Chapter 3: A-Grade

“Rules,” Hollis said.

He said it to the board. Then he picked up the eraser, reached up, and wiped GRANT, M. DETENTION off in three passes. It came away in a gray smear and left the board gray underneath, and he didn’t turn around while he did it.

Milo sat with his hands flat on the desk and watched him do it. Two and a half, he thought. Cap was counted in ghosts — that was the part people got wrong, they heard a number and thought of it as a score — and he had two and a half of them and a sheet of paper in an office on the second floor that said half of one.

“Four tiers,” Hollis said. “Write them down. I’m not repeating them and the district isn’t going to mail them to you.”

The marker squeaked. He wrote in block capitals.

A — MERIDIAN
B — HALCYON STATE
C — RIDGEMONT COMMUNITY
D — ARIES

“A gets you Meridian. That’s the flagship. That’s the building they put on the news when they want a face for the recruitment ads. B gets you Halcyon State, which is a real school with a real degree and a real loan attached to it. C gets you Ridgemont, which is two years and a bus pass. D gets you Aries.” He tapped the D twice, hard enough that the board rocked. “Aries will take anybody. Aries will take your money and hand you a laminated card, and when I say laminated card I want you to hear me being literal.”

Two people in the middle rows laughed. Hollis waited them out, and then he kept waiting, until the quiet was the loudest thing that had happened all day.

“Now the part you’re actually worried about. If you pick a tier and you don’t clear it, you don’t drop a tier. There’s no second pick. There’s no appeal. There’s no well, I almost. You come out of that gate with nothing on your record except that you went in, and what you have in September is a diploma from this school and a job with hours on it.”

A pen stopped somewhere behind Milo and did not start again.

“One more thing, and then I want everybody’s face up here.” Hollis capped the marker. “Inside, you can bind. Any ghost you can bring to terms, you can put your name on, and it counts the same in there as it would on a street. It makes the whole exam easier if you have something standing next to you. That’s not a secret and it isn’t a trick. It’s the reason half of you are going to come back with something and half of you aren’t.”

He turned back to the board and wrote, under the four tiers, in smaller letters: STANDARD STOCK.

“Every A-class haunt on the sheet is stocked the same. Two malevolent-grade. Five vengeful-grade. Below that, lesser — and nobody counts the lesser.”

Milo felt his own thumb move against the desk once, like it was testing something.

Seven countable bodies in an A-class haunt, and he could hold —

Not seven. Two and a half. So which two.

He looked down at the dark of the desk panel, waiting for a thumbprint, and did the arithmetic he had been doing since fourth period: two malevolent-grade, or one malevolent and one vengeful and a half of something that would sit in the third slot and be no use to anybody. Lesser, uncounted was a phrase he was going to take home and look at from a few different angles.

“Grant.”

Hollis was standing with his arms folded.

“What happens if you don’t clear.”

Somebody at the side of the room made a small sound. Milo didn’t look at them.

“Nothing happens,” he said. “You get the diploma from here and the job with hours on it.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“You get nothing. Not a lower tier. Nothing.”

Hollis held still. It was a better answer than the one he’d come in with, and Milo could see him set it down somewhere and not pick it back up.

“So you can read,” Hollis said. “Fine. Then say the other part out loud, so the room knows I’m not making it up.”

Milo knew what he was going to say before he said it. There were thirty desks in Room 214 and about twenty-six people in them, and every one of them was looking at the front now, and Hollis had been teaching long enough to know exactly what his own voice did when he dropped it low.

“You’re point five,” Hollis said. “Say it.”

“Point five.”

“You’ll pick D. You’ll clear D, because you have a mouth on you and D is not difficult, and in September you’ll have your card and a bus that goes out to Aries twice a day. You’ll be alive in October. That’s more than some of you are going to manage, and no, I’m not going to tell you which ones.” He picked up a folder. “Sit down.”

Milo sat.

In the front row, the girl with the two clips in her hair wrote the four tiers down, and the standard stock, and the part about September, in small square handwriting, and she did not look at him once the whole time. That was fine. He hadn’t made any friends up there he felt like keeping.

The fluorescent in the corner clicked. It was on the wrong rhythm again, two beats short of the one it used to have in September, and Milo caught himself counting it.

