JIN BARGED INTO the fluorescent-lit lobby of the Sword & Cross School ten minutes later than he should have. A barrel-chested attendant with ruddy cheeks and a clipboard clamped under an iron bicep was already giving orders—which meant Jin was already behind.
“So remember, it’s meds, beds, and reds,” the attendant barked at a cluster of three other students all standing with their backs to Jin. “Remember the basics and no one gets hurt.”
Jin hurried to slip in behind the group. He was still trying to figure out whether he’d filled out the giant stack of paperwork correctly, whether this shaven-headed guide standing before them was a man or a woman, whether there was anyone to help him with this enormous duffel bag, whether his parents were going to get rid of his beloved Plymouth Fury the minute they arrived home from dropping him off here. They’d been threatening to sell the car all summer, and now they had a reason even Jin couldn’t argue with: No one was allowed to have a car at Jin’s new school. His new reform school, to be precise.
He was still getting used to the term.
“Could you, uh, could you repeat that?” he asked the attendant. “What was it, meds—?”
“Well, look what the storm blew in,” the attendant said loudly, then continued, enunciating slowly: “Meds. If you’re one of the medicated students, this is where you go to keep yourself doped up, sane, breathing, whatever.” Woman, Jin decided, studying the attendant. No man would be catty enough to say all that in such a saccharine tone of voice.
“Got it.” Jin felt his stomach heave. “Meds.”
He’d been off meds for years now. After the accident this past summer, Dr. Sanford, his specialist in Hopkinton—and the reason his parents had sent him to boarding school all the way in New Hampshire—had wanted to consider medicating him again. Though he’d finally convinced him of his quasi-stability, it had taken an extra month of analysis on him part just to stay off those awful antipsychotics.
Which was why he was enrolling in his senior year at Sword & Cross a full month after the academic year had begun. Being a new student was bad enough, and Jin had been really nervous about having to jump into classes where everyone else was already settled. But from the looks of this tour, he wasn’t the only new kid arriving today.
He sneaked a peek at the three other students standing in a half circle around him. At his last school, Dover Prep, the campus tour on the first day was where he’d met his best friend, Sandeul. On a campus where all the other students had practically been weaned together, it would have been enough that Jin and Sandeul were the only non-legacy kids. But it didn’t take long for the two boys to realize they also had the exact same obsession with the exact same old movies—especially where Albert Finney was concerned. After their discovery freshman year while watching Two for the Road that neither one of them could make a bag of popcorn without setting off the fire alarm, Sandeul and Jin hadn’t left each other’s sides. Until … until they’d had to. At Jin’s sides today were three boys. One of the boy seemed easy enough to figure out, blond and Neutrogena-commercial pretty.
“I’m Hoseok,” he drawled, flashing Jin a big smile that disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, before Jin could even offer his own name. The boy’s waning interest reminded him more of a southern version of the boys at Dover than someone he’d expect at Sword & Cross. Jin couldn’t decide whether this was comforting or not, any more than he could imagine what a boy who looked like this would be doing at reform school.
To Jin’s right was a boy with short brown hair, brown eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his nose. But the way he wouldn’t even meet his eyes, just kept picking at a hangnail on his thumb, gave Jin the impression that, like him, he was probably still stunned and embarrassed to find himself here.
The guy to his left, on the other hand, fit Jin’s image of this place a little bit too perfectly. He was tall and thin, with a DJ bag slung over his shoulder, shaggy black hair, and large, black-doe eyes. His lips were soft and a natural rose color most girls would kill for. At the back of his neck, a black tattoo in the shape of a sunburst seemed almost to glow on his light skin, rising up from the edge of his black T-shirt.
Unlike the other two, when this guy turned to meet his gaze, he held it and didn’t let go. His mouth was set in a straight line, but his eyes were warm and alive. He gazed at him, standing as still as a sculpture, which made Jin feel rooted to his spot, too. He in his breath. Those eyes were intense, and alluring, and, well, a little bit disarming.
With some loud throat-clearing noises, the attendant interrupted the boy’s trancelike stare. Jin blushed and pretended to be very busy scratching his head.
