Chapter 1

============================================================

The night before the election, Leilani Nakamura sat on her bedroom floor in a nest of poster board scraps and dried glue sticks and tried to decide if her slogan was any good.

"A Safer School Begins with Us," she read out loud, for the forty-seventh time.

It still sounded okay. Maybe. It was short. It had a rhythm. It didn't rhyme, which she'd decided a week ago was a good thing because every other candidate poster in Harriet Tubman Middle School's main hallway rhymed, and rhyming made you sound like you were five. Mateo had run last year with "Vote Castellanos, He's the One Who Knows," and even he admitted later it had sounded like a cereal commercial.

Her grandmother, Mari Obaachan, was downstairs in the kitchen doing something that involved the smell of ginger and the quiet clatter of a wooden spoon. Leilani could hear her humming, low, not a song exactly, just the kind of sound her grandmother made when she was thinking. Her mom was at the hospital until ten. Her dad was on the couch reading the news on his tablet and occasionally saying "Hm" at it like the news had asked him a question.

Leilani looked at the poster in her lap. She had drawn a cartoon shield with a heart inside it. She had drawn it three times, actually, because the first shield had looked like a potato and the second shield had looked like a potato with a heart disease.

"Leilani." Her grandmother's voice came up the stairs. "Come eat."

"I'm working."

"You're worrying. Come eat."

That was fair. Leilani got up, stepped carefully around the mess of her campaign, and went downstairs.

The kitchen smelled like home. It always did. Her grandmother had a way of cooking that made every room she was in smell like somewhere safe. Tonight it was miso soup and rice and a small plate of pickled cucumbers that her grandmother set down on the table with the same reverence most people saved for wedding rings.

"Eat," her grandmother said.

"Obaachan, what if I lose?"

"Then you lose."

"That's not helpful."

"I'm not a help line." Her grandmother sat down across from her and picked up her own bowl. "I'm your grandmother. Eat your soup."

“In the time of Bahá’u’lláh it extended to a total of fifteen, and by the close of the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá it had reached some thirty-five countries.” her grandmother said now, not looking up.

"What."

"It's only terrible if what you were running for wasn't worth running for. If you were running for the right thing, and you lose, you still ran for the right thing. That part doesn't go away."

"So if I lose, I still got to be the girl who tried to stop bullying."

"You still are that girl. You always were. The election is just paperwork."

Leilani smiled a little into her soup. "That's kind of a quote-worthy thing to say, Obaachan."

"Put it on a poster."

"Too late."

"Next election." Her grandmother winked. "I have a whole closet of them."

The next day was Wednesday. Wednesday was election day because Mr. Perez, the student activities director, had a meeting every Thursday afternoon and wanted the results tallied before he left. This was the kind of bureaucratic detail Leilani had come to know about her middle school the way you came to know the creaky steps in your own house.

She wore her green sweater. Green was the color she had chosen as her campaign color, partly because it was her favorite and partly because, as Henry Zhang had pointed out when she was planning, nobody else was going to pick green. Most candidates picked red or blue, the two colors of presidential elections. Green made her stand out on the posters. Henry had said this while sketching the poster layout with a ruler and a set of colored pencils arranged from warm to cool. Henry was like that.

At homeroom, Mr. Perez came on the loudspeaker and reminded everyone that voting was during lunch.

At lunch, Leilani didn't eat. She sat at a table near the voting booth — which was actually three folding tables with cardboard dividers — and tried to look like a person who was not watching. Her opponents were a boy named Bryce Kellerman, who had run on a platform of "More Pizza Fridays," and a girl named Priya Shah, who had run on a platform of "Real Change, Real Voice," which Leilani had to admit was also a good slogan, though vaguer.

Bryce spent the whole lunch period eating three slices of pizza in a row at the table next to the voting booth, which Leilani suspected was a kind of in-person advertisement. Priya walked around shaking hands like she was running for Congress.

Leilani sat and tried not to throw up.

"You okay?" Her best friend Sky dropped into the seat beside her with a tray of chicken nuggets and half an orange. Sky always had half an orange. It was some lunch-packing system her mother had, which involved splitting each orange between Sky and her older brother so nobody ever had a whole one.

"I'm fine," Leilani said.

"You're lying."

"I know."

"I already voted for you."

"I know."

"I drew a little heart next to your name."

"Sky."

"What?"

"You're not supposed to draw on the ballot. They'll throw it out."

Sky paused in the middle of biting into a chicken nugget. "Oh," she said. "Huh."

"Sky!"

"I didn't know! I'll go tell Mr. Perez."

"Don't tell Mr. Perez, he'll think you were doing it on purpose to sabotage me."

"But I was voting for you!"

"That's worse."

"Leilani."

"What?"

"You're going to win. Even without my vote."

Leilani looked at her best friend. Sky had dark brown hair she kept in a braid down her back, and freckles across her nose, and the kind of face that always looked like it was about to laugh, and sometimes did, for no reason anyone could figure out. Sky's mother was from a big South Indian family in Chicago and her father was from a long line of midwestern Marshalls who had been teaching high school English for three generations, and when the two of them had gotten married they had hyphenated their names so smoothly that Skylar Marshall-Patel had always sounded to Leilani like a single word.

"I don't know if I'm going to win," Leilani said.

"I do," said Sky. "I have a feeling."

"You had a feeling about the science fair too."

"That was different. That judge was biased."

"Against the fact that your volcano didn't erupt."

"It erupted a little." Sky popped a chicken nugget in her mouth. "You just weren't looking at the right moment."

The results came at the end of eighth period. Mr. Perez, because he liked theater, insisted on reading them over the loudspeaker personally. Leilani was in English, where Ms. Okonkwo had given up on teaching anything that would take longer than ten minutes because everyone kept staring at the speaker on the wall as if it might say something.

"Good afternoon, Harriet Tubman Middle School," said Mr. Perez's voice, and Leilani felt her whole stomach fold up like origami. "I'm pleased to announce the results of today's student council election."

Sky, who was in the same class, reached under the desk and grabbed Leilani's hand and squeezed it so hard Leilani's knuckles popped.

Cheers from somewhere down the hall.

More cheers, fainter.

"And for eighth grade president —"

Leilani closed her eyes.

"— with sixty-one percent of the vote, Leilani Nakamura."

The classroom exploded. Sky actually screamed, a short, loud "HA!" kind of scream that made Ms. Okonkwo laugh out loud. Mateo, who was two rows over, stood up on his chair and did a small dance that involved pointing at Leilani and mouthing the words "I KNEW IT." Henry, who was in the corner, clapped quietly, because Henry clapped everything quietly. Leilani opened her eyes and found that the entire class was smiling at her. Even the kids who hadn't voted for her. Even Bryce Kellerman, who was not in this class, would've smiled, probably, because he was a genuinely nice guy who was mostly running on pizza as a bit.

"Congratulations, Leilani," said Ms. Okonkwo, over the noise. "Eighth-grade president."

"Thanks," Leilani said, because she didn't know what else to say.

"How does it feel?"

Leilani thought about it. "Weirdly normal," she said. "And also like I might puke."

Ms. Okonkwo laughed again. "Welcome to public office."

"Obaachan," Leilani said. "You didn't even know if I won."

"I knew."

"You couldn't have known."

"I had a feeling." Her grandmother handed her a plate. "And a backup plan, which was this cake with your name on it and the word CAKE after it."

"What?"

"In case you lost. Cake would still be cake."

Leilani laughed and hugged her grandmother and the hug was the kind where she could smell the lemon hand soap her grandmother used and the faint, permanent sweetness of ginger that lived in her grandmother's cardigan, and for a moment the whole day — the nerves, the announcement, Sky's hand on hers under the desk — felt like something solid she could hold.

Her grandmother pulled back, looked at her, and didn't smile.

"Obaachan?"

"I'm proud of you."

"Thanks."

"And I want you to listen to me for one minute."

"Okay."

Her grandmother held her by the shoulders. Her hands, as always, were surprisingly strong. "Leilani. Being elected is when the work starts. It is not when it ends."

"I know."

"You say you know. But you don't know yet. You don't know what it's going to ask of you."

"Obaachan —"

"Listen." Her grandmother's voice was gentle, but it was also the voice she must have used, Leilani thought, in thirty-one years of classrooms. The voice that made you stop. "You ran on something hard. Bullying is not a poster. It is not a slogan. It is a knot, and somebody at your school is tying it, and somebody is inside it. You are going to have to look at it. You understand?"

"I understand."

"You might not like what you see."

"I know."

Her grandmother looked at her for another second. Then she let her go, and smiled, and handed her a fork.

"Eat your cake, President Nakamura."

Leilani ate her cake.

Outside the kitchen window, her grandmother's garden was just starting to come awake for spring — green shoots pushing up in the dirt, the small white flowers on the plum tree opening in the late afternoon light. Leilani watched them through a mouthful of frosting and thought about what her grandmother had said, and filed it away, the way she filed away everything her grandmother said, in the part of her mind she would come back to later, when she needed it.

She didn't know, yet, that she would need it in four weeks.

=====

The Marshall-Patel house was five blocks from Leilani's, and Leilani had walked to it so many times that she no longer thought of the walk as a walk. It was more like a migration — automatic, seasonal, a thing her feet did. There were exactly two hundred and eighteen steps between her front door and Sky's front door. She had counted once in fourth grade because she had been a weird fourth grader, and the number had stuck.

Sky's house was loud. That was the first thing about it. Sky had three siblings — her older brother Tanner, who was fifteen and in high school, and twin sisters named Priya and Anjali who were seven and conducted themselves like a two-person orchestra at all times. Sky's mother was a pediatrician who worked long shifts and came home tired but always, always smiled when Leilani came through the door. Sky's father taught high school English and had a beard and a collection of Beatles records and a habit of quoting Mary Oliver at breakfast.

The day after the election, Leilani went to Sky's house after school, because that was what she always did on Thursdays. Sky had guitar lessons on Tuesdays and jiu-jitsu on Wednesdays and nothing on Thursdays, which meant Thursdays were for Leilani.

"Hi, Ms. Marshall-Patel," Leilani said when she walked in.

"Mira is fine," Sky's mother said, from the kitchen, which was what she always said, because Leilani had been calling her Ms. Marshall-Patel since fourth grade and also this was America and Sky's mother had long ago accepted that Leilani had been raised to use last names no matter what.

"Hi, Mira," Leilani said, trying it out, and Sky's mother smiled.

"Congratulations, Madam President."

"Thanks."

"I made you girls a snack."

The snack was apple slices and peanut butter and some kind of crumbly cookie that Sky's mother had started making years ago and that Leilani had come to think of as "Sky cookies" in her head. Leilani and Sky took a plate and retreated to Sky's room, which was on the second floor and had a window seat looking out over the back yard and the neighbor's tulip garden.

"I have news," Sky said, flopping onto the bed and stuffing a whole apple slice in her mouth.

"News?"

"My mom says I can get a dog."

"Sky!"

"I KNOW."

"What kind of dog?"

"Any kind. She said any kind."

"Your mom is a doctor. She said any kind?"

"She said any kind reasonable."

"That's different."

"I know."

They sat with this for a moment. Sky had wanted a dog for as long as Leilani had known her. Sky had a file on her laptop called "Dog Plans" that was seventeen pages long and had been updated more frequently over the years than the Constitution.

"You have to let me help name it," Leilani said.

"Obviously."

"I want to submit five names for consideration."

"You get three names."

"Four."

"Three and a half."

"What's half a name?"

"A nickname. You can submit three names and one nickname."

"Deal."

They shook on it. They always shook on it. This was another thing about Sky's and Leilani's friendship — everything, eventually, got shook on, even the tiniest agreements, because when they had first become friends in fourth grade, Mrs. Kaminski's class had done a unit on treaties, and Sky had come back from school that day having decided that all important decisions in life required a handshake. Leilani had gone along with it. Four years later, she still went along with it.

"Oh," Sky said, after a minute. "You're coming to Tanner's thing on Saturday, right?"

"What thing?"

"His team qualified. Regionals. My mom said we're all going."

"Oh, right."

Sky's older brother Tanner was, as Sky's mother liked to say, "a whole situation." Tanner was a sophomore at the high school attached to their middle school campus — the two schools shared a parking lot and a gym, though not much else. Tanner was a star on the lacrosse team. He was tall and handsome in a way that Leilani had given up trying to pretend didn't register, because it was just a fact, the way "the sky is blue" was a fact. He had floppy brown hair and his mother's brown skin and his father's bright gray eyes, and when he walked into a room people looked at him.

But what Leilani liked about Tanner wasn't any of that. What she liked about Tanner was that he was kind to his little sister. He was kind in the way only an older sibling can be — the casual, consistent, low-key kindness of someone who has decided, somewhere along the way, that their younger sibling is okay. He had taught Sky to ride a bike. He had taught Sky to braid her own hair. He had spent, Leilani knew, several entire Saturdays in third grade helping Sky build a diorama of the solar system that had Pluto still included because Sky had cried when he said Pluto wasn't a planet anymore, and he had caved.

Leilani had always liked Tanner.

"I'll come," she said. "What time?"

"One. At the high school field. Bring an orange. I'll bring an orange. We can have two whole oranges."

"Revolutionary."

"Presidential."

They laughed. Sky shoved another apple slice into her mouth.

"Lei," she said, with her mouth full.

"Sky."

"I'm really proud of you. About the election."

"Thanks."

"I know I already said it. But I wanted to say it without the nuggets."

Leilani looked at her best friend. Sky, sitting cross-legged on her messy bed, apple peel stuck to her lip, brown eyes warm and slightly ridiculous. Sky, who had been in her life since they were nine. Sky, whose mother made Sky cookies. Sky, whose brother was a whole situation.

"I love you," Leilani said, because that was a thing she and Sky had always said, casually, easily, the way sisters say it.

"I love you too, idiot," Sky said. "Hand me a cookie."

Leilani handed her a cookie.

The afternoon light came in through Sky's window. Somewhere downstairs, Priya and Anjali were fighting about a stuffed animal. Somewhere farther downstairs, Sky's mother was laughing at something on the radio. Outside, a breeze moved the new leaves on the maple tree in the yard, the leaves the size of a baby's hand, tender and still unfolding.

And that thought, like her grandmother's warning, like the crooked pink icing spelling PRESIDENT, she filed away.

She didn't know that she was going to need it.

=====

The first student council meeting after the election was on Monday. Leilani brought a notebook. Nobody else brought a notebook. She made a mental note that nobody else had brought a notebook, and another mental note not to judge anyone for this, because her grandmother had once said that people who judged other people in meetings ended up being very lonely people.

"Welcome, new officers," said Mr. Perez, who was short and round and had a mustache that always looked like it had an opinion. "First things first. Congratulations. Second things second. We have a lot of work to do."

Leilani sat up straighter.

Mr. Perez passed out a stapled packet. The packet was called STUDENT COUNCIL ONBOARDING and the first page had a graphic of a shaking-hands emoji.

"This is what the council did last year," Mr. Perez said. "Mostly dances. One fundraiser. A spirit week. You will see there's a section at the back called 'Ongoing Issues.' Can everybody turn to that section?"

Everybody turned to that section. The officers were Leilani, for eighth grade; Daniel Kim, for seventh; Amaya Robinson, for sixth; plus a treasurer, a secretary, and two at-large members. Seven people total. Leilani noticed the number. She always noticed numbers.

"Yes," Leilani said.

"Great." Mr. Perez looked at her. Not unkindly. "What do you want to do about it?"

Leilani had prepared for this. She opened her notebook. On the first page she had written, in her neat handwriting, six things.

1. Anti-bullying posters in all hallways 2. Peer mediator program 3. Monthly school-wide assembly on respect 4. Anonymous reporting box (physical and digital) 5. Faculty training 6. Student-led wellness committee

She read the list out. Mr. Perez nodded his head at each item. The other officers nodded too. Daniel Kim took notes on his phone, which was how Daniel Kim did everything. Amaya Robinson, who was eleven and new, mostly looked impressed.

"Great list," Mr. Perez said, when she had finished. "Let's start with one and four. One is the easiest — we can have posters up by next week. Four, the reporting box, we need to talk to Principal Adler about. Everything else, let's scope as the semester goes."

"Okay," Leilani said.

"Any other new business?"

The meeting ended forty-five minutes later. Leilani walked out of room 203 feeling like a person who had attended a meeting — which, she realized, was a surprisingly specific feeling. It felt, she thought, like being slightly more of a grown-up than she had been when she walked in. It felt like responsibility that hadn't yet figured out what it was going to ask of her.

Then she saw the girl.

The girl was standing outside Mr. Perez's door. Small, thin, dark hair cut short. Glasses. A red hoodie pulled up over the top of her head. She was holding her backpack in front of her like a shield.

Leilani recognized her. Grace Chen. A seventh grader. She'd been in Leilani's lunch block last year before the school had moved the lunch periods around. Quiet kid. Smart kid. The kind of kid teachers didn't have to worry about.

"Hi, Grace," Leilani said.

Grace opened her mouth and didn't say anything.

"Are you okay?"

Grace looked down.

"Do you want to — do you want to go somewhere?"

Grace nodded.

They ended up in the empty music room. It was three doors down and Leilani knew from extracurriculars that it was always unlocked after three p.m. The music room had risers in a U-shape and a piano shoved against the far wall and a bulletin board with a curling poster of the circle of fifths. Leilani sat on the lowest riser. Grace sat next to her, still holding her backpack.

"You can — you can tell me," Leilani said, and then wished immediately that she had said something better, because her grandmother had said once that people don't need to be told they can tell you; they need to feel it.

But Grace started to talk anyway.

"It's my phone," Grace said, in a small voice.

"Your phone?"

"I've been getting — there are these messages."

"What kind?"

"Mean ones."

Grace took out her phone. Her hands were trembling. She unlocked it — Leilani looked away for the passcode, on principle — and turned it so Leilani could see.

The screen showed a group text. The sender's name was a string of emoji that Leilani didn't recognize. The message was a photo. The photo was of Grace at lunch, from maybe two weeks ago — Leilani could tell because Grace's hoodie in the photo was orange, not red, and Grace had told her once she rotated hoodies by the week. The photo was of Grace alone at a table, chewing, in mid-bite, with her mouth open.

Leilani's stomach dropped.

"There's more," Grace whispered.

She scrolled. There were five photos of Grace, all from different days. Each one had a mean caption. Each one was a photo somebody had taken of her when she wasn't looking.

"Who sent these?"

"I don't know. I don't know the number. But other kids have them. I know they have them. I saw Ella Ransom showing it to — to somebody at her locker. I heard them laughing."

Grace started to cry.

Leilani did not know what to do. This was not a fact she had ever been taught to deal with. She knew about planets. She knew about the Pythagorean theorem. She knew about the French Revolution. She did not know about Grace Chen crying in a music room after school with a phone full of photos of herself.

She did the only thing she could think to do. She reached out and put her hand on Grace's shoulder.

Grace cried harder.

"I'm — I'm sorry," Grace said. "I didn't know who to tell. My mom — I can't tell my mom. She'll make me change schools. I can't change schools. My sister is here next year. I can't."

"Grace."

"I just — I thought maybe — you said —"

"I said. I did say."

"You said you wanted to make the school safer."

"I did say that."

Grace looked at her. Red eyes behind her glasses. "Are you going to do something?"

Leilani took a breath.

"Yes," she said. "I am going to do something."

Grace wiped her nose with her sleeve. "When?"

"I don't know yet. But I am going to. Can I — can you send me screenshots? Of the worst ones? I won't show them to anyone who doesn't need to see them. I promise."

"Okay."

"And can you give me the names of anyone else you know this is happening to?"

Grace swallowed. "I know three others. One is in eighth."

"Who?"

"Jamie Sorensen."

"Jamie." Leilani knew Jamie. Jamie was in her math class.

"And Lila Ortiz. Sixth grade."

"Okay."

"And a girl named Nasim in seventh grade. I don't know her last name."

"Okay."

Grace swallowed again. "Leilani?"

"Yeah."

"Please don't let anyone know I told you."

Leilani looked at Grace. At her hands, still holding the backpack. At her small shoulders in the red hoodie. At her face, so afraid that it wasn't even the face of a person crying anymore, just the face of a person trying to be invisible.

"Grace," she said, "I promise."

Grace nodded.

Leilani walked home that day with Grace's phone screenshots coming in, one by one, to her own phone. Her grandmother was in the garden. Her mother was at the hospital. Her father was at his office. The house was empty and light. Leilani went to her room, shut the door, sat on her bed, and stared at the messages on her screen until the sun moved.

Her grandmother's voice came up through the floor.

"Leilani. Dinner."

"I'll be down in a minute, Obaachan."

"Are you okay?"

"I'll be down in a minute, Obaachan."

She put her phone face down on her pillow. She went downstairs. Her grandmother had made saba, grilled mackerel, with rice and seaweed salad. Leilani sat at the table and ate. Her grandmother watched her, and didn't ask, and didn't push. Her grandmother had a way of not asking that was the warmest kind of not-asking in the world — a silent assurance that when you were ready, the asking would be there.

After dinner, Leilani helped clean up. She dried the dishes and put them away. She walked her grandmother to the living room. She went upstairs and sat on her bed again and looked at her phone.

The screenshots were still there.

She scrolled. And scrolled. And then, near the bottom, she saw a username she didn't recognize. It was in one of the group texts Grace had forwarded. The original sender. The person who had started the thread where Grace's photos were shared.

The username was a lacrosse stick emoji and the number 14.

Tanner Marshall-Patel's lacrosse number was 14.

Leilani sat very still on her bed.

Then she put her phone face down on her pillow again and turned off her light.

She didn't sleep well.

=====

Leilani did not tell anyone what she had seen for three days.

This was not because she didn't want to. It was because she did not know how to. The lacrosse-stick-14 username sat in her phone like a piece of live wire, and every time she thought about it she could feel her stomach flip over. She could not show the screenshots to her grandmother, because she could not say, out loud, my best friend's brother. She could not tell her mother, because her mother was a surgeon and would do a surgeon thing and call the school immediately. She could not tell Sky, obviously. She could not tell Sky.

So she did something she had never done before. She investigated.

On Tuesday, in math class, she sat down next to Jamie Sorensen. Jamie was a tall, quiet girl with long hair who Leilani had known since sixth grade in the distant way you know a person who is in two of your classes but not really in your life. Jamie was good at math. Jamie was good, Leilani had heard, at a lot of things, soccer, violin, but Jamie was also the kind of girl who got through a school day with her head slightly down.

"Hey, Jamie."

"Hey."

"Can I ask you something weird?"

Jamie looked up.

"You can say no," Leilani added quickly. "I just, have you been getting messages? Mean ones. From a number you don't know."

Jamie's face changed.

It changed in a way that Leilani knew the moment she saw it. It was not the face of a person who was confused. It was the face of a person who had been expecting, sometime, somewhere, for somebody to ask.

"Yes," Jamie said.

