“I’m not going to force you to trust anyone,” I say. I trust no one, not even Carrie, really, and she’s my oldest real friend / fifth grade. “So how about things? You trust your car, right?”

  “It’s a dependable car,” she says.

  “What else?”

  “I trusted this chair when I sat on it. And I trusted that school would be open today. I didn’t trust that no one would steal shit from my locker,” she says.

  “That’s only because you had that happen before,” I say.

  “Someone broke into your locker?” Len says. “That sucks.”

  “Eighth grade. Gym locker. Stole my favorite pair of jeans,” Carrie says. “Never saw them again.”

  “So trust often depends on past experience, as established,” I say.

  “Sorry about your jeans,” Ellie says. “You can never replicate a favorite pair of jeans.”

  “Agreed,” Len says.

  Carrie stops to explain the ideas in her class project about Zimbardo’s time perspectives and how they affect us, especially relating to Trust. Well, her, specifically. She will fear her locker being robbed because it has been robbed before because in regard to locker-theft experiences, she has a “past-negative time perspective.” Eric jumps in and explains that theoretically, she could still have that lack of Trust even if her locker hadn’t been robbed before because trauma that passes down via epigenetics can cause children of people who had their locker robbed to have the distrust naturally. Ellie adds that Trust is a tricky concept when viewed through a child development lens because there are different levels of trust. As a baby, you learn Trust when you are taken care of, but by age ten, you have moral ideas and know, for example, that lying is a barrier to Trust, even if someone is lying to you because they think it’s part of taking care of you.

  “I wish Nigel was here to hear you guys talk,” Len says, with his camera out, recording. “You sound so fucking smart.”

  “Best team ever,” Carrie says.

  We high-five.

  Nigel is suddenly talking at us through the intercom. “Psych Team, check in.”

  We sound off, like saying “here” in first-grade attendance except we say Hello, Nigel in the most done-with-Nigel voices we can manage.

  “Are you geniuses coming up with anything? Your thesis statements are due next week.”

  We’re in different climate zones. Nigel is a plant that grows in places where things don’t freeze and thesis statements matter / delicate. We are five teenagers who grow in wild northern fucking Alaska trying to figure out what feelings are. We tell him we’re fine. He says we don’t seem fine / that he’s coming to class tomorrow to assess us.

  He says, “Don’t forget, your papers have to be twice as good as everyone else’s because you chose psychology,” and the intercom squeaks off.

  They all look back to me as if Nigel never interrupted. I say, “We’re in Zeno’s arrow. So I want you to really feel something. Close your eyes. Think of a person you really admire, or the feeling of being admired. Or the feeling of being accepted or being trusted. What do you feel about trustworthy things? I’ll write down anything you blurt out starting . . . now.”

  During the next half hour, the whiteboard fills with words and phrases.

  Proud, good, like I did something right, the feeling of giving yourself to someone you trust, watching someone be awesome, sending thank-you cards when you mean it (not when forced—Eric thinks this is evil), wishing you could be more like someone and knowing you can, doing good deeds feels nice, helping someone by listening, not gossiping, being accepted feels so good, being admired can feel fake (is that trust or lack of it? or humility?—Len) makes me cry, makes me smile, makes me want to do more good things, makes a person feel successful, when you trust someone it’s like being safe in your bed, having no fears, inspires hope, inspires more trust.

  x equals how I don’t know what Trust is.

  The hardest thing about talking about Trust, we learn for the third time, is that all of our minds go to lack of Trust because we feel we have experienced that more than Trust. Carrie points out again that this means we are past-negative according to Zimbardo. We debate—have we really been screwed over that many times or is it only a perception? Where does being screwed over fit on this clock? Len: anger, fear, sadness, disgust. Eric: Surprise, too. Ellie: Nigel is a perfect example.

  We examine what makes someone trustworthy. Mutual respect, good listener, good communicator, honesty, no gossip, knows when to let you cry (Ellie) and knows when to help you, and is happy to see you and see you succeed. In your corner, has your back, sticks up for you.

  x equals how I know what Trust is, but don’t have any.

  UNBELIEVABLE / PALEOLITHIC

  I was warming up / long throws for fun. I felt energy everywhere and inside me and I saw the other throwers out on the field collecting their javs and goofing around. I didn’t think my jav would go that far.

  No one got hurt.

  That’s all that matters.

  Coach Aimee says, “That’s a fifty-meter javelin. It shouldn’t even land point down at that distance.” She hands me another jav and says nothing about how far it went.

  This time everyone is watching. I run. I hop-step. I throw. I aim for the goal posts. It falls short and lands right in front of Giselle Masterson, flat landing / skid.

  “That had to be a hundred fifty,” Coach Turner says, jogging toward us. Coach Aimee barely looks up from her training schedule clipboard.

  “I’m scared about next Tuesday,” I blurt / energy gone wild.

  “You’ll do fine,” Coach Turner says.

  “I still don’t know what a field judge is,” I say.

