On Thanksgiving night, my parents video-called me, sitting in the kitchen, sink and cabinets out of focus over their shoulders. Mom had her hair out of its ponytail for once, two streams of tangled black. As the resolution of the video flickered and cleared, I felt my intestines form a deliberate pretzel.
I asked about Thanksgiving. They’d gone over to the Davises’ for dinner, as usual—the Davises had six kids, so they never said no to a couple of extra adults to balance things out. Hopefully, they’d managed to keep their tensions out of the Davises’ apartment.
Finally, Dad asked, “What did you want to talk about?”
“I need to tell you something.” My heart pattered. “So, this year, I got into this singing group.”
My parents traded a look. “You what?” Mom said.
“It’s a vocal group, and they’re really good. There’s this competition we’ve been working for, and it—”
“Why is this the first we’re hearing about this?” Dad asked.
I swallowed, improvising. “Since it’s not theater, I thought you might not want me to be doing it. But I love it, okay? I really love it. And this competition is a big deal. We’ve got a chance to tour all over the world with a professional singing group. A famous group.”
My parents looked as if I’d switched to speaking Arabic.
“They expense the whole trip,” I rushed on. “We wouldn’t need to pay anything or do anything. If we win, I—can I go? It’s over winter break. Please? It’s a big deal. A huge deal. It could be a career-making thing.”
They looked at each other, then back at me, in unison. My mom said slowly, “I don’t see a problem with that. Who’s in the group?”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “I mean, the tour’s going to be a bunch of adults. You know, professionals. But my singing group is, um . . . well, it’d be me and seven boys.”
“Absolutely not,” Dad said. At the same time, Mom spluttered, “What singing group has seven boys and one girl?”
“They sort of . . .” I winced. “I mean, they think I’m a boy, is the thing. I’ve been kind of pretending. To be a boy. So. Um.”
Both of them sat absolutely still for a moment, so still I wondered if the screen had frozen. Then they came back to life. “What?” my mom said, aghast.
My dad said, “How on earth have you been pretending to be—”
I tugged off my wig.
My parents’ mouths dropped open. I was tempted to screencap the sight and send it out as a Christmas card.
“You cut all your hair,” my mom said. She sounded as if she might pass out. “You cut it off.”
“Yeah. Yep.”
My dad sank a hand into his own hair as if reassuring himself that it was still there. Mom gave her head a violent shake and said in a low, dangerous voice, “So, you’re saying you lied to your school?”
“No! Kind of. Not really. It’s a club, so there’s only one teacher who’s involved. The school doesn’t . . . really know. It’s just the guys.”
If my mom heard a word I said, it made no visible impact. She was still studying my hair with unqualified horror.
I bit my lip. “If it makes it better, people cut their hair for parts in shows all the time.”
Then Dad let out a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle.
Mom looked at him with astonishment. After a second of restraint, Dad cracked. “How dumb do these people have to be not to see she’s a girl?” The burst of laughter that came from his mouth was too much for the computer: The audio peaked and cracked, sending across a robotic blare of mirth.
Slowly, my mom looked back at me, and after a second, she started laughing, too. Stunned, I sat there, watching Dad transition from howling to wheezing. He wiped his eyes with his knuckles, caught Mom’s eyes again, and they collapsed against each other’s shoulders in hysterics.
What the fuck, I thought.
When they finally got themselves together, I said, “So, is that a yes, or?”
“I think,” Dad said, looking at Mom, “if it’s worth it, you should do the competition.”
Mom jumped in. “It really costs nothing?”
“Zero.”
“Well,” she said, and folded her hands. “If you win, we’ll talk more about it. But if you do win, no more of this lying to these boys. No more telling your school you’re—” She brandished an indicating finger at the camera. “You know.”
“Yes. Okay. Absolutely.” If I made it that far, then, I’d have to figure out a way to have my cake and also eat all of the cake. I’d have to explain who I was—but too late for anyone to take it back. I imagined an e-mail from overseas, or possibly a carrier pigeon. Smoke signals?
My plans slowed in their swirling patterns for a moment, stilling as I examined my parents. I wanted to thank them, but I couldn’t form a sound. Their laughter had struck a strange, sweet note inside me. I hadn’t seen them like that in so long, unified, looking at each other as if they were allies. They looked so much younger, it made me feel ancient.
“Who is it?”