"How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Did you tell anyone?"

Jamie shook her head.

"My mom knows I'm upset but I didn't tell her why. Leilani, please don't tell."

"I won't."

"Please."

"Jamie. I promise." Leilani took a breath. "Can I ask, do you know who it is?"

Jamie looked at her math book.

"It's organized," she said, quietly. "You know that, right? It's not just one person. There's a group chat. A big one. The photos get, shared. Different people take them at different times. I don't know all the people. But I know, I know who's in charge of it."

"Who."

Jamie swallowed. "I can't say."

"Jamie."

"I can't."

"Is it Tanner Marshall-Patel?"

Jamie's shoulders did the smallest, fastest thing Leilani had ever seen. Not a nod. Not a shake. A flinch. A tiny, involuntary flinch of a girl who has heard the name of a person she is afraid of.

"Oh," Leilani said.

"Please," Jamie said again. "Please don't. If he knows I told you he'll make it worse."

"He won't know."

"He will."

"Jamie. I promise. I am not going to tell him. I am not going to tell anybody. Until I know what to do."

Jamie looked at her, and there was a moment when Leilani thought Jamie might cry. But Jamie, Leilani realized, had already cried about this. A lot. A lot of times. In places nobody could see her.

"Okay," Jamie said.

"Okay."

They did not speak of it again that class. Mr. Klein stood at the front of the room and talked about the Pythagorean theorem, which was the only thing, in that moment, that seemed reliably true.

That afternoon, Leilani went to Lila Ortiz's locker.

Lila was eleven. A sixth grader. Long hair in two braids. A unicorn sticker on her locker. Leilani didn't know her at all, sixth graders were a whole country away from eighth graders, but she approached her carefully, the way you would approach a bird.

"Hi, Lila."

"Hi?"

"I'm Leilani. I'm the eighth grade president. I wanted to, can I ask you something?"

Lila's mouth opened a little. She looked around the hallway. "I, I don't know."

"It's about something Grace Chen told me."

Lila's face crumpled.

It took forty-five seconds. That was all. Forty-five seconds for an eleven-year-old girl standing at her locker with a unicorn sticker on it to tell Leilani that she had been getting photos of herself forwarded to her anonymously for two months, that she had stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria and now ate in the library, that she thought it was her fault, that she thought maybe if she was thinner it would stop, that she hadn't told her mom because her mom was already sad about the divorce.

Leilani listened. She didn't interrupt. When Lila was done, Leilani said, "Lila. This is not your fault. I need you to hear me say that. This is not your fault."

"Okay," Lila said, in a voice that did not believe her.

"I'm going to fix it."

"Okay."

"I promise."

Lila nodded, and closed her locker, and walked away.

Nasim was harder to find. Nasim was in seventh grade, and Leilani didn't know her schedule, and couldn't exactly walk up to every Nasim in the building and say "Are you the one being cyberbullied?" It took her until Thursday, when she finally spotted a girl named Nasim Rahimi at the drinking fountain outside the gym. Nasim was small, dark-eyed, had a nose ring, the legal kind, the kind her parents had apparently signed off on, and was wearing headphones. Leilani waited until she was done drinking.

"Nasim?"

The girl looked up.

"I'm Leilani. Can I, can I walk with you?"

Nasim took off her headphones. "Okay."

They walked down the hallway. Leilani kept her voice low. She explained, briefly, what she was doing. She didn't say Tanner's name. She didn't name the group chat. She just said, I know you're getting messages. I know this is happening. I'm trying to help. Will you tell me?

Nasim was tougher than the others. Nasim was angry.

"I want whoever is doing this to rot," Nasim said, very quietly, in the hallway, between sixth and seventh period. "I want them to feel everything I've felt and more. Do you understand what I am saying."

"I understand."

"My dad thinks I'm failing math because I'm not trying. I'm not failing math because I'm not trying. I'm failing math because I can't sleep. I can't sleep because every time I close my eyes I see the picture they took of me eating. I am a seventh grade girl. And somebody has decided I am a joke."

"Nasim."

"What."

"I'm going to stop it."

Nasim looked at her. There was a long second.

"Prove it," Nasim said.

Then she put her headphones back on and walked away.

Leilani walked to her own locker. She leaned her forehead against the cold metal. She thought, for a moment, that she might cry. She didn't. She took three breaths, the way her grandmother had taught her when she was little and had tantrums. Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for six. Again.

By the time she got home that day, she had a list.

She closed the notebook.

She went downstairs. Her grandmother was making dinner. The kitchen smelled like garlic and sesame oil.

"Obaachan."

"Mm."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"You can ask me anything."

Leilani sat at the kitchen counter. Her grandmother was slicing green onions, her hands steady, the knife moving in that small rocking motion she always used.

"If you knew something," Leilani said. "Something true. And telling it would cost you a person you love. What would you do."

Her grandmother did not look up. She kept slicing. The knife made its quiet tap against the cutting board.

"Is the person you love the one who did the thing?" her grandmother asked.

"No. But they love the person who did the thing."

"Ah." Her grandmother nodded. The knife kept moving. "That is a harder question."

"I know."

"I cannot answer it for you, Leilani."

"I didn't ask you to."

"Good." Her grandmother looked up. Her eyes were warm. "Because I would tell you the wrong thing. I would tell you what I would do, and that is not what you should do. You should do what you should do."

"That's not helpful."

"I told you. I'm not a help line."

Leilani almost laughed. Her grandmother scraped the green onions off the board into a bowl. Then she paused. She wiped her hands on her apron. She looked at Leilani for a long moment.

"I will say one thing."

"Okay."

"When I was teaching, many years ago, there was a boy in my seventh grade class. His name was Daniel. Daniel was a good boy. And Daniel's best friend was another boy, who was not a good boy. The other boy was cruel. He was cruel in small, consistent ways, to a girl in our class, and Daniel knew. Daniel had known for months. And Daniel never said anything, because the other boy was his best friend. And then one day the other boy did something so cruel that the girl left school. She transferred. Her family moved. And Daniel came to me, after, and he cried, Leilani. A thirteen-year-old boy cried in my classroom. He said, 'I knew. I knew the whole time. And I didn't say anything.'"

"Obaachan."

"I think about Daniel often."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that he had learned something he would carry for a long time. And that the next time, he would do better. And that this was what being a person was, learning, and doing better."

"Did he?"

"Did he what?"

"Did he do better? The next time?"

Her grandmother smiled, just a little. "I believe so. He became a man I am still in touch with, actually. He's a lawyer now. He defends children. I think Daniel is very careful, now, about what he knows and does not say."

Leilani sat with this.

"Obaachan. Did that really happen?"

"Everything I tell you really happened, Leilani. That is the only way I know how to teach."

Her grandmother turned back to her cooking.

Leilani stayed at the counter for a long time.

I am not going to be Daniel.

=====

Henry Zhang lived in a small gray house on a cul-de-sac on the north side of town, and his bedroom had more screens in it than the rest of his family's house combined. Henry was the only kid Leilani knew with three monitors. He called them "the rig." He had built the rig himself over the course of two summers, with money he had earned tutoring in math, and he was not precious about it, which Leilani liked. Henry let his little cousins play games on the rig. Henry let his dad check email on the rig. Henry once, memorably, let the family cat sit on the keyboard for an entire afternoon because the cat was sleeping and Henry did not want to disturb a sleeping cat.

Leilani went to Henry's on Friday after school. She had told her grandmother she was doing a project. Her grandmother had looked at her, had said nothing, and had handed her a bento box for the road.

Henry opened the door wearing a hoodie that said I CAME FOR THE FREE PIZZA on the front. Henry's hoodies were always like that.

"Hi," Henry said.

"Hi."

"You look serious."

"I am serious."

Henry stepped aside. "Come up."

They went upstairs. Henry's room was as Leilani remembered it, the rig on the desk, a bookshelf of philosophy paperbacks (Henry had read Aristotle for fun in sixth grade, which was a fact Leilani remained impressed by), and a robot arm on the floor that Henry had been building for his science fair project for what was now two years running.

"Close the door," Leilani said.

Henry closed the door.

"Is this one of those conversations," Henry said, "where you're going to tell me something and I have to be careful what I say next."

"Yes."

"Great." Henry sat down at his desk. "Go."

Leilani told him.

It took about fifteen minutes. She showed him the screenshots Grace had sent her. She showed him the list of names. She told him about Jamie's flinch and Lila's unicorn sticker and Nasim saying prove it. She told him about the lacrosse-stick-14 username. When she got to the part about Tanner, Henry's expression did not change, but his hand moved, once, to the pen on his desk, and picked it up, and put it back down.

Henry, she noticed, always did something with his hands when he was thinking.

"Okay what."

"Okay, first of all. This is worse than you think."

"How can it be worse than I think."

"Because you're thinking about it at kid scale. At kid scale, it looks like, a bunch of middle schoolers sharing mean texts. Which is bad. But this" — he gestured at the screenshots on Leilani's phone — "this has architecture. Somebody set this up. Somebody is maintaining it. It's a system."

"That's what Jamie said. She said it was organized."

"Jamie's right." Henry looked at her. "Leilani. Can I look more closely?"

"What do you mean."

"I can look at the metadata. On the screenshots. The file info. Not the messages themselves, we'd need the phone for that, but the screenshots can sometimes tell me things."

"Like what."

"Like when they were taken. What device they were taken on. Whether they've been edited. Whether other pictures from the same chat have been deleted."

"Is that legal?"

"I'm not going to hack anything." Henry looked a little offended. "I'm just looking at the file info. That's like, that's on every JPEG. Anybody can look at it."

"Oh."

"Do you want me to?"

Leilani thought about it. Then she nodded.

Henry plugged her phone in. He worked for about ten minutes. He barely spoke. He made a couple of small noises, "huh," "mm," that Leilani knew meant things. Finally he turned.

"Okay. Here's what I can tell you. The screenshots were taken from at least three different devices. So there are at least three people forwarding this chat out. The original images, the ones of the kids eating, those were taken on an iPhone, and from the height and angle of the shots, I'd say from someone sitting one table over. Kid height, or close to. So the photographer is a student. Probably an eighth grader, based on lunch block, but I can't prove that."

"Anything else."

"Yeah. Look at this one." He enlarged a screenshot. "See the reaction emoji on the side? The little heart? That's a reaction from whoever is admin of the chat. Admin reactions show in a specific position on this app. I recognize the position. Whoever reacted to that photo has admin permissions."

"And who reacted?"

Henry zoomed in.

The username was the lacrosse stick and 14.

They looked at each other.

"Does this count as proof?" Leilani said.

"It's not, like, FBI proof. It's not court proof. But if you went to Principal Adler with this? Yeah. It's enough for her to start asking questions. Especially combined with the testimony of the targeted kids."

"I don't want to make them testify."

"I know. I don't mean testify in a legal way. I mean, if they're willing to say to her what they said to you. That would be enough."

Leilani stared at the ceiling of Henry's room.

"Henry."

"Yeah."

"You know who Tanner is, right?"

"Sky's brother."

"Sky's brother."

"I know."

"This is, this is going to blow everything up. If I do this."

"Yeah."

"I don't know if I can do it alone."

Henry looked at her. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his hoodie and put them back on.

"Then don't do it alone," Henry said.

"What do you mean."

"I mean don't do it alone. I mean you don't have to. Get some people. Figure it out together."

"That's, I mean, that sounds nice but, like, who."

"Leilani." Henry almost rolled his eyes. "You're surrounded by people who would help you think about this. Rashad. Mateo. Jada. Farah. Wesley. Me. You know all of us. You've known all of us since sixth grade. We've all, at one point or another, said something to you about something. Rashad asked you two weeks ago if you thought democracy at a middle school was even ethical. Mateo told you in September that your campaign was 'the most morally serious thing to happen at this school since Mrs. Kellerman caught Bryce cheating on the math test.' Farah wrote you a congratulations song. An actual song. With guitar chords. You don't even notice."

"I noticed the song."

"Well, you didn't notice the pattern. The pattern is that there are seven of us, and we are all, in our own ways, the kind of kids who take things seriously. That is not an accident. You, to some extent, gathered us. You just didn't realize it."

Leilani blinked.

"I'm not a gatherer."

"You kind of are." Henry shrugged. "It's your thing. You're the class president. That's not a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention."

"Henry."

"Yeah."

"Would you come if I called a meeting?"

"Yes."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. For this? Yeah."

Leilani got home at six. Her grandmother was on the back porch. Her grandmother was sitting in the blue rocking chair with a cup of tea and watching the sun set over the garden. The plum tree was in full bloom now, a cloud of white.

"How was your project," her grandmother said.

"It wasn't a project."

"I know."

Leilani sat down next to her. The porch boards were still warm from the day.

"Obaachan. Can I have people over Sunday afternoon?"

"How many people."

"Six."

"That's a lot of people."

"I know. Can I, can I use the basement."

"The basement is yours anytime you want it. It is also full of my old Christmas decorations, and so you will have to pretend they are ambiance."

"I can do that."

Her grandmother sipped her tea.

"What are you going to do," her grandmother said, "with six people in a basement on a Sunday afternoon."

Leilani watched the sun drop behind the neighbor's roof.

"I think we're going to consult."

Her grandmother turned her head. Slowly. She looked at Leilani with an expression Leilani had never quite seen before, surprised, proud, almost amused, all at once.

"Consult," her grandmother said.

"Yes."

"Do you know that word."

"You said it, once. Years ago. You were talking about a family you used to know. You said they had a way of deciding things that you admired. You said they called it consultation."

Her grandmother was quiet for a long time.

"The Dalirs," she said, finally. "The family's name was Dalir. They lived two houses down from us in San Jose when I was teaching. Very kind people. They were Bahá'ís. They did not make a big deal of their faith. But when they had a family decision to make, they would sit together, all of them, even the children, and they would discuss. They did not argue. They did not bully. They did not try to win. They put the question in the middle, like, like a piece of bread on a table. And they talked around it. They said what they thought, without attachment. They listened. And somehow, they always came out with something good. I watched them do this many times. I was not a close friend, but I was a neighbor, and I saw. I came to admire it very much."

"Did you ever do it? With our family?"

Her grandmother smiled, a little sadly. "Our family is louder. I tried, once or twice. It didn't quite take. But I have never forgotten the Dalirs. And I think of consultation still. As a kind of, as a kind of muscle. That most people never learn."

"Can you teach me?"

Her grandmother looked at her.

"You are going to learn by doing," her grandmother said. "That is how consultation works. You cannot be taught it in a lecture. You have to try it. I will tell you the guiding lines. The rest is for you."

"Okay."

"You want to know them now?"

"Yes."

Her grandmother set down her tea. She held up one finger.

"First. Begin by searching for the facts. The truth. What is actually happening. No opinions yet. Just what is."

Another finger.

"Second. Speak freely. But once you have spoken, let the idea go. It is not yours anymore. It belongs to the group. If they take it apart, that is fine. You must not defend your idea like a child defends a toy."

A third finger.

"Third. Listen, really listen, to the people who disagree with you. Especially them. Because a consultation where everybody agrees is not a consultation. It is a meeting."

A fourth finger.

"Fourth. Aim at the truth. Not at being right. Not at winning. At what is actually true and good."

And a fifth.

"Fifth. When a decision is reached, everybody supports it. Even the people who disagreed. You do not sabotage the decision afterward because you wanted something else. You trust the process. You trust the group. You go forward together."

She stopped. She looked at Leilani.

"There is more. But those are the bones. You will feel the rest."

"Obaachan."

"Mm."

"This is huge. This is what you want for the world."

Her grandmother laughed. "What I want for the world is harder. What I want for the world is that people stop being cruel to each other. Consultation is just a small practice. A good one. A little piece of it."

"I'm going to try."

"I hope so."

They sat on the porch until the light was gone and the mosquitoes came out and her grandmother's knees needed a break from sitting. Leilani helped her up. They went inside. Leilani ate dinner with her parents, neither of whom knew what she was planning. Her mother asked her about student council. Leilani said everything was fine. Her father asked her about her grades. Leilani said everything was fine. Her grandmother passed her another helping of rice without being asked.

That night, Leilani sent six text messages.

Each one said the same thing.

Hey. Can you come to my house Sunday at 2? Something serious. I need your help. Bring a snack.

Leilani turned off her phone. She lay in the dark. She thought about the Dalirs, whom she had never met, in a house in San Jose she had never seen, sitting around a table with a piece of bread in the middle. She thought about how a piece of bread could be a question. She thought about how a question could be a piece of bread.

She slept.

=====

Sunday at two. Leilani had cleaned the basement. She had not known, until she cleaned the basement, how much of her life was kept down there. Boxes labeled BABY CLOTHES. Boxes labeled LEILANI ART, K-3. A single box, cryptically, labeled WEIRD STUFF, which she did not open because her father had long ago forbidden her to open it, which of course meant she had opened it, once, and discovered a collection of her grandmother's old classroom trophies that were meant to be a surprise for her grandmother's retirement party, and had sworn a blood oath to her father that she would never mention it.

She set up folding chairs in a circle. She put out a bowl of pretzels. She put out two liters of lemonade and a stack of paper cups. She swept the floor. She hid the weird stuff.

Rashad was first. He was always first. Rashad Ibrahim had been Leilani's friend since he arrived at Harriet Tubman in fifth grade, having moved with his family from Minneapolis, and he had never, in the three years Leilani had known him, been late to anything. Rashad had dark skin, a thoughtful face, and a closet full of cardigans that made him look, consistently, like a miniature college professor. He was carrying a plate of cookies covered with plastic wrap.

"Hi," Rashad said.

"You're early."

"I'm on time. Everyone else is late."

"Fair." She let him in.

Mateo came next, arguing on the phone with his mother about whether he was allowed to eat dinner at Leilani's, which he wasn't, because his grandmother was coming over, which he had forgotten. Mateo Castellanos was short, loud, and funny, and had the specific kind of charm that made teachers sigh and kids love him. He had been in Leilani's class since second grade, and had the distinction of being the only person in her grade who had ever made her laugh so hard at a school assembly that she'd been sent to the hall.

"Okay, Mami, te quiero, bye, bye, bye." Mateo hung up. "I cannot stay for dinner. Apparently."

"I didn't invite you for dinner."

"Thank you. This makes the conversation I just had with my mother completely absurd. I love it. Where should I put these empanadas."

"You brought empanadas?"

"My mother brought empanadas. For you. She says congratulations on being president. She also says you are welcome to come over anytime. She also says if I am not home by six there will be consequences. This is my life."

Leilani took the empanadas.

Farah and Wesley came together, which surprised Leilani until she remembered they both took the bus, and their stops were two away from each other. Farah Darvish carried her guitar, which she carried everywhere, not in an annoying way, but in the way a person carries an essential organ. Farah was tall, thin, and had very long black hair that she kept in a braid down her back, and a voice that could make a cafeteria of middle schoolers go quiet. Wesley Brightfeather was smaller, quieter, with dark eyes and long hair he kept tied back with a leather cord. Wesley's family had moved to town from South Dakota three years ago when his grandfather had taken a teaching position at the state university, and Wesley, in a school of approximately four hundred kids, was the only Lakota student anyone could remember ever attending. He wore it lightly. He wore most things lightly. Leilani had noticed that Wesley had a way of being in a room that took up very little space and somehow, still, made the room feel better.

"Hi," Wesley said.

"I'll tell everyone at once. Come in."

"Sorry," Jada said, coming in. "Traffic."

"There's no traffic in this town."

"Sports traffic. There was a soccer thing. Whatever."

They all trooped down to the basement. Henry was already there, which Leilani only realized when she reached the bottom of the steps and saw him. He had let himself in through the back door and set up, without being asked, a small whiteboard he must have brought from home. He had written, at the top of the whiteboard, in neat letters, nothing. Just the date. 4/14. He looked up. He smiled.

"Ambiance," he said, gesturing at the Christmas decorations.

Leilani laughed a little, thinly.

"Okay," she said, standing in the middle of the circle of folding chairs, feeling all six of her friends look at her. "Okay. So. I need to tell you something. And I need you to not tell anyone. Ever."

They waited.

Leilani had thought about how to do this for two days. In the end, she just did it.

She told them about Grace. About the screenshots. About Jamie and Lila and Nasim. About the lacrosse-stick-14 username. About Henry's analysis. About Tanner.

When she said Tanner's name, she watched their faces. None of them were surprised in the way that said Tanner? Impossible! They were surprised in a different way. It was the way of people realizing that a thing they had half-noticed, without looking at, was actually the thing.

Everyone turned to her.

"What?" Leilani said.

"I didn't know who ran it. I've heard about it. Some girls on JV basketball were talking about it in the locker room last week. They thought it was funny. They were laughing about, like, some picture of somebody. I don't know who. I told them it wasn't funny. They stopped laughing, around me anyway." Jada folded her arms. "But I didn't do anything else. I didn't tell anyone. I should have told somebody."

"You didn't know what to tell," Rashad said, gently.

"I had a feeling, though. I had a feeling it was a bad thing. And I did not pursue the feeling."

Mateo, for once, was not making a joke. "I heard something too. I heard a kid in the hall say something about lunch photos. I didn't know what it meant. I thought it was a meme or something."

Farah said, "I didn't hear anything. I want to say that. I want to say I didn't hear anything. Because my first instinct is to say I did, just to be part of this. But I didn't. I feel, I feel I should have. But I didn't."

"That's important to say," Wesley said, looking at Farah. "That's really important."

Wesley had a way of saying things that made people feel seen. Farah nodded.

Henry cleared his throat.

"So," Henry said. "What are we doing here."

Everyone looked at Leilani.

"I don't know," Leilani said, honestly. "That's the truth. I don't know what to do. I don't know what the right thing is. I know there's something that has to happen. I can't let this keep going. But I don't know how. Or when. Or what. And" — she swallowed — "Tanner is Sky's brother. Sky is my best friend. Sky is family to me. And whatever we do, I am going to lose her. I am."

Silence.

Rashad leaned forward.

"Leilani," he said. "Why did you call us."

"Because Henry told me to."

Rashad looked at Henry. Henry shrugged.

"I mean," Rashad said, "why are we the ones you called. Not your parents. Not a teacher."

Leilani took a breath.

"Because" — she paused, trying to find the words — "because my grandmother told me about a thing called consultation. It's, it's a way of deciding things together. Of looking at a hard problem from all sides. She learned it from a Bahá'í family she used to know. It's not a religious thing, I mean, it is, but she's using it as, as a practice. A way of thinking. And I think, I think this is a consultation thing. I think this is the kind of problem you cannot solve alone. I called you because, because you're the people I trust to tell me the truth. You are the people who, when I say something, will not just agree with me. You are the people who will push me. And I need to be pushed. I need to get this right."

Silence again. Longer.

Mateo said, slowly, "Wait. This is a thing? Consultation? Your grandmother actually knows how to do this?"

"She told me the basics. Five rules, basically."

"Tell us."

