AHHH, TUESDAY. WAFFLE day. For as long as Jin could remember, summer Tuesdays meant fresh coffee, b bowls of raspberries and whipped cream, and an unending stack of crispy golden brown waffles. Even this summer, when his parents started acting a little scared of him, waffle day was one thing he could count on. He could roll over in bed on a Tuesday morning, and before he was aware of anything else, he knew instinctively what day it was.

Jin sniffed, slowly coming to his senses, then sniffed again with a little more gusto. No, there was no buttermilk batter, nothing but the vinegary smell of peeling paint. He rubbed the sleep away and took in his cramped dorm room. It looked like the “before” shot on a home renovation show. The long nightmare that had been Monday came back to him: the surrender of his cell phone, the meat loaf incident and Yoongi’s flashing eyes in the lunchroom, Taehyung brushing him off in the library. What it was that made him so spiteful, Jin didn’t have a clue.

He sat up to look out the window. It was still dark; the sun hadn’t even peeked over the horizon yet. He never woke up this early. If pressed, he didn’t actually think he could remember ever having seen the sunrise. Truthfully, something about sunrise-watching as an activity had always made him nervous. It was the waiting moments, the just-before-the-sun-snapped-over-the-horizon moments, sitting in the darkness looking out across a tree line. Prime shadow time.

Jin sighed an audibly homesick, lonely sigh, which made him even more homesick and lonely. What was he going to do with himself for the three hours between the crack of dawn and his first class? Crack of dawn—why did the words ring in his ears? Oh. Crap. He was supposed to be at detention.

He scrambled out of bed, tripping over his still-packed duffel bag, and yanked another boring black sweater from the top of a stack of boring black sweaters. He tugged on yesterday’s black jeans, winced as he caught a glimpse of his disastrous bed head, and tried to run his fingers through his hair as he dashed out the door.

He was out of breath when he reached the waist-high, intricately sculpted wrought iron gates of the cemetery. He was choking on the overwhelming smell of skunk cabbage and feeling far too alone with his thoughts. Where was everyone else? Was their definition of “crack of dawn” different from his? He glanced down at his watch. It was already six-fifteen.

All they’d told him was to meet at the cemetery, and Jin was pretty sure this was the only entrance. He stood at the threshold, where the gritty asphalt of the parking lot gave way to a mangled lot full of weeds. He spotted a lone dandelion, and it crossed his mind that a younger Jin would have pounced on it and then made a wish and blown. But this Jin’s wishes felt too heavy for something so light.

The delicate gates were all that divided the cemetery from the parking lot. Pretty remarkable for a school with so much barbed wire everywhere else. Jin ran his hand along the gates, tracing the ornate floral pattern with his fingers. The gates must have dated back to the Civil War days Jimin was talking about, back when the cemetery was used to bury fallen soldiers. When the school attached to it was not a home for wayward psychos. When the whole place was a lot less overgrown and shadowy.

It was strange—the rest of the campus was as flat as a sheet of paper, but somehow, the cemetery had a concave, bowl-like shape. From here, he could see the slope of the whole vast thing before him. Row after row of simple headstones lined the slopes like spectators at an arena.

But toward the middle, at the lowest point of the cemetery, the path through the grounds twisted into a maze of larger carved tombs, marble statues, and mausoleums. Probably for Confederate officers, or just the soldiers who came from money. They looked like they’d be beautiful up close. But from here, the sheer weight of them seemed to drag the cemetery down, almost like the whole place was being swallowed into a drain.

Footsteps behind him. Jin whirled around to see a stumpy, black-clad figure emerge from behind a tree. Ken! He had to resist the urge to throw his arms around the boy. Jin had never been so glad to see anyone—though it was hard to believe Ken ever got detentions.

“Aren’t you late?” Ken asked, stopping a few feet in front of Jin and giving him an amused you-poor-new-bie shake of the head.

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” Jin said. “Aren’t you the one who’s late?”

Ken smirked. “No way, I’m just an early riser. I never get detention.” He shrugged and pushed his purple glasses up on his nose. “But you do, along with five other unfortunate souls, who are probably getting angrier by the minute waiting for you down at the monolith.” He stood on tiptoe and pointed behind Jin, toward the largest stone structure, which rose up from the middle of the deepest part of the cemetery. If Jin squinted, he could just make out a group of black figures clustered around its base.