“Julian,” I called through Isaac’s door.
After a second’s muffled noise, the door swung open. Isaac’s bun was messier than normal; a thick fistful of dark hair hung under one of his pointy ears. A pair of bulky headphones hung around his slender neck, branded with thick white text reading Audio-Technica. Wires snaked around his wrist, black and red.
For a second, we eyed each other. There were fragments of something swimming under his usual careless expression. Had five days changed his mind? Had he thought over everything and decided to tell the others after all—or never talk to me again?
“Hey.” He smiled. “Come in.”
Relief doused the fires of worry in my head. I wove through his maze of clutter, found a patch of wall to lean against, and summoned the words I’d planned while trying to sleep. Two plain sentences. Listen, I’m not coming back to Kensington after break. I’m still all in for the competition, but we should talk about replacing me.
I imagined some boy sitting in my armchair in the Nest, and I felt, for a second, as interchangeable as something sent down an assembly line.
My throat tight, I scanned the room. Isaac’s recording setup sat on his desk: the microphone plugged into a preamp with a half-dozen dials, which fed into his computer. In front of the mic, a disk of black nylon was positioned to catch uneven bursts of air, attached to the stand by a goosenecked bracket. “Didn’t you just get back?” I said, nodding at the setup.
“Yep.” Isaac leapt over his suitcase and folded his laptop shut, hiding the screen full of multicolored recording tracks. “I’ve got priorities. The muse waits for nobody, Julian. Um, Jordan.” Unplugging the mic and unscrewing the stand, he glanced at me over his shoulder. “What name should I use?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just don’t call me Jordan in front of the guys.”
“I’ll just call you J,” he said, looping the mic cable in a blur of black rubber. “Like a blue jay. Except that you’re human and stuff.” He gave me a suspicious look. “Supposedly.”
“You are the weirdest person I know,” I said with a grin, and it wasn’t even an exaggeration. Under the misleading layers of being well-dressed and good at guitar, he was very possibly the biggest dweeb at Kensington. I remembered my audition, with that heinous nonjoke about the president of the United States, and it seemed impossible that I’d ever been afraid of Isaac thinking I was weird.
I forced my smile down. Three weeks left, I reminded myself. No reminiscing. Time to start letting go. “How’s it going?” I said, keeping the strain from my voice. “The album, I mean.”
“Not bad. I did all the instrumentals over break, so now I just have to finish up the vocals.” He slid his equipment into a drawer. “I probably should’ve left my guitar home—I don’t really need it now, I guess. Anyway, whatever.” He hopped up on his bed and fiddled with the knotted drawstring of his hoodie. He had crooked fingers from holding pencils and picks and handles too tight. “Why’d you come by? What’s up?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. If I told him, it made this real. It would begin the three-week goodbye.
“Just wanted to . . . you know,” I said quietly. “Make sure you didn’t drive off the road.”
He laughed. “Thanks, asshole.” His laugh froze. “I mean, um—”
“Any time.” I smiled back.
His shoulders loosened. “Right. So.” He cleared his throat. “How was staying here for Thanksgiving? We got more snow, right? That must’ve been fun. Did you go sledding? You don’t look dead of boredom, at least. So that’s good.”
“. . . I survived, yeah,” I said past a strangled feeling in my throat.
After a moment, Isaac smiled a confused smile. “Gonna give me any more than that?”
“What?”
His smile skewed uneven. He shrugged. “Well, when we talked—I just. I mean, we talked.”
I know. I know. It had been smooth and effortless, the way talking hardly ever is. We’d talked and it had felt like a song.
I couldn’t hold his eyes. I studied the posters plastering the walls instead. One displayed a gaunt, stubbly man perched on a stool, draped in spotlights, acoustic guitar tucked into his lap. Another showed a slice of black stage with a guitarist on his knees, the red-and-gold face of his electric gleaming. And there was Freddie Mercury, stripe of mustache above his generous mouth, wailing into a sparkling microphone, sweat pearling on his brow.
My thoughts circled back around, apparently determined to remind me how, five days ago, Isaac and I had murmured into the night until it paled with the promise of dawn. Before that night, I hadn’t let myself think of Isaac as anything more than the senior always looking for trouble. Since then, I’d reconsidered. He wasn’t looking for trouble. He was trouble.
“Um,” he said. “So I guess I thought I’d . . .”