Leilani told them. She repeated her grandmother's five guidelines. The five fingers. Begin with facts. Speak freely, then let the idea go. Listen to those who disagree. Aim at truth, not being right. When a decision is reached, support it together.

While she was talking, Rashad, for some reason, started to smile. Not a teasing smile. A real one.

"What," Leilani said.

"Nothing. It's just, I love this. I love it. This is what I've been looking for and didn't know it. I think about this kind of thing all the time. Like, how do groups actually decide anything? How do committees not fall apart? How do you make a choice without power just, like, ramming it through?" Rashad laughed. "I am so in. I am so in I might cry."

"Please don't cry," Mateo said.

"I will try not to cry."

"Okay, wait," Jada said. "Can we actually try this? Can we do it now?"

"I want to try too," Farah said. "Can we just, can we have the meeting? Can we consult? Right now?"

Wesley looked at the ceiling. Then he said, in his quiet voice, "My grandfather used to talk about a thing like this. When I was little. He said the old way of making decisions in our people, the old way, before a lot of things happened to it, was to sit in a circle and let every voice speak. And wait to speak until you had listened. He said, he said a decision made without every voice is a broken decision. It will not hold."

"Oh," Farah said, very softly. "That's, that is it. Exactly."

"I think every people has some version of this," Rashad said. "The specifics change. The bones don't. My father used to tell me about shura, in our tradition. It means, roughly, the same thing. A circle of people working something out together."

"Okay," Henry said. "So. Not just a Bahá'í thing. A general, we-are-humans-and-we-have-done-this-forever thing."

"Right."

"I am a little bit less skeptical now."

"Were you skeptical?" Mateo asked.

"A little. I'm always a little skeptical. That's my role."

Leilani looked at them. Her six people. In folding chairs in her basement surrounded by her grandmother's Christmas decorations and a bowl of pretzels.

"We should give this a name," Mateo said, suddenly. "If we're going to keep doing this. Not, like, a pretentious name. But a name. So we know we're in this. So it's a thing."

"Like a club?" Farah said.

"Like a club."

"What should we call it," Jada said.

Silence.

"What."

"Covenant. It means, like, a promise. A serious promise, between people. A really old word for it. A promise you keep even when it's hard. Which is what we're doing. We are promising each other to figure this out together. To tell the truth. To consult. That is a covenant. We are a covenant club."

"It sounds like a church youth group," Mateo said.

"Maybe it is." Rashad shrugged. "I'm okay with that."

"No, I actually like it," Farah said. "I like that it's serious. The things we're going to talk about are serious. I don't want the name to be cute."

"'The Covenant Club,'" Jada said, trying it out. "The Covenant Club. Hm. Yeah. Okay."

"I'm in," Farah said.

"In," Jada said.

"In," Rashad said.

"In," Henry said.

"Obviously in," Mateo said. "I brought empanadas."

Leilani looked at all of them. She felt something in her chest unfold, like a piece of folded paper opening after a long time.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Then, then let's start. Let's, let's consult."

They all leaned forward a little.

"What's the first question," Mateo said.

Henry, at the whiteboard, lifted his marker.

"What is true," Leilani said.

And the room got quiet in the way a room gets quiet before something important happens in it.

Upstairs, Leilani's grandmother was making tea. She did not come down. She did not need to. She knew what was happening in her own basement.

=====

Henry brought the screenshots up on his laptop and projected them onto a white sheet he had tacked to the basement wall. (Henry had brought the sheet. Henry had come prepared.) He had scrubbed them, he explained, of any identifying info about the target kids, the girls' faces were blurred, their names replaced with letters, so nobody in the room would be seeing Grace's or Jamie's or Lila's image without their consent. He'd done this, he said, because respect for the targeted students was not optional, even in here, even among us.

"Henry," Rashad said. "You are very impressive."

"Thank you."

"I'm serious."

"I know. Thank you."

Leilani talked them through what she'd found. She told them the full list, seven names she knew of, maybe more. She told them about Jamie's flinch. About Nasim's anger. About Lila's unicorn sticker. About Grace in the music room.

She did not cry. She had cried about this already. She was past that, now.

When she finished, Jada said, "So we are all clear. Tanner Marshall-Patel is the admin of the group chat."

"Yes."

"Based on the reaction position Henry identified."

"Yes."

"And what else."

He clicked. A different screenshot came up.

"This is from a follow-up set Grace sent Leilani Friday night. Because once Grace started talking, she, she let loose. This is a reply from Tanner in the chat. His username is visible in the reply preview, because another user quoted him."

"Oh," Farah said, very softly.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"Yes."

Mateo exhaled. "I, I was not ready for how specifically bad this was. I am going to say that. I thought I was ready. I was not."

"Nobody is ready," Wesley said.

Jada put her hand over her mouth.

Rashad leaned forward. "Okay. Before we go further. Let's do the first question correctly. What is true. Leilani, your grandmother's first rule, that's, that's the ground we stand on, right? We don't skip it. We don't assume. So let's actually say what we know. Out loud. So we all hear it."

"Okay."

"I'll go first." Rashad held up one finger. "What is true. One. There is a group chat at Harriet Tubman Middle School where photos of students are being posted and mocked." He held up a second finger. "Two. Tanner Marshall-Patel is the admin of the chat. Three. He reacts to the posts approvingly. Four. The chat has around forty members. Five. At least seven students have been targeted. Six. Several of those students have told Leilani directly that this is causing them real harm. Panic. Sleep loss. Avoidance of the cafeteria. Shame."

"Yes," Farah said.

"Is that true?" Rashad said. "Is all of that true? Does anybody want to correct any of it?"

"No," Henry said. "The data supports all of it."

"The kids supports all of it," Leilani said. "I spoke to them. They were not vague. They were not exaggerating. I could see them. I could see them in their bodies."

"Okay." Rashad nodded. "Now. Here's another thing I want to ask. What is also true that's more complicated."

"Like what," Jada said.

"Like, it's also true that Tanner Marshall-Patel has not, as far as we know, been in trouble at school before. It's also true that he is a popular kid who many adults and students speak of warmly. It's also true that he is the older brother of a specific person, Sky, whom we love, and whose family has also been kind to us. It's also true that he is fifteen years old, which is not an adult, not a seasoned criminal. He is, he is a kid. Who is doing a terrible thing."

"Why do we have to say that part," Jada said. Her voice was tight.

"Because it's true."

"Does it matter that it's true?"

"I think it matters because we have to hold the truth of the harm and the truth of his age at the same time. Otherwise, we'll, we'll overcorrect. We'll treat him like a monster. He's not a monster. He's a kid doing a terrible thing. And we need to treat him like that, not like a monster, or we'll get the response wrong."

"Rashad," Jada said, slowly, "I hear you. I do. But. Kids like this grow up. And when they grow up, the things they did as kids don't just, disappear. They become patterns. Tanner is fifteen now. If nobody stops him, he's going to be twenty-five doing this, and worse. The thing we owe him, the kindest thing we owe him, is to stop this now. Before it hardens. That is also the truth. Is it not?"

Rashad looked at her. A long look.

"Yes," he said. "That is also true."

"Okay," Jada said.

"Okay."

"Please."

"It's true that Tanner is not doing this alone. It's true that forty other kids are in the chat. It's true that at least some of those kids are laughing at the captions. Some of them are probably just watching. Some of them may not even look at it much. But all forty are a little bit participating, by being there. So Tanner is the worst. But Tanner is not the only problem. The chat is the problem. The culture that made the chat possible is the problem."

"Oh," Henry said. "Yes. Yes. That is important."

"I keep thinking," Farah said, "that if we only think about Tanner, we'll miss the bigger thing. The bigger thing is that a whole slice of the school thinks this is okay. Or at least, not their problem. That is, that is a bigger true thing than Tanner."

"Yeah," Leilani said, slowly. "Yeah."

Wesley spoke then. He had been quiet for a long time.

"I want to name something," Wesley said. "And I will try to say it clearly. It is also true that this kind of thing is not new. What's new is the phone. The way it scales. The way it makes the cruelty faster and wider. But the cruelty itself, the making fun of girls, the pointing at a body, the laughing, this is old. I'm not saying that to, to excuse it. I'm saying it because we should know what we are dealing with. This is a very old pattern. And the reason it is so hard to stop is because it is very old."

The room was quiet.

"My grandfather," Wesley said, "told me once that the hardest thing to change is the thing everyone thinks is normal. That is what he said. 'The hardest thing to change is the thing everyone thinks is normal.' He was talking about something else. A different situation. But I think it applies here. This chat is not normal. But at Harriet Tubman, right now, it has become normal for forty kids. The work is not just to punish Tanner. The work is to make it stop being normal."

"Wesley," Farah said. "That was."

"What?"

"That was just, that was important."

"I was trying to say what was true."

"I know."

Henry, at the whiteboard, was writing things down. He was writing in bullet points. Under the header 1. WHAT IS TRUE? he had a long list now. Facts. Complications. Tensions. He was writing fast, and occasionally stopping to draw an arrow between two items.

"Okay," Leilani said, after a minute. "So. The truth is this. A group of forty kids, led by a fifteen-year-old named Tanner, is participating in a chat that is harming at least seven students we know of, and probably more we don't. The harm is real. The harm is not exaggerated. The harm is, in some cases, severe. Tanner is a kid who is doing a terrible thing. The chat is part of a bigger culture at our school that thinks cruelty of this kind is acceptable. The cruelty is old. The technology is new. Stopping it is going to require stopping Tanner, and stopping the chat, and, in some way, shifting the culture so this doesn't happen again. All of that is true."

"Yes," Rashad said.

"Yes," Jada said.

"Yes," Farah said.

"Yes," Wesley said.

"Yes," Henry said.

"Yes," Mateo said.

"I know."

"I just wanted to say it out loud."

"Thanks."

"Question one," he said. "Done."

"Question two," Leilani said.

They looked at each other.

It was four o'clock. They had been there for two hours. The pretzels were gone. The empanadas were mostly gone. The lemonade was mostly gone. Upstairs, Leilani could hear the quiet movement of her grandmother. She was, Leilani realized, probably going to need to order pizza.

"Can we stop for today?" Farah said. "I want to, I want to sit with this. One question a day, maybe. Or every few days. That's what I'm thinking. We don't answer all seven in one afternoon. We let each one breathe."

"That's good," Leilani said. "That's right."

"Same time next week?"

"Next week feels long."

"Wednesday?"

"Wednesday."

They cleaned up. They stacked the folding chairs. Mateo took his mother's empanada plate. Jada took the chip bowl. Henry packed up the projector. At the top of the basement stairs, they all hugged Leilani, one by one, the specific hug of people who had just agreed to be each other's people for something serious.

Rashad was last. He held Leilani by the shoulders.

"We are going to figure this out," Rashad said. "I want you to know. You are not alone in this. We are with you. I don't know yet what we are going to do. But we are going to do it together."

"Thank you."

"Hey."

"What."

"I love the name. Covenant Club. I'm going to pretend I didn't come up with it and act surprised every time somebody says it."

"Rashad."

"What."

"Go home."

He went home.

Leilani closed the door behind them. She turned around. Her grandmother was standing in the kitchen, at the counter, with a cup of tea in her hand, watching her.

"Did you consult," her grandmother said.

"We consulted."

"And?"

"It, it worked, Obaachan."

Her grandmother smiled.

"Yes," she said, simply. "It usually does."

=====

Wednesday came. The week in between had felt, to Leilani, like a different kind of time than any time she had ever lived in. She walked the hallways of Harriet Tubman Middle School and everything looked the same and everything had changed. The posters in the hallway still said things like HAVE A GREAT SPRING and READING IS POWERFUL. The bell still rang between periods. The cafeteria still smelled like tater tots. And yet Leilani, now, was walking through the school as a person who knew a secret about it.

She noticed, for the first time, that Grace Chen ate lunch on a bench in the hallway outside the cafeteria, not inside. She had probably been doing this for weeks. Leilani had never noticed.

She noticed, for the first time, that Jamie Sorensen sat with her back to the door in every class.

She noticed, for the first time, that Lila Ortiz walked past the cafeteria and kept going, to the library, where the librarian Miss Park smiled at her without asking why.

She noticed, for the first time, that Nasim Rahimi always had her headphones on. Not as a fashion choice. As armor.

And she noticed, for the first time, how many kids at Harriet Tubman walked down the hallway with their eyes slightly down.

It hurt to notice.

Wednesday at three-thirty, they gathered again. Same basement. Same folding chairs. Fresh pretzels. Henry had printed out, this time, a full list of every student whose photo had appeared in the group chat. Grace had been his source; she had, once she trusted Leilani, given them access to her phone for an evening so Henry could scroll through the entire shared history. He had come back with the list. He laid it on the floor in the middle of the circle.

It was three pages long.

"Three pages," Farah said, quietly.

"Not all of them are severe," Henry said. "Some of them are, you know, one mean caption, posted once, maybe not even mocked after. But some of them are, they're sustained. The same kid, over and over, for weeks. Those are the ones I'm most worried about."

"How many names total," Jada said.

"Twenty-three."

"Twenty-three."

"Yes."

Silence.

"Okay," Leilani said. "Question two. Who is being hurt."

"Let's start with the twenty-three," Rashad said. "And then let's ask if that's the whole answer. I suspect it isn't."

"Agreed."

Four sixth graders. Lila was one. Three others were boys Leilani had never heard of, all small, all new to the school.

Eleven seventh graders. Grace was one. Nasim was one. A girl named Ava, whom Lila had named, had been targeted particularly hard. A boy named Marcus, quiet, with a slight speech stutter, had been mocked in four different posts.

Eight eighth graders. Jamie was one. A girl named Zara, whom Leilani had not known was a target. A boy named Cameron. A girl named Sofia, who had, Jada noted quietly, transferred schools two weeks ago. They all stopped when Jada said that.

"Transferred," Farah said.

"Her mom said she was having trouble adjusting to middle school. She didn't say why. I didn't know why. Now I think I know why."

"Oh," Mateo said.

"She's gone," Wesley said. "Like the girl your grandmother told you about, Leilani. She's gone."

"Yeah."

Nobody spoke for a minute.

That is twenty-three kids.

That was one girl who had already left her whole school because of this.

Mateo said, "Can I add to the who-is-being-hurt list?"

"Go."

"The forty kids in the chat."

They all looked at him.

"Hear me out," Mateo said. "I'm not saying they are hurt the same way. They are not. They are hurting other people. But, Farah said this last time, there is a bigger thing happening. Those forty kids are being, they are being shaped. By participating in this chat, they are becoming certain kinds of people. Cruel people. Or, the kind of person who stays quiet while cruel things happen. That is a harm too. Not the kind you see on a face. The kind that grows inside."

"You mean, their souls," Farah said, quietly.

"If we want to call it that. Yeah."

"I'm going to call it that," Farah said.

"Okay. Their souls. The forty kids in the chat are also being hurt. They just don't know it. Some of them may never know it. But a few of them, a few of them probably know it already, and they hate it, and they don't know how to get out, because they're stuck, because they're afraid of what happens if they leave. So. Add them to the list."

"Tanner," Rashad said.

"What?"

"Tanner is also being hurt. If we're being honest."

"Rashad."

"I know. I know. But listen. I'm not excusing him. I am not. But, but it is also true that what Tanner is doing to other people is something he is also doing to himself. He is becoming a certain kind of person. At fifteen. And if nobody stops him, if nobody stops this, he is going to be thirty, and forty, and sixty, and he is going to have done worse things, and he will have become unreachable. He is, he is hurting himself too. That is part of the picture."

Jada looked at Rashad for a long moment.

"I don't want to feel sorry for him," Jada said.

"I know."

"I am struggling with feeling sorry for him."

"I know. I am too. I am only saying, if we are completing the list, he is on it. Not because he is innocent. Because nobody is untouched by their own cruelty. It changes them. It is changing him."

"Yeah. Okay. But he doesn't get to be the main part of the list."

"He is not. He is the last part of the list. The main part is the twenty-three."

TWENTY-THREE (targeted kids, known)

POSSIBLY MORE (targeted kids, unknown)

THE 40 (participants, moral harm)

TANNER (the worst participant, also morally harmed)

"This is uncomfortable," Mateo said. "The way he wrote it. It's making my stomach hurt."

"That's fair," Henry said. "Mine too."

They looked at her.

"The kids who don't know."

"The kids who," Farah started.

"The kids who are outside the chat. Who know something is wrong at school but can't name it. The atmosphere is colder than it was last year. Things are meaner. There is a specific tone in the hallways. They don't know what it is. But they are living in it. And it is, it is hurting them too. Just, diffuse. Quieter. Less visible."

"Oh," Farah said.

"The air of the school has become, it has become bad. Because of this."

"Yes," Wesley said.

"So, if we are really being honest. The whole school is being hurt."

"Yes."

The whiteboard now looked, to Leilani, terrible. In the best way. Terrible because it was so much. Terrible because she had done this, by asking. But, also, good. Because the truth was on the board. Because they had said it out loud.

"Okay," Rashad said. "So. This is not an abstraction. This is not a question of, 'is bullying bad.' Obviously bullying is bad. This is a question of, this chat is causing a defined amount of harm, to a defined group of people, measurable in real ways, and the number is much bigger than we thought when we started."

"Right."

"Yes," Leilani said.

"So we move to Question Three."

=====

The third meeting of the Covenant Club happened on the following Sunday, because the following week had been too busy, basketball for Jada, science fair for Henry, a family wedding for Farah, Mateo's grandmother's birthday, a field trip for Wesley, a family obligation that Rashad did not specify, and a kind of paralysis for Leilani that had nothing to do with her schedule.

Once in the hall, where Sky had run up and given her a hug so hard it lifted her off the ground, and told her about the new dog her family had gotten. A rescue. A beagle-shepherd mix named Pancake. Sky had videos of Pancake already, thirty of them, which she made Leilani watch in a single sitting. Pancake sleeping. Pancake eating. Pancake attempting, unsuccessfully, to climb onto the couch. Leilani had laughed at the videos. She had laughed for real, because Pancake was ridiculous, and Sky's joy was contagious, and for ten minutes Leilani had forgotten entirely what she was doing.

Twice at lunch, where Sky had saved her a seat, as she always did, at their usual table by the window. They had eaten together. Sky had told Leilani about her English paper. Leilani had told Sky about student council. Sky had asked Leilani if she wanted to come over Saturday, because Tanner had a lacrosse game and they would be home alone with Pancake and could order a whole pizza for just the two of them.

Leilani had said yes. Then she had gone home and thrown up.

This is what she was not telling anyone. That every conversation with Sky had, now, the quality of a lie. That she was carrying this knowledge around in her chest like a stone, and that every time Sky laughed, the stone got heavier, not lighter, because the stone was about Sky's brother, and Sky did not know, and Leilani was choosing not to tell her, and Leilani did not know if not telling her was being a good friend or being a bad friend, and she could not, could not, could not figure it out.

She had been sleeping badly. Her grandmother had started putting a small envelope of chamomile tea on her nightstand every night without saying anything.

Sunday. Two p.m. Basement. Folding chairs.

"No," Leilani said, honestly.

"Okay. Let's go anyway."

The room was quiet.

Nobody corrected her.

"Sky didn't do this," Leilani said. "Sky had nothing to do with this. Sky doesn't know. Her brother did this. But if I tell the principal, or if we do whatever we decide we have to do, Sky is going to be in the splash zone. Her family is going to blow up. Her brother is going to be suspended, or, or maybe expelled. Her mother is going to be a wreck. Her father is going to be a wreck. Her little sisters are going to be confused and scared. And Sky, Sky is going to know that I did it. That I knew and I didn't tell her first. That I used information I got partly because I was her friend and a part of her family, to go against her family. She is going to feel betrayed. She is going to be right to feel betrayed. I will be a person who betrayed her best friend."

Nobody spoke.

"Or," Leilani said, "I tell her first. Before anything. I tell her what I know. I give her the chance to process. Maybe to talk to her brother herself. Maybe, I don't know. But then, then she is carrying information she can't not carry. And maybe Tanner finds out. Maybe Tanner deletes the chat. Maybe the evidence disappears. Maybe he gets away with it. And the twenty-three kids, and the one kid who already left, they all don't get justice. Because I wanted to save my friendship first."

She stopped.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

She was crying now. She had not meant to. But she was.

Farah scooted her chair closer and put her arm around Leilani. Farah did not say anything. Farah just sat there with her arm around Leilani while Leilani cried, quietly, into her own hand.

After a minute, Farah said, "Can I sing something."

"What?"

"I, sorry. Can I sing something. I was going to, I had this song in my head all week. From something my mom used to sing me. I don't know the whole thing. But there's one line. I just, I want to sing it. Is that weird?"

"Sing it," Rashad said.

Farah sang.

Her voice was quiet. She did not use the guitar. She just sang, in the clear, slightly cracked way a thirteen-year-old girl sings when she is about to cry too. In Persian first, then in English. Leilani had not known Farah could speak Persian. She had heard Farah's mother sometimes on the phone, but she had never heard Farah. The melody was like water.

"It's a song about, it's about a nightingale," Farah said, breaking. "That is, she's singing, and she knows the song will cost her. The song is the truth. And the truth will cost her. But, but she sings anyway. Because the song is, the song is why she's alive. She is, she was not made to be silent. That's the line. 'I was not made to be silent, even if my song costs me the garden.' That is, that is roughly the translation. My mother taught it to me when I was small. I don't know why I remembered it now. I haven't thought about it in years."

"Farah," Leilani said.

"I'm sorry. I don't know if that helps. It just kept, it kept, playing in my head all week and I had to, I had to say it."

"It helps."

"Really?"

"Yes."

Wesley, who had not spoken, took a slow breath.

"My grandfather," Wesley said. Everyone turned to look at him. "My grandfather told me something once. He told me that courage, real courage, is not the absence of fear. He said anybody who tells you courage is about not being afraid is a person who has never had to do the hard thing. He said. He said real courage is about what you love. You are always afraid. But if you love the truth more than you love being liked, then you will do the thing that scares you. Because you, you love something more. That's how you find out what you love."

Everyone was quiet.

"He said it better than that," Wesley said. "I can't remember all the words."

"You said it fine," Mateo said, low.

"I think," Wesley said, "that what we owe our friends, our real friends, the ones who are really our friends, is the truth. Even when it costs us. Because a friendship built on us not telling each other the truth, is not, is not actually a friendship. It's something else. It's a, it's a performance of a friendship. A real friend, the best thing we can give them, is the truth. Even a hard truth. Even one that makes them mad."

"Wesley," Leilani said.

"Yes."

"But Sky didn't do anything."

"I know. That's not the point. The point is, what you say to Sky, when the time comes to say it, that's between you and Sky. You tell Sky, eventually, you tell her everything. That's what you owe her. Not secrecy. Truth. That is what friendship is. But, but when. But how. That's the question."

"So you're saying, I don't tell her first. I tell her, but I don't tell her first."