“They just said meet at the cemetery,” Jin said, already feeling defeated. “No one told me where to go.”

“Well, I’m telling you: monolith. Now get down there,” Ken said. “You’re not going to make many friends by cutting into their morning any more than you already have.”

Jin gulped. Part of him wanted to ask Ken to show him the way. From up here, it looked like a labyrinth, and Jin did not want to get lost in the cemetery. Suddenly, he got that nervous, far-away-from-home feeling, and he knew it was only going to get worse in there. He cracked his knuckles, stalling.

“Jin?” Ken said, giving his shoulders a bit of a shove. “You’re still standing here.”

Jin tried to give Ken a brave thank-you smile, but had to settle for an awkward facial twitch. Then he hurried down the slope into the heart of the cemetery.

The sun still hadn’t risen, but it was getting closer, and these last few predawn moments were always the ones that creeped him out the most. He tore past the rows of plain headstones. At one point they must have been upright, but by now they were so old that most of them tipped over to one side or the other, giving the whole place the look of a set of morbid dominoes.

He slopped in his black Converse sneakers through puddles of mud, crunched over dead leaves. By the time he cleared the section of simple plots and made it to the more ornate tombs, the ground had more or less flattened out, and he was totally lost. He stopped running, tried to catch his breath. Voices. If he calmed down, he could hear voices.

“Five more minutes, then I’m out,” a guy said.

“Too bad your opinion has no value, Mr. Park Seo-joon.” An ornery voice, one Jin recognized from his classes yesterday. Ms. Kang. After the meat loaf incident, Jin had shown up late to her class and hadn’t exactly made the most favorable impression on the dour, spherical science teacher.

“Unless anyone wants to lose their social privileges this week”—groans from among the tombs—“we will all wait patiently, as if we had nothing better to do, until Mr. Kim decides to grace us with his presence.”

“I’m here,” Jin gasped, finally rounding a giant statue of a cherub.

Ms. Kang stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a variation of yesterday’s loose black muumuu. Her thin mouse-brown hair was plastered to her scalp and her dull brown eyes showed only annoyance at Jin’s arrival. Biology had always been tough for Jin, and so far, he wasn’t doing his grade in Ms. Kang’s class any favors.

Behind her were Jimin, Yoongi, and Seo-joon, scattered around a circle of plinths that all faced a large central statue of an angel. Compared to the rest of the statues, this one seemed newer, whiter, grander. And leaning up against the angel’s sculpted thigh—he almost hadn’t noticed—was Taehyung.

He was wearing the busted black leather jacket and the bright red scarf he’d fixated on yesterday. Jin took in his messy blond hair, which looked like it hadn’t yet been smoothed down after sleep … which made him think about what Taehyung might look like when he was sleeping … which made him blush so intensely that by the time his eyes made their way down from his hairline to his eyes, he was thoroughly humiliated.

By then Taehyung was glaring at him.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “I didn’t know where we were supposed to meet. I swear—”

“Save it,” Ms. Kang said, dragging a finger across . “You’ve wasted enough of everyone’s time. Now, I’m sure you all remember whatever despicable indiscretion you committed to find yourself here. You can think about that for the next two hours while you work. Pair up. You know the drill.” She glanced at Jin and let out her breath. “Okay, who wants a protégée?”

To Jin’s horror, all of the other students looked at their feet. But then, after a torturous minute, a fifth student stepped into view around the corner of the mausoleum.

“I do.”

Jungkook. His black V-neck T-shirt fit close around his shoulders. Seo-joon moved aside as Jungkook pushed past and walked toward Jin. His eyes were glued to him as he strode forward, moving smoothly and confidently, as at ease in his reform school garb as Jin was ill at ease. Part of him wanted to avert his eyes, because it was embarrassing the way Jungkook was staring at him in front of everyone. But for some reason, he was mesmerized. He couldn’t break his gaze—until Jimin stepped between them.

“Dibs,” he said. “I called dibs.”

“No you didn’t,” Jungkook said.

“Yes I did, you just didn’t hear me from your weird perch back there.” The words rushed out of Jimin. “I want Jin.”

“I—” Jungkook started to respond.