“Those of you who’ve learned the ropes are free to go after you dump your hazards.” The attendant gestured at a large cardboard box under a sign that said in big black letters PROHIBITED MATERIALS. “And when I say free, Jung Hwan”—she clamped a hand down on the freckled kid’s shoulder, making him jump—“I mean gymnasium-bound to meet your preassigned student guides. You”—she pointed at Jin—“dump your hazards and stay with me.”
The four of them shuffled toward the box and Jin watched, baffled, as the other students began to empty their pockets. Hoseok pulled out a three-inch blue Swiss Army knife. The doe-eyed guy reluctantly dumped a can of spray paint and a box cutter. Even the hapless Jung Hwan let loose several books of matches and a small container of lighter fluid. Jin felt almost stupid that he wasn’t concealing a hazard of his own—but when he saw the other kids reach into their pockets and chuck their cell phones into the box, he gulped.
Leaning forward to read the PROHIBITED MATERIALS sign a little more closely, he saw that cell phones, pagers, and all two-way radio devices were strictly forbidden. It was bad enough that he couldn’t have his car! Jin clamped a sweaty hand around the cell phone in his pocket, his only connection to the outside world. When the attendant saw the look on his face, Jin received a few quick slaps on the cheek. “Don’t swoon on me, kid, they don’t pay me enough to resuscitate. Besides, you get one phone call once a week in the main lobby.”
One phone call … once a week? But—
He looked down at his phone one last time and saw that he’d received two new text messages. It didn’t seem possible that these would be his two last text messages. The first one was from Sandeul.
Call immediately! Will be waiting by the phone all nite so be ready to dish. And remember the mantra I assigned you. You’ll survive! BTW, for what it’s worth, I think everyone’s totally forgotten about …
In typical Sandeul fashion, he’d gone on so long that Jin’s crap cell phone cut the message off four lines in. In a way, Jin was almost relieved. He didn’t want to read about how everyone from his old school had already forgotten what had happened to him, what he’d done to land himself in this place.
He sighed and scrolled down to his second message. It was from his mom, who’d only just gotten the hang of texting a few weeks ago, and who surely had not known about this one-call-once-a-week thing or she would never have abandoned his son here. Right?
Kiddo, we are always thinking of you. Be good and try to eat enough protein. We’ll talk when we can. Love, M&D
With a sigh, Jin realized his parents must have known. How else to explain their drawn faces when he’d waved goodbye at the school gates this morning, duffel bag in hand? At breakfast, he’d tried to joke about finally losing that appalling New England accent he’d picked up at Dover, but his parents hadn’t even cracked a smile. He’d thought they were still mad at him. They never did the whole raising-their-voice thing, which meant that when Jin really messed up, they just gave him the old silent treatment. Now he understood this morning’s strange demeanor: His parents were already mourning the loss of contact with their only son.
“We’re still waiting on one person,” the attendant sang. “I wonder who it is.” Jin’s attention snapped back to the Hazard Box, which was now b with contraband he didn’t even recognize. He could feel the dark-haired boy’s doe eyes staring at him. He looked up and noticed that everyone was staring. His turn. He closed his eyes and slowly opened his fingers, letting his phone slip from his grasp and land with a sad thunk on top of the heap. The sound of being all alone.
Jung Hwan and Hoseok headed for the door without so much as a look in Jin’s direction, but the third boy turned to the attendant.
“I can fill him in,” he said, nodding at Jin.
“Not part of our deal,” the attendant replied automatically, as if she’d been expecting this dialogue. “You’re a new student again—that means new-student restrictions. Back to square one. You don’t like it, you should have thought twice before breaking parole.”
The boy stood motionless, expressionless, as the attendant tugged Jin—who’d stiffened at the word “parole”—toward the end of a yellowed hall.
“Moving on,” she said, as if nothing had just happened. “Beds.” She pointed out the west-facing window to a distant cinder-block building. Jin could see Hoseok and Jung Hwan shuffling slowly toward them, with the third boy walking slowly, as if catching up to them were the last thing on his list of things to do.
The dorm was formidable and square, a solid gray block of a building whose thick double doors gave away nothing about the possibility of life inside them. A large stone plaque stood planted in the middle of the dead lawn, and Jin remembered from the Web site the words PAULINE DORMITORY chiseled into it. It looked even uglier in the hazy morning sun than it had looked in the flat black-and-white photograph.