I waited.
“Never mind,” he said. “Forget it.”
“No, what?”
He swung his legs, his quick voice coming to life. “Did I tell you I burned the turkey on Thanksgiving?” he asked. “I can’t cook. It’s horrible. I swear I could burn those lazy-person cookies you get in the frozen section. When I was twelve, I basically set our kitchen on fire. My mom still has a grease burn on her forearm.”
I let him swing the subject in a wide arc, far away from anything that mattered. But I kept hoping, as we bantered about dining hall food and competition prospects and our upcoming rehearsal schedule, that he’d steer us back.
I didn’t want to tell him. I knew I had to.
Then, out of nowhere, he said, “I kind of thought I should call you,” and it jarred me back to myself.
“Uh. What?”
“I don’t know. After I got back home, I thought, like, she’s a girl. You’re a girl. That was a weird time at the retreat. Right? So, I should call. Or text. Something.” His eyes were brushing me all over, then meeting mine, then darting away embarrassed. He lay back on his bed, examining his ceiling. “You’re not mad, right?”
“Wh—mad about what?” I said, bewildered.
“That I didn’t get in touch.”
“What? No.” I pulled his chair out from his desk and sat. “What are you talking about?”
“Fuck. I don’t know.” He put his pillow over his face and said something into it.
“That’s, um, not the best way to make words.”
He slid the pillow up until his sharp chin and mouth poked out beneath. “It doesn’t make sense anymore. I don’t know if you would’ve wanted to talk, or if it made me an asshole for not talking, or if you were worried about—”
“Isaac. Hey. It’s okay.” I studied his profile as the pillow slipped from his face. He was still staring at the ceiling.
I wasn’t going to tell him to stop overanalyzing. Not until I figured out how to stop doing it myself.
“You’re not an asshole,” I said, quieter.
He straightened up slowly, a thick lock of hair falling over his forehead. He brushed it back. “Okay. I just . . . I don’t get how girls work.”
I tried not to laugh, disbelieving. “I work like me. Like a person. I’m the same human being, okay? You know me.” Sudden resentment needled me. “And also, I’m not suddenly trailing after you and hoping you’ll call me, just ’cause I’m a girl.”
He made a frantic motion. “What! No, that’s not what I—I didn’t mean—”
After a moment of his floundering, I leaned against his desk, amazed. No wonder Isaac Nakahara had never had a girlfriend, then, if this was how he talked to girls.
“Then tell me what you mean,” I said, and I meant it to sound amused, a little sarcastic, but it didn’t come out that way. His room was silent except for the murmur of the heating and a whisper of music down the hall, and in the stillness my words were halting and confused.
He leaned back against the wall. “All right. I wanted to call you, okay?” he said, with an air of finality. Like that explained everything.
I waited a long moment for an elaboration, but for once, Isaac didn’t keep talking. He just held my eyes, wearing a serious, unfamiliar expression.
The door opened. I jolted, twisting around.
Jon Cox stalked in, his mouth curled in a snarl.
“They keyed my fucking car,” he said, his voice trembling. “Those shitheads keyed my car!”
Isaac and I were both on our feet in seconds. “Where are they?” Isaac said.
“Isaac,” I warned.
“I saw a couple of them near Arlington,” Jon Cox said.
“Guys—”
Isaac grabbed his coat. The stuttering boy had disappeared. The sharp knife of revenge was back. “Let’s go.”
“Guys!” I snapped.
Two heads turned my way.
“This needs to go to the administration, okay? That’s destruction of property. That’s not rivalry—with your car, that’s a felony.”
Jon Cox looked downright offended. “Oh, like we can’t sort this out ourselves?” he said.
“Yeah, exactly like that,” I shot back. “If they get suspended, or in legal trouble, colleges are going to see it. That’s actual consequences. We can’t do actual consequences without . . . I don’t know.”
“Without what?” Jon Cox demanded.
“Without stooping to their level.”
“They’re not going to see it that way,” Jon Cox said. “Connor Caskey is going to go around like, yeah, we won, the Sharps are a bunch of pussies.”
A sheen of red lowered over my vision. “Oh, is that your priority? Making sure some asshole doesn’t think you’re effeminate?”
Jon Cox mouthed for a second, looking baffled.