"I'm saying, I don't know when. But I know secrecy is not the thing we owe a friend. Truth is."

Jada spoke. "I want to add something. And I'm going to be a little sharp. Forgive me."

"Go."

"Leilani. Sky is not the only person in this. I hear you saying, 'what do I owe Sky.' That is a real question. But there are twenty-three other kids. Sky is one person. And, I want to be clear, I love Sky. She is great. She is. But the twenty-three kids are also people. And they are being hurt right now. Every day we wait, they are being hurt more. The Sky question is heavy. But it is not the only question. And I, I don't want us to weigh one friendship, even a precious one, against the safety of twenty-three other people, and come out with the friendship on top. That would be wrong. Wouldn't it?"

Leilani swallowed.

"It would."

"So."

"So."

"So we have to figure this out. We have to figure out how to tell Sky, how to do it in a way that is kind, but, but we also have to move. We can't wait forever."

"Yeah."

"Mateo."

"Oh," Farah said. "Oh. That's."

"That's true," Leilani said.

"I don't love him," Mateo said. "But I think that's true about him anyway."

WHAT DO WE OWE OUR FRIENDS?

- The truth, told with care

- Not silence, not even for love

They stared at the board.

"So, what do we do about Sky," Jada said, directly.

Leilani took a breath.

"I think," Leilani said, slowly, "I think I tell her. Before I go to the principal. I tell her first. The night before. So she hears it from me. She will still hate me. She might still never forgive me. But at least she will hear it from me. Not from the school. Not from a rumor. From me."

"That feels right," Farah said.

"Does it?"

"It feels like the most truthful version of something that has no painless version."

"Yeah."

"Lei," Rashad said. "What you're choosing, it, I want to name it. You are choosing to probably lose your best friend. For the sake of twenty-three kids, most of whom you don't know. That is, that is a specific kind of thing. A specific kind of choice."

"I know."

"I just, I want to name it. So you know we see it. So we, so when you do it, you don't feel like you did it in secret. We see what this costs you."

Leilani nodded. She couldn't speak.

She nodded again.

"We will carry it with you," he said again, slowly. "That's what this thing is. That's what the Covenant Club is for."

"Yes," Rashad said.

"Yes," Henry said.

They all said it. Quietly. One after another. Like a promise.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Leilani cried again. She was going to cry a lot, she suspected, over the next few weeks. She was probably going to stop being embarrassed about it, eventually. Her friends were not embarrassed. Her friends had all, at some point in the meeting, been a little bit weepy themselves. Middle school was a place where people tried not to cry. But this basement had become, somehow, a place that was not quite middle school. A place where crying was allowed. A place where singing was allowed. A place where Wesley could say 'we will carry it with you' and mean it, and have everyone understand exactly what he meant.

They ended late that afternoon. Six o'clock. Leilani's grandmother had cooked, without asking, enough food for seven people. She had, without asking, set it on the dining room table. She had, without asking, put a small plate of Farah's favorite thing (pomegranate seeds, from a pomegranate she had found specifically at the Armenian grocery on the east side) at Farah's place. She knew them all, somehow. She knew what they ate. She called them all up the stairs.

They ate together, all seven of them, plus Mari Obaachan at the head of the table. They did not talk about the meeting. They talked about school. They talked about the dog Pancake, whom Leilani described without mentioning Sky's last name. They talked about Henry's robot arm. They talked about Farah's grandmother in Tehran who sent her voice messages every Sunday that were longer than any American voice message had ever been. They talked about nothing. They talked about everything. They were friends, is what they were. They were friends who were doing the hardest thing any of them had ever done, together, and they were also friends who were eating rice and fish on a Sunday night.

After they left, Leilani's grandmother sat down at the now-empty table and looked at her granddaughter across it.

"Leilani," she said.

"Obaachan."

"I am so proud of you."

"You don't even know what we talked about."

"I don't need to. I have ears. I heard you crying. I heard Farah singing. I heard Wesley, the boy with the quiet voice. I did not understand the words. I did not need to. I know what a consultation sounds like when it is working. It sounds like this."

Leilani nodded. She couldn't speak.

Her grandmother reached across the table and took her hand.

"You are doing something hard. And you are doing it well. I have almost nothing to teach you right now, Leilani. You are past the lessons. You are in the doing. The doing is where you are. Be brave there."

"Obaachan. I am so scared."

"I know."

"I love Sky."

"I know."

"I don't want to lose her."

"I know."

Her grandmother did not say anything else. She did not say, 'you won't lose her,' which would have been a lie, and her grandmother did not lie. She did not say, 'you will lose her and it will be okay,' which was also probably a lie, because Leilani was thirteen, and losing your best friend was not okay when you were thirteen, whatever anyone said.

Her grandmother just held her hand.

They sat there like that for a long time.

=====

The week that followed was the worst week of Leilani Nakamura's life.

She was going to say that, later, to her mother, and her mother was going to laugh and say, "Oh, honey. There will be worse." And Leilani was going to realize, with the specific grief of a kid realizing an adult is right, that her mother was right. Adulthood would bring worse. Adulthood probably brought much worse, regularly. But on this specific week, in April of her eighth grade year, Leilani did not know that yet. This was the worst week yet.

Monday was normal. She got through it by pretending it was normal. Mr. Klein's math class, Ms. Okonkwo's English, lunch with Sky, social studies, Spanish. Sky was as Sky always was. Funny. Loud. Her backpack still unzipped. She showed Leilani a new Pancake video at lunch, one in which Pancake was attempting to eat a sock. Pancake was not succeeding. Pancake looked extremely pleased about this. Leilani laughed at the video. She actually laughed. Sky leaned into her shoulder, the way she always did, and said, "I love that dog more than most people I know."

"I know," Leilani said.

"That's not a compliment to humans."

"I know."

Sky crunched her apple. "Hey, are you okay? You seem weird today."

"Student council stuff."

"Oh no. Is it bad?"

"It's, it's a lot. I'll tell you about it when I figure it out."

"Okay." Sky nodded seriously. "But tell me. When you figure it out. I want to hear."

"I will."

Leilani ate half a sandwich. She put the other half back in her bag.

She stared at the sentence.

She stared at that paragraph.

She deleted it.

She wrote it again, differently.

She deleted that too.

It was not that she couldn't write. It was that writing it made it real. Once she wrote it, it would exist. It would be a document. Someone could print it. Someone could forward it. Someone could read it to someone else. This paragraph was going to be, eventually, a piece of paper on Principal Adler's desk, and Principal Adler was going to read it, and she was going to make a call, and Sky's mother was going to pick up that call, and that was the moment everything in Leilani's life was going to change.

She closed the laptop.

Her grandmother came in. She put a hand on Leilani's shoulder. "Not yet?"

"Not yet."

"Okay."

"Obaachan. I think I'm going to throw up."

"Then throw up. Then try again."

Leilani laughed a tiny laugh. "That's gross, Obaachan."

"It's honest."

Rashad made them all say that last sentence out loud so they would remember it.

It did not change whether they owed the twenty-three targeted kids anything. It only changed whether they noticed.

They had noticed.

So they owed.

4. WHAT DO WE OWE THOSE WE DON'T KNOW?

Agreed.

Wednesday was the day of the bathroom door.

Leilani did not know, in the morning, that it was going to be a day about a bathroom door. She thought it was going to be a normal Wednesday. She had woken up with a headache. She had taken an Advil. Her grandmother had made her eggs. She had walked to school.

At her locker before first period, Leilani saw Sky. Sky was coming down the hallway toward her, and Sky was, Sky was the best version of Sky today. Sky was wearing a yellow sweater Leilani had never seen before, and her braid was messy in the way Sky's braid was always messy, and she had her backpack slung over one shoulder and her lunch bag in the other hand and her whole face was lit up about something, Leilani could tell from fifty feet away, Sky was excited to tell her something.

"Lei!" Sky's voice, carrying down the hall. "LEI. I have news."

"What?"

"Tanner made captain."

"What?"

"Of lacrosse. The coach pulled him aside yesterday. He's the new captain of the high school team. He's a sophomore, Lei. That's huge. He's usually a junior thing. Coach said Tanner is a natural leader. Isn't that the coolest?"

Sky was beaming.

Leilani felt her stomach turn inside out.

"Cool," she said. It came out wrong. It came out as a tiny, quiet word, a word that did not come close to matching Sky's brightness.

Sky did not seem to notice. Sky was running on her own joy. "My dad is taking us out to dinner Friday. You should come. We're going to that Mexican place you like. The one with the flan."

"Oh. Um. I might have a thing."

"What thing?"

"Student council thing."

"Come after."

"I don't know when it'll be done."

"Come after." Sky put a hand on Leilani's arm. "Lei, you have to. You're family. My mom was like, 'is Leilani coming?' Like, she assumed. You are family. You have to come."

Leilani looked at her. Sky, her best friend. Sky's hand, on her arm. Sky, inviting her to a dinner Friday, to celebrate Tanner's captaincy, at the restaurant with the flan, because Sky's family had always, always, always included her.

Leilani opened her mouth.

She could not speak.

Sky's eyebrows went up. "Lei?"

"I, I have to go to my locker."

"You are at your locker."

"I have to, I have to go to the bathroom."

"Okay?"

"I'll, I'll text you."

"Lei, are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. I'll, I'll text you. Congrats to Tanner. Tell him congrats."

"I will."

"Bye."

Leilani walked, too fast, down the hall to the girls' bathroom. She pushed open the door. Two sixth graders were at the sinks. She waited for them to leave. They took forever. They were discussing, loudly, a sixth grade crush. Leilani stood at the last sink and pretended to wash her hands. She washed them until they were raw. The two sixth graders left. The door swung shut behind them.

Leilani went into the last stall. The one at the end. The one with the door that always stuck a little when you shut it. She shut the door. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She put her face in her hands.

She was shaking.

She was really, physically, visibly shaking.

I cannot not do this. But I cannot do this.

She stared at the sentence.

She did not cross it out. She did not fix it. She did not improve the grammar. It was a bad sentence, but it was true. It was exactly what was happening. It was exactly where she was.

She was, she realized, sitting in a locked stall on Wednesday morning during first period, in the Harriet Tubman Middle School girls' bathroom, at the hinge of her own life.

If she kept going, she lost Sky. Probably. Maybe forever. She lost the Friday dinners. She lost Pancake. She lost Sky's mother saying "is Leilani coming" as if Leilani were obviously coming. She lost the second family that had been, for four years, quietly a part of her life. She lost the best friend of her childhood, the person who had braided her hair in fifth grade when Leilani had a cast on her arm, the person who had been at every birthday, the person who had drawn a heart next to her name on her election ballot even though it was against the rules.

If she stopped, she lost the twenty-three. She lost Grace, who had cried in the music room. She lost Lila, who had the unicorn sticker and the divorced mother. She lost Nasim, who had said "prove it" and meant it. She lost the ones she didn't know yet. She lost the integrity of every word she had said during her campaign. She lost the girl on the poster with the shield that looked like a potato. She lost Mari Obaachan's pride, though her grandmother would never say so. She lost, in some deep way, herself. The self she had decided, this year, to be. The self who did the hard right thing.

She sat in the stall.

She did not cry. She was past crying. She was in some other place past crying, where her heart was beating hard and her hands were still trembling and her brain was, weirdly, very quiet.

She thought about Farah. About the nightingale. The one who was not made to be silent. Even if the song cost her the garden.

She thought about her grandmother, and the Dalirs, and the bread on the table. She thought about her grandmother saying, you are past the lessons. You are in the doing.

She was in the doing.

She took a breath.

She stood up, and she unlocked the stall door, and she walked out into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sinks. Her face was very pale. Her eyes were red but dry. She looked, she thought, not quite like herself. She looked like somebody who had decided something. Not somebody happy about it. Not somebody confident. Just somebody who had decided.

The bell rang.

First period was starting. She was going to be late.

She washed her hands again, for real this time. She dried them on a paper towel. She picked up her backpack. She opened the bathroom door.

In the hallway, she saw Sky. Sky was at her own locker now. Sky was laughing at something on her phone, probably a Pancake video. Sky was just being Sky. Sky did not know. Sky did not yet know what was coming. Sky would know, soon, because Leilani was going to tell her. Leilani was going to tell her Thursday night. That was what the Covenant Club had decided. Thursday night, Leilani would tell Sky. Friday morning, Leilani would go to Principal Adler with Henry and Rashad and all the evidence. The plan was clear. The plan had been consulted. The plan had been blessed by the seven of them, by Mari Obaachan's five rules, by Wesley's grandfather's old wisdom, by Farah's nightingale, by all of it.

The plan was clear.

What was not clear was how Leilani was going to walk down this hallway right now, past her best friend, past the yellow sweater Leilani had never seen before, past the one person at Harriet Tubman Middle School who loved her without complication, and pretend, for one more day, that everything was fine.

She started walking.

Sky looked up. Sky saw her. Sky smiled. A big, easy, Sky smile, across the hallway. The smile that had been there for four years. The smile that was, Leilani thought, about to be taken away from her.

"LEI!" Sky mouthed, from across the hall. "LATE!"

Leilani lifted her hand. She tried to smile back.

She was not sure what her face did.

She walked past Sky, past Sky's locker, past the open backpack and the messy braid and the yellow sweater. She kept walking. She made it around the corner. She made it almost all the way to Mr. Klein's math room. And then, then, her legs did not want to carry her anymore. They were not, it turned out, unlimited. They had a limit. The limit was the corner by room 148, where she stopped, and she put her hand against the cool painted cinder block wall, and she breathed.

A teacher went past her. It was Ms. Okonkwo. Ms. Okonkwo paused.

"Leilani? You okay?"

"Yes, Ms. Okonkwo. I'm just, I got lightheaded."

"Do you need the nurse?"

"No. I'm okay. Thank you. I'm going to class."

"Okay. But if you start feeling worse, you come find me."

"Okay."

Ms. Okonkwo walked on. Leilani took three breaths, her grandmother's four-four-six, in through the nose, hold, out through the mouth. Three of them. She straightened up. She pushed off the wall. She walked into math class, twelve minutes late. Mr. Klein waved her to her seat without a word. Mr. Klein, thankfully, was not a teacher who embarrassed late kids. Mr. Klein knew that kids had reasons.

Leilani sat down. She took out her math notebook. She opened it. On the first page was a doodle she had drawn weeks ago, a little shield with a heart inside, from her campaign logo. She looked at it.

She had said, on her campaign posters, that a safer school began with us. She had meant it. She had believed it. She still believed it. She just had not known, when she wrote it on a poster in her bedroom with her grandmother's ginger smell drifting up the stairs, what "began with us" was going to mean. She had thought it was going to mean posters. Committees. An anonymous reporting box.

It meant Thursday night. The conversation she was going to have with Sky.

It meant, Friday morning, a paper on Principal Adler's desk with Tanner's name on it.

It meant whatever came after.

Leilani closed the notebook. She opened her math textbook. She tried to focus on the Pythagorean theorem, which was, still, reliably true.

I cannot not do this. But I cannot do this.

She did not delete it.

She walked into second period.

She had twenty-four hours.

=====

She made it through second period, and third period, and lunch. Lunch was the hardest. Sky saved her a seat, as always, by the window. Sky had her half orange. Sky had a turkey sandwich her mother had cut into triangles, the way Mira Marshall-Patel had been cutting Sky's sandwiches since kindergarten, and Sky had, every year, failed to ask her to stop, because Sky had admitted once to Leilani that she secretly liked the triangles.

"Lei," Sky said, the moment Leilani sat down. "You look like a ghost. Are you sick? Do you want my sandwich? My mom put extra mustard, the way I like it, but you could pick it off."

"I'm not hungry."

"You never eat anymore."

"I eat."

"You don't."

"Sky."

"What."

"Can we, can we just eat?"

Sky looked at her for a long moment. Sky was not a stupid person. Sky was, in fact, a very perceptive person, when she wanted to be. Sky usually didn't want to be, because Sky had chosen, years ago, to be a person who trusted other people and didn't scrutinize them. But Sky, right now, was looking at Leilani in a way that said, I am scrutinizing you.

"Lei. Are we okay?"

"Yes."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No."

"Did I do something?"

"No. Sky. No. I promise. I am not mad at you. I am, I am going through something. It's, it's about student council. It's a hard thing. I will tell you. I promise I will tell you. Just, just not, not at lunch today, okay?"

"When."

"Soon."

"Lei."

"Soon. I promise."

Sky nodded. Sky did not look convinced. But Sky was Sky, and Sky reached across the table, and Sky took one of Leilani's French fries, without asking, and Sky said, "I'm here when you're ready," and then Sky started telling Leilani about Pancake again, because Sky was also Sky.

Leilani ate three fries. She could not eat any more than that.

After school, Leilani went directly to her grandmother's room.

Her grandmother was sitting in the blue chair by the garden window. She was reading, or pretending to read, because her book was open but her eyes were on the plum tree. The plum blossoms had begun to drop. The yard was dusted with white petals like a light snow.

"Obaachan."

"Mm."

"I'm going to tell Sky tomorrow. After school."

Her grandmother closed the book. She did not say anything for a minute.

"Okay," she said, at last.

"Friday I'm going to Principal Adler."

"Okay."

"I wanted you to know."

"Thank you." Her grandmother reached out and patted the chair next to her. "Sit with me."

Leilani sat.

They looked at the plum tree together.

"Did you know," her grandmother said, "that my mother used to say the plum blossom is the bravest flower. Because it blooms first. When the world is still cold. It doesn't wait. It goes. And then, only then, other things follow. She said a plum blossom has no one to tell it, 'it is safe now.' It blooms because it is time."

"Obaachan."

"I know. It's too neat, isn't it?"

"A little."

"My mother was a little neat. I inherited some of it. You, I hope you inherit less."

"It's okay. I like when you're neat."

Her grandmother smiled.

They sat there, not speaking, for a while longer. The petals fell. A bird did something in the tree. Leilani rested her head on her grandmother's shoulder, which she had not done, she realized, in a very long time. Her grandmother's shoulder was small, and bony, and the most comforting place in the world.

"Obaachan."

"Mm."

"I don't know how to start the sentence."

"The one with Sky."

"Yes."

"You will know when you are in front of her. You do not need to know now. Trust yourself. Trust that you have been preparing for this. Trust that, when the moment comes, the words will come too. Trust the girl who stood on your campaign poster with the shield that looked like a potato."

"You remember the potato?"

"I remember everything, Leilani. It is my job."

Leilani laughed a tiny laugh. A real one.

Her grandmother kissed the top of her head.

=====

Thursday morning Leilani woke up early. The sun was not up yet. Her room was gray and cold. She lay in bed and watched the ceiling. She thought about the sentence she was going to say to Sky. She tried several versions in her head.

Sky. I have to tell you something.

Sky. It's about Tanner.

Sky. I know this is going to hurt you.

Sky. Please listen. Please let me finish before you say anything.

Sky. I love you. I love you. I love you.

All of them felt wrong. All of them felt right. All of them were going to come out of her mouth in some order, she hoped. She did not know which.

At breakfast her grandmother handed her a small paper bag. "This is for later. After school. Do not look at it now."

"Obaachan."

"Take it."

Leilani took it. Her grandmother's paper bag. She put it in her backpack.

The school day was long. It was, she thought, the longest school day of her life. Every class lasted a year. Every passing period lasted a decade. She saw Sky three times in the hallway and they each time waved to each other and Leilani forced herself to smile. The smile was wrong. Sky noticed. Sky did not say anything.

At the end of eighth period, Leilani went to her locker. She got her things. She walked down the hall to Sky's locker, as she did every day. She waited. Sky came. Sky was talking to Priya Shah, of all people, about, Leilani heard, homework. Sky waved goodbye to Priya. Sky turned to Leilani.

"Hey, Lei."

"Sky. Can we walk home together? Just us? Can we, can we go by the park?"

Sky looked at her.

"Yes," Sky said, slowly. "Is this the thing?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

They walked out of the school together. It was a beautiful April afternoon. The kind of afternoon that should have been in a different story. The park was three blocks out of their way. It had a path that went around a small pond, and benches, and a playground full of little kids with their parents. Leilani led Sky to a bench by the pond, far enough from the playground that no one would hear them, near enough that they were not quite alone in the world.

They sat.

Leilani started to cry.

"Lei?"

She handed Sky a mochi.

"Lei. What."

She took a breath.

"Sky. I have to tell you something. And I need you to listen to all of it before you say anything. Can you do that?"

Sky nodded slowly.

"Okay."

Leilani looked at the pond. She looked at the ducks on the pond. She looked at her hands.

She looked at Sky.

"I love you," she said. "I love you. I am your best friend. I am going to say a thing and I am going to still be your best friend when I say it. Even if you hate me. Even if you never want to see me again. I am still going to be your best friend. Because that is what I am. Okay?"

"Lei, you are scaring me."

"I know. I'm sorry. Okay. Here. It's about Tanner."

Sky's face changed.

"What about Tanner."

And Leilani, sitting on a bench by a pond in April, with a paper bag from her grandmother and a mochi in her hand and her best friend watching her, began to tell her best friend the truth.

She told it all the way through. The screenshots. The group chat. Grace in the music room. Jamie's flinch. Lila's unicorn sticker. Nasim's "prove it." Sofia, who had transferred. The Covenant Club, which Sky had not known existed. The consultations. The seven questions. The plan for Friday. The name Tanner. Not as a rumor. As the person running the chat. As the person reacting to photos of girls eating lunch with "keep 'em coming, this one is FIRE."

Sky did not interrupt.

Sky did, at some point, put her mochi down on the bench.

Sky, when Leilani finished, was crying too. Silently. Tears running down her face. Sky's mouth was open a little.

"Sky," Leilani said. "I am so sorry."

Sky did not say anything.

"Sky. Please say something."

"I."

"What."

"I heard you."

"Okay."

"I heard all of it."

"Okay."

"Lei."

"Yes."

"I don't, I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to."

Sky wiped her face with the back of her hand.

"I have to go," Sky said.

"Sky."

"I have to go home, Lei. I have to. I, I can't, I can't be here right now. I have to go. I'm not, I am not saying I hate you. I am not saying we are not friends. I am, I am saying I cannot be here right now."

"Okay."

"I will, I will talk to you. I don't know when. Soon. I need, I need to go home."

"Okay."

"I believe you."

And then she walked away.

Leilani sat on the bench for a long time after Sky had gone. The ducks moved on the pond. The little kids on the playground shouted. The sun began to go down. Leilani did not eat her mochi. She wrapped it up, and put it back in the paper bag, and stood, and walked home.

Her grandmother was at the door when she got there. Her grandmother did not ask anything. Her grandmother just opened her arms. Leilani walked into them, and her grandmother held her, and Leilani realized she had never, in her whole life, been more grateful for her grandmother than she was right now.

"She believed me," Leilani whispered.

"I know."

"I lost her, Obaachan."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"I lost her."