Even from this distance, Jin could see black mold covering the face of the dorm. All the windows were obstructed by rows of thick steel bars. He squinted. Was that barbed wire topping the fence around the building?
The attendant looked down at a chart, flipping through Jin’s file. “Room sixty-three. Throw your bag in my office with the rest of them for now. You can unpack this afternoon.”
Jin dragged his red duffel bag toward three other nondescript black trunks. Then he reached reflexively for his cell phone, where he usually keyed in things he needed to remember. But as his hand searched his empty pocket, he sighed and committed the room number to memory instead.
He still didn’t see why he couldn’t just stay with his parents; their house in Thunderbolt was less than a half hour from Sword & Cross. It had felt so good to be back home in Savannah, where, as his mom always said, even the wind blew lazily. Georgia’s softer, slower pace suited Jin way more than New England ever had.
But Sword & Cross didn’t feel like Savannah. It hardly felt like anywhere at all, except the lifeless, colorless place where the court had mandated he board. He’d overheard his dad on the phone with the headmaster the other day, nodding in his befuddled biology-professor way and saying, “Yes, yes, maybe it would be best for him to be supervised all the time. No, no, we wouldn’t want to interfere with your system.”
Clearly his father had not seen the conditions of his only son’s supervision. This place looked like a maximum-security prison.
“And what about, what did you say—the reds?” Jin asked the attendant, ready to be released from the tour.
“Reds,” the attendant said, pointing toward a small wired device hanging from the ceiling: a lens with a flashing red light. Jin hadn’t seen it before, but as soon as the attendant pointed the first one out, he realized they were everywhere.
“Cameras?”
“Very good,” the attendant said, voice dripping condescension. “We make them obvious in order to remind you. All the time, everywhere, we’re watching you. So don’t screw up—that is, if you can help yourself.”
Every time someone talked to Jin like he was a total psychopath, he came that much closer to believing it was true.
All summer, the memories had haunted him, in his dreams and in the rare moments his parents left him alone. Something had happened in that cabin, and everyone (including Jin) was dying to know exactly what. The police, the judge, the social worker had all tried to pry the truth out of him, but he was as clueless about it all as they were. He and Yi Jung had been joking around the whole evening, chasing each other down to the row of cabins on the lake, away from the rest of the party. He’d tried to explain that it had been one of the best nights of his life, until it turned into the worst.
He’d spent so much time replaying that night in his head, hearing Yi Jung’s laugh, feeling his hands close around his waist, and trying to reconcile his gut instinct that he really was innocent.
But now, every rule and regulation at Sword & Cross seemed to work against that notion, seemed to suggest that he was, in fact, dangerous and needed to be controlled.
Jin felt a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Look,” the attendant said. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re far from the worst case here.”
It was the first humane gesture the attendant had made toward Jin, and he believed that it was intended to make him feel better. But. He’d been sent here because of the suspicious death of the guy he’d been crazy about, and still he was “far from the worst case here”? Jin wondered what else exactly they were dealing with at Sword & Cross.
“Okay, orientation’s over,” the attendant said. “You’re on your own now. Here’s a map if you need to find anything else.” She gave Jin a photocopy of a crude hand-drawn map, then glanced at her watch. “You’ve got an hour before your first class, but my soaps come on in five, so”—she waved her hand at Jin—“make yourself scarce. And don’t forget,” she said, pointing up at the cameras one last time. “The reds are watching you.”
Before Jin could reply, a slim, dark-haired boy appeared in front of him, wagging his small fingers in Jin’s face.
“Ooooooh,” the boy taunted in a ghost-story-telling voice, dancing around Jin in a circle. “The reds are watching youuuu.”
“Get out of here, Jimin, before I have you lobotomized,” the attendant said, though it was clear from her first brief but genuine smile that she had some coarse affection for the crazy boy.
It was also clear that Jimin did not reciprocate the love. He mimed a jerking-off motion at the attendant, then stared at Jin, daring him to be offended.
“And just for that,” the attendant said, jotting a furious note in her book, “you’ve earned yourself the task of showing Mr. Sunshine around today.”