  Coach Aimee says, “We’ll walk you through it. I promise.”

  “What if I throw at the wrong time?”

  “I’ll be there with you,” Coach Aimee says. “I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

  “I still don’t know when to get on deck or in the hole or whatever,” I say.

  “On hold,” Coach Aimee corrects / looks so sick of me.

  “Throw it again, kid,” Coach Turner says.

  I pick up the last of the javs and weigh it in my hand. I bounce on my feet. Energy is everywhere. It’s like I’m pulling from a source underground. All that lightning that gets rerouted to the earth—green wires attached to metal poles—it’s rerouting upward now. Into my feet. My legs. My back. My arm. Into the jav. I am the jav. I have to hold back, the way I’ve always held back. I fly right over the field with no wobble. Giselle Masterson shades her eyes with her hand / sees me closing in.

  She runs / watches it land where she was standing. She looks over at us—Coach Turner, Coach Aimee, and me—and she picks up her gear by the shed and huffs out of the stadium and toward the locker room.

  “Unbelievable!” Coach Turner says. “You really got something!”

  “I’m Paleolithic.”

  I walk to the other end of the field and pick up my javs.

  Giselle’s two thrower friends greet me with something I’m not used to.

  “Holy shit can you throw! Nice job!”

  “Yeah—you’re going to score us some serious points.”

  I look at them, unsure what to say.

  “I get to concentrate on discus now. Can’t thank you enough,” the first one says.

  “Me too,” the other one says. “I can’t even get close to beating you.”

  I am a lost / loose wire. I am a million wires.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask.

  TRACK TEAM

  “You’re good,” one of them says.

  “You’ve never been on-team before. We didn’t know you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Giselle hates everyone,” one says.

  “Does that mean you do, too?”

  “Her dad,” one says, “was in the Olympics.”

  “That’s cool,” I say.

  “He threw javelin,” one says.

  I don’t know why her dad being an Olympic javelin thrower means Giselle should hate everyone / maybe that’s why my Paleolithic survival spear almost hit her / to understand anything is to understand energy.

  “Did he win medals?” I ask.

  The two of them shrug and start collecting gear and putting it in the wagon. I walk to the shed to put the javs back. They follow, eventually. I don’t know what to say to them. I see Carrie taking off her spikes on the bleachers, so I walk over and sit next to her.

  “Dude. What the hell?” she says.

  “Yeah. It’s weird.”

  “How do you even do that?” she asks.

  “I think it’s energy. And time. I don’t know. Something like that.”

  BIG MAC MEAL

  “I’ll have a Big Mac meal with a vanilla shake, please,” Carrie says into the speaker.

  She gives me one more chance to order / I decline.

  Once we get the food, she drives to her house a few minutes away and we go inside. Carrie’s house is normal. It’s in a development, like ours is, but there is no exposed plywood and no mystery switch on the wall. Carrie has never seen the inside of my house. From the outside, I’m sure it looks fine.

  She starts eating and I call Daddy.

  “I came home with Carrie because her parents aren’t home,” I say.

  Daddy says, “We have sausage for dinner. I will save for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you studying?” he asks.

  “We just got here. But yes. I’m working on my paper.”

  He tells me to be home in an hour and I hang up.

  Carrie says, “You still can’t figure out a thesis statement?”

  “I’m stalling.”

  “It’s just a paper,” she says. “It’s not like we’re really going to figure out how to save the world, you know. It’s just a distraction from this time thing.”

  Time thing. Eight billion of us / no wristwatches / no way to break the record in hurdles no matter if you’re in Bali or Botswana. Always 0623202016:44 / we are molecules floating in time / we are resting arrows / time thing.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”

  I walk around her kitchen. It’s nothing like our kitchen. Our kitchen is eat-in and small. Hers has nowhere to eat as a family, but a huge island and breakfast bar in the middle. Everything is marble.

  “So, why is Giselle Masterson such a bitch?” I ask.

  She chews and swallows. Washes it down with milkshake. “Um. She’s probably only a bitch to you,” she says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  She looks at me with her head tilted like I should know what she’s talking about. “You don’t know?” Always the last one to know / this is not new / AFT3RMATH.

  I hold my hands out and shrug.

  Carrie takes a deep breath. “I don’t even know how to tell you this if you don’t know,” she says, “but . . . there’s a pretty popular rumor that your brother used to . . . um . . . be with Giselle. When he was a senior.”

  I do math. Richard is twenty-one and Giselle is a sophomore in high school. “No,” I say. “There’s no way anyone would even believe that.”

  She ugh-sighs. “The story goes that he picked her up at the rec center in the morning after her dad dropped her off.”

  “That’s, like, six in the morning.”

  “Yeah. He took her to some parking lot and they . . . you know,” Carrie says.

  “What? Talked about pre-algebra?”

  “You know.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  She nods and shoves a fist of fries into her mouth.

  “Your sister told the whole school he was always like that,” she says.

