December eighth. Noon. Harry Valiant High School, Routeville, Illinois.

“Three-thirty,” Amanda said just after finishing off her tuna sandwich.

“What?”

We were in the cafeteria. It was twelve-seventeen, and my girlfriend and I sat at a table near the exit. The air was cold, due to the heating system failure three days ago. Lots of kids had the sniffles, red eyes, and coughs, and if any sicky came my way, I always covered my nose and mouth—even though I wore a mask—as an additional precaution. I also had on my jacket. Winters in Illinois weren’t kind.

Call me overly careful or even paranoid, but catching a cold wasn’t on my to-do list. My parents—government paper pushers—had been complaining of feeling crappy the past few days as well.

As for Amanda’s parents, same deal. Her father was a viral researcher, and he’d admitted that his research on the new flu had come to a standstill. “It keeps mutating,” he’d said to me the last time we met. “Changing every day, so synthesizing a vaccine is going to be difficult until it hits its final form.”

Breach of protocol? Maybe, but this latest-not-so-greatest version of the flu had been all over the news for the past few days, so it wasn’t exactly a secret. And while admitting to a civilian that a vaccine simply wasn’t around may not have been the right thing to do, I could keep a secret as well as anyone.

We’d had so many kinds of flu over the past few years it wasn’t funny. I still felt okay, as did Amanda, but that was because we wore masks in class, as did most of the other kids. Better safe than sorry, and those who didn’t wear masks seemed to get sick more than those who did.

Our city, just over fourteen thousand in terms of population, a nice suburban area near Champagne, was a good place to live. It had a cool local mall where Amanda and I usually hung out after school for a few hours before going home, and it was safe. We never had to worry about crime. We never had to worry about anything...

“Three-thirty,” Amanda repeated and snapped her fingers for attention, putting on a mock-severe tone of voice. “Gosh, Carl, I don’t see why I put up with you.”

“When you say that, pilgrim, smile.”

My answer made her laugh. Her father was a big John Wayne fan and loved the late actor’s westerns. Good for him. After reading about Wayne, the less said, the better. He had his fans, natch, but his way of thinking simply didn’t jive with mine.

I’d never mentioned that to my girlfriend, though. Amanda was very open-minded, but she’d always supported her father, and blood was blood, after all.

“Ah’m smiling,” Amanda drawled and then switched to speaking without her drawl. “I was thinking, after school, let’s go to the mall. I want to buy a blouse, and they’re on sale.”

“So I get to watch you model clothes,” I replied after thinking that I’d miss fooling around on the internet. I loved playing a first-person POV shooting game named Calling Duty, and while I wasn’t great at it, the graphics, dialogue, and music were prime. In fact, they were all at least a light-year beyond what anyone else had ever come up with.

My goal was to someday be as good as the all-time leader, a person with the screen name Depth Charge. I had no idea who he or she was, but they were good. No, better than good. Their high score was over seventy million. In contrast, the second-highest result was forty-two million, the magical number, and as for me, I never got past the ten-million range...

“Hey, Carl, are you home?”

“What?” I’d been spacing out again, thinking about games and whatnot instead of thinking about the special girl I was with.

Amanda tossed me a slow, lazy grin. “I’ll forgive you for not listening to me, Carl...once. Like I was saying, when we go shopping, you get to be with me. That’s better than watching me show off a new blouse.”

I couldn’t disagree with that. We’d met earlier this year in September, our junior year at school. Homeroom class, just before nine, Amanda walked into the room on the first day of the term, and everyone’s gaze immediately went to her.

It was easy to see why. She was medium height—five-seven, same as me—with long blonde hair, green eyes, a sylphlike figure, and an attitude of you-can’t-touch-this.

Said attitude showed in her no-nonsense stride, the way she sat as if erecting an invisible barrier around her... everything. Perhaps she realized her effect on people, perhaps not. But all the same, she remained kind of aloof. It was a deal-with-it scenario. Either people accepted it, or they didn’t.

For the first two weeks, she’d sat with a different student every day, as if she was putting them into the friend-slash-no-friend-slash-maybe-friend categories. She was never unfriendly, always civil, but the divide was there.

Divides were something I understood all too well. I was a minority in the school, and in my freshman year, a few students had made it clear that my presence wasn’t welcome due to me having a Jewish family name. Silverman was a lot different than West or Smith or Collins.

And when I ran across people who said bigoted things simply because they knew it would piss me off, with people like that, you couldn’t talk to them, reason with them, or ever hope to be friends with them, much less sit in their circle.