She pointed at Jin, who looked anything but sunny in his black jeans, black boots, and black tshirt. Under the “Dress Code” section, the Sword & Cross Web site had cheerily maintained that as long as the students were on good behavior, they were free to dress as they pleased, with just two small stipulations: style must be modest and color must be black. Some freedom. 
Jimin sized him up, tapping one finger against his pale lips. “Perfect,” he said, stepping forward to loop his arm through Jin’s. “I was just thinking I could really use a new slave.”
The door to the lobby swung open and in walked the tall kid with doe eyes. He shook his head and said to Jin, “This place isn’t afraid to do a strip search. So if you’re packing any other hazards”—he raised an eyebrow and dumped a handful of unrecognizables in the box—“save yourself the trouble.”
Behind Jin, Jimin laughed under his breath. The boy’s head shot up, and when his eyes registered Jimin, he opened his mouth, then closed it, like he was unsure how to proceed.
“Jimin,” he said evenly.
“Jungkook,” he returned.
“You know him?” Jin whispered, wondering whether there were the same kinds of cliques in reform schools as there were in prep schools like Dover.
“Don’t remind me,” Jimin said, dragging Jin out the door into the gray and swampy morning. The back of the main building let out onto a chipped sidewalk bordering a messy field. The grass was so overgrown, it looked more like a vacant lot than a school commons, but a faded scoreboard and a small stack of wooden bleachers argued otherwise.
Beyond the commons lay four severe-looking buildings: the cinder-block dormitory on the far left, a huge old ugly church on the far right, and two other expansive structures in between that Jin imagined were the classrooms.
This was it. His whole world was reduced to the sorry sight before his eyes.
Jimin immediately veered right off the path and led Jin to the field, sitting him down on top of one of the waterlogged wooden bleachers.
The corresponding setup at Dover had screamed Ivy League jock-in-training, so Jin had always avoided hanging out there. But this empty field, with its rusted, warped goals, told a very different story. One that wasn’t as easy for Jin to figure out. Three turkey vultures swooped overhead, and a dismal wind whipped through the bare branches of the oak trees. Jin ducked his chin down into his mock turtleneck.
“Soooo,” Jimin said. “Now you’ve met Bo Young .”
“I thought his name was Jungkook.”
“We’re not talking about him,” Jimin said quickly. “I mean she-man in there.” Jimin jerked his head toward the office where they’d left the attendant in front of the TV. “Whaddya think—dude or chick?”
“Uh, chick?” Jin said tentatively. “Is this a test?”
Jimin cracked a smile. “The first of many. And you passed. At least, I think you passed. The gender of most of the faculty here is an ongoing, schoolwide debate. Don’t worry, you’ll get into it.”
Jin thought Jimin was making a joke—in which case, cool. But this was all such a huge change from Dover. At his old school, the green-tie-wearing, pomaded future senators had practically oozed through the halls in the genteel hush that money seemed to lay over everything.
More often than not, the other Dover kids gave Jin a don’t-smudge-the-white-walls-with-your-fingerprints sideways glance. He tried to imagine Jimin there: lazing on the bleachers, making a loud, crude joke in his peppery voice. Jin tried to imagine what Sandeul might think of Jimin. There’d been no one like him at Dover.
“Okay, spill it,” Jimin ordered. Plopping down on the top bleacher and motioning for Jin to join him, he said, “What’d ya do to get in here?”
Jimin’s tone was playful, but suddenly Jin had to sit down. It was ridiculous, but he’d half expected to get through his first day of school without the past creeping up and robbing him of his thin façade of calm. Of course people here were going to want to know.
He could feel the blood thrumming at his temples. It happened whenever he tried to think back—really think back—to that night. He’d never stop feeling guilty about what had happened to Yi Jung, but he also tried really hard not to get mired down in the shadows, which by now were the only things he could remember about the accident. Those dark, indefinable things that he could never tell anyone about.
Scratch that—he’d started to tell Yi Jung about the peculiar presence he’d felt that night, about the twisting shapes hanging over their heads, threatening to mar their perfect evening. Of course, by then it was already too late. Yi Jung was gone, his body burned beyond recognition, and Jin was … was he … guilty?
No one knew about the murky shapes he sometimes saw in the darkness. They’d always come to him. They’d come and gone for so long that Jin couldn’t even remember the first time he’d seen them. But he could remember the first time he realized that the shadows didn’t come for everyone—or actually, anyone but him.