Jimin cocked his head expectantly. Jin swallowed. Was he going to come out and say he wanted him, too? Couldn’t they just forget about it? Serve detention in a group of three?

Jungkook patted Jin’s arm. “I’ll catch up with you after, okay?” he said to him, like it was a promise he’d asked him to keep.

The other kids hopped off tombs they’d been sitting on and trooped toward a shed. Jin followed, clinging to Jimin, who wordlessly handed him a rake.

“So. Do you want the avenging angel, or the fleshy embracing lovers?”

There was no mention of yesterday’s events, or of Jimin’s note, and Jin somehow didn’t feel he should bring anything up with Jimin now. Instead, he glanced overhead to find himself flanked by two giant statues. The one closer to him looked like a Rodin. A man and woman stood tangled in an embrace. He’d studied French sculpture back at Dover, and always thought Rodins were the most romantic pieces. But now it was hard to look at the embracing lovers without thinking of Taehyung. Taehyung. Who hated him. If he needed any further proof of that after he’d basically bolted from the library last night, all he had to do was think back to the fresh glare he’d gotten from him this morning.

“Where’s the avenging angel?” he asked Jimin with a sigh.

“Good choice. Over here.” Jimin led Jin to a massive marble sculpture of an angel saving the ground from the strike of a thunderbolt. It might have been an interesting piece, back in the day when it was first carved. But now it just looked old and dirty, covered in mud and green moss.

“I don’t get it,” Jin said. “What do we do?”

“Scrub-a-dub-dub,” Jimin said, almost singing. “I like to pretend I’m giving them a little bath.” With that, he scrambled up the giant angel, swinging his legs over the statue’s thunderbolt-thwarting arm, as if the whole thing were a sturdy old oak tree for him to climb.

Terrified of looking like he was asking for more trouble from Ms. Kang, Jin starting working his rake across the base of the statue. He tried to clear away what seemed like an endless pile of damp leaves.

Three minutes later, his arms were killing him. He definitely hadn’t dressed for this kind of muddy manual labor. Jin had never been sent to detention at Dover, but from what he’d overheard, it consisted of filling a piece of paper with “I will not plagiarize off the Internet” a few hundred times.

This was brutal. Especially when all he’d really done was accidentally bump into Yoongi in the lunchroom. He was trying not to make snap judgments here, but clearing mud from the graves of people who’d been dead over a century? Jin totally hated his life right now.

Then a tease of sunlight finally filtered through the trees, and suddenly there was color in the graveyard. Jin felt instantly lighter. He could see more than ten feet in front of him. He could see Taehyung … working side by side with Yoongi.

Jin’s heart sank. The airy feeling disappeared.

He looked at Jimin, who shot him a this-blows sympathy glance but kept working.

“Hey,” Jin whispered loudly.

Jimin put a finger to his lips but motioned for Jin to climb up next to him.

With much less grace and agility, Jin grabbed the statue’s arm and swung himself up onto the plinth. Once he was fairly certain that he wasn’t going to tumble to the ground, he whispered, “So … Taehyung’s friends with Yoongi?”

Jimin snorted. “No way, they totally hate each other,” he said quickly, then paused. “Why d’you ask?”

Jin pointed at the two of them, doing no work whatsoever to clear brush from their tomb. They were standing close to each other, leaning on their rakes and having a conversation that Jin desperately wished he could hear. “They look like friends to me.”

“It’s detention,” Jimin said flatly. “You have to pair up. Do you think Seo-joon and Jester the Molester are friends?” He pointed at Seo-joon and Jungkook. They seemed to be arguing about the best way to divvy up their work on the lovers’ statue. “Detention buddies does not equal real-life buddies.”

Jimin looked back at Jin, who could feel his face falling, despite his best efforts to appear unfazed.

“Look, Jin, I didn’t mean …” He trailed off. “Okay, aside from the fact that you made me waste a good twenty minutes of my morning, I have no problem with you. In fact, I think you’re sort of interesting. Kinda fresh. That said, I don’t know what you were expecting in terms of mushy-gushy friendship here at Sword & Cross. But let me be the first to tell you, it just ain’t that easy. People are here because they’ve got baggage. I’m talking curbside-check-in, pay-the-fine-’cause-it’s-over-fifty-pounds kind of baggage. Get it?”

