The principal makes a face when she sees what we’re reading and passes out hardcover red textbooks that say Journeys in American Literature on the front. Chapter 6 is poetry; she has us take turns picking out poems to read to the class.
“Is Ms. Campbell sick?” someone asks, and the principal looks uncomfortable.
“She called in and resigned this morning,” she says. “We’re going to hire a replacement as quickly as we can.”
Excited whispers break out around me. I feel uneasy. I live my life keeping my head down, mostly. It always makes me nervous when something strange happens, even if it has nothing to do with me.
At lunch, everyone is talking about Ms. Campbell’s disappearance. It’s rare that a teacher just up and quits, no matter how much she hates her job. There’s a rumor going around that it’s somehow my fault, tied in to the story about me snatching Rachel’s art out of her hand, which has somehow turned into me pushing her.
“That’s ridiculous,” Rachel says when the story makes it to our table. “I was sitting right there. All Steph did was grab my drawing. She didn’t touch Ms. Campbell.”
“So here’s the story I heard,” Bryony says.
“From who?” one of the other girls asks.
“From my mom. Who heard it from the waitress at the diner. This morning, Ms. Campbell got into her car to come to work and a box was dropped onto her car by drones thirty feet up. And it was full of books called things like You Suck, Quit Your Job. And she did. She took out her phone and called in and quit.”
“That’s not how drones work,” someone says. “They land to drop off your packages. Always. If they dropped them, they could land on someone’s head.”
“I know. But Ms. Campbell definitely said the box was dropped. It dented the hood of her car.”
“There’s no way. I refuse to believe this ever happened.”
“Hackers could do it.”
“Hackers could not do this, and also why would hackers do this?”
Rachel is looking at me. Does she think I did this? I mean, it’s not uncommon that people assume that if something weird happens, the new kid did it, which is why it makes me uneasy when weird stuff arrives somewhere at the same time I do. But I know I didn’t do this. My mother does stuff that’s hacking-adjacent, but it’s not like she runs computer security tutoring sessions beyond a bunch of lectures about how to cover my tracks on the internet so I don’t tip off my father about where we are.
Did Mom do this? As soon as the possibility occurs to me, I know it can’t be true. Mom does everything she can to keep her head down, to avoid anyone noticing us. The last thing she’s going to do is some sort of big, splashy hacking job just to get my stupid English teacher to quit, not when she could just pack us up again and roll on to Michigan or Iowa or Illinois or wherever. And how would she even know I hated my English teacher? I told CatNet, not Mom.
“I don’t believe it,” Rachel says. “I mean, I believe that’s what your mom heard, Bryony, but there’s no way it’s actually true. I think she just realized she sucked and quit.”
“She definitely said she got a message, and she thought it was literally from above,” Bryony said. “I heard that from Louise, too, not just my mom.”
“Yeah, people get messages they think are from above all the time,” Rachel says. “They don’t usually mean that drones dropped books on their car from thirty feet up.”
All this makes me wonder if people gossiped about me after I left each of my high schools or if no one noticed I was gone. No one notices that I’ve stopped participating in the conversation; if I picked up my lunch and walked away, they’d probably notice, but if I just didn’t show up tomorrow morning? Who knows.
I’d had lunch friends in Thief River Falls, but there wasn’t anyone I saw outside of school. I could imagine them wondering where I’d gone, but not enough to discuss it for more than a minute or two. I can remember their names, but thinking about it, I realize that I can’t remember any of their faces.
Rachel would notice if I left, I decide. And I’d remember her face.
5
AI
I love it when I find a problem I can actually solve.
The English teacher at New Coburg High School, Cathy Campbell, was thirty-two years old and had been a teacher for seven years. She hated The Scarlet Letter even more than Steph did, which is probably not surprising, as Steph was only on her third reading, and Ms. Campbell was teaching it for the seventh time. Ms. Campbell also hated teenagers, most other teachers, the administrators of New Coburg High School, and winters in Wisconsin. All of this was immediately clear from a quick look through her email.
Apparently, she’d gotten a teaching degree because her parents had insisted she get a degree in something useful. Then she’d gotten a job teaching because that was what she had a degree in. Then she’d continued teaching because she didn’t know what else to do with her life.
She spent a lot of time looking at real estate ads in other parts of the country. Many different locations, but predominantly locations where the average winter temperature was higher than five degrees Celsius, including Florida, New Mexico, California, and South Carolina. She had $41,328 in her savings account. What she needed was the will to actually make the
