Page 166 of Under Story

“I’d bring you with me,” Maisie tells him.

While the others exchange schedules, Laurel scans the food line. Eli, late from English, waits with his tray. He winks when he catches her looking.

Maisie points her fork at Laurel. “Look at you. You’re swooning. I don’t know why you two ever broke up. You’re meant to be together.”

—

They used to have houses or apartments. Now teenagers have bedrooms. Eli arranges his records by genre and year. Maisie buys peel-and-stick wallpaper with blue and purple hearts, and Laurel hangs her Lilith Fair poster beside one from Save the Whales. Riordan decorates his room with a lifetime’s collection of artisan crafts: robes, crowns, swords, candles, walking sticks, and drinking horns. In the antiuniverse, his passion—the Renaissance—is not historical but speculative. Riordan finds his parents, both computer programmers, hopelessly old-fashioned. Renaissance enthusiasts imagine the world of the future.

That weekend, the freshman class gathers for a bonfire. Green Day wafts from somebody’s boombox. A retired nurse brings vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet, and former teachers play beer pong on the lawn.

Laurel and Eli make out behind a tree. They aren’t alone. Time together is precious; all but the most progressive parents forbid sleepovers between couples. As the fire dies, Amy Wagner clings to Mikey Schneider.

“It’s so unfair,” she says. “We were literally living together six months ago.”

In the beginning, high school feels like an ongoing reunion. Laurel’s classmates trade stories about their careers and share pictures of their children; the fashion is to carry these in vinyl wallet inserts. Their laptops are long dead. They lug hardcover binders, Five Star planners, bulky pencil cases. Laurel exchanges her Nokia for a pager and relearns numerical slang: 99 for nighty-night, 143 for I love you. On the side of her middle finger, a long-departed callus takes its old place.

—

Some students, like Amy Wagner, are comforted by structure. For others, depression sets in during sophomore year. Laurel has spurts of manic energy—she stays up until four in the morning, or laughs hysterically with Maisie—but also low periods, blue periods, when she feels withdrawn and nihilistic.

For the first time, her relationship with Clare becomes strained. Laurel has lived as an adult for decades; her curfew alone is a daily humiliation. After she sneaks out in Clare’s Civic with Eli, Clare institutes new rules: no driving or drinking. Worst of all, when Eli comes over, Laurel must keep her bedroom door open.

“What are you afraid of?” Laurel shouts.

“Laurel, this is a fact of life. After a certain age,” Clare says, “sex is inappropriate.”

Eli’s parents don’t seem to know how to handle the subject, either. A conservative electorate has stripped sex education from schools. The assumption—or the hope—seems to be that teens will grow out of it.

And won’t they? Algebra and social studies feel like laughable distractions. The deeper problem is unsolvable: they’re aging down to nothing.

For years, Laurel found purpose in her work, and in being Silas’s mother. These roles also helped to distract her. In order to function here, she’d had to compartmentalize. She locked the memories—the people—from the world she left behind in the mental basement where she once kept thoughts of Silas. That way, they wouldn’t haunt her, or reprove her for abandonment. For being a bad friend. For being a bad daughter.

Now she walks through the orchard, talking to herself.

“I never meant to stay this long,” she says.

Laurel’s teenage mind is restless, her internal chemistry changing. Her emotions run pure as a spring. She has come to love the Twos, but she yearns for the people she came from.

In Ms. Guillard’s art class, she draws them. Her parents in front of the farmhouse, Pete’s arm around Clare’s waist. Gloria in a chair by the fireplace, radiant in old age. Laurel sketches Jules searching for fossils, and Maisie with her arms around Frankie and Hazel. Her task, self-assigned, is to capture what makes them singular—distinct not just from all others but from their counterparts.

Ms. Guillard comes to observe while Laurel shades Maisie’s face.

“It is Maisie,” Ms. Guillard says. “And…not Maisie.”

“Yes,” says Laurel, encouraged.

But each image, pried from memory, feels faulty in some way. Laurel can’t remember the layout of Gloria’s house, and she never seems to capture Maisie’s smile. Art began as her favorite subject, but it comes to feel as fraught as the others.

In September—the last month of the school year—Donald Brock-Medley is expelled. In the gym, he had graffitied: THE POINT IS THAT WERE DYING. Laurel’s English teacher asks the class to identify Donald’s grammatical error. Amy Wagner’s hand shoots up. Jules walks out of the room. The teacher assigns him an essay on self-control.

While the gym is repainted, Coach Brewster installs a volleyball net outside. Laurel and Eli huddle as they walk to class.

“We need to get out of here,” she says.

The maple trees have almost lost their color. Laurel used to love watching the leaves turn green. Now she wishes they’d stay red a little longer.

Eli jams his hands in his pockets. “We’ve tried. I’m out of ideas. And physics doesn’t come to me as easily as it used to.”