Isaac leapt in. “Okay,” he said, giving me a cautionary look. “You know what, maybe it is time to just talk to someone. Graves, maybe. Tell you what, let me—”
“No, don’t,” Jon Cox blurted. He shook his head, pushing a hand through his hair. “He’ll tell my parents. I swore I wouldn’t get the car hurt.” Looking defeated, he backed toward the door. “Forget it. I’ll see you guys later.”
“Wait,” I said, but he was already gone.
The lunch bell rang, and the Greek Monologue class sprang up from our table.
“Tell your friends to come to the showcase next week,” Reese called over the hubbub. “Hang up those posters.” The posters in question showed us gathered in the Black Box in costume, under harsh lighting, looking suitably tragic and dramatic. We’d been having class in the Black Box, mostly, for a month or so, preparing for the final performance. Reese’s critiques were merciless, but the showcase replaced a final exam for this class, so nobody complained.
I was planning on taking down every single poster I found. My face hanging up around campus? Not safe.
“To the bathrooms!” exclaimed Ash Crawford, grabbing a sheaf of posters.
“What?” said Pilar Velasquez, giving him a weird look.
“The best place to hang up posters is the back of stall doors,” Ash explained, heading for the door. “People can’t escape, you know? If you put . . .”
They made up the back end of the escaping stream of students, and when their laughter was cut off by the closing door, I turned to look at Reese, who stood at the oval table, appraising me. It was only the first day back from break, and I already felt threadbare. This dean’s meeting would be the first of this afternoon’s emotionally exhausting sessions. Goodbye to Admissions. Goodbye to Financial Aid. Goodbye to theater.
“Let’s go to my office,” she said.
Long rays of afternoon light fragmented through the old glass in Reese’s office window. The rhythmic whip of the fan took over. Her long nails were pressed together, arching a cage up between her palms. I gazed, resigned, at her silver manicure.
“Have you considered work-study?” Reese asked.
“Yeah, I talked to Human Resources. They said they’ve already finished their hiring for spring, so I’d have to wait until fall. I don’t have time to wait, is the thing.”
Reese shook her head, toying with a charm on one of her bracelets. “This has come up at every single Board meeting for the past few years,” she said. “I can’t fathom how the academy claims to meet 100% of demonstrated need, if outside costs like travel and supplies aren’t within the student’s grasp.” Her lips thinned. “We’re slow to change, unfortunately.”
“Yeah.”
Reese folded her arms on her desk and leaned forward. The tightness of her dark bun drew her forehead back, lifting the arches of her brows. Beneath, her softly lined eyes were serious. “Jordan, I’ve started your parents with the transfer application, but I tried to discourage them from the idea. You’re an excellent student. I know the circumstances seem severe, but there are steps you and your family can take to tackle them, if you’re committed to graduating from Kensington. We can map this situation out for you; we can take this little by little.”
The quiet intensity in her voice took me aback. I didn’t know why, but it made me want to disengage, or disappear. I stared at my thighs.
“Let’s assume you get a work-study job next year,” Reese continued, clicking a pen into action. “That leaves us with two breaks and next semester to account for. Three blocks of time; we can look at them one by one.” 1, 2, 3 went the rollerball tip onto blank paper, hollow-sounding on the desktop. “Let’s start with next semester first, all right? There may be work opportunities available in town. I can ask on your behalf, if you’re not comfortable.” A pause. “Jordan?”
I looked up reluctantly. My teeth felt glued together, my voice pushed deep inside a pouch I couldn’t open. It’s useless, said a repeating voice in the back of my mind. Why bother? Something would always fall through. It was easy to say this was just a set of Unfortunate Circumstances, but looking back, hadn’t we always just been stringing our way from Unfortunate Circumstance to Unfortunate Circumstance? If it wasn’t the fallout from a hospital stay, it was getting cycled out of a job. If it wasn’t a job, it was the hiking rent. If it wasn’t rent, it was some freak expenditure that threatened to unbalance everything: a rattling air conditioner that spat out hot air and rancid water, weeping for replacement; or an abscessed tooth that knotted up my mother’s face every time she bit down, which cost some stupid amount of money to extract, because it’s a rare part-time job that comes with dental.
If it wasn’t any of those circumstances, it was my parents’ innate, unshakable conviction that I was more valuable at home where they could manage me.
And if it wasn’t my parents, at the end of the day, it was my own failings. My own inability to get cast or find my way into this community as myself. My inability even to hold on to somebody. I didn’t belong at Kensington, and trying to belong made it worse every time.