When he was seven, his family had been on vacation in Hilton Head and his parents had taken him on a boat trip. It was just about sunset when the shadows started rolling in over the water, and he’d turned to his father and said, “What do you do when they come, Dad? Why aren’t you afraid of the monsters?” There were no monsters, his parents assured him, but Jin’s repeated insistence on the presence of something wobbly and dark had gotten him several appointments with the family eye doctor, and then glasses, and then appointments with the ear doctor after he made the mistake of describing the hoarse whooshing noise that the shadows sometimes made—and then therapy, and then more therapy, and finally the prescription for anti-psychotic medication.

But nothing ever made them go away.

By the time he was fourteen, Jin refused to take his meds. That was when they found Dr. Sanford, and the Dover School nearby. They flew to New Hampshire, and his father drove their rental car up a long, curved driveway to a hilltop mansion called Shady Hollows. They planted Jin in front of a man in a lab coat and asked him if he still saw his “visions.” His parents’ palms were sweating as they gripped his hands, brows furrowed with the fear that there was something terribly wrong with their son.

No one came out and said that if he didn’t tell Dr. Sanford what they all wanted him to say, he might be seeing a whole lot more of Shady Hollows. When he lied and acted normal, he was allowed to enroll at Dover, and only had to visit Dr. Sanford twice a month.

Jin had been permitted to stop taking the horrible pills as soon as he started pretending he didn’t see the shadows anymore. But he still had no control over when they might appear. All he knew was that the mental catalog of places where they’d come for him in the past—dense forests, murky waters—became the places he avoided at all costs. All he knew was that when the shadows came, they were usually accompanied by a cold chill under his skin, a sickening feeling unlike anything else.

Jin straddled one of the bleachers and gripped his temples between his thumbs and middle fingers. If he was going to make it through today, he had to push his past to the recesses of his mind. He couldn’t stand probing the memory of that night by himself, so there was no way he could air all the gruesome details to some weird, maniacal stranger.

Instead of answering, he watched Jimin, who was lying back on the bleachers, sporting a pair of enormous black sunglasses that covered the better part of his face. It was hard to tell, but he must have been staring at Jin, too, because after a second, he shot up from the bleachers and grinned. “Cut my hair like yours,” he said.

“What?” Jin gasped. “Your hair is beautiful.”

It was true: Jimin's hair were short at the front and sides, but were long at the back that sparkled in the sunlight, giving off just a tinge of red.

“Beautiful schmootiful,” Jimin said. “Yours is y, edgy. And I want it.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Jin said. Was that a compliment? He didn’t know if he was supposed to be flattered or unnerved by the way Jimin assumed he could have whatever he wanted, even if what he wanted belonged to someone else. “Where are we going to get—”

“Ta-da!” Jimin reached into his bag and pulled out the blue Swiss Army knife Hoseok had tossed into the Hazard Box. “What?” he said, seeing Jin’s reaction. “I always bring my sticky fingers on new-student drop-off days. The idea alone gets me through the dog days of Sword & Cross internment … er … summer camp.”

“You spent the whole summer … here?” Jin winced.

“Ha! Spoken like a true newbie. You’re probably expecting a spring break.” He tossed Jin the Swiss Army knife. “We don’t get to leave this hellhole. Ever. Now cut.”

“What about the reds?” Jin asked, glancing around with the knife in his hand. There were bound to be cameras somewhere out here.

Jimin shook his head. “I refuse to associate with pansies. Can you handle it or not?”

Jin nodded.

“And don’t tell me you’ve never cut hair before.” Jimin grabbed the Swiss Army knife back from Jin, pulled out the scissor tool, and handed it back. “Not another word until you tell me how fantastic I look.”

He gathered Jimin’s long hair in his hands, held the small scissors firmly, and began to hack.

The hair fell to his feet and Jimin gasped and whipped around. He picked it up and held it to the sun. Jin’s heart constricted at the sight. But Jimin just let a thin smile spread across his lips. He ran his fingers through the fallen hair once, then dropped it into his bag.

“Awesome,” he said. “Keep going.”

“Jimin,” Jin whispered before he could stop himself. “Your neck. It’s all—”

“Scarred?” Jimin finished. “You can say it.”

The skin on Jimin’s neck, from the back of his left ear all the way down to his collarbone, was jagged and marbled and shiny. Jin’s mind went to Yi Jung—to those awful pictures. Even his own parents wouldn’t look at him after they saw them. He was having a hard time looking at Jimin now.

Jimin grabbed Jin’s hand and pressed it to the skin. It was hot and cold at the same time. It was smooth and rough.

“I’m not afraid of it,” Jimin said. “Are you?”

“No,” Jin said, though he wished Jimin would take his hand away so Jin could take his away, too. His stomach churned as he wondered whether this was how Yi Jung’s skin would have felt.

“Are you afraid of who you really are, Jin?”

“No,” Jin said again quickly. It must be so obvious that he was lying. He closed his eyes. All he wanted from Sword & Cross was a fresh start, a place where people didn’t look at him the way Jimin was looking at him right now. At the school’s gates that morning, when his father had whispered the Kim family motto in his ear—“Kims never crash”—it had felt possible, but already Jin felt so run down and exposed. He tugged his hand away. “So how’d it happen?” he asked, looking down. 