"Leilani. Listen to me. You did the right thing. You did the hardest thing. You did it with kindness, and with truth, and with the best friend you have ever been. What Sky does with that is Sky's choice, and Sky needs time, and you do not know what will happen yet. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"You do not know what will happen yet."

"Yes."

Her grandmother held her for a long time.

Tomorrow was Friday.

Tomorrow was Principal Adler.

CLIFFHANGER. She did not know, yet, what Friday would bring.

But she would.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2 FOR FULL BOOK]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The Covenant Club met on Saturday in Mari Obaachan's sunroom, because the library was too public now, and because Leilani's grandmother had offered without being asked. She had set out a plate of senbei and a pitcher of barley tea, and then she had disappeared into the kitchen, where Leilani could hear her washing rice and humming a song whose name Leilani had never learned.

Seven chairs. Seven people. The afternoon light came in at a low angle, striping the wooden floor in pale bars. Mari Obaachan's sunroom had once been a back porch, her grandfather had enclosed it with his own hands in the summer of 1978, and the wood of the ceiling beams still showed his brushstrokes where he had stained them. Leilani had grown up in this room. She had done her second-grade math worksheets here on winter afternoons, her bare feet tucked under her grandmother's cat, whose name had been Oniichan until Oniichan had died two summers ago and Mari Obaachan had declared herself finished with cats. The ghost of Oniichan still lingered in the room in the form of a single small scratch on the leg of the coffee table, which Mari Obaachan refused to have sanded out.

He had a blue pen and a red pen, and a small nervous habit of clicking them alternately when he was thinking. He was clicking them now. Leilani had come to love the sound. It was the sound of someone taking the work seriously.

"So," he said. "We've talked about the people close to us. Sky. Tanner. What we owe each other in this room. But there's another question, and I think it's the hardest one yet."

"Grace Chen," Jada said quietly.

"Grace Chen," Rashad agreed. "And Madison. And Priya. And the two seventh graders whose names we only learned last week. And the one we haven't found yet, the one in the screenshots from October whose face is blurred but whose voice bubble says, please stop."

Farah flinched. She had her guitar with her, resting flat across her lap, though she hadn't played it. Her fingers were moving over the strings silently, the way some people moved a rosary.

"We don't know Grace," Mateo said. "Not really. I sat next to her in sixth-grade science. She passed me a pencil once."

"I don't know Madison at all," Henry admitted. "I know her name. I could pick her out of a yearbook. That's it."

"So what do we owe them?" Rashad said. "That's the question. We've been circling it for two weeks without asking it directly. Are we doing this for our friends, or are we doing it for them?"

Leilani pressed her palms flat against her thighs. She had slept badly. She had woken three times in the night, each time with the memory of Sky in the hallway on Friday, Sky's shoulder turning away from her in the careful, miserable way people turn away when they already half-know.

"If we're only doing this for our friends," she said slowly, "then we're doing it for Sky. And Sky doesn't want us to do it."

"Not yet," Wesley said.

He had not spoken much that afternoon. He was sitting cross-legged on the rug beside Farah's chair, a paperback tucked into his back pocket as always. His black hair was tied back with a leather cord his older sister had made him. He had a way of speaking that Leilani had come to trust, not because he spoke often, but because when he did, his words landed.

"Not yet," Wesley said again. "But that's Sky right now. That's not Sky six months from now. That's not Sky the kind of person she wants to be. And anyway, if we only do things for people who want us to do them, we'd never do anything hard."

"Wesley's right," Jada said. "My track coach says, if you only run when it feels good, you're not a runner. You're a person who sometimes runs."

"I love that," Farah said. "That's going in a song."

"Everything goes in a song with you."

"Everything should go in a song."

Rashad rapped his pen lightly against his notebook. "Okay. But let's not dodge. Let's stay with Question 4. What do we owe Grace Chen?"

Silence. The refrigerator in the kitchen hummed. Outside, a crow called twice.

Henry cleared his throat. "In robotics we have a rule. If you see a bug and you don't report it, and someone else's robot breaks because of it, that's on you. Not because you caused the bug. Because you saw it. Seeing puts you on the hook."

"That's harsh," Mateo said.

"It's harsh, but I think it's true." Henry pushed his glasses up. "We saw. Leilani saw first, but once she told us, we saw. We can't unsee. And Grace is walking around school thinking nobody's on her side. We're on her side. She just doesn't know it."

"So we owe her knowledge," Wesley said.

"We owe her knowledge," Henry said. "And protection. And a chance to not be humiliated privately forever by a group of boys who think it's funny."

Leilani closed her eyes. She could see Grace in her mind — Grace from two weeks ago in the library, hunched over a book, her braid falling over one shoulder, flinching when some boy at a nearby table laughed. Grace had thought the laugh was at her. Maybe it had been. Maybe it hadn't. But Grace had lived as if every laugh might be.

"My grandmother," Leilani said, "once told me a story about her mother. About a time my great-grandmother saw a woman being yelled at in the market in Hiroshima, after the war, when everyone was hungry and angry and nobody had time to be kind. My great-grandmother didn't know the woman. But she stopped. She stood next to her. She didn't say anything. She just stood there until the man yelling went away."

"Why did she do that?" Farah asked.

"My grandmother says she asked her the same question, years later. And my great-grandmother said, because if I hadn't, I would have been someone who didn't."

Mateo made a small sound, like he had been hit gently in the chest. He put his hand on his sternum and pressed it there for a second, an odd little gesture Leilani had noticed him make before when a thing landed hard. Mateo's father had been a journalist in Colombia in the 1990s, a decade that had cost Mateo's family dearly, and Mateo carried in his bones a particular sensitivity to what was said and not said. His grandmother had been the one who insisted the family emigrate. He had told Leilani once, on the bus in sixth grade, that he had inherited her stubbornness. He had said it like a fact about his bone marrow.

"That's what my grandmother would call silencio cómplice," Mateo said. "Complicit silence. The kind of silence that lets a bad thing continue. She taught me the phrase when I was ten. I've been trying to grow up around it ever since."

Farah wrote the phrase down in the margin of Rashad's notebook without asking, in her careful small hand. Farah wrote down words. Leilani had seen her fill half a spiral-bound notebook with them — words in English, in Farsi, in Spanish that she had heard from Mateo, in the small private language she and her older sister had invented when they were seven. Words were how Farah paid attention.

"I like that," Rashad said. "Because if I hadn't, I would have been someone who didn't."

"Write that down," Jada said.

Rashad was already writing.

The doorbell rang.

Leilani looked up, startled. She had not invited anyone else. None of them had. She glanced at Wesley, who was already getting up, an odd, small smile on his face.

"I hope this is okay," Wesley said. "I asked my grandfather to come. He's in town for a cousin's graduation. I told him what we were doing, and he said he'd like to meet you. Just for a minute. He's not going to stay long."

"Wesley," Leilani said, "of course it's okay."

Mari Obaachan was already at the door before Leilani could stand up, greeting someone in her low warm voice. A moment later she led the visitor into the sunroom, her small hand resting lightly on his arm, the way she did with guests she had decided she liked.

He was a tall old man, with a face as creased as a paper lantern that had been folded and opened many times. He wore a blue work shirt and jeans and a turquoise ring on his little finger. He held a straw hat in both hands in front of him, the brim slightly bent.

"This is my grandfather," Wesley said. "Mr. Brightfeather."

"Charles," the old man said, nodding at them. "You can call me Charles. I won't be offended either way."

"Please sit," Mari Obaachan said. She had brought in a chair from the dining room without any of them noticing. "You have come a long way."

"Not so long," Charles Brightfeather said. "My grandson told me about what you're doing here. Told me you have questions. I'm a man who likes questions, so I thought I would come and listen."

"We don't have to — " Leilani began.

"No, no." He waved a hand. The turquoise ring caught the light. "Don't stop. Go on. I'll just sit. If I have anything to say, I'll say it, and if I don't, I won't."

They were quiet for a moment, a little intimidated. Then Rashad, whose instinct for conversation had always been good, read Question 4 aloud from his notebook.

"What do we owe those we don't know."

Charles Brightfeather nodded slowly. He did not answer right away. He set his hat on his knee and looked out the window at Mari Obaachan's garden, where the first green shoots of crocuses were pushing up through the mulch.

"That's a big question," he said finally. "My people have been working on that question for a long time."

"What have you figured out?" Henry asked. His voice was careful.

"Not everything," Charles said. He laughed, a dry small laugh. "Not even most things. But I'll tell you one thing I have come to believe." He tapped his chest, once, with two fingers. "We owe each other the truth. Even to the people we don't know. Especially to them. Because if you tell the truth only to the people who love you, that's not really telling the truth. That's just having a conversation."

"That's harder," Farah said.

"That's harder," Charles agreed. "But it's realer. And here is the other thing I'll say, and then I'll be quiet and eat some of these very good senbei your grandmother has put out."

He looked at Wesley. He looked at Leilani. He looked around at all seven of them.

"Your ancestors," he said, "left you their voice. It's yours to use. Nobody else can use it for you. Nobody else can give it away. You're small, but your voice isn't. You've been given a voice by people who didn't always get to use theirs. And the worst thing you can do with a gift like that is nothing."

Nobody spoke.

Rashad wrote it down. Leilani watched him write it, and for a moment she wanted to cry, and for a moment she wanted to stand up and shout, and instead she just sat very still and let the words sit inside her where her ribs were.

Your ancestors left you their voice.

Charles ate two senbei, praised them, and stood up. He said goodbye to Mari Obaachan in a quiet voice that Leilani did not catch. He clapped Wesley on the shoulder. He was gone within ten minutes of arriving.

The sunroom felt different after he left. Fuller and emptier at the same time, the way a room feels after a big piece of music stops playing.

"Okay," Rashad said. His voice was rough. "Okay. Question 4. What do we owe those we don't know. Let's vote."

"We haven't written the motion," Mateo said.

"Second," Jada said instantly.

"Third," said Henry.

"We don't need thirds," Rashad said, almost laughing.

"I know. I just want to be on record."

They voted. Seven hands. Seven yeses.

Leilani put her hand up last, and she put it up slowly, because for the first time since this whole thing had begun she understood that she was not alone in it. She was one of seven. And the seven of them, together, were now going to do a very hard thing.

After the vote, nobody moved. For a long time they all sat with their hands in their laps as if the simple action of voting had used up the capacity they had, that afternoon, for motion.

Mari Obaachan came in from the kitchen with fresh tea. She did not ask what they had decided. She did not need to. She had been listening — Leilani knew she had been listening, because her grandmother always listened — and she had long ago stopped being surprised by the things young people chose when given a chance.

"You are going to stay for supper," Mari Obaachan said. It was not a question. "Call your parents. Tell them Mrs. Nakamura insists. I am making rice and pickles and a little fish. It will be simple. It will be enough."

"Mrs. Nakamura — " Farah began.

"Mari. You have been in my house four times now. Call me Mari."

"Mari. Thank you."

They called their parents. Seven phone calls, one after the other, seven small explanations. No one's parents said no. There is something about a grandmother's voice, Rashad said afterward, that even other people's parents respect.

They ate at Mari Obaachan's long low table. They sat on the floor cushions, knees bumping each other. Mari Obaachan had set seven small bowls of miso, seven smaller bowls of pickles — yellow takuan and pink pickled ginger and a dark brown umeboshi whose name Farah could not pronounce but whose sourness made her eyes water and laugh. The fish was a single mackerel, grilled with salt, which Mari Obaachan portioned with a patient hand so each plate had a small careful piece.

They ate and they talked, and the talking was not about Tanner or the group chat or the vote. It was about ordinary things. Jada's cousin's wedding. Wesley's grandfather's drive home the next morning. Henry's little brother, who had memorized the names of every dinosaur in a book and insisted on quizzing Henry nightly. Farah's mother's bakery, which had just started making a new kind of cookie that Farah had named because her mother couldn't decide.

It was the first time the seven of them had broken bread together. Leilani felt the moment settle inside her like a stone settling at the bottom of a stream. When she helped her grandmother wash dishes afterward, Mari Obaachan was humming again, a new song this time, something Leilani thought might be a sea song or a planting song, something whose words she did not know but whose rhythm felt older than any words Leilani had in her own head.

"They are good children," Mari Obaachan said, quietly, over the sound of water.

"They are, Obaachan."

"You chose them well."

"I don't know if I chose them, really."

"You chose them. They chose you. A thing like that is done together. It does not matter who went first."

Leilani thought about this for a long time that night, lying in her bed, watching the shadow of the branch outside her window move slowly across the ceiling.

A thing like that is done together.

It does not matter who went first.

Sunday morning, the house was quiet in the particular way it was quiet after Leilani's parents had gone to their running group. Mari Obaachan was in the kitchen rolling out dough for a pie. The radio was playing some old folk station, a slide guitar like someone crying politely.

Leilani sat at the kitchen table with her notebook open and a pen and could not make her hand move.

She had written Question 5 at the top of the page three times, and three times crossed it out, not because it was the wrong question but because she could not bear to look at it.

Is it courage if you lose a friendship?

She had thought, when they first made the list of seven questions, that this would be one of the easier ones. Abstract. Philosophical. The kind of thing you argued about at two in the morning during a sleepover. Yes it is, no it isn't, define friendship, define courage, pass the chips.

Mari Obaachan came over and looked down at the notebook.

"Which one is this?" she said.

"Five."

"Hmm." Her grandmother wiped flour off her hands with a small folded towel. She pulled out the chair across from Leilani and sat. "Read it to me."

"Is it courage if you lose a friendship."

Mari Obaachan nodded slowly. She did not answer right away, which was one of the things Leilani loved about her grandmother. Her grandmother never rushed to have the answer. She let questions sit on the table like an extra guest, and often the question got up and left on its own.

"What do you think?" she said finally.

"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

"No, you do know. You just don't like the answer."

Leilani pressed the pen against the paper until the point bent.

"If I lose Sky," she said, "what was the point? What's the point of any of this if the person I was trying to do it with isn't even speaking to me?"

"Sky is not the point," Mari Obaachan said.

"She was. At the beginning. She was part of the point."

"Mmm." Her grandmother looked out the window. The crocuses were a little more open today, their purple a little stronger. "Yes. She was. And she isn't now. Because what you're doing has grown bigger than Sky, and bigger than you, and bigger than what the two of you can hold between you."

"That's not fair. I didn't ask for it to get bigger."

"No. But things get bigger. Love gets bigger. Grief gets bigger. Responsibility gets bigger. You don't pick the size of the thing you're given, Leilani-chan. You only pick whether to pick it up."

Leilani put her head down on the notebook. The paper was cool against her forehead. She felt her grandmother's hand on her back, light, just resting there.

"Obaachan, I don't know if I can do this and still be Sky's friend."

The hand did not move. Did not pat. Just sat.

"Maybe not," Mari Obaachan said.

Leilani made a small sound against the notebook.

"Maybe not," her grandmother said again, softly. "But that's not the measure. The measure is who you become. Who you become through this, and who you become after. Your friendships will be what they will be. Your marriages, your children, your old ladies' clubs when you are eighty and I am long dead — they will come and go. The only thing that stays is who you are when nobody is looking, and what you did when it cost you."

"That's not very comforting."

"It's not supposed to be comforting. You didn't ask me to comfort you."

"I kind of did."

Mari Obaachan laughed, a short warm laugh. She lifted Leilani's head gently by the hair, like she had when Leilani was five, and looked at her.

"Listen. Courage is not brave feelings. Courage is doing what is right when you feel everything. When you are scared. When you are tired. When you might lose someone you love. If you do the right thing only when it costs nothing, that is not courage. That is convenience."

"I don't want to be convenient."

"I know you don't. That is why this hurts."

Leilani sat up. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. Her grandmother stood, creakily, and went back to the dough.

"What are you making?"

"Blueberry. With lattice."

"My favorite."

"I know your favorite, Leilani-chan. I have known it for thirteen years."

She wrote.

Dear Sky, I know you saw me on Friday. I saw you see me. I wanted to say hi. I wanted to pretend nothing was wrong. I wanted to go back to Tuesday when I still thought I could figure out a way to do this that didn't hurt you. I know I can't.

I don't know if you will ever read this. I think maybe I am writing it so I remember. So I remember that I didn't want to hurt you, even when I had to do a thing that hurt you. There is a difference. I hope someday you will know there is a difference.

Remember in fourth grade, when we made the treehouse out of the old couch cushions and the sheets and your mom didn't even yell when we pulled them off the couch? Remember how we said we were going to live there forever? I think I still half want to. I think part of me is going to keep leaving the ladder out for you.

I am going to do a hard thing this week. It is a thing you are not going to thank me for. I am not doing it to hurt you. I am doing it because there are nine people being hurt, and one of them might be more, and they have been hurt for months, and I found out, and now I know, and I can't stop knowing.

I love you. I am your best friend. I am still your best friend even if you aren't mine for a while. I will wait. I will wait a long time. I will wait as long as I need to.

Love, Lei

She did not send it. She folded it once and put it in the back of the notebook.

Mari Obaachan brought her a slice of pie, warm, two hours later.

"Eat," her grandmother said.

"I don't know if I'm hungry."

"Eat anyway."

She ate.

The pie was better than the pie had any right to be. The crust had the kind of lamination that only came from hands that had been making pie for fifty years. The blueberries had a tartness that caught the back of her tongue and then went soft. Leilani ate slowly, a piece at a time, not because she was savoring but because chewing was somehow an easier rhythm than breathing, right then.

Mari Obaachan sat across from her and drank a cup of green tea and did not speak.

"Obaachan," Leilani said, when she had finished half the slice, "were you ever — was there ever a time when you had to — "

"Yes."

"I didn't finish the question."

"I know. The answer is yes. Whatever the question is. There was a time."

"Tell me."

Her grandmother set her cup down. She looked out the window. The late winter light was the color of old linen.

"When I was nineteen," Mari Obaachan said, "I worked at a bank in Honolulu. I was a teller. I was not a very good teller. I counted money correctly, but I did not smile enough. My supervisor told me this. She was a young woman named Mrs. Takahashi, only six years older than me but she wore her hair like a person twenty years older, in a very stiff style. She was very unkind to a woman who also worked there — a Filipino woman named Mrs. Delos Reyes, who had three children and a husband who had been sick for a long time. Mrs. Takahashi was unkind to her in small ways. Never so unkind that anyone outside the bank would have called it unkind. But every day. Every single day. She would correct Mrs. Delos Reyes in front of customers. She would assign her the worst shifts. She would — she would make her work on Sundays when the other tellers got Sundays off."

"And you saw it."

"I saw it. Everyone saw it. We all said nothing, because Mrs. Takahashi was the supervisor, and because we were afraid for our jobs, and because — because it was not our business. That is what we told ourselves. Our jobs were to count money. We counted money."

"What did you do?"

"For a long time I did nothing. That is what I am telling you. I did nothing for almost a year. And every day I felt worse. And one day Mrs. Delos Reyes came to work with a bruise on her wrist — her husband's medicine had been expensive, and she had had some bad days at home — and Mrs. Takahashi made a joke about it. A small joke. Nothing terrible. But the joke was such a small cruel thing that something in me — it was like a piece of china cracking. I could hear it crack."

"What did you do?"

"I said to Mrs. Takahashi, in front of everyone, in a very loud voice, 'I do not like the way you speak to Mrs. Delos Reyes.' That is what I said. Not eloquent. Not brave. Just those words. In Japanese and in English both, because I was upset, and when I am upset I go between."

"What happened?"

"Mrs. Takahashi fired me. The next day. She had to give a reason, so the reason was that I had been fifteen minutes late one morning three months before. That was her reason."

"Obaachan."

"I did not find another job for eight months. My father was very angry with me. He did not understand. He said I had thrown away a good position for a stranger. He said I was foolish."

"Were you foolish?"

Her grandmother picked up her teacup. She drank. She set it down.

"No, Leilani-chan. I was young. I was not wise. I did not do it the best way. If I had been wiser, maybe I would have gone to the bank manager first, or written a letter. Maybe there was a better way. But I was not foolish. I was the opposite of foolish. I was one of the few things I have ever been that I am proud of being."

"Did it help? Mrs. Delos Reyes?"

"It did not help Mrs. Delos Reyes. Not right away. Mrs. Takahashi kept her job. Mrs. Delos Reyes kept hers too. I kept mine only for one more day. The thing I did was small and I paid for it, and nothing was immediately better."

"Then — "

"But. Listen. Three years later, Leilani-chan, I met Mrs. Delos Reyes at the fish market, and she recognized me, and she took my hand in both of her hands and she cried. She said, you were the only one who ever said a word. She said, for three years I remembered that you said a word. She said, my daughter is going to be a lawyer, and when she graduates I am going to tell her the story of the Japanese girl at the bank who said a word one time and then was gone."

Leilani was crying. She hadn't known she was going to, and she was.

"Her daughter," Mari Obaachan said, "became a lawyer. Mrs. Delos Reyes sent me a photograph of her graduation. I still have it, somewhere, in a box. I will find it one day for you. I will show you her face."

"Obaachan — "

"I am telling you this, Leilani-chan, because I want you to know that the results of doing what is right are almost never what you expect. You will not always see the fruit of the tree you plant. Sometimes you plant it and you walk away and you go to a different country and you die and then, a hundred years later, a child sits in its shade and does not know your name. That is sometimes all that is given to us. That is enough."

Leilani wiped her eyes. She ate the rest of her pie. Her grandmother got up, refilled her tea, sat back down. The folk station on the radio played a song about a train that was not coming back.

"I love you, Obaachan."

"I love you too, Leilani-chan. Now go wash your face. It is blotchy."

The Covenant Club met again on Monday, this time in the back of the library during the long lunch period, because Henry had scouted and said the librarian was out that day and the substitute was letting everyone study quietly wherever they wanted. They claimed a round table in the corner behind the biography shelves. Wesley, characteristically, brought a book to hold up as a prop.

"Question 6," Rashad said. He had renumbered. "Wait, no. We did Question 5. What's 6?"

"What does justice look like at our age," Henry said, reading from his phone.

"Right. But before that — "

"Before that," Mateo said, "we need a plan. Because we've decided to act, and acting means doing something, and we haven't decided what something looks like."

"Also," Jada said, "it's Monday. Tanner is here. The group chat is probably still going. Every day we don't act is another day of messages."

Leilani's mouth tasted dry. She nodded.

"Options," Rashad said. He flipped to a new page. "Let's put them on the table."

"Option A," Henry said. "We take the evidence to the principal. All of it. Screenshots, names, dates. We ask him to handle it through the school's disciplinary process."

"Option B," Farah said. "We confront Tanner. Go to him, say we know, give him a chance to stop on his own."

"Option C," Wesley said. "We tell Sky first. Before the principal. Out of respect. Give her a chance to know before the adults come in."

"Option D," Mateo said, "a combination. Tell Sky, then give Tanner a window, then principal if he doesn't stop."