“Jordan,” Reese repeated, but I stood up.
“I need to go,” I said. “Thank you for talking. But this isn’t going to work.”
She called after me one more time as I walked out the door.
Usually, Thanksgiving Break made the last couple weeks of school before Winter Break feel unnecessary. This year was different. With two weeks to go, the campus started to buzz with competition talk. Advertisements plastered campus. An Aural Fixation poster the size of my mattress appeared in McKnight above the dish return. A cappella talk started to infiltrate the neurotic pre-exam discussions of study techniques: Are you going to ask for their beatboxer’s signature? He’s so cute. Do you think people are going to stake out seats ahead of time? Carnelian has to win. No, the Sharps. No, Hear Hear. Do you think Aural Fixation is going to sing? If they do “When You Call,” I think I’m going to pass out . . .
Soon, the obligatory counterculture discussions about the competition sprang up: Why is this happening with exams coming up? We need to study. Who cares about a cappella, anyway? It’s not even real music. Nobody was this excited when that amazing slam poet toured here. We didn’t get posters when that award-winning experimental kazoo artist did a show here . . . he got featured in TIME and everything . . . but nooo, a cappella is more important . . .
Trav moved rehearsals to the Arlington stage so we could practice with sound tech. We trained ourselves to avoid the deafening feedback that came from aiming Ps and Bs directly at our handheld mics, shots of air that sounded like pressure popping in the amplifiers.
Trav had a pair of kids from the music school sitting backstage left, plugged into a digital soundboard, tweaking dials so that the rocket-launch decibel levels from Isaac and Erik didn’t drown out Nihal and Marcus, who sounded like mosquitoes in comparison. These kids didn’t seem to have names and didn’t talk to anyone but Trav, but they seemed to love telling him things he already knew. They also wore Official Sound Guy Face, which was an intriguing blend of displeased and pompous.
To be fair to the tech guys, it must have been infuriating to watch us mess up in the same ways repeatedly for nights on end. “Hold the mic farther from your face,” Trav told Erik one night, for the eightieth time.
Erik looked like he wanted to throw the mic at the wall. “Can’t we just use the area mics, like every other group?”
“No,” Trav snapped, and took a breath. “No. This is worth it. Otherwise, we’ll lose half the arrangement to the choreography, and we’ll be hideously quiet in comparison to everyone else, and—just trust me.”
He was right, as always. When we were balanced and mixed and polished, the mics were worth every minute we’d spent on them. The curved black spine of the performance hall reflected sound down to the back walls, every consonant as crisp as a cracked knuckle. The Nest had its own resonance, a homey echo back from the rafters, but here, plugged in, amplified, and choreographed, we sounded like another group entirely.
After rehearsals, we packed up our equipment and marched it up the Prince stairs. We had eight wireless mics, heavy black Sennheisers; the eight-channel receiver; the mixer, with its army of sliders and dials and plugs; and a couple of bulky monitors that made my arms ache.
“Why don’t the other groups use individual mics?” I asked once, as we climbed up to the Nest, equipment in hand.
“Because they have more people,” Nihal replied over his shoulder. “And mics get expensive very fast.”
“Careful, rooks,” Trav barked as Erik and Marcus accidentally knocked the tech trunk into the wall. They panted apologies. The instant we were back inside the Nest, Trav was under the lid of the chest and inspecting every bit and every piece, ensuring that nothing was scraped or bent. He had a tender, soulful look on his face, as if his father had wrought the sound tech over the course of sixty-one long years and it was all Trav had left of him.
I set down a monitor with a grunt. “How expensive?” I asked.
“$11,000, I think?” Nihal said, glancing to Mama for confirmation.
I choked on my breath. “What?”
“Yeah, several years’ concert tickets. Dr. Graves helped us figure everything out—he handles the money.” Nihal raised his eyebrows, his eyes laughing. “We suspect he’s skimmed off the top.”
I was still gaping. “What, are those mics made out of platinum?”
“Sapphire, actually.”
I couldn’t even quip back. I could hardly think about money these days. It was a short slide to an inevitable reminder: Kiss this place goodbye.