“Remember how I didn’t press you when you clammed up about what you did to get here?” Jimin asked, raising his eyebrows.

Jin nodded.

Jimin gestured to the scissors. “Touch it up in the back, okay? Make me look real pretty. Make me look like you.”

Even with the same exact cut, Jimin would still only look like a very undernourished version of Jin. While Jin attempted to even out the first haircut he’d ever given, Jimin delved into the complexities of life at Sword & Cross.

“That cell block over there is Augustine. It’s where we have our so-called Social events on Wednesday nights. And all of our classes,” he said, pointing at a building the color of yellowed teeth, two buildings to the right of the dorm. It looked like it had been designed by the same sadist who’d done Pauline. It was dismally square, dismally fortresslike, fortified by the same barbed wire and barred windows. An unnatural-looking gray mist cloaked the walls like moss, making it impossible to see whether anyone was over there.

“Fair warning,” Jimin continued. “You’re going to hate the classes here. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

“Why? What’s so bad about them?” Jin asked. Maybe Jimin just didn’t like school in general. With his black bag that only seemed big enough to hold his new Swiss Army knife, he didn’t exactly look bookish.

“The classes here are soulless,” Jimin said. “Worse, they’ll strip you of your soul. Of the eighty kids in this place, I’d say we’ve only got about three remaining souls.” He glanced up. “Unspoken for, anyway …”

That didn’t sound promising, but Jin was hung up on another part of Jimin’s answer. “Wait, there are only eighty kids in this whole school?” The summer before he went to Dover, Jin had pored over the thick Prospective Students handbook, memorizing all the statistics. But everything he’d learned so far about Sword & Cross had surprised him, making him realize that he was coming into reform school completely unprepared.

Jimin nodded, making Jin accidentally snip off a chunk of hair he’d meant to leave. Whoops. Hopefully Jimin wouldn’t notice—or maybe he’d just think it was edgy.

“Eight classes, ten kids a pop. You get to know everybody’s crap pret-ty quickly,” Jimin said. “And vice versa.”

“I guess so,” Jin agreed, biting his lip. Jimin was joking, but Jin wondered whether he’d be sitting here with that cool smirk in his brown eyes if he knew the exact nature of Jin’s backstory. The longer Jin could keep his past under wraps, the better off he’d be.

“And you’ll want to steer clear of the hard cases.”

“Hard cases?”

“The kids with the wristband tracking devices,” Jimin said. “About a third of the student body.”

“And they’re the ones who—”

“You don’t want to mess with. Trust me.”

“Well, what’d they do?” Jin asked.

As much as Jin wanted to keep his own story a secret, he didn’t like the way Jimin was treating him like some sort of an innocent child. Whatever those kids had done couldn’t be much worse than what everyone told him he had done. Or could it? After all, he knew next to nothing about these people and this place. The possibilities stirred up a cold gray fear in the pit of his stomach.

“Oh, you know,” Jimin drawled. “Aided and abetted terrorist acts. Chopped up their parents and roasted them on a spit.” He turned around to wink at Jin.

“Shut up,” Jin said.

“I’m serious. Those psychos are under much tighter restrictions than the rest of the screwups here. We call them the shackled.”

Jin laughed at Jimin’s dramatic tone.

“Your haircut’s done,” he said, running his hands through Jimin’s hair to fluff it up a little. It actually looked really cool.

“Sweet,” Jimin said. He turned to face Jin. When he ran his fingers through his hair, the sleeves of his black sweater fell back on his forearms and Jin caught a glimpse of a black wristband, dotted with rows of silver studs, and, on the other wrist, another band that looked more … mechanical. Jimin caught him looking and raised his eyebrows devilishly.

“Told ya,” he said. “Total effing psychos.” He grinned. “Come on, I’ll give you the rest of the tour.”

Jin didn’t have much choice. He scrambled down the bleachers after Jimin, ducking when one of the turkey vultures swooped dangerously low. Jimin, who didn’t seem to notice, pointed at a lichen-swathed church at the far right of the commons.

“Over here, you’ll find our state-of-the-art gymnasium,” he said, assuming a nasal tour guide tone of voice. “Yes, yes, to the untrained eye it looks like a church. It used to be. We’re kind of in an architectural hand-me-down Hell here at Sword & Cross. A few years ago, some calisthenic-crazed shrink showed up ranting about overmedicated teens ruining society. He donated a -ton of money so they’d convert it into a gym. Now the powers that be think we can work out our ‘frustrations’ in a ‘more natural and productive way.’”