"Option E," Jada said, "we don't confront Tanner at all. He'll delete everything. Henry already has the evidence backed up, right?"

"Backed up three ways," Henry said. "Local drive, encrypted cloud, a thumb drive my dad doesn't know I have."

"Why three ways?" Farah said.

"Because this is important," Henry said. "And because I watched a lot of detective shows last summer."

Rashad was writing all of this down. His handwriting was getting faster and a little messier. Leilani watched his hand move and tried to pretend her own heart wasn't beating in her ears.

"Here's what I keep coming back to," Mateo said. "We have to tell Sky first. She deserves to know from us. Not from the principal calling her brother into the office and then her parents getting called in and Sky finding out that way. That's — it's not respectful. It's not what a friend would do."

"But," Jada said, "the second we tell Sky, she tells Tanner. Maybe not because she wants to. Because she loves him. Because she's in shock. And he deletes everything, and then when the principal asks him, he says, what evidence?"

"Henry has the evidence," Wesley said.

"Right, but then it looks like Henry stole it. Hacked into a private group chat. And the school disciplines Henry instead of Tanner."

"They might discipline Henry anyway," Henry said. He said it calmly. "I've thought about that."

"Henry, what?" Farah said.

"I didn't hack anything," Henry said. "Leilani gave me the screenshots that were forwarded to her. I made copies. I added metadata. I organized them. I haven't done anything illegal. But the school might be mad. That's a cost I'm willing to pay."

"Henry — "

"Guys, we've been talking about this in the abstract for two weeks. Someone has to actually bear the cost. I can. My grades are good, my parents are reasonable, I've read the student handbook. I'm the least bad person to be the evidence guy. Let me be the evidence guy."

He said all of this looking at the table, not at them. Leilani reached across and put her hand briefly on his sleeve.

"Henry," she said. "Thank you."

"Please don't make a thing of it."

"I'm making a small thing of it."

"Okay. Fine. A small thing. Moving on."

Rashad laughed, a surprised laugh, and the table laughed with him, and for one second the weight lifted. Then it came back down.

"So," Rashad said. "We're back to the Sky question. Do we tell her first?"

Mateo leaned forward. "Look. I know the risk. Tanner could delete. But Henry has backups, and the backups will hold up, and if the school wants to punish Henry for having the evidence, we'll all stand with him. Right?"

"Right," Jada said.

"Right," Wesley said.

"Right," Farah said.

"Right," Leilani said.

"So the risk is manageable. The cost of not telling Sky is not manageable. If we don't tell Sky, we're saying her feelings don't matter. We're saying the process matters more than the person. And I don't — " he shook his head. "I don't want to be that. I don't want to be a person who thinks the cleanest outcome is worth running over someone who trusted us."

"She doesn't trust us anymore," Leilani said quietly. "She only trusts me. Barely."

"Then you tell her."

Everyone looked at Leilani.

Leilani looked back at her hands. Her palms were sweating against the polished wood of the library table. She nodded, once.

"I'll tell her," she said.

"When?" Rashad asked.

"Tonight. Tomorrow. This week. Before we go to the principal. I'll tell her, and I'll show her the screenshots, because if I don't show her she won't believe me, and she deserves the chance to not believe me and then to see."

"And after you tell her?" Farah said.

"After I tell her, I give her a day. Just a day. Twenty-four hours. Time to absorb. And then we go to the principal together, all seven of us, and we give him everything we have, and we ask him to do his job."

"And Tanner?" Jada said.

"Tanner will face what he faces."

"What if he destroys evidence?" Wesley asked.

"Henry has backups."

"What if he threatens you?"

"Then we deal with it. Together."

"What if he — "

"Jada," Leilani said. Her voice was shaking a little. "I know. I know all the what-ifs. I've been lying awake thinking about them. But at some point we have to stop thinking about the what-ifs and we have to do the thing, because the longer we wait, the more Grace and Madison and Priya and the other people are getting hurt. Right now. Tonight. While we sit in this library and talk about it. So."

Silence.

"So we do it this week," Rashad said.

"This week," Jada said.

"I'll talk to Sky tonight," Leilani said.

"Leilani," Mateo said. "We're with you. Okay? Whatever happens."

"Whatever happens," Farah said.

"Whatever happens," Wesley said, and he said it in a way that sounded ancient, the way his grandfather had said your ancestors left you their voice.

Leilani put her hand in the middle of the table, palm down. She did it without thinking. And then, one by one, the others did too, stacking their hands on hers, and for a moment she thought she was going to cry, in the middle of the library, behind the biography shelves, with the substitute librarian two aisles away humming to herself about mitochondria.

"The Covenant Club," Rashad said softly.

"The Covenant Club," they all said.

They lifted their hands at the same time, and the bell rang for the end of the period, and they dispersed in seven different directions, quietly, as they had practiced.

Leilani walked to her next class in a kind of bright daze. Her social studies teacher was beginning a unit on civil rights movements, and Leilani sat in the third row and listened to Mr. Patel talk about Montgomery in 1955, about a woman named Claudette Colvin who had sat down on a bus months before Rosa Parks and had never become famous because the organizers had decided she was not the right face for the movement. Leilani wrote the name down in her notebook. Claudette Colvin. She underlined it. She thought, unprompted and without knowing why, that there were probably hundreds of Claudette Colvins in the world right now, girls whose names no one would remember, doing the small hard things that made the bigger things possible.

After school, walking home, she passed the maple tree by the bus stop — the tree she and Sky had sat under in third grade, the tree that still had a faded yellow ribbon tied around its lowest branch, a ribbon Sky had tied there in fifth grade in honor of her grandmother's dog that had died. The ribbon was almost white now from weather. The knot had held. Leilani touched it as she passed. She did not break stride.

She made it home by four fifteen. She did her homework. She ate dinner. She went to bed. She did not sleep well, but she slept some, which was more than she had in several nights, and when she woke on Tuesday morning her first thought was not of Tanner but of Mrs. Delos Reyes's daughter at her law school graduation, a photograph in a box somewhere in her grandmother's house, a face she had never seen but could almost imagine.

Leilani walked to Sky's house after school. It was a twelve-minute walk. She had done it hundreds of times — in the sun, in the snow, in the rain, with backpacks and without, with homework and birthday cakes and sleepover duffels and the weight of nothing at all.

This time she walked it with a manila envelope in her backpack, and every step felt heavier than the last.

Sky's house was a green ranch with a sagging porch and a wind chime shaped like a dragonfly. Sky's mother was a pediatric nurse, and Sky's father was a software engineer, and they were nice in the way that nice people are nice, in a tired reliable way. Sky's mother answered the door in scrubs.

"Lei! Sweetie. I haven't seen you in — "

"Hi, Mrs. Marshall-Patel. Is Sky here?"

"She's upstairs. You okay, honey? You look pale."

"I just — I just need to talk to her for a minute."

"Go on up."

Leilani climbed the stairs. Her legs felt like they were moving through water. Sky's door was closed. Leilani stood on the landing outside it for a moment, her hand raised to knock, her throat so tight she thought she might not be able to speak when Sky opened the door.

She knocked.

"Come in," Sky said.

Sky was at her desk, which faced the window. She was doing pre-calc. Her hair was in a loose bun. She did not look up when Leilani came in.

"Hi," Leilani said.

"Hi." Sky kept writing. "What's up."

"I need to talk to you."

"I'm doing homework."

"I know. I wouldn't — I wouldn't be here if it wasn't important."

Sky set her pencil down. She turned in her chair. Her face was a face Leilani didn't fully recognize. Tired. Guarded. Older than it had been two weeks ago.

"Okay," Sky said.

Leilani sat on the edge of the bed. Her knees were level with Sky's knees. They were three feet apart. They might as well have been in different countries.

"Sky," she said. "I have to tell you something. And I need you to just — let me get through it. And then I need to show you something. And then we can talk about all of it."

"Lei, you're scaring me."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please."

Sky nodded, slowly. Her hands tightened in her lap.

Leilani took a breath. She had practiced this. She had practiced it in the mirror and in the shower and on her pillow at two in the morning. None of the practice helped.

"Two weeks ago," she said, "someone forwarded me screenshots from a group chat. A group chat that's been running since, it looks like, October. The group chat has ten to twelve members. Most of them are eighth-grade boys at Tubman. They post screenshots of girls from our grade. They rate them. They make — they make comments. About their bodies. About their faces. About a lot of things. One of them sent a picture of Grace Chen that he took without her knowing, in the cafeteria. Another one. I don't want to tell you what they did with it."

Sky had gone very still.

"Lei," Sky said. "What are you — "

"Sky. Tanner runs the group. Tanner is the admin."

Sky did not move. Her eyes did not leave Leilani's face.

"No," Sky said.

"Yes."

"No. No, Tanner — Tanner is annoying and he's a jerk sometimes but he's not — he wouldn't — "

"Sky."

"Show me. Show me whatever you have."

Leilani unzipped her backpack. Her hands were shaking. She took out the manila envelope. She took out the printouts — Henry had made them, carefully, redacting the faces of the girls but not the names of the posters. She held them across the gap to Sky.

Sky took them.

Sky read.

Leilani watched Sky's face, and watching it was worse than any of the things she had imagined. It was like watching a piece of paper burn. The edges caught first, then the middle went dark, and then it was all black.

Sky read the first page. She read the second. She got to the fourth page, which was a message from Tanner himself — his username, his photo in the corner, his words, unmistakable, ugly — and she made a sound like a person who had been hit.

"When did you get these," Sky said. Her voice was flat.

"Two weeks ago."

"Two weeks."

"Sky, I wanted to — "

"Two weeks, Lei?"

"I didn't know what to do. I didn't — I didn't want to tell you until I knew what I was going to do. I didn't want to come to you with half a problem."

Sky laughed. It was a hard laugh. It wasn't really a laugh.

"You didn't want to come to me with half a problem. What, so you'd have it all figured out, and then you'd present it to me, like a — like a project? Like a thing you'd fixed?"

"No. No, Sky, I — "

"You had a whole club, didn't you. You had a whole secret club. You all sat around and talked about my brother behind my back for two weeks."

"We weren't — "

"What were you, then?"

"We were trying to figure out how to do this without hurting you. We tried. I tried. For two weeks I tried to find a way that — "

"I'm not a way, Leilani. I'm a person. I'm your best friend. And you had information about my family, about my brother, for two weeks, and you didn't come to me."

"Sky."

"Why didn't you tell me the second you suspected?"

Leilani opened her mouth. She closed it. She tried again. "Because I was afraid you'd tell Tanner and he'd destroy the evidence. Because I was afraid of hurting you. Because I didn't want to be the one who broke this to you. Because I was — I was selfish. I was scared. I didn't know how."

"You didn't know how."

"No."

"So you decided for me. You decided what I got to know and when I got to know it. You and Rashad and Jada and Wesley and whoever, you all decided what my life looked like this week."

"Sky, we were going to tell you. We are telling you. That's what I'm doing right now."

"After you already made a plan."

Leilani was crying now. She hadn't meant to cry. She hated that she was crying, because it felt like it was asking Sky to comfort her, and she was not entitled to be comforted.

"After we made a plan," she said, "yes. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Sky. I don't know how else to say it."

Sky stood up. She walked to the window. She stood with her back to Leilani for a long time. Outside, a car went by. A dog barked, twice, down the street.

"Get out," Sky said. She did not turn around.

"Sky — "

"Lei. Please. Get out. I can't look at you right now. I need to — I need to not look at you."

"Sky, I love you."

"Don't. Don't say that right now. Don't put that on me right now."

"Okay. Okay."

Leilani picked up the envelope — she was not sure, later, why she picked it up, whether she thought Sky didn't want it or whether it was instinct — and she stood up, and she walked to the door. At the door she paused.

"The copies are Henry's," she said. "Those pages are yours. If you want them. I'm sorry. I love you. I'm sorry."

She closed the door behind her.

She walked down the stairs. Sky's mother was in the kitchen, pouring coffee. Sky's mother looked up.

"Leaving already, sweetie?"

"Yes, Mrs. Marshall-Patel."

"You sure you're okay?"

"I'm sure. Thank you."

Leilani walked home. It was nearly five now and the light was starting to go blue. She did not cry on the walk, because she was too cold, and because there was a bright hard something in her chest that she didn't have a name for.

She went up to her room. She lay on her bed with her coat still on. She looked at the ceiling for a long time.

She did not know if Sky would ever be her friend again.

She had known this was going to happen. She had known it in the library, she had known it in the bathroom on Friday, she had known it every night for two weeks when she woke up at three in the morning.

Knowing a thing did not make the thing smaller when it came.

She lay there for a long time with her coat on. The heater kicked on once and kicked off again. A truck rumbled by outside. Her phone, in her pocket, buzzed twice — a text from Rashad, a text from Farah — and she didn't check them. She pulled the edge of her coat up over her face and breathed the smell of her own coat, which was wool and a little like the winter outside and a little like herself, a smell she did not know she recognized until that moment.

She thought about Sky's face.

She thought about the way Sky had said two weeks, like it was the name of a thing she had been betrayed by.

She turned it over and over. She made herself think through the counterfactual the way Henry would have. If she had told Sky the first day — the very day the screenshots came to her — what would have happened? Sky would have been destroyed. Sky would have gone home that night unable to eat, unable to sleep. Sky would have, probably, confronted Tanner herself. Tanner would have denied it. Sky would have had no evidence, and even if she had, she would have been alone. The group chat would have continued. The victims would have kept being victims. And whatever happened to Sky's family would have been happening with less preparation, less thought, less of anything like a plan.

Or Sky would have gone to the principal herself. Alone. A thirteen-year-old girl, alone, walking into the principal's office to turn her own brother in, with no friends beside her and no one who had sat with her through questions.

That would have been worse. Leilani was sure of it, when she thought it through. That would have been much worse.

That was true too. Both of those things could be true at the same time. Leilani, lying on her bed in her coat, understood for the first time — really understood — that adulthood, whatever else it was, might mostly be the practice of holding two true things at once that did not agree.

She did not know which of the two true things was bigger. Maybe they were the same size. Maybe that was how this worked.

And then, because she was still thirteen and tired and her heart was a bruise, she cried a little more, silently, into the wool of her coat.

Mari Obaachan knocked at her door sometime after dark. Leilani didn't answer. Her grandmother opened the door anyway, stood in the doorway with the hall light behind her.

"Obaachan," Leilani said. "I did it."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"I can see it on your face, Leilani-chan. A face doesn't hide a thing like this."

Mari Obaachan came and sat on the bed. She put her small warm hand on Leilani's forehead, the way she used to when Leilani had fevers.

"She told me to get out," Leilani said.

"Yes."

"She might never forgive me."

"Yes. That is possible."

"Obaachan, please tell me I did the right thing."

"I cannot tell you that, Leilani-chan. I was not in that room. Only you were in that room."

"Please."

Mari Obaachan was quiet for a long time.

"You did a true thing," she said finally. "The right thing and the true thing are not always the same thing. But the true thing is the only thing you can ever really do. The rest is luck and time and people's own hearts, and none of that is in your hands."

"I don't like that answer."

"No. I didn't either, when my grandmother told me. But I kept it anyway."

Leilani turned her face into her grandmother's shoulder. She cried. She cried the way she had not cried for years — silently, her whole body shaking, her hands gripping the rough cotton of her grandmother's sweater. Her grandmother held her, and did not shush her, and did not tell her it would be all right, because her grandmother was honest above everything, and it was not yet all right.

Tuesday morning, before first period, the Covenant Club met in the corner of the cafeteria that nobody ever used — the one next to the recycling bins, where the light was bad. Leilani had not slept. Her eyes were swollen. She did not try to hide it.

"Oh, Lei," Farah said when she saw her. Farah hugged her, which was not something Farah normally did. Farah smelled like honey shampoo and something peppery that Leilani thought might be her mother's cardamom bread.

"I'm okay," Leilani said, into Farah's hair.

"You're not, but okay."

The others gathered. Rashad had his notebook, of course. Jada had two granola bars, one of which she handed to Leilani without asking. Henry had an expression on his face that Leilani had come to recognize as his I-am-not-okay face, which on Henry looked like a slightly more fixed version of his regular face.

"I told her," Leilani said. "Last night. She — she told me to get out."

"Oh, Leilani," Mateo said.

"She's not going to tell Tanner," Leilani said. "I don't think. I think she's — I think she's in shock. She's not going to protect him."

"You don't know that."

"I don't know anything. But I know Sky, even if Sky doesn't want to know me, and I don't think she's going to run to Tanner."

"Okay," Rashad said. "Then here's what I think. I don't think we should wait a day. I think we should go to the principal today. This morning. First period. Because every hour we wait is another hour Tanner might figure out his sister has seen the screenshots, and then — "

"I agree," Henry said.

"I agree," Wesley said.

"Leilani?" Rashad said.

Leilani nodded. She was past the place where she could second-guess. She had told Sky. The rest of it was going to happen now, and all she could do was put one foot in front of the other.

"Today," she said. "First period."

"Question 6," Rashad said, because Rashad was Rashad. "What does justice look like at our age? Before we go in. Five minutes. Everyone."

"It looks like telling the truth," Jada said.

"It looks like letting adults do their job," Henry said. "Not doing vigilante stuff. Not posting online. Not making it viral."

"That," Farah said. "Important. We're not making it public. We're not naming names outside this process. This isn't about revenge."

"Right," Mateo said. "Justice at our age — it's not like the movies. It's not a big confrontation. It's not shaming people. It's telling the adults who are supposed to be in charge, and trusting them to do the thing they're supposed to do."

"What if they don't?" Farah said.

"Then we escalate. But we start with the system."

"We give the system a chance," Wesley said, "because the system gave some of our people no chance at all, and we don't want to be the ones who say the system is always worthless. We want to be the ones who say, okay, here's a test. Run."

"I like that," Rashad said. "I like that a lot."

"And," Leilani said, finding her voice, "it looks like Grace Chen not having to do this herself. Grace shouldn't have to walk into the principal's office carrying her own humiliation. We carry it for her. That's what justice at our age looks like. It looks like carrying each other's weight when we can."

Rashad wrote it down.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. We go in. All seven of us. Now."

They left the cafeteria. They walked through the halls like a small steady flock. Leilani was in the middle. Henry carried the envelope. Wesley walked beside Leilani, not saying anything, just being there.

The principal's name was Mr. Okafor. He was a tall, soft-spoken man with gray at the temples who had been at Tubman for eleven years. He was in a meeting when they arrived. The secretary, Ms. Diaz, raised her eyebrows.

"All seven of you? Do you have an appointment?"

"No, ma'am," Rashad said. "But we need to speak with Mr. Okafor as soon as he's free. It's serious. It's about student safety."

Ms. Diaz's expression shifted. She picked up the phone.

"Mr. Okafor," she said, "I have seven students out here who need to speak with you. Yes. Yes, it looks like that kind of serious."

The meeting ended. Mr. Okafor opened his door. He looked at them — at the seven of them, standing together in his office doorway — and something in his face settled into a different register.

"Come in," he said. "All of you."

They filed in. His office had only two chairs. They stood in a loose half-circle. Henry put the envelope on his desk.

"Mr. Okafor," Leilani said. Her voice was steadier than she had expected. "My name is Leilani Nakamura. I'm the eighth-grade class president. Over the last two weeks, the seven of us have gathered and reviewed evidence of a group chat being run by several Tubman students. The chat has been used to post photos of female students without their consent, to rate and mock them, and to share images that are — that are inappropriate. At least nine students have been targeted. Some are eighth graders. At least two are seventh graders. We have the screenshots, organized, dated. We're bringing this to you because this is your job, and because we trust you to take it seriously."

Mr. Okafor looked at the envelope.

"May I?" he said.

"Please."

He opened it. He read. He read the first page slowly, and the second slowly, and then faster, and then slower again. His face did not change much. Only his jaw. His jaw set, and set harder.

When he finished the last page, he closed the envelope gently. He looked up. He looked at each of them, one by one.

"You have done the right thing," he said. "It is going to be handled. Today. By me. I will need to speak with each of you individually later this week. I will need to involve your parents. I will need to involve other families. But I want you to understand that you have done the right thing, and that I will do mine."

"Mr. Okafor," Leilani said. "One of the students involved is the brother of my best friend. Her name is Sky Marshall-Patel. She knows. She knows as of last night. I wanted you to know that too, because — because she should not be surprised."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Thank you for telling me. That was the right thing too."

"Thank you."

"Go to first period," he said. "All of you. I will find each of you over the next day or two. I will be in touch with your parents today. Thank you."

They left.

In the hallway, Farah let out a long slow breath.

"That was — " she said. "That was — "

"Easier than I thought," Henry said.

"Harder than I thought," Jada said.

"Both," Rashad said. "Both of those."

They went to first period.

By the end of the day, Tanner had been called into the office. By Wednesday morning, he had been suspended pending a disciplinary hearing. By Friday, two other boys had also been suspended, and three more had been put on conduct probation. Letters went out to families. A meeting was scheduled for the following week. The words restorative justice appeared on one of the letters, and Leilani read them and felt something in her chest unclench a little.

She did not see Sky all week.

She did not see Tanner at all. Tanner was gone from school.

The rest of the Covenant Club was not gone, however. The seven of them had, without deciding to, begun sitting together at lunch every day. It was not a dramatic thing. No one had announced it. It had simply happened — on the Tuesday after the principal's office, Rashad had walked over to Leilani's usual table and set down his tray, and then Jada had come, and then Mateo, and then the others, and by Wednesday there were seven plates on the long table and the table had, by some quiet consensus, become theirs.

They did not talk about Tanner at lunch. They did not talk about the chat. They talked about ordinary things. Henry's robotics team had qualified for regionals. Jada had pulled a hamstring and was going to have to sit out the next meet, which made her so frustrated she had cried in the locker room. Wesley had read a biography of a Ghanaian astronomer he wanted everyone to read. Farah's older sister had been accepted to college, which meant, Farah said, that her mother was going to cry at some point every day for the next nine months.

It was good. It was good in a way Leilani had not known she needed it to be. The Covenant Club was not only a thing they did in crisis. It was a thing they were now, all the time. A table. A lunch. A constant low thrumming sense of being known.

On Thursday at lunch, Rashad set down his tray and said, "Question 8."

"Eight?" Jada said. "We only had seven."

"Question 8," Rashad said. "What are we for now? Once the thing is done. Once the questions are answered. What is the Covenant Club for when we are not in an emergency?"

"Oh," Farah said.

"I've been thinking about it for a week," Rashad said. "I don't think we're done. I think we have more questions. I think the Seven Questions were for one thing. But there are going to be other things. There are going to be other things probably next year. And the year after. And the year after that. I don't want us to dissolve. I want us to — I don't know. I want us to meet. Monthly. Just to check in. Just to keep asking."

"Even if there is no Tanner," Henry said, slowly. "Even if there is no crisis."