As the competition clock ticked down from two weeks to ten days to seven, I drifted out from myself like a boat leaving land. I began to count my lasts: the last essay I would turn in to Rollins, the last critique Reese would give on my monologue, the last time I would see Carnelian walking around campus in early December, doing jazz arrangements of carols. During the Greek Monologue showcase: last time I would see Ash perform, then Pilar, then Jamie. Ticking down by the word.
My finals counted down. Core classes had exams first, hour-long blocks of frantic scribbling in blue books; electives took over on Wednesday; and the week ended with a whimper, not a bang, empty class periods filled with distractions. On Friday, I walked out of my last class, English with Mr. O’Neill; we’d read a poem by Eavan Boland he’d said was his favorite, about an Irish couple killed by weather and hunger and history. Emerging into the winter light, I got that feeling that sometimes sets in after waking up from a particularly vivid dream, a disconnection from reality. I almost expected the landscape to disappear around me patch by patch.
Late that afternoon, Isaac and I got a text from Jon Cox: a picture of his and Mama’s dorm-room door. I zoomed in on the image.
A whiteboard hung on the door. I’d swung by their room in Ewing a couple times and seen it—usually, inside jokes were scribbled across the board, doodles of comic book characters, thinly veiled sexual references, or the running count of how many times Mama had reminded Jon to take out the trash (thirty-four).
In Jon Cox’s text, the whiteboard wore a very different doodle. A drawing of a person filled most of the space, a bulging shape whose head, hands, and feet were exaggeratedly small, toothpaste caps on a bursting tube. The doodle wore a shirt that read in angry capitals, THEODORE PUGH HUGE.
They wrote it in permanent marker, Jon Cox texted. I’m taking it down. Mama’s pretty upset about it. He’s skipping his last orchestra practice.
I stared at the horrible drawing. This must have hit hard. Nothing else all year had managed to tear Mama away from Handel, the love of his life.
Furious heat itched up my back. Of every shitty thing so far—the music-burning, the car-keying—this was the shittiest. What had Mama ever done to Connor Caskey?
Yes, fine, Connor’s dad was an asshole, but past a point, that stopped mattering. A reason wasn’t an excuse. Same genus, different species.
I pulled my coat on and flung my window open, outrage spurring me faster. The snow hampered my rushing steps. It took longer than I would’ve liked to reach the music academic building, a heather-gray block adjacent to Arlington Hall. Teachers bulky with coats trickled steadily through the lobby, the stairwell, and the second floor. I rushed down the hall, scanning the plaques on the office doors. Mrs. Chen. Mr. Goossens. Ms. Mburu. The faculty in the School of Music kind of resembled a United Nations conference.
Finally, I knocked on Dr. Graves’s door, praying he hadn’t left yet.
“Come in,” he called, sounding impatient.
I entered. Wintry sun through an arched window limned the office with white light. A bookcase by the door held titles like A Brief Introduction to Modal Counterpoint, and Religiosity in the Life of Bach, and Early Music and the Evolution of Stable Harmonies. Dr. Graves himself stood behind an oaken desk, hunched over his keyboard, square glasses perched on the prominent bridge of his nose.
He straightened up. “Julian. Hello.” His computer sang a tune, shutting down. “I’m on my way out. I’ll be at the competition tomorrow; may we talk then?”
“This won’t take long.”
He checked his watch with a humorless laugh. “Can you make it under five minutes?”
“Sure,” I said, drawing myself up. “The Minuets are trying to sabotage us.” It sounded so petty out in the air like this.
His expression darkened. “How so?”
“It’s been a bunch of stuff. Vandalism, and they burned a bunch of our music, and today they left graffiti on someone’s dorm.”
“What sort of graffiti?”
I shifted. “Well, it . . . here.” As Dr. Graves buttoned up his coat, I pulled out my phone, searching for the photo. Gray leather briefcase gripped in his grayish, leathery hand, he ushered me out the door. Backing up a bit in the hall, I held the screen out to face him.
Graves locked his office, tucked his keys away, and peered at my phone through his glasses. A shadow passed across his expression.
After examining the picture for a second more, he drew back and pinned me with a look I’d never seen on a grown-up’s face before. Some withering mixture of disdain and dismissal. “Mr. Zhang, if you can prove who exactly did this, let me know.” His gray eyes flashed. “In the meantime, may I give some advice for you and the boys?”
“Yeah?”
“Man up.”
And he set off down the hall, leaving me doused in disbelief.