Jin shrugged, feeling embarrassed. “It was just a question.”

Jimin snickered. “Are you always so defensive? What the hell did you do to get in here, anyway?”

Jin didn’t feel like talking about it. Maybe Jimin was right, he’d be better off not trying to make friends. He hopped down and went back to attacking the moss at the base of the statue.

Unfortunately, Jimin was intrigued. He hopped down, too, and brought his rake down on top of Jin’s to pin it in place.

“Ooh, tell me tell me tell me,” he taunted.

Jimin’s face was so close to Jin’s. It reminded Jin of yesterday, crouching over Jimin after he’d convulsed. They’d had a moment, hadn’t they? And part of Jin badly wanted to be able to talk to someone. It had been such a long, stifling summer with his parents. He sighed, resting his forehead on the handle of his rake.

A salty, nervous taste filled his mouth, but he couldn’t swallow it away. The last time he’d gone into these details, it had been because of a court order. He would just as soon have forgotten them, but the longer Jimin stared him down, the clearer the words grew, and the closer they came to the tip of his tongue.

“I was with a friend one night,” he started to explain, taking a long, deep breath. “And something terrible happened.” He closed his eyes, praying that the scene wouldn’t play out in a burst under the red-black of his eyelids. “There was a fire. I made it out … and he didn’t.”

Jimin yawned, much less horrified by the story than Jin was.

“Anyway,” Jin went on, “afterwards, I couldn’t remember the details, how it happened. What I could remember—what I told the judge, anyway—I guess they thought I was crazy.” He tried to smile, but it felt forced.

To Jin’s surprise, Jimim squeezed his shoulder. And for a second, his face looked really sincere. Then it changed back into its smirk.

“We’re all so misunderstood, aren’t we?” He poked Jin in the gut with his finger. “You know, Seo-joon and I were just talking about how we don’t have any pyromaniac friends. And everyone knows you need a good pyro to pull off any reform school prank worth the effort.” He was scheming already. “Seo-joon thought maybe that other new kid, Jung Hwan, but I’d rather cast my lot with you. We should all collaborate sometime.”

Jin swallowed hard. He wasn’t a pyro. But he was done talking about his past; he didn’t even feel like defending himself.

“Ooh, wait until Seo-joon hears,” Jimin said, throwing down his rake. “You’re like our dream come true.”

Jin opened his mouth to protest, but Jimin had already taken off. Perfect, Jin thought, listening to the sound of Jimin’s shoes squishing through the mud. Now it was only a matter of minutes before word traveled around the cemetery to Taehyung.

Alone again, he looked up at the statue. Even though he’d already cleared a huge pile of moss and mulch, the angel looked dirtier than ever. The whole project felt so pointless. He doubted anyone ever came to visit this place anyway. He also doubted that any of the other detainees were still working.

His eye just happened to fall on Taehyung, who was working. He was very diligently using a wire brush to scrub some mold off the bronze inscription on a tomb. He’d even pushed up the sleeves of his sweater, and Jin could see his muscles straining as he went at it. He sighed, and—he couldn’t help it—leaned his elbow against the stone angel to watch him.

He’s always been such a hard worker.

Jin quickly shook his head. Where had that come from? He had no idea what it meant. And yet, he’d been the one who’d thought it. It was the kind of phrase that sometimes formed in his mind just before he drifted into sleep. Senseless babble he could never assign to anything outside his dreams. But here he was, wide-awake.

He needed to get a handle on this Taehyung thing. He’d known him for one day, and already, he could feel himself slipping into a very strange and unfamiliar place.

“Probably best to stay away from him,” a cold voice behind him said.

Jin whipped around to find Yoongi, in the same pose he’d found him in yesterday: hands on his hips, nostrils flaring.

“Who?” he asked Yoongi, knowing he sounded stupid.

Yoongi rolled his eyes. “Just trust me when I tell you that falling for Taehyung would be a very, very bad idea.”

Before Jin could answer, Yoongi was gone. But Taehyung—it was almost as if he’d heard his name—was looking straight at Jin. Then walking straight at him.

