“Is your friend okay?” Sharon asked Zeke.

  “I don’t know,” Zeke said, downcast. “I don’t even know if he’s my friend.”

  Mr. MacPherson was their teacher, a wildebeest so old he told them he’d rather be known as a gnu, which he pronounced with the g—“ganoo” rather than just “noo.” No one was sure which part of any of that they were supposed to take seriously, and Mr. MacPherson seemed to enjoy how much they didn’t know.

  “Antarctica!” he shouted at them, waking a few of them up. It was a warm afternoon. Easy to get sleepy, especially when it was a geography module. “Who can tell me about Antarctica?”

  A seal in the back raised her flipper.

  “Anybody who’s not actually from there,” said Mr. MacPherson.

  The seal lowered her flipper. Zeke looked over at Miel in the back row. He’d said nothing since recess, not to Zeke, not to anyone.

  Mr. MacPherson started to pace in front of the map on the big screen at the front of the class, which showed Antarctica from above, all the lines of the world radiating out from the South Pole at its center. “Would you believe me if I said that Antarctica was the biggest desert in the world?”

  “Yes,” snapped a bored Pelicarnassus. “You’re a teacher. We’re supposed to believe you.”

  In the desk next to Zeke, though, Daniel was positively squirming with indignation, waving his hand frantically. “But it can’t be a desert! It’s made of water!”

  “Wrong,” Mr. MacPherson said. “Why is the tiny lizard wrong?”

  The seal’s flipper went up again. Mr. MacPherson sighed. “Anyone else?” There were no other hands, claws, or wings, so Mr. MacPherson nodded at the seal and said, “Very well, Briony.”

  “It’s not made of water,” she said. “It’s made of ice. And it never rains. Or almost never.”

  “Correct,” Mr. MacPherson said.

  “It’s very, very cold,” persisted the seal.

  “Also correct—”

  “That’s why I have a layer of blubber.”

  “That’s enough, Briony—”

  “It protects us both on land and in water that’s only just above freezing.”

  Mr. MacPherson pulled a herring-flavored cookie out of a box. He threw it to Briony, who caught it midair and gulped it down, barking and slapping her flippers together.

  It would be easy to laugh at the enthusiasm of seals—they were the most excitable animal, would talk your ear off, and would dominate any classroom if every teacher didn’t keep a herring-cookie bucket—but they were also one of the kindest animals Zeke knew. As long as you weren’t an orca, they would be your friend instantly.

  “We’re all going to make salt-relief maps of Antarctica,” Mr. MacPherson said now. “We’re going to mix salt and flour and water together, and then you’re going to build a three-dimensional map of—” Mr. MacPherson lowered his glasses and looked at Daniel. “Have you already eaten your salt and flour, Daniel?”

  “No, Mr. MacPherson,” Daniel said, his mouth full.

  Mr. MacPherson rolled his eyes. “Zeke, can I ask you to get more from Ms. Pfister in the stockroom?”

  Zeke’s stomach sank. “Yes, Mr. MacPherson.” He slid out of his desk, giving the evil eye to Daniel, who said “What?” while putting more wet flour on his tongue.

  A hard day had suddenly gotten worse.

  Zeke left geography class and made his way to see Ms. Pfister, who ran the stockroom. There wasn’t a student in the school who wasn’t afraid of her. Even Pelicarnassus and the lions who played football didn’t sass her. She was the very worst animal in the world. The cruelest, the proudest, the most superior and haughty. It didn’t matter that she worked full-time in a school stockroom, handing out construction paper and carefully measured glitter to children; she still acted like the Queen of England, if the Queen of England were still alive but super mean and hated kids.

  Zeke walked as slowly as he could down the empty hallway, wondering why there weren’t Hall Monitors at times like these. Wouldn’t this be when students were skipping class? Not just in the morning when they were late or at recess and lunch, but now, when everyone was learning or being taught or sitting there pretending one or the other?

