He recognizes the sound of stilettos on the cement floor. And Mrs. Jacobson bends over to look down at him, grinning, the birthmark under her left eye, visible under the shifting leather of her mask as she laughs…

The VHS’s label reads, in a cheap script font, Sunflower. Joey feeds it to the player, and the credits roll. He skips through them—Tommy was right: who needs them?—and gets to the action. Slave’s on all fours, ass in the air, sturdy and sucking in that brisket like a Westminster ribbon winner, being whipped by Mistress, and Joey lets himself go; he wishes he could be even more boundless, to stick his head into the TV set, to feel what Slave feels, to bleed how Slave bleeds. How nice it would be to feel that pain, that logic; how nice would it be to be nothing.

Holding up the remote to pause, and get himself ready, and notices that his hand is slowly fading—he can see the veins underneath, the muscle, the white void of bone, but even they, as he continues to stare, disappear, evanescing into the air, leaving only the minutia of his bedroom to gawk at.

His exhale is of relief; he feels himself getting lighter, and his last sight is watching Mistress, with a bloody index finger in her mouth, smiling at the camera like an innocent schoolgirl.

At the sound of the bell ringing, Sam puts her earmarked copy of Man in the High Castle down and pulls out her notebook and the algebra homework that she actually took the time to do. Mrs. Jacobson’s at her desk filling out the attendance sheet. The desks to Sam’s left and right are empty. Alyssa—is that her name? the girl in the green sweater at the far right desk?—gives her a not-derogatory stare, the beginnings of a smile starting at the edges of her lips before she looks away. Sam blushes. But hey, where are Joey and Tommy? Are they absent today?

Yet, then again…Joey and Tommy? The names have a nebulous familiarity to them, but she can’t quite place it. Maybe it was some dream she had.

The window next to her is open just enough so the tail end of the dawn chorus, that audible worship of the starting day, seeps through.