"Especially then," Wesley said. "Because the times between crises are when most of the harm actually happens. Slowly. Quietly. Small and small. If we wait for another emergency to meet again, we're only ever reactive. The club would only exist as a response to something bad. I don't want the club to be only that. I want it to be — "

"A practice," Leilani said.

"A practice," Wesley said. "Yes."

"A practice," Rashad said, writing.

They voted again, at the lunch table, over cartons of chocolate milk and french fries. Seven yeses. Again.

The Covenant Club, they agreed, would continue.

It would meet on the first Sunday of every month in Mari Obaachan's sunroom, for as long as Mari Obaachan would have them, which Mari Obaachan said would be for as long as she drew breath and possibly longer.

And so it did. It met in April, and it met in May, and it met on the first Sunday of June, and it would meet into summer and into the next school year, and into a great many years after that, though none of them — sitting around that lunch table that Thursday afternoon — could have yet imagined the questions they would someday bring to that sunroom, or the people they would someday be when they asked them.

At the end of the week, in homeroom on Friday, Grace Chen walked past Leilani's desk. Grace did not stop. Grace did not say anything. But Grace put her hand, briefly, on Leilani's shoulder as she walked by. Just once. A small pressure. Grace kept walking, and Leilani sat very still, and her eyes filled with tears for reasons she did not fully understand.

"I know he might. He said he would."

"Yes. He was very complimentary. He said you have handled something very serious with a maturity most adults do not manage. He said he wanted me to hear it from him before I heard it from anywhere else."

"Mom."

"He also said you might be in for a hard few weeks."

"I think I'm already in them."

Leilani's mother looked at her for a long time. Leilani's mother was a woman named Amy Nakamura who had trained as an architect and now worked for a firm that designed elementary schools, which was a particular kind of irony Leilani had never quite learned how to talk about. Amy Nakamura was a person who did not show much on her face most of the time, but right now her face was showing something, something Leilani could not quite read.

"Mom?"

"I am trying not to cry, Lei."

"It's okay if you do."

"No. I'm going to save it. I just — I want you to know. Your dad and I — when we named you Leilani we thought it was a pretty name. A family name. We didn't know we were naming someone who would — who was going to — "

"Mom. Mom. Please. You're going to set me off."

"Okay. Okay. One more thing. Then I'll stop."

"Okay."

"I'm proud of you. I'm just — I am so proud of you, Lei. I am sorry this is costing you Sky. I know it is. I don't know what to do about that. I don't think there's anything to do about that. But I want you to know that in this house, every day, your father and I are — we are — "

She couldn't finish the sentence. She got up and went to the kitchen sink and filled her glass of water again although it was still mostly full. Her back was to Leilani. Her shoulders shook once and then stilled.

"Mom," Leilani said, very quietly. "Thank you."

Her mother nodded at the window.

Then Mari Obaachan came through the back door with a bag of persimmons she had bought at the market, and the kitchen filled with the sweet heavy smell of them, and Leilani's mother turned around and said, in a voice that was almost normal again, "Obaachan, those better be for me," and her grandmother said, "They are not for you, they are for Leilani, you have had enough persimmons in your life," and all three of them laughed, which was a good laugh, a laugh that reset the room, and Leilani went to her grandmother and pressed her face for one second against the soft old wool of her cardigan, and her grandmother smelled like persimmons and garden soil and laundry detergent, which was the exact combination of smells that, Leilani thought, would someday mean home to her for the rest of her life.

On Monday morning of the following week, Leilani discovered that her locker had been written on.

It was written in black Sharpie, across the gray metal, in the clumsy block letters of someone trying to be threatening. The word was SNITCH. It was written three times, in three sizes, as if whoever had done it had not been able to stop.

Leilani stood in front of her locker for a long moment. Around her the hallway flowed — kids laughing, slamming lockers, shouting about a test. A boy she didn't know skated by on sneakers too loud for the tiled floor. Nobody stopped. Nobody seemed to see.

She took her coat off. She hung it over the word.

It was Jada. Jada was holding her gym bag, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Jada looked at the locker. Jada looked at Leilani.

"Third what?" Leilani said.

"Third one like this. Wesley's got something on his locker too. And Mateo's. I think someone went through with a marker last night or this morning."

"Jada."

"Don't. Don't start. I'm with you. We're all with you. We go to the office now, we report it, they handle it. The janitor comes and cleans it. It's a thing. It's not the thing."

"They know it's us."

"They know it's somebody. They're guessing. It was going to come out eventually. We knew this might happen."

Leilani put her forehead against the cold metal of the locker.

"I'm so tired, Jada."

"I know. Come on. Come to the office with me. Then I'm walking you to first period."

They went to the office. Ms. Diaz shook her head and sighed in a way that suggested this was neither the first nor the last time she would sigh today. Mr. Okafor came out of his office, looked at the pictures Jada had taken of each locker on her phone, and pressed his lips together.

"Yes," Jada said immediately.

"Yes," Leilani said, a beat later.

"If you stop feeling safe, you come to me. Either of you. Any of the seven of you. That door is open."

"Thank you," Leilani said.

Jada walked her to first period. Mateo was already at the door.

"I got Wesley," Mateo said. "Walked him to Spanish. He's fine. Or he's Wesley fine, which is a different thing but the same."

"Thanks, Mateo," Leilani said.

"Don't thank me. Don't do that."

"Okay."

"We're the Covenant Club, Lei."

"I know."

"Don't forget."

"I won't."

The rest of the day was an uneven texture of small cuts and small kindnesses. Leilani was bumped in the hallway between second and third period, hard enough to drop her notebook. When she bent to pick it up, three people stepped over her, not around. The fourth person crouched down and helped her — a seventh grader Leilani had never spoken to. "Are you okay?" the seventh grader said. "I'm Priya. I — thank you. Just thank you."

Priya.

Leilani looked at Priya, and Priya looked at Leilani, and they understood each other without saying anything more. Priya walked with her to third period.

At lunch, someone tripped Leilani with a backpack. She caught herself on a table. A teacher saw, and said the boy's name sharply, and the boy turned red and mumbled sorry, and Leilani said it's fine but it wasn't fine.

At the same lunch, a girl Leilani barely knew — a quiet girl named Hannah who sat two rows back in social studies — slid into the seat next to her with a lunch tray.

"Hi," Hannah said.

"Hi."

"I heard what you did. I wanted to sit with you. Is that okay?"

"Yes," Leilani said. "That's okay."

They ate in silence. Hannah was not a talker. But when the bell rang, Hannah stood up and said, "Same time tomorrow?" and Leilani said yes, and Hannah nodded once, seriously, and went to her locker.

Wednesday after school, Leilani stopped in the library on her way home. She was looking for a book, but mostly she was looking for silence. Grace Chen was sitting at a table in the corner with a notebook open and her braid over her shoulder and a pen in her hand that she wasn't using. When Grace saw Leilani, Grace stood up.

"Leilani," Grace said.

"Hi, Grace."

"I've been — I've been waiting to find you. I didn't want to do it in the hallway. Can I — can I sit with you for a minute?"

"Yeah. Yes."

They sat.

Grace put both her hands on the table. She took a breath.

"I wanted to say thank you," Grace said. "I know you didn't do this for me. Not — not just for me. I know it's bigger than that. But you didn't have to do it at all, and you did, and it — " Her voice wavered. "It changed my life. I didn't tell anyone what was happening to me. Not my mom. Not anyone. I thought I just had to — I thought I just had to get through middle school. And now I don't. Now it's handled. Or it will be. And I wanted to say thank you, because — because I don't know if I would have said anything on my own."

"Grace."

"My mom wrote a letter. To the principal. Thanking you. All seven of you. She asked me for your names."

"You gave her our names?"

"I gave her your names."

"Okay. Okay, that's — that's good. Thank you."

"She also made me this." Grace reached into her bag. She pulled out a small tin. "Ginger cookies. My grandmother's recipe. There's one for each of you. She said to say thank you from our whole family."

Leilani took the tin. It was warm, faintly, from Grace's bag. She held it against her chest.

"I'll tell them," she said.

"Tell them I'm sorry I didn't do it myself."

"Grace. You don't owe anyone an apology. Not you. Not ever."

Grace nodded. Her eyes were wet but she was not quite crying.

"Okay," Grace said. "Okay."

The days kept passing. Ten days. Twelve days. Fourteen.

Leilani learned, from two different people, that Sky had been pulled out of school for three days after Tanner was suspended. Family meetings, probably. Conversations at home that Leilani could not imagine and did not want to. Sky came back to school with a new carefulness to her face, a walking-on-eggshells quality, and she avoided every hallway Leilani was likely to be in.

Leilani respected it. She did not chase. She did not corner Sky at her locker. She did not send another text. She had promised Sky space, and she was going to give her space, even though space was one of the worst things in the world.

At night she wrote in her journal. Not letters to Sky, exactly — she had stopped writing those, because the letters were starting to feel like a kind of pressure, an expectation, and she did not want to build up a pile of expectations Sky would never read. Instead she wrote ordinary things. What Mari Obaachan made for dinner. What she noticed on the walk home. A line from a book she was reading. The color of the light at five thirty on a February afternoon, which was a blue she had never seen a name for.

Some of what she wrote was about Sky anyway, because Sky had been in her life for so long that everything was a little bit about Sky. The way the tree by the bus stop had started to bud was about Sky, because it was the tree they had sat under in third grade during the fire drill and decided they were going to be best friends forever. The pre-calc worksheet was about Sky, because Sky had always been two steps ahead in math. The new show Leilani's mother was watching was about Sky, because Sky had asked her in October if it was any good.

I miss you, Leilani wrote one night. But I am going to miss you quietly. Not at you. Not toward you. Just on my own, where you don't have to feel it.

She read that sentence the next morning and was glad she had written it, even though no one would see it.

Mari Obaachan asked about Sky only once.

"Has she spoken to you?"

"No."

"Are you okay?"

"No. But I'm getting there."

"That is the best any of us does."

Her grandmother did not ask again. Her grandmother had a way of letting grief sit in the room without stepping on it. She did make a lot of soup. She made miso soup, and tomato soup, and a kabocha squash soup that was Leilani's favorite, and she brought bowls to Leilani's room without announcement and set them on the desk and then left again, closing the door quietly. Leilani ate every bowl. She did not always want to. She ate them anyway, because the soups were how her grandmother was saying all the things her grandmother was not saying.

Farah came over one Saturday. She brought her guitar. She did not ask to play anything, and Leilani did not ask her to play anything. They sat on Leilani's bed. Farah tuned the guitar, absently, for about an hour. Then she played one song, a song she had written herself, in a key that was somewhere between a lullaby and a march.

"What's it called?" Leilani said, when Farah finished.

"The Covenant Club."

"Oh."

"I know. I know. It's a little much. I'll change the title."

"No. Don't change it."

"Okay."

Farah played the song twice more, and then put the guitar away, and then they did homework in silence for two hours, and Farah went home before dinner.

At school, Leilani fell into small new routines. She ate lunch with Hannah, sometimes with Mateo and Jada, always at a table where the light was good. She walked to her locker with one of the seven whenever she could. She learned the faces of the people who looked at her with anger, and she learned the faces of the people who looked at her with a shy unfamiliar thank you. Over time the first faces thinned and the second faces multiplied, not dramatically, just a slow quiet shift, the way a tide comes in so gradually you don't notice it rising until you realize your feet are wet.

One afternoon — it might have been a Thursday — she saw Sky in the parking lot after school. Sky was getting into her mother's car. For half a second, Sky looked up and saw Leilani.

Sky did not wave. But Sky did not look away either. Sky held Leilani's eyes for a beat, just a beat, and then Sky got in the car, and the car drove away.

Leilani stood there. Her breath made a small cloud in the cold.

1. Sky looking at me for a second in the parking lot and not looking away. 2. Grace's hand on my shoulder Friday. 3. Priya saying thank you and her eyes not being scared for the first time. 4. Hannah asking about the Covenant Club like she had been thinking about it for days. 5. Obaachan's face when I came home. I did not know a face could say I am proud and I am worried in the same expression at the same time. I am going to practice that face for when I have kids. 6. Mateo carrying a granola bar around in his backpack for me without being asked. 7. Wesley leaving a book on my desk at lunch, a novel I had mentioned in passing six weeks ago, with a bookmark in it at the page he thought I would like. 8. The crocuses. 9. The crocuses. I know I already said them. But the crocuses.

She added to the list every night. Some nights the list was only two or three lines. Some nights it filled a page. She discovered, slowly, that the act of writing down the not-nothings was its own kind of protection, its own kind of slow healing. She could not make Sky come back. She could not make the anger in the hallway go away. But she could notice the not-nothings, and she could notice them out loud, on paper, where her hand could see them. That was a thing she could do.

She thought about her grandmother's story. About Mrs. Delos Reyes. About planting a tree whose shade you might never sit in. She thought that a list of not-nothings was a kind of small tree, planted every night on ruled paper. She did not know what kind of tree it might turn into. She was not sure she needed to.

On a Wednesday near the end of March, Farah came to her locker between periods.

"I finished the song," Farah said.

"The Covenant Club song?"

"A different one. Well. A related one. Can I play it for you at lunch? Just you. I want to know if — I want to know before I play it for the others."

"Yes. Yes, of course."

"It's about the questions," Leilani said, when Farah had finished.

"It's about the questions."

"It's beautiful, Farah."

"It's maybe too much. I don't know. I keep going back and forth."

"It isn't too much. It's exactly as much as it needs to be."

Farah set the guitar down. She leaned back against the brick of the music room wall. She closed her eyes.

"Lei. I want to tell you something."

"Okay."

"I was one of the people in the screenshots."

Leilani sat very still.

"What?"

"Last year. In seventh grade. There was a photo of me in the chat. I didn't know. Rashad mentioned it to me a couple of days ago, very carefully, because he had seen it in Henry's files. It — it was not — it was not the worst thing. It was a comment. About my face. About — about my nose, actually. They called me — it doesn't matter what they called me."

"Farah."

"I didn't want to tell you at first because I didn't want it to be — I didn't want you to feel like you had done all this for me, too. I wanted you to know you were doing it for people you didn't know. I wanted Question 4 to be real. But it stopped being honest of me to not tell you. Question 1 was what is true, and I was not being true."

"Farah, I'm so sorry."

"It's not — Lei, it's okay. It's old. I didn't see it at the time. I didn't know. I have a nose like my mother's. I love my nose. They were wrong about my nose. I am saying this and I am still surprised at how old it makes me feel and how small it makes me feel at the same time. I wanted to tell you because I wanted you to know that the Covenant Club is not only something I did for other people. It's also something I did for me. Even when I didn't know."

Leilani put her arm around Farah. Farah leaned her head against Leilani's shoulder. The bell rang for fifth period. Neither of them moved for another thirty seconds.

"Thank you for telling me," Leilani said finally.

"Thank you for doing it. Even before you knew. Even before I knew."

They stood up. They walked to fifth period. They did not speak again until school ended, but the not-speaking was different now, a shared not-speaking, a not-speaking made of having told and been told.

Three weeks after the incident — that was how the faculty was calling it now, the incident, a bloodless word that carried the whole weight of it anyway — Mr. Okafor called Leilani into his office.

"The school is holding an assembly," he said. "Next Tuesday. About online conduct, peer respect, and what it means to speak up. I would like you, as eighth-grade class president, to speak. Just a few minutes. You can say whatever you want to say, within reason. You do not have to do this. If you would rather not, nobody will think less of you. But I am asking."

Leilani sat in the chair opposite his desk. Her palms were sweating again. They had been sweating, in one degree or another, for a month.

"Mr. Okafor," she said, "I'm scared."

"I know," he said. "I would be worried if you weren't."

"What if I say the wrong thing?"

"Then you will have said a wrong thing at a time when most people say nothing at all. That is still a better score than most."

She managed a small laugh.

"Can I think about it?"

"Until Friday."

"Okay."

She thought about it. She thought about it on the walk home. She thought about it while she watched her grandmother water the early daffodils. She thought about it at dinner, while her mother talked about work and her father talked about a neighbor's dog. At bedtime she sat at her desk with a blank page.

The blank page was too much. She closed the notebook.

The next day at lunch she told the Covenant Club.

"He wants you to speak," Rashad said. "That's huge."

"That's amazing," Farah said. "You have to do it."

"I don't know if I have to."

"Okay. You should do it."

"Farah, she said she doesn't know. Give her a second."

"I'm giving her a second."

"Guys." Leilani held up her hands. "I think — I think I'm going to do it. I just don't know what to say."

"We'll help you draft," Henry said immediately. "What do you want the through-line to be?"

"I don't want to name anyone. Anyone. Not Tanner. Not Grace. Not the boys in the chat. I don't want to shame anyone from a stage. That's not — that's not what this was for."

"Agreed," Mateo said.

"I want to say something about the Seven Questions. Without calling them that. I want to say something about the idea that truth and care can be in the same sentence. That asking hard questions together is better than answering easy questions alone. Something like that."

"That's the whole speech right there," Wesley said.

"That's not a speech. That's three sentences."

"That's a great three sentences."

"Can I write the middle with you guys?"

"Yes."

They wrote it together, sitting in Mari Obaachan's sunroom on Sunday afternoon. Rashad held the pen most of the time. Henry fact-checked. Farah read sections aloud in different tones so Leilani could hear how they sounded. Jada kept saying, shorter, say it shorter. Mateo pushed back whenever a sentence got preachy. Wesley added one quiet phrase near the end and then refused to let them take it out.

By sunset they had a speech. It was three pages long, double-spaced, with Leilani's handwritten corrections over most of it. Leilani read it out loud to her grandmother after everyone had gone home. Mari Obaachan listened with her eyes closed.

"It is a good speech, Leilani-chan."

"Is it?"

"It is a small speech. Small speeches are the best kind."

On Tuesday morning Leilani put on a dress she rarely wore — navy blue, knee-length, one her mother had bought her in September for school pictures. She braided her hair. She ate half a piece of toast. Her hands shook when she put on her shoes.

The assembly was in the auditorium. The auditorium held the whole school — about four hundred and fifty students — and when Leilani stood offstage and looked out at them, she felt her legs start to give.

Mateo was at her shoulder.

"Hey," he said quietly. "Lei."

"Yeah."

"You don't have to be brave. You just have to say the words. The words are brave. You just carry them."

"Okay."

"Go."

She walked out to the podium. Mr. Okafor introduced her. The auditorium went quiet in a way it usually did not go quiet for anything. She could feel it — the listening. She had never felt it before.

She set her pages on the podium. She looked up.

"Hi," she said. Her voice in the microphone sounded like someone else's. "I'm Leilani Nakamura. Some of you know me. Most of you don't. I'm the eighth-grade class president, and I was asked to speak today about what happened a few weeks ago at our school. I'm not going to tell you that story. You've mostly heard it. The pieces have been moving around between you in hallways and at lunch tables, and I am not going to correct the pieces or fill in the pieces. That's not what I want to do with three minutes."

She took a breath.

"What I want to do is tell you about questions. When I first learned that something bad was happening at our school, I did what I think most of you would do. I froze. I pretended I hadn't seen. I told myself it wasn't my problem, or if it was my problem, it was bigger than me, and there wasn't anything I could do. I sat with that for about a day. And then my grandmother asked me a question. She asked me, are you the kind of person who looks away. And I realized that the person I wanted to be was not the person who looked away. But I didn't know how to be the other person either.

"We didn't get perfect answers. We got arguments. We got middle-of-the-night doubts. We got mistakes. Some of us — " she swallowed — "lost something we loved, doing the thing we believed we had to do. But we got each other. And we got, at the end, a kind of answer. A shape of an answer.

"Here is what I learned. I learned that truth and care are not opposites. They are each other's only protection. If you have care without truth, you get a lie that is supposed to keep someone comfortable. If you have truth without care, you get a weapon. But if you have both — if you speak what is true in a voice that is gentle, if you act on what is true without trying to humiliate anyone — then you get something else. Then you get the beginning of a kind of justice. A small kind. A thirteen-year-old kind. But a real kind.

"I am not going to tell you what to do. I am not up here to tell anyone what to do. But I will tell you what I am going to try to do, and you can do with it what you want. I am going to try to ask questions instead of looking away. I am going to try to ask them in rooms with other people, because I've learned that the question you ask alone is smaller than the question you ask together. I am going to try to speak about what I know without tearing anyone down. I am going to try to apologize when I am wrong, which I am going to be, a lot. And I am going to try to leave the door open. To people. To forgiveness. To conversation. Even when it hurts.

"That's all. Thank you for listening."

She stepped back from the podium.

The auditorium was quiet for a second that stretched and stretched. Then somewhere near the back, one person clapped. Then another. Then a whole wave of sound came toward her, and she could not tell if she was hearing applause or something else, something bigger than applause, the sound of a room of four hundred and fifty kids who had been listening and were now letting out a breath.

She walked offstage. Mateo grabbed her hand. Farah grabbed her other hand. Someone — she thought it was Rashad — was wiping his eyes, openly, without apologizing.

At the back of the stage, standing in the wings, she saw Ms. Patel, the art teacher, crying. Just crying quietly, her hand over her mouth.

Leilani did not know Ms. Patel well. She would remember that face for a long time.

Ms. Patel found her in the hallway ten minutes later and took her hands in both of hers, briefly, without saying anything, and then let go and walked away. Leilani did not understand the whole of what had just passed between them. She understood enough. Ms. Patel had, at some point in her own life, needed someone to say the kinds of things Leilani had just said, and no one had said them. That was all Leilani needed to know about Ms. Patel, ever, to love her a little.

It was unsigned. Leilani folded it back up. She put it in the inside pocket of her jacket, the zippered pocket she used for things that mattered. It joined, in that pocket, a flat pebble from her grandmother's garden, a fortune from a fortune cookie that read You will soon make an important decision, and a folded bus ticket from a trip to Hilo the summer she was ten. The pocket was becoming, she realized, a small archive of a self.

Backstage Mr. Okafor put his hand on her shoulder.

"Thank you," he said. It was all he said. She nodded. She could not have spoken if she had tried.

Later, in the hallway, before she could get to her locker, she was stopped fourteen times. Students she had never talked to. A boy from her math class who had never looked at her once all year. Two seventh graders holding hands. An eighth-grade girl who said, "I just — I just wanted to say." And then didn't finish the sentence, just nodded, and walked away.

Grace Chen hugged her. Priya hugged her. Hannah hugged her.

Sky did not come up to her. Sky was there, somewhere, Leilani was almost sure of it, somewhere in the crowd. But Sky did not come up.

That was all right. Leilani had not expected her to.

The restorative-justice circle was scheduled for a Thursday afternoon in the school's seldom-used conference room, the one with the long oval table and the soft lamps and the strangely good carpet that Leilani had never walked on before. Mr. Okafor had brought in a facilitator from the district — a small woman named Ms. Okonkwo with silver braids and a measured voice — who had run these circles for fifteen years.