  He reached the stockroom, which was just a square room like a classroom but with a half door over which you had to ask Ms. Pfister for what you wanted. There was a little shelf on the top of the half door, too, as if it wasn’t hard enough for the smaller students to see over it as it was. Fortunately, Zeke was tall for his age, tall for a monitor lizard. So tall and big, actually, that two lions once talked about him joining the football team. To each other. They didn’t talk to Zeke; they just looked at him and talked to each other about him like he wasn’t there. That was lions for you.

  Or was it, though? Zeke wondered. They were all taught these things, or if they weren’t taught, they were things that everyone “knew.” But how did they know? Were all seals enthusiastic? Were all pandas super relaxed? Were all lions arrogant and above it all? Or if they were any of those things, were they those things not because they actually were, but because people expected them to be?

  Zeke knew what people thought about lizards—cold-blooded, for one, which made them somehow alien, plus all that scuttling and what was with the tongues?—but he was different from Alicia, who was different from Daniel. And, sure, they scuttled a little; that’s how lizards walked. But every lizard he knew was a completely different kind of person. Individual, not just a type.

  What if that were true of lions and seals and pandas?

  Zeke really did wonder this. Though he, like everyone else, was prepared to make an exception for Ms. Pfister, who was—as previously stated—the worst animal you could be.

  Zeke stopped in front of the stockroom door, took a deep breath, rehearsed everything he was going to say. Then he pressed the bell to summon Ms. Pfister. “Just get the flour and salt and leave as fast as possible,” he said to himself as he waited. “You have Mr. MacPherson’s note, there’s nothing you’ve done wrong, every form she asks for has already been filled out—”

  But he ran out of time to finish the pep talk.

  For here came Ms. Pfister.

  There was only so much preparing you could do when you were forced to talk to a pony.

  “What is that?” Ms. Pfister said, blinking down at him over the bottom half of the door, her glasses halfway down her nose. “Is that a lizard?”

  “Hello, Ms. Pfister,” Zeke began, trying to get it out of the way as fast as he could. “Mr. MacPherson sent me to pick up some more—”

  “Mr. MacPherson would do well to steward his supplies with more care,” she interrupted. People often said a voice “dripped with disdain.” Ms. Pfister’s gushed it. “Does that wildebeest think I just magic up these supplies from the supply fairy?”

  Zeke blinked. “Do you?”

  She ignored this. “And he sends a little gecko to ask for a refreshment.” She pronounced this in a weird French way, ray-fresh-mon, that Zeke recognized because of his knee.

  “I’m a monitor lizard.”

  She neighed with scorn. “You have mistaken me for someone who cares.” She turned to go.

  “I still need the supplies, Ms. Pfister.”

  She turned back around, which took a moment because ponies do not have quick turning radii. “You ‘need’ them?” she asked, her bushy eyebrows practically leaving her face in disbelief.

  He pushed Mr. MacPherson’s request form at her. “Please may I have them for Mr. MacPherson, please, Ms. Pfister, please.”

  She narrowed her eyes, which ponies can do very well. “You may have half.”

  This was actually okay, as every teacher knew Ms. Pfister well enough to request far more than she would ever grant. Ms. Pfister knew this in return, so it was really a system that either worked perfectly or was an explanation of how people could be super dumb, even if they were grown-ups.

  Zeke, however, would be expected to negotiate.

  “We need at least eighty percent,” he said. This also wasn’t true, but it’s what Mr. MacPherson had told him to start with.

  “Eighty percent is not for little lizards,” Ms. Pfister said, gushing the disdain again. “Eighty percent is for big boys.”

  “I am quite large,” Zeke said.

  Ms. Pfister blinked. Zeke wasn’t wrong, and it seemed to be the first time she bothered to see him as an individual rather than as a small agent of evil come to ruin her day. Zeke wasn’t sure this would be an improvement.

  “So you are,” Ms. Pfister said. “Somehow both fat and insignificant.”

  No, definitely not an improvement.

