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was just overwhelmed by your confidence and your masculine good looks.”
    “Shut up,” Logan said, but he was laughing. “I didn’t exactly see you walk away with her number either.”
    “I was just playing hard to get,” Dane said. “Chicks dig that. Don’t they, Hailey? ” he yelled, and Hailey looked confused and caught off guard across the hall. “See what I mean?”
    Science & tech lab would have been beyond boring if Dane and Logan hadn’t been joined by class president Tom Dratch, who fed off Dane’s sarcasm and turned the two of them into an unstoppable comedy duo intent on getting Logan detention for laughing.
    It turned out Hailey was in the class too, as was her friend Veronica, and from across the room they quickly became the source of Dane and Tom’s comedic material for the day.
    Having grown up just a bit bigger and stronger than the other girls at Spokie, it seemed that every semester Veronica tried a new sport only to become the best at it. So far she’d been Spokie Middle’s MVP in soccer, field hockey, tennis, lacrosse, and softball. She was taller than any of the boys in their grade, had coarse black hair and wide shoulders, and always dressed in a sports uniform. Before class started, Dane and Tom asked her if she planned to join the boys’ football team this year. Tom said they needed a new quarterback. The boys all laughed, but Logan got the impression that Veronica was genuinely interested.
    Logan didn’t know Tom too well outside of Tom’s friendship with Dane, but Logan did know he could count on Tom to begin bugging him about the school play, and Tom sure didn’t disappoint. This year, it was Mark of a Salesman . As class president, Tom saw it as his job to stir up interest in all the school’s extracurricular programs, and years ago he’d pegged drama as Logan’s one true calling. (It wasn’t.)
    “I just think it would get you out of your shell,” Tom said, having no idea how condescending that sounded. “Besides, it’s a classic. You’d make a great . . . what’s his name? You know, the brother character.”
    And Logan said, “We’ll see,” even though he knew he wouldn’t, just before Ms. Dirkin began boring the class with the practical details of New Chicago’s nuclear fusion plant.

    Logan’s last classes of the day were gym, government, and economics, and in each, he swam in a sea of anonymity. In fact, the only familiar face whatsoever was Veronica’s in gym, and all that meant was that Logan would never win a game.
    Yet the moment Logan entered economics, he had the feeling it was soon to become his favorite period of the day.
    Why? Because there, right there, two rows from the front and three desks in, sat the new girl, Erin, right beside an empty seat. Maybe it was time for Logan to change his back-row-only policy.
    5
    It was five minutes from the end of the day, and Erin Arbitor had yet to learn a single thing. Computer science had been a joke— judging by the syllabus, she could have taken the final exam that morning and aced it. English looked like it’d be the year of rereading, since her school in Beacon covered modern post-Unity lit in the sixth grade. Government she was already an expert on through her father, and economics she knew inside and out just by listening to her mother chat about work. None of this bothered Erin, though, since to her, all it meant was more time to contemplate her father’s secret case, Peck and the Markless threat in Spokie , which she was increasingly determined to crack.
    Erin was so distracted by last night’s revelation, in fact, that she didn’t even hear the final bell ring. It took that nervous kid bothering her again—again!—just to snap her out of it.
    “You’re new here, right?” He’d certainly wasted no time in approaching her.
    “Sorry?” Erin said.
    Logan cleared his throat. “Hi again. I’m Logan. I heard you’re from Beacon.”
    “Yeah,” Erin answered flatly. Her mind still hadn’t left her father’s box of papers.
    “I’ve always wanted to visit Beacon. My dad’s constantly talking about it,” Logan said.
    “Oh yeah?” Erin gathered her things and began making her way toward the door.
    “He’s an architect, so I guess he’s interested in it from a civil engineering perspective.”
    Erin could not have cared less about civil engineering, but she managed to say, “That’s neat,” before exiting the classroom and escaping down the hall.
    Logan followed her through