Not everyone attended. Two of the named victims declined, which Ms. Okonkwo had told them was completely their right. Three of the boys' families attended, two did not. Tanner was there, sitting between his parents, who looked like people who had not slept in three weeks. Sky was there too, sitting beside her mother, her hands folded in her lap.

Ms. Okonkwo met her at the door.

"Leilani? I'm Deborah Okonkwo. We spoke on the phone. Thank you for coming."

"Thank you for — for having me."

"I want you to know what this is not. This is not a trial. No one is going to question you. You do not have to speak unless you want to. The circle has a talking piece — this stone, here, see? — and you only speak when the stone is in your hand. Anyone can pass the stone without speaking. Anyone can cry. Anyone can leave, with my permission. Any questions?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Then take a seat."

Leilani sat. Her assigned seat was roughly opposite Tanner. She did not look at him directly. She could feel him there, in her peripheral vision — thinner than he had been, his head down.

Grace Chen sat two seats from Leilani. Grace's mother sat on the other side of Grace, her arm around her daughter's shoulders. Madison was at the far end, next to her father. Priya was not there; her family had sent a letter, which Ms. Okonkwo would read later.

She lit a small candle in the middle of the table. The room was already dim. The candle made the carpet look darker and the faces look softer.

She passed the stone first to one of the boys — not Tanner — a ninth grader named Jeremy. Jeremy was pale. His mother had come with him. He held the stone like it was heavy.

"I — " Jeremy said. He cleared his throat. "I want to say that I'm sorry. I said things in the chat that I — that I thought were jokes. I knew they weren't, kind of. I thought they were. I said them anyway. I want to say I am sorry to Grace, and to Madison, and to the others. I am sorry. That's — that's what I want to say."

He passed the stone.

The stone moved around the table. Another boy spoke. He cried, openly. His father put a hand on his shoulder. A third boy spoke only to say, "I am sorry. I won't do it again. I don't have the other words right now." Ms. Okonkwo nodded at him and said, "Thank you. That is enough."

Then the stone came to Tanner.

Tanner held it for a long time. Leilani looked at the table. She could not watch his face. She did not want to.

"I started the chat," Tanner said. His voice was low but it was steady. It was an older voice than Leilani remembered. "I started it two years ago as a thing with my friends. It wasn't — it wasn't like this at the beginning. I told myself it wasn't like this even when it was. I — I want to say something to Grace and to Madison and to — to all of the people who I hurt."

He stopped. He took a long breath.

"Grace. Madison. You didn't know me. I didn't know you. I treated you like you were — like you weren't — like you weren't people I would ever have to look at. I was wrong. I am — I am really sorry. I am sorry I took the picture. I am sorry I sent it. I am sorry I let other people send pictures. I am sorry I laughed when I should have stopped it. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am just saying it to you. I am sorry. That's all."

He didn't look at Sky. He didn't look at Leilani. He passed the stone.

Grace's mother held the stone next. Her hand shook. She did not speak for a long time. When she did, her voice was quiet.

"I do not yet know what to do with what I feel," she said. "My daughter is thirteen years old. My daughter did not tell me. My daughter tried to hold this alone. When a child tries to hold something like this alone, it is because the world has told them it is their job to hold it alone. I want to say — I want to say to the boys at this table, and to the parents of these boys, that I am not here to ruin anyone's life. I am here because I want my daughter to grow up in a world where this does not happen. I do not know how to build that world. I do not think any of us do. But I think this — " she gestured at the circle — "is a start. A small start. I want to thank the children who brought this to the principal. They did not have to. They did it anyway. Grace has told me about them. I am grateful."

She passed the stone to Grace.

Grace held the stone with both hands. She did not speak for a long time. Finally she said, "I am only going to say one thing. To Tanner. I heard your apology. I am not ready to accept it. But I heard it. Thank you for saying it where I could hear it."

She passed.

The stone came around to Sky.

Sky looked at it. Sky's fingers closed around it. Sky looked up. Her eyes met Leilani's, across the table, for the first time in five weeks.

Leilani's stomach lurched.

"I have not spoken to my brother much," Sky said, her voice soft and careful. "I have not known what to say to him. I am still very angry. I am angry at him. I am angry at people I am not supposed to be angry at. I am angry at myself. I did not see what my brother was doing. I should have seen. I think some part of me did see and pretended not to, which is worse. I want to say to Grace, and to Madison, and to the other girls — I am sorry. I am his sister. That is not an excuse, but it is a fact, and in my family it has always meant that I am supposed to look out for him, and I did not know it also meant I was supposed to look out for you. I am learning. I am sorry."

She stopped. She looked at the stone. She looked up again, briefly, at Leilani.

"I also want to say — " Her voice caught. She steadied it. "I want to say that my best friend did something hard. Something I am still angry with her for. But she did the right thing. I am not ready to tell her that yet. But I am telling this room. Because this room is where you tell the true things. Thank you."

She passed the stone.

Leilani's eyes were blurring. She could not make them stop. She did not trust her voice to do anything sensible. She took the stone when it came to her and held it for a full minute. Ms. Okonkwo waited patiently.

"Thank you," Leilani said finally. "Thank you all for letting me be in this room. I don't have much to say. I didn't come here to say anything. I came because Mr. Okafor asked me to, and because I wanted to be in the same room as the people I have been thinking about for a month. I want to thank Ms. Okonkwo for running the circle. I want to thank Grace and Madison for coming. I want to thank the boys who spoke honestly. I want to thank Sky."

She did not look at Sky. She did not trust herself to.

"And I want to say — I want to say that this is not the end of anything. None of this is over. We are all going to walk out of this room and we are going to have the rest of our lives. I hope we all become people who remember this day. I hope we all do the small thing we can do tomorrow."

She passed the stone.

The circle went on for another hour. Ms. Okonkwo read Priya's family's letter. Mr. Okafor spoke briefly about the steps the school was taking. The candle burned down about halfway. When Ms. Okonkwo closed the circle and blew out the candle, the room was still quiet, the kind of quiet that felt like a held breath finally released.

Tanner and his parents were the last to stand up. Tanner did not look at Leilani as he passed her. But at the door, he paused. He did not turn around.

"Leilani," he said, his voice low. "Thank you."

He walked out.

Sky was a few steps behind him. She paused too. She met Leilani's eyes. She did not speak. She gave the smallest nod Leilani had ever seen, so small it could have been a trick of the lamplight.

Leilani nodded back.

Sky walked out.

Leilani stayed in her chair for a long time after the room had emptied. Ms. Okonkwo moved quietly around her, gathering papers, blowing out the candle properly, tucking the stone back into a soft cloth bag. Mr. Okafor stood by the door, waiting without hurrying. The light in the conference room had shifted while they sat — it was almost evening now, and the lamps had grown relatively brighter as the windows dimmed.

"Leilani," Ms. Okonkwo said. Her voice was low. "You did not have to speak. You did. That was a gift to the circle."

"I didn't say much."

"Circle is not a place where quantity counts. You said the thing you had. That is what the circle is for."

"Ms. Okonkwo — "

"Yes?"

"Does it work? This. Does it — do people change?"

Ms. Okonkwo finished folding her cloth. She sat down in the chair beside Leilani. She did not answer right away, which Leilani had learned, now, to trust in a person.

"Some people," she said. "Some of the time. Not all people, not always. Sometimes a circle is a place where one person begins to change, and nobody sees it for two years, and then one day the change comes through. Sometimes the change is in the person we least expect. Sometimes the change is in the witnesses — the people who watched, who thought they were just there as support, who went home changed. I have been doing this for fifteen years and I do not know, Leilani, which person in any given circle will be the one who changes. I have given up trying to know. I only know that the circle makes a space where change is possible. That is what it can do. It is not a small thing, but it is not a guaranteed thing."

"That sounds hard."

"It is hard. Most work that is worth doing is hard."

Leilani nodded. She stood. She picked up her backpack. At the door she turned.

"Thank you," she said.

"Go home, Leilani Nakamura. You have done enough for one afternoon."

Leilani went home. Mari Obaachan had made soup — a clear soup, with mushrooms and a single thin slice of lemon floating at the top, a soup whose purpose was not quite nourishment and not quite medicine but something in between. Leilani ate it slowly. Her grandmother did not ask about the circle. Her grandmother asked only whether the soup was too hot, and whether Leilani wanted a second bowl, and whether Leilani had enough pencils for the next day, and those three questions were somehow more restful, at that moment, than any questions about the circle could have been.

Six weeks later it was April.

The crocuses had gone. The daffodils had gone. Mari Obaachan's garden was now full of tulips, stiff and red and ridiculous, and the new soft green of hosta shoots pushing up through the dark mulch. The magnolia in the yard across the street had bloomed and dropped in the space of five days, like a person laughing once and then leaving.

It was a Saturday. Leilani was in the garden, helping her grandmother transplant the pepper seedlings from the seed trays into the raised bed. Mari Obaachan was giving instructions in her steady soft voice. Leilani's hands were dirty. The sun was warm on the back of her neck. Somewhere a cardinal was doing its two-note whistle over and over.

She heard the gate.

She looked up.

Sky was standing at the fence. Sky was wearing a gray hoodie. Her hair was in a loose ponytail. She had her hands in her pockets. She was looking at Leilani with the same cautious old face Leilani had last seen in the restorative circle, six weeks ago.

"Hi," Sky said.

"Hi."

"Can I come in?"

Leilani stood up. Her knees ached a little from kneeling. Her grandmother did not turn around. Her grandmother kept her hands in the soil and her eyes on the peppers, and Leilani knew her grandmother had heard, and knew her grandmother was giving them privacy in the only way a garden allowed.

"Yes," Leilani said. "Come in."

Sky opened the gate. She walked through. She did not move toward Leilani. She stopped at the edge of the vegetable bed.

"Can I sit?" Sky said.

"Yes."

They sat on the short stone wall that ran along the edge of the garden. They sat at the distance old friends sometimes sit, close but not touching. Leilani had dirt on her hands. She wiped them on her jeans.

For a long time they did not speak. A blue jay landed on the birdbath and took three quick drinks and flew off.

"I'm still angry with you," Sky said.

"Okay."

"I'm really angry with you."

"Okay."

"But I think I'm going to get over it."

Leilani turned her head. She looked at Sky. Sky was looking at the birdbath.

"I'll wait," Leilani said.

"I know you will. That's part of why I'm going to get over it."

"Okay."

They sat some more. A plane passed high overhead. The cardinal started again, somewhere in the maple tree.

"My brother," Sky said. "My brother is not okay."

"I know."

"He's seeing a therapist. He's doing community service. He's not going to be allowed back at Tubman next year. He's going to transfer for high school. My parents found a program. It's — it's actually pretty good, I think. He's — he's trying. I don't know what to do with my — with my love for him. I love him. He did a terrible thing. Both of those are true at the same time. Nobody tells you how to hold that."

"Nobody tells you how to hold a lot of things."

"Yeah."

"Sky — "

"Don't apologize again. Please. You've apologized enough. I don't want any more apologies. I want — I want to just — I want to be quiet for a while with my friend."

"Okay."

They were quiet.

"Tell me about it," Sky said eventually. "The Covenant Club. You never got to tell me. From the beginning. How it started. Who was in it. What you did. Tell me."

"Sky, I — "

"Please. I want to know. I think — I think I need to know. The real story. Not what I heard. Not what was in the email the school sent out. I want to hear it from you."

Leilani took a breath. She began.

She told Sky about the afternoon when the screenshots had first come to her, on her phone, on the bus, with the slanting October light. She told Sky about the bathroom where she had stood shaking afterward. She told Sky about walking to Mari Obaachan's sunroom the next day and not being able to eat any of the senbei. She told Sky about the first meeting of the Covenant Club, the seven of them around Mari Obaachan's dining table, and the way Rashad had pulled out his notebook and written QUESTION 1 in big block letters.

She told Sky about the seven questions. One by one. She told Sky what the questions had cost them. She told Sky what each person in the club had said. She told Sky about the moment Wesley's grandfather had walked in and said, your ancestors left you their voice.

She told Sky about Question 5 and the pie her grandmother had made. She told Sky about writing the letter she had never sent. She told Sky about the walk home from Sky's house that night, with the cold coming down and the streetlights coming on and her heart like a piece of cold stone inside her chest.

She told Sky about the walk to the principal's office. About Grace's tin of ginger cookies. About Hannah sliding into the seat next to her at lunch. About Priya picking up her notebook in the hallway. About the day her locker had said SNITCH in three different sizes.

She told Sky about the assembly. Sky had been there for the assembly, of course, but Leilani told her what it had been like from the other side of the podium. The way the auditorium had been so quiet. The way Mateo had grabbed her hand afterward.

She told Sky about the restorative circle. What the room had looked like. What the candle had looked like. What Tanner had said, Leilani repeated it as closely as she could remember, because she thought Sky should hear it, and because she thought it had been more than most people gave their brothers a chance to say. She told Sky what Sky herself had said, as if Sky had not said it, because Leilani suspected Sky had not fully heard her own words in the moment, the way you never do.

She told Sky about the weeks since. The cautious widening. The quiet lunches. The slow spring.

"And that's — that's the Covenant Club," Leilani said.

She had been talking for almost an hour.

Sky sat quietly. A leaf fell from somewhere and landed on her knee. She picked it up, turned it over in her fingers.

"Will you let me meet them?" Sky said. "Not — not right away. Someday. Will you let me meet them?"

"They'd like that."

"Farah. I want to hear her song."

"How do you know about the song?"

"Your mom mentioned it to my mom."

"Our mothers are plotting."

"Our mothers are always plotting."

They both laughed, for the first time in a long time, and it was a small laugh, and it was real.

Mari Obaachan had finished with the peppers. She was washing her hands at the outdoor spigot. She glanced at them briefly. She went inside without saying anything.

"Lei," Sky said. "I'm not — I'm not going to be your only friend anymore. I can't. I can tell that already. I think that's good. But — but I want to be one of them. Is that still on the table?"

"Sky. That has always been on the table. I left the ladder out."

"What ladder?"

"From the treehouse. The couch-cushion treehouse."

"Oh. Oh. Okay."

Sky reached over. She took Leilani's hand. She held it. She did not squeeze. She just held.

They sat that way for another long while.

——

The last day of the school year was in June. It was hot. The sky was the hard blue you only got in summer, the kind that made you squint. The eighth-grade class had gathered for their end-of-year picnic in the park behind the school, and there was a volleyball net and someone's speaker playing too loud and the smell of watermelon rising off the picnic tables in the sun.

Leilani sat on a red blanket with the Covenant Club.

Rashad was reading, because Rashad was always reading. Farah was tuning her guitar. Henry and Wesley were arguing, amiably, about whether a particular board game was actually a board game or a card game. Jada was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her hair haloed out around her on the blanket. Mateo was chopping a watermelon with a plastic knife, badly.

"Hi," said a voice.

They all looked up.

Sky was standing at the edge of the blanket. She was wearing a yellow t-shirt and cutoffs and sunglasses pushed up on top of her head.

"Can I — " Sky began.

"Yes," said every single person on the blanket, at exactly the same time, without consulting each other.

"Wow," Sky said. "Okay."

She sat. She sat next to Leilani, a little stiffly, not quite touching her. Leilani handed her a slice of watermelon. Sky took it.

"I think we're missing one," Farah said. "Lei, did you bring the — "

"The napkins? Yeah, they're in my bag."

Farah dug for the napkins. Rashad started telling a story about his little sister that he had been building up for a week. Jada sat up to listen. Mateo laughed so hard at the punchline that he fell sideways off the blanket into the grass. Henry made a small horrified sound, Henry did not like people falling off blankets, and that made Jada laugh too.

Sky was eating her watermelon. She was laughing a little. Not a lot. But a little, which was more than none.

At the edge of the park, beyond the low wall, Leilani could see Mari Obaachan sitting on a bench under a tree. Her grandmother had come to watch the last day, because that was something her grandmother liked to do — to quietly witness things. Mari Obaachan was not waving. Mari Obaachan was just sitting. Her hair was white in the sun.

Leilani caught her grandmother's eye across the distance. Mari Obaachan lifted her hand, a small hand, only a little. A hello, or maybe just an acknowledgment. Yes. Yes, I see you. Yes, I see all of them.

Leilani lifted her own hand back.

Farah played the opening chords of a song. A song with a melody that had been in Leilani's head for weeks, though she had only heard it once.

"Is that — " Sky said.

"Yes," Leilani said.

"Play it," Sky said. "Play the whole thing."

Farah played it.

The volleyball game went on in the distance. Someone's speaker kept playing. The cardinal in the tree at the edge of the park kept up its two notes. Farah's voice — clear and a little unsteady and very much her own — carried across the blanket, not loud, not trying to be heard by anyone who wasn't already listening.

Leilani leaned back on her palms. Sky was beside her. The sun was hot on her face. Around her were seven people, no — eight now, eight — who had walked through something with her, and she with them, and on the other side of it they were here, on this blanket, with watermelon, with a song.

The song ended. Farah set the guitar down. Someone started another round of watermelon.

Leilani looked up at the sky. It was a hard bright blue. The kind you only get in June.

She closed her eyes and held it there for a moment, because she had learned, in the last year, that the quiet moments did not last unless you stopped to notice them.

When she opened her eyes again, Sky was handing her a napkin.

"Your hands are all watermelon," Sky said.

"Oh."

"Here."

Leilani took the napkin. She wiped her hands. She handed it back.

"Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome," Sky said.

The afternoon went on.

A soccer ball came rolling onto the blanket from somewhere in the distance, and Jada stood up and punted it back with a motion Leilani had never seen Jada make in any context other than PE, and Jada sat back down and said, "I have been waiting years to do that in public," and Rashad fell over laughing.

Farah picked up the guitar again and played something lighter, something with a faster beat, and Henry — of all people, Henry, who did not dance — tapped his foot, and Mateo stood and spun Jada around once in a goofy exaggerated way, and Jada laughed a big real laugh, and the whole blanket became for a moment a small pocket of joy that had somehow assembled itself out of a year of grief and sleepless nights and cold walks home and ginger cookies and a circle with a stone passed around it.

Sky did not dance. Sky watched, and she smiled, a quiet smile, the kind of smile a person smiles when they are still a little bit sad but are reaching, deliberately, toward happiness. Leilani recognized that smile. Leilani was wearing it too.

After a while the others drifted off — Mateo toward the volleyball game, Jada with him, Farah to sit under a tree with her guitar and whoever happened to come listen, Rashad and Henry into a debate about something Rashad had been reading, Wesley curled up on a corner of the blanket with a paperback.

Sky and Leilani were left, more or less, alone on the blanket.

"Lei," Sky said.

"Yeah."

"My mom is making shepherd's pie tonight. She said to ask you if you want to come for dinner. She made it clear she would like it if you said yes. She's been asking for weeks. I kept telling her I wasn't ready. I think — I think I'm ready. For shepherd's pie. Not for — not for everything. But for shepherd's pie."

Leilani smiled. Her throat was tight.

"Yes," she said. "Tell her yes."

"Okay."

"Sky?"

"Yeah?"

"Tanner won't be there, will he."

"No. He's staying with my aunt this week. He and I are — we're good. We're not all the way good. But we're talking. More than we have in a long time. He's different, Lei. Not — not fixed. Different. You can see it. I see it. My mom sees it. He will sit with his consequences for a long time. But he is sitting with them."

"I'm glad."

"I know you are. That is one of the things I am learning about you, Lei. That you can be glad for him and still have done what you did. You can hold both. It's taken me a while to see that."

"It's taken me a while to see it too."

They were quiet. The sky was that hard blue. A small plane went over. Somewhere a dog barked, and somewhere else another dog barked back.

"Lei," Sky said. "The couch-cushion treehouse."

"Yeah."

"I still have one of the cushions. In my closet. I never put it back on the couch. My mom never asked me to. I think she knew."

"Sky."

"I'm going to keep it."

"I want you to keep it."

"Okay."

They lay back on the blanket. Side by side, not touching, looking up at the June sky. A cloud shaped like a tortoise drifted over, and another shaped like no animal Leilani could name. The grass around the blanket smelled like cut stems and clover. Leilani's watermelon-sticky hand was resting near Sky's hand, and after a while Sky moved her hand the one inch that was the last inch, and their fingers were touching, and neither of them said anything about it, because some things did not need to be said out loud when you had already lived through them.

Across the park, on her bench, Mari Obaachan was still sitting. She would sit there, Leilani knew, until the last of the Covenant Club had gone home. That was who her grandmother was. A person who stayed. A person who witnessed.

She closed her eyes again. The sun was warm on her lids. The picnic kept happening around her, soft and loud at once, held lightly in the middle of the afternoon.

The Covenant Club kept happening. It had not ended. It would not end this year. It would probably not end for a long time, if at all. It would change. People would leave and people would come. The questions themselves would get bigger, and different, and harder. But the practice would hold. That was the thing she had learned, above all the others. The practice would hold. You did not have to have the answers. You only had to keep sitting down with the questions.

She opened her eyes.

Sky was looking at her.

"What are you thinking about?" Sky said.

"I was thinking about questions."

"Of course you were."

"Sky."

"Yeah?"

"What's your favorite question?"

Sky thought. Her forehead wrinkled slightly, which was a thing it did when she was thinking. It had been doing that thing since they were four years old. Leilani had not seen it in weeks, and the seeing of it now made her chest ache the good kind of ache.

"I don't know yet," Sky said. "I'll get back to you."

"Okay."

"Lei?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad I'm here."

"Me too."

They lay there together. The sun kept being the sun. The school year had come to its end. Something new was about to begin, and something that had ended had been small enough and whole enough that it might, eventually, begin again in a shape they had not seen yet.

The afternoon went on. The afternoon kept going on. Somewhere a bell rang at a different school. Somewhere a mother called a child home. Somewhere a grandmother stood up from a bench and smoothed her skirt and walked slowly across a park toward a red blanket and seven — eight — children who would, later in their lives, all remember this day, this exact afternoon, this exact sky, as the afternoon that had ended the first chapter of a story they were all only barely old enough to know they were inside.

She sat up. She made a place on the blanket. She waited for her grandmother. The breeze moved once through the oak tree overhead, and the leaves made a small applause, and Mari Obaachan came and sat down among them, and the Covenant Club welcomed her the way a family welcomes the person it had been secretly waiting for all along.

THE END

----------

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Bahá'í writings tell us that justice is "the best beloved of all things" in the sight of God, and that through its power each of us can see with our own eyes and know of our own knowledge. This book is a small story about what that looks like when you are thirteen — when the world keeps telling you you are too young to matter, and you decide, quietly, in a sunroom, with six friends and a grandmother making pie, that you are not. That your voice, given to you by the people who came before, is yours to use. That the worst thing you can do with a gift like that is nothing.

If you are young and you are reading this, and there is a question in your life that you are carrying alone, I hope you find your seven. I hope you sit with them. I hope you ask.

Crimson Ark Publishing