Jin groaned. He had always loathed gym class.

As Jin jogged to keep up, he took in the rest of the grounds. The Dover quad had been so well kept, all manicured and dotted with evenly spaced, carefully pruned trees. Sword & Cross looked like it had been plopped down and abandoned in the middle of a swamp. Weeping willows dangled to the ground, kudzu grew along the walls in sheets, and every third step they took squished.

And it wasn’t just the way the place looked. Every humid breath Jin took stuck in his lungs. Just breathing at Sword & Cross made him feel like he was sinking into quicksand.

“Apparently the architects got in a huge standoff over how to retrofit the style of the old military academy buildings. The upshot is we ended up with half penitentiary, half medieval torture zone. And no gardener,” Jimin said, kicking some slime off his combat boots. “Gross. Oh, and there’s the cemetery.”

Jin followed Jimin’s pointing finger to the far left side of the quad, just past the dormitory. An even thicker cloak of mist hung over the walled-off portion of land. It was bordered on three sides by a thick forest of oaks. He couldn’t see into the cemetery, which seemed almost to sink below the surface of the ground, but he could smell the rot and hear the chorus of cicadas buzzing in the trees. For a second, he thought he saw the dark swish of the shadows—but he blinked and they were gone.

“That’s a cemetery?”

“Yep. This used to be a military academy, way back in the Civil War days. So that’s where they buried all their dead. It’s creepy as all get-out. And lawd,” Jimin said, piling on a fake southern accent, “it stinks to high Heaven.” Then he winked at Jin. “We hang out there a lot.”

Jin looked at Jimin to see if he was kidding. Jimin just shrugged.

“Okay, it was only once. And it was only after a really big pharmapalooza.”

Now, that was a word Jin recognized.

“Aha!” Jimin laughed. “I just saw a light go on up there. So somebody is home. Well, Jin, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you’ve never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it.”

“What’s the difference?” Jin asked, trying to skirt the fact that he’d never actually been to a big party at Dover.

“You’ll see.” Jimin paused and turned to Jin. “You’ll come over tonight and hang out, okay?” He surprised Jin by taking his hand. “Promise?”

“But I thought you said I should stay away from the hard cases,” Jin joked.

“Rule number two—don’t listen to me!” Jimin laughed, shaking his head. “I’m certifiably insane!”

He started jogging again and Jin trailed after him.

“Wait, what was rule number one?”

“Keep up!”

As they came around the corner of the cinder-block classrooms, Jimin skidded to a halt. “Affect cool,” he said.

“Cool,” Jin repeated.

All the other students seemed to be clustered around the kudzu-strangled trees outside Augustine. No one looked exactly happy to be hanging out, but no one looked ready to go inside yet, either.

There hadn’t been much of a dress code at Dover, so Jin wasn’t used to the uniformity it gave a student body. Then again, even though every kid here was wearing the same black jeans, black mock-turtleneck T-shirt, and black sweater tied over the shoulders or around the waist, there were still substantial differences in the way they pulled it off.

A group of tattooed girls standing in a crossed-armed circle wore bangle bracelets up to their elbows. The black bandanas in their hair reminded Jin of a film he’d once seen about motorcycle-gang girls. 

He’d rented it because he’d thought: What could be cooler than an all-girls motorcycle gang? Now Jin’s eyes locked with those of one of the girls across the lawn. The sideways squint of the girl’s darkly lined cat-eyes made Jin quickly shift the direction of his gaze.

A guy and a girl who were holding hands had sewn sequins in the shape of skulls and crossbones on the back of their black sweaters. Every few seconds, one of them would pull the other in for a kiss on the temple, on the earlobe, on the eye. When they looped their arms around each other, Jin could see that each wore the blinking wristband tracking device. They looked a little rough, but it was obvious how much in love they were. Every time he saw their tongue rings flashing, Jin felt a lonely pinch inside his chest.

Behind the lovers, a cluster of blond boys stood pressed against the wall. Each of them wore his sweater, despite the heat. And they all had on white oxford shirts underneath, the collars starched straight up. Their black pants hit the vamps of their polished dress shoes perfectly. Of all the students on the quad, these boys seemed to Jin to be the closest thing to Doverites. But a closer look quickly set them apart from boys he used to know. Boys like Yi Jung.