He knew the sun had gone behind a cloud. If he could break his stare, he could look up and see it for himself. But he couldn’t look up, he couldn’t look away, and for some reason, he had to squint to see him. Almost like Taehyung was creating his own light, like he was blinding him. A hollow ringing noise filled up his ears, and his knees began to tremble.

He wanted to pick up his rake and pretend he didn’t see him coming. But it was too late to play it cool.

“What’d he say to you?” he asked.

“Um,” Jin hedged, racking his brain for a sensible lie. Finding nothing. He cracked his knuckles.

Taehyung cupped his hand over his. “I hate it when you do that.”

Jin jerked away instinctively. His hand on his had been so fleeting, yet he felt his face flush. He meant it was a pet peeve of his, that knuckle cracking from anyone would bother him, right? Because to say that he hated it when he did that implied that he’d seen him do it before. And he couldn’t have. He barely knew him.

Then why did this feel like a fight they’d had before?

“Yoongi told me to stay away from you,” he said finally.

Taehyung tilted his head from side to side, seeming to consider this. “He’s probably right.”

Jin shivered. A shadow drifted over them, darkening the angel’s face just long enough for Jin to worry. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, praying Taehyung couldn’t tell anything was strange.

But the panic was rising inside him. He wanted to run. He couldn’t run. What if he got lost in the cemetery?

Taehyung followed his gaze toward the sky.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“So are you going to do it?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest, a dare.

“What?” he said. Run?

Taehyung took a step toward him. He was now less than a foot away. Jin held his breath. He kept his body completely still. He waited.

“Are you going to stay away from me?”

It almost sounded like he was flirting.

But Jin was completely out of sorts. His brow was damp with sweat, and he squeezed his temples between two fingers, trying to regain possession of his body, trying to take it back from Taehyung's control. He was totally unprepared to flirt back. That was, if what he was doing was actually flirting.

He took a step back. “I guess so.”

“Didn’t hear you,” he whispered, cocking an eyebrow and taking another step closer.

Jin backed up again, farther this time. He practically slammed into the base of the statue, and could feel the gritty stone foot of the angel scraping his back. A second, darker, colder shadow whooshed over them. He could have sworn Taehyung shivered along with him.

And then the deep groan of something heavy startled them both. Jin gasped as the top of the marble statue teetered over them, like a tree branch swaying in the breeze. For a second, it seemed to hover in the air.

Jin and Taehyung stood staring at the angel. Both of them knew it was on its way down. The angel’s head bowed slowly toward them, like it was praying—and then the whole statue picked up speed as it started hurtling down. Jin felt Taehyung’s hand wrap around his waist instantly, tightly, like he knew exactly where Jin began and where he ended. His other hand covered Jin's head and forced him down just as the statue toppled over them. Right where they’d been standing. It landed with a massive crash—headfirst in the mud, with its feet still resting on the plinth, leaving a little triangle underneath, where Taehyung and Jin crouched.

They were panting, nose to nose, Taehyung’s eyes scared. Between their bodies and the statue, there were only a few inches of space.

“Jin?” he whispered.

All he could do was nod.

His eyes narrowed. “What did you see?”

Then a hand appeared and Jin felt himself being pulled out of the space under the statue. There was a scraping against his back and then a waft of air. He saw the flicker of daylight again. The detention crew stood gaping, except for Ms. Kang, who was glaring, and Jungkook, who helped Jin to his feet.

“Are you okay?” Jungkook asked, running his eyes over him for scrapes and bruises and brushing some dirt from his shoulder. “I saw the statue coming down and I ran over to try and stop it, but it was already … You must have been so terrified.”

Jin didn’t respond. Terrified was only part of how he’d felt.

Taehyung, already on his feet, didn’t even turn around to see whether Jin was okay or not. He just walked away.

Jin’s jaw dropped as he watched him go, as he watched everyone else seem not to care that he had bailed.

“What did you do?” Ms. Kang asked.

“I don’t know. One minute, we were standing there”—Jin glanced at Ms. Kang —“um, working. The next thing I knew, the statue just fell over.”

Ms. Kang bent down to examine the shattered angel. Its head had cracked straight down the middle. She started muttering something about forces of nature and old stones.

But it was the voice at Jin’s ear that stayed with him, even after everyone else had gone back to work. It was Yoongi, just inches behind his shoulder, who whispered, “Looks like someone should start listening when I give advice.”