  A thousand tiny bombs / “She’s a liar,” I say.

  “Well, yeah. She eventually told me it was a lie and she was just mad at him for making her walk to school.”

  “But people still believe it?”

  “Big rumor, little town,” she says.

  I sit and stare into space / time stops all over again / “Huh.”

  “Sorry to have to tell you that.”

  “No wonder Giselle hates me,” I say. I send good-energy to Giselle Masterson, wherever she is.

  Carrie adds, “She probably doesn’t even remember. It’s not like anything actually happened. But maybe you could tone it down a bit. I’ve been in track since seventh grade with Giselle. She was always the star. This is probably freaking her out.”

  When Carrie drives me to my house I can feel a new energy between us. Like she’s mad at me for an old rumor / for throwing so far / tone it down a bit.

  REST

  Daddy has installed an intercom system from wherever-he-is to the kitchen.

  “Plate is in oven,” he says through a speaker.

  “Thank you.” I put a mitt on and get it from the oven.

  “You smell like fast food.”

  I decide not to hear him / believe he can smell me through a speaker. I walk to the wall unit / turn the volume all the way down. I’m thinking about Richard and Giselle Masterson / rumors / sister. I’m thinking about how everyone knows more than I do about everything. I’m thinking about my thesis statement. I don’t know why they make us work so hard on something so impossible. I’m tired. We’re all tired.

  I think about Zeno and arrows. Motion / Time. All of us stuck in a single resting moment, not resting. I don’t think I’ve ever rested in the sixteen years I’ve been alive. I’m not sure any kid does.

  Maybe if we knew what it was like to rest, we would understand time better.

  Fear

  WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT NIGEL

  I’m not ready for Solution Time today. Was up too late failing at finding a thesis statement / succeeding at pulling 189 more nails.

  It’s pretend–St. Patrick’s Day and the school is more green than usual. Eric is wearing a kelly-green polo shirt. Len is wearing forest-green boots. Nigel is here / smells like green gin. He’s standing with his arms crossed with a smile on his face like burnt toast.

  “This whole team is a waste of time,” Nigel says.

  “Ironic,” Eric says. We giggle.

  On / off / Nigel explodes.

  He levels eyes with Eric. “If this is so funny, then tell me how this time paradox is going to work out for your dad. If a two-year sentence is stuck in time, how long will it be before you see him again? Didn’t think of that, did you?”

  None of us knew that Eric’s dad was in prison / not dancing to Cuban music while he makes dinner with Eric’s mom. Shit. Nigel is an asshole. I want to erase his mouth.

  WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT NIGEL’S MOUTH

  My mother kept my

  childhood drawings of

  fish and horses and one time,

  a bird.

  She wrote the dates

  on the back and put them

  in a box.

  There are ten family pictures.

  I drew one each year

  on my birthday

  because I like tradition.

  In all ten,

  sister has no mouth.

  “You guys don’t know anything about the world! You haven’t had to pay bills or suffer at all. You haven’t experienced being successful. I’ve worked for twenty years and my peers call me a transformational teacher. What do they call you? You’re just a bunch of cocky kids who think you know shit when you haven’t even been out of the county,” he says.

  Nigel is showing his whole ass here. All of us have left the county. Most of us have been out of the country. Three of us have dual passports. Eric’s mom is from Argentina. Len’s mom is from Lagos.

  “You know,” Nigel says, “when I go to Nepal, I see things none of you would . . .”

  Len texts me. You know he just broke up with Ms. Moreland, right? Dude’s going nuts from too much semen.

  I text back. What a douche. I can’t believe he just said that to Eric.

  Dude is high on himself.

  Really? Moreland?

  Yup.

  Why do I never know this kind of gossip?

  I’m a documentarian. It’s my job to know things.

  Carrie elbows me. Nigel has stopped talking about his travel adventures. He has asked a question.

  Ellie says, “Today Tru was going to talk to us about Fear for the last time. Her project is really interesting, Nigel. All of ours are.”

  I never thought Ellie would be the one to stick up for us, but Eric is still staring at his jeans.

  “Do you know what other teams are doing right now?” Nigel says. “STEM—you know—actual science?”

  “Psychology is science,” Len says.

  Nigel looks up toward the ceiling / cycling through energy / on / off / on.

  “You know what, Leonard?” Nigel kicks the nearest chair and sends it sliding across the floor / crashing into the other chairs and desks like bumper cars. BOOM! “I’m sick of your shit. I’m failing you. I’m failing you all.” He looks at his phone for a moment and then walks out the door / slams it louder than I’ve ever heard a door slam.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Ellie stops pacing / Carrie’s eyes stop leaking, Len has already uploaded the video of Nigel’s tirade from his phone and trimmed it to a perfect fifteen-second clip. Eric has texted his mother and told her that Nigel just told the entire class that his dad is in prison. I have picked up the kicked chair from the floor and it’s full of frantic energy.

  Today is Fear.

  Nigel is Fear.

  We just did Fear / today.