Just standing in a group, these guys radiated a specific kind of toughness. It was right there in the look in their eyes. It was hard to explain, but it suddenly struck Jin that just like him, everyone at this school had a past. Everyone here probably had secrets they wouldn’t want to share. But he couldn’t figure out whether this realization made him feel more or less isolated.

Jimin noticed Jin’s eyes running over the rest of the kids.

“We all do what we can to make it through the day,” he said, shrugging. “But in case you hadn’t observed the low-hanging vultures, this place pretty much reeks of death.” He took a seat on a bench under a weeping willow and patted the spot next to him for Jin.

Jin wiped away a mound of wet, decaying leaves, but just before he sat down, he noticed another dress code violation.

A very attractive dress code violation.

He wore a bright red scarf around his neck. It was far from cold outside, but he had on a black leather motorcycle jacket over his black sweater, too. Maybe it was because his was the only spot of color on the quad, but he was all that Jin could look at. In fact, everything else so paled in comparison that, for one long moment, Jin forgot where he was.

He took in his deep golden hair and matching tan. His high cheekbones, the dark sunglasses that covered his eyes, the soft shape of his lips. In all the movies Jin had seen, and in all the books he’d read, the love interest was mind-blowingly good-looking—except for that one little flaw. The chipped tooth, the charming cowlick, the beauty mark on his left cheek. He knew why—if the hero was too unblemished, he’d risk being unapproachable. But approachable or not, Jin had always had a weakness for the sublimely gorgeous. Like this guy.

He leaned up against the building with his arms crossed lightly over his chest. And for a split second, Jin saw a flashing image of himself folded into those arms. He shook his head, but the vision stayed so clear that he almost took off toward him. 

No. That was crazy. Right? Even at a school full of crazies, Jin was well aware that this instinct was insane. He didn’t even know him.

He was talking to another kid with short hair and a toothy smile. Both of them were laughing hard and genuinely—in a way that made Jin strangely jealous. He tried to think back and remember how long it had been since he’d laughed, really laughed, like that.

“That’s Kim Taehyung,” Jimin said, leaning in and reading his mind. “I can tell he’s attracted somebody’s attention.”

“Understatement,” Jin agreed, embarrassed when he realized how he must have looked to Jimin.

“Yeah, well, if you like that sort of thing.”

“What’s not to like?” Jin said, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. 

“His friend there is Seo Joon,” Jimin said, nodding in the short haired kid’s direction. “He’s cool. The kind of guy who can get his hands on things, ya know?”

Not really, Jin thought, biting his lip. “What kinds of things?”

Jimin shrugged, using his poached Swiss Army knife to saw off a fraying strand from a rip in his black jeans. “Just things. Ask-and-you-shall-receive kind of stuff.”

“What about Taehyung?” Jin asked. “What’s his story?”

“Oh, he doesn’t give up.” Jimin laughed, then cleared his throat. “No one really knows,” he said. “He holds pretty tight to his mystery man persona. Could just be your typical reform school .”

“I’m no stranger to s,” Jin said, though as soon as the words came out, he wished he could take them back. After what had happened to Yi Jung— whatever had happened—he was the last person who should be making character judgments. But more than that, the rare time he made even the smallest reference to that night, the shifting black canopy of the shadows came back to him, almost like he was right back at the lake.

He glanced again at Taehyung. He took his glasses off and slid them inside his jacket, then turned to look at him.

His gaze caught his, and Jin watched as his eyes widened and then quickly narrowed in what looked like surprise. But no—it was more than that. When Taehyung’s eyes held his, his breath caught in his throat. He recognized him from somewhere.

But he would have remembered meeting someone like him. He would have remembered feeling as absolutely shaken up as he did right now. 

He realized they were still locking eyes when Taehyung flashed him a smile. A jet of warmth shot through him and he had to grip the bench for support. He felt his lips pull up in a smile back at him, but then he raised his hand in the air.

And flipped him off.

Jin gasped and dropped his eyes.

“What?” Jimin asked, oblivious to what had just gone down. “Never mind,” he said. “We don’t have time. I sense the bell.”

The bell rang as if on cue, and the whole student body started the slow shuffle into the building. Jimin was tugging on Jin’s hand and spouting off directions about where to meet him next and when. But Jin was still reeling from being flipped the bird by such a perfect stranger. His momentary delirium over Taehyung had vanished, and now the only thing he wanted to know was:

What was that guy’s problem?

Just before he ducked into his first class, he dared to glance back. His face was blank, but there was no mistaking it—he was watching him go.