  But that word. That one word. That one three-letter word.

  That was where Ms. Pfister made her mistake.

  A little volcano seemed to erupt somewhere within Zeke. It was deep down, and unless you knew him as well as Daniel or Alicia, you’d never have guessed, unless you saw the way his left upper lip—where there was a little, tiny scar that no one, not even his mom, knew how it had got there—was starting to twitch in a particular way.

  Zeke was a big lizard. He was a tall lizard, but he was also a wide lizard. He knew this. It was obvious to anyone. But most people knew better than to use the three-letter word. Not because they were nice deep down—no, that was a myth peddled by all kinds of those drippy books they used to be read in kindergarten to make them sleep—but because 1) the fact that Zeke was big meant he could probably also hurt you if you pushed the wrong button, and that three-letter word was a radioactively glowing button with the word WRONG! written across the top, and 2) anyone who made fun of someone else’s appearance like that immediately lost the argument; if you called someone “fat,” then that didn’t say much about the so-called fat person, but it said a lot about you.

  “A hundred percent,” Zeke said now, holding her gaze and returning it, with interest.

  “I beg your pardon?” She tossed her mane in a typically cruel pony fashion.

  “You really should beg my pardon,” Zeke said. “I am husky. I am big for my age. These are the things polite people say.”

  “Oh.” Ms. Pfister took on a baby voice. “Did he get his little fat feelings hurt?”

  Zeke got louder. “One hundred percent!”

  “You’re getting nothing.”

  “ONE HUNDRED PERCENT!”

  “You need to adjust your attitude or I’ll call Principal Wombat.”

  “And I’ll tell her you called me fat!”

  “Who do you think she’s going to believe, lizard? A puny little nothing of a student or a teacher?”

  “You’re not a teacher. You’re barely a clerk.”

  Ms. Pfister gasped. Actually gasped.

  “And I think we both know Principal Wombat will believe that you’re capable of saying anything. I’m willing to wait until she gets here.”

  Ms. Pfister’s pony ears folded back in the way of any angry horse. But Zeke was still looking into her eyes, and whatever she saw before her—a raging monitor lizard that could do anything, an annoying student who regardless should maybe not be toyed with, or perhaps there was kindness in there somewhere, beneath all the cruelty and smelly horse blankets—caused her to waver.

  “Are you calling my bluff, little lizard?” she said.

  “Are you calling mine?” Zeke asked.

  A long moment of staring.

  Another one.

  And another.

  But there’s no mammal on earth who could outstare a lizard.

  “Don’t push it,” Ms. Pfister said, but she got one hundred percent of the salt and flour Mr. MacPherson had requested. She didn’t say another word to Zeke and she very pointedly did not hand it over the half-door shelf to him, so he had to reach up awkwardly and lift it all down himself.

  It still felt like a victory.

  “Whoa,” Alicia said, surprising Zeke as he came around the corner from the stockroom. “That was amazing.”

  “You saw?” Zeke asked.

  “Yeah, I saw. Zeke! You beat Ms. Pfister!”

  Zeke was bashful and looked at his feet. “Well, she called me fat.”

  Alicia audibly gasped. “That witch! That witch with her stupid gorgeous mane!”

  “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “The power of truth and justice! That’s what came over you! You were a superhero back there! I saw with my own two . . . Are you okay?”

  “I don’t think so,” Zeke said, and fell over.

  Alicia got him sitting up against a wall with his head between his knees, taking deep breaths. “It’s okay,” she said, patting his back after she’d gathered the dropped canisters of flour and salt. “It’s bound to be a little nerve-wracking.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “That’s okay, too.”

  “What was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking you weren’t going to put up with someone being that horrendous to you, even if she was a teacher.”

  “Yeah, but I punched Pelicarnassus before. That’s not like me either.”

  “Well, maybe he deserved it.”

  “Violence makes me the same as him. I don’t want that.”

  Alicia sighed and sat down next to him, bumping up against his shoulder. “That’s Zeke,” she said, “always more thoughtful than anyone else. Always figuring out how to be.”

  “Be what?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Where’s your sash?”

  “I’m not on Hall Monitor duty. I told Mr. MacPherson I needed the bathroom.”

  “You’ll get in trouble if you wait too long.”

  Alicia just shrugged and started humming a little tune. She tended to care about different things than everybody else. She cared about things like justice. And her friends. And justice for her friends. But she was also kind of happy that she only had two friends in Zeke and Daniel, because “Any more would be really tiring,” she once said, “and I think I’m kinda lazy.”

  But she was as brave as France, too. Take how she looked after Daniel, for example. When the three of them first started school, Daniel—the smallest—was an immediate target.

  That lasted less than a week. Not because of Zeke, who would very happily defend Daniel from any attack, but because Alicia was always there first. Zeke remembered the second day of kindergarten when a particularly mean little yak started picking on Daniel.

  Daniel, bless him, didn’t even notice at first. The yak and his little yak friends started asking Daniel to dance for them, and he didn’t see that they were laughing or that anything was wrong until the main yak—what was his name? Kevin?— Kevin came up behind Daniel and caught one of his whirling arms with a yak horn. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if that had been all—Daniel was a lizard and therefore basically untrippable—but Kevin pushed. Hard. Daniel went down, clonked his head on the ground, and cried out.

  Alicia had Kevin the yak on his knees before he’d even been able to finish laughing. She could pinch, Alicia could, and she had an instinctive feel for when someone’s height and weight could be used against them that was impressive even for a lizard, who had to think about those things all the time. One swift pinch of an ear, one assertive push behind a knee, and Kevin the yak was down without even entirely realizing that he’d fallen.

  “Try it again, Kevin!” Alicia yelled straight into his tufted ear. “Do it one more time, I dare you!”

  “Get off me,” Kevin said, and tried to stand, but Alicia wasn’t having any of that. With one more tug and two more pushes, all four of Kevin’s legs had buckled and he lay on his side, clearly not at all sure how he’d gotten there.

  “I could do this all day, Kevin,” she said, “and I will until you apologize to Daniel.”

  “No way, I’m not going to—”

  Two more moves and he was on his back, which is not at all comfortable for a yak.

  “All right! All right! I’m sorry, Daniel!”

  “And you’re never going to bother him again.”

  “And I’m never going to bother him again!”

  “And neither will any of your yak friends.”

  “And neither will any of my yak friends!”

  “Aw, thanks, Kevin!” Daniel said cheerfully, also possibly unsure of what had just happened.

  But after that, no one bothered him or Alicia or Zeke. Not even the larger predators, who liked to chase anything small (though Zeke thought it was possible they couldn’t actually tell the difference between other species, that to them the world might have just been divided into “me” and “food”).

  “I’m going to get in so much trouble,” Zeke said now.

  “I don’t think you will,” Alicia said. “I don’t think Ms. Pfister will want it to get around that you won.”

  “I didn’t really win—”

  “You won, Zeke, trust me.” She looked him in the eyes, which was rare for her and happened only when she really wanted you to listen. Zeke knew this, so he waited until she looked away before he did, too.

  “We should get back to class,” Zeke said.

  “How’s your mom?” Alicia asked, looking at her shoelaces.

  Zeke was so surprised by the question it was like someone had slapped him in the chest. “She’s fine,” he said, too quickly.

  “No, she isn’t,” Alicia said, standing. She offered Zeke a hand to help him up, but he was literally twice her size. It was like a lamb helping up a tractor. He got up himself.

  “Alicia—”

  “Daniel told me about the window—”

  “That was Pelicarnassus—”

  “And that you were too afraid to tell your mom.”

  This was true. Both Daniel and Alicia knew about the black dog. They also knew Zeke didn’t want to talk about it.

  “My mom worries about your mom,” Alicia said. “If you ever need any help. Any help.”