“Okay,” Dumpster whispered. “Okay. Hear me out before you say anything, I’ve done the math.”

“You haven’t done the math.”

“I’ve done some of the math.” His elbows were on the desk and his shoulders were up around his ears and he was talking fast, the way he talked about everything, but his fingers were locked on the edge of the desk. “Both of us pick D. Sign some little dead-eyed nothing the way you’d hire a guy to stand by a door. Clean it out in an afternoon. In September we get a place near Aries, one bedroom, split it — you’re not going to eat four hundred a month, nobody eats four hundred a month—“

“Kevin.”

“—and we’ve got the whole year to figure out the transfer thing. There’s got to be a transfer thing—“

“Kevin.” Milo turned in his chair. “D is one bored little ghost and a card that says I can do this. That’s the offer. Thirty years of going down somebody’s basement to pull out a thing that used to be a dog. I’m not making a speech about it. It’s the inventory.”

Dumpster’s mouth opened. Closed.

“People die in D too,” he said, small. “It’s not— people die in D. It’s not a parking lot.”

“I know,” Milo said.

The silence after that was Dumpster’s, and Milo let him have it, and after a while Dumpster let go of the desk and put his hands in his lap and looked at his own panel, which was a dark rectangle with a thumbprint-shaped nothing in the middle of it.

“Just don’t sit down yet,” he said. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing I’m asking. Stand at my desk when I do it. Thirty seconds and then you can go be the guy who picks A.”

Milo looked at him.

“Then the whole room watches you pick the dumpster,” he said. “You want thirty seconds of the whole room watching you do that?”

Dumpster breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, once, and his shoulders came down about an inch.

“Right,” he said. “Yeah. No. Right.”

He put his thumb down on the glass.

The front of his panel went the dull flat gray of D, and the name came up in block letters underneath it, and under the name a picture of a landfill from above, a wide rutted field with a front-end loader parked at the edge of it and the loader’s arm still up.

Milo did not sit down right away. He stood next to his chair a half-second longer than he needed to, watching Dumpster pull his hood up over his head, and then he sat.

Hollis came back up the aisle, and then he came back down it.

He stopped at Milo’s desk with a folder under his arm and set one hand flat on the desk, and when he spoke it was quiet enough that the two rows behind wouldn’t have gotten more than a word of it.

“How many ghosts have you stood in a room with.”

“Zero,” Milo said.

“Then you don’t know what you’re pricing.” Hollis’s thumb tapped the folder once. “I’ve made that phone call. Twice, in eleven years. Both times it was to a woman who thought her kid was going to be a binder. Your name is on a stack in that office on the second floor with a lot of other names, and nobody in that building knows any of them either.”

“That’s probably true.”

“You are last in your year in theory and last in your year in cap. You have half a ghost and a mouth.” Hollis said it without heat. “That’s what walks into an A-class haunt this morning, and it walks in there because you didn’t like the way D sounded when I read it out.” He leaned in a little, not much. “Pick D. I’ll write you a reference myself. I’ll drive you down to that office and vouch for you in front of a stranger, which I have never done for a student, and will not be doing for a boy who asked a ghost in a red dress whether she was single.”

Milo sat with his hands in his lap.

“There’s nothing in D worth binding,” he said.

Hollis opened his mouth.

Nothing came out of it that fit. He stood there long enough that people looked up.

Then he took his folder and walked back to the front of the room without saying anything else.

The panel unlocked at his thumb and woke up warm.

HAUNT CLASS A — MERCY GENERAL.

He didn’t touch that one. There were twelve of them on the sheet, twelve A-class haunts, each with a name and a photograph the size of a postage stamp, and a line under each one that said what was inside and how many were counted. Two malevolent. Five vengeful. Lesser, uncounted.

He read the line under the first three and stopped, because it was the same line.

He put his thumb down on the pane the way you’d swat something. Hard, quick, without looking at what was under it.

The panel went amber.

Somebody two rows over said, “Is that an A—“

The hallway PA was in the middle of the word ninth — something from the office about the ninth-grade lunch line — and then the word didn’t finish, and there was nothing where the rest of it should have been. No fade, no click. It was there and then it wasn’t.

The radiator’s clank went thin and far away after it.

Chalk went. Hot radiator dust went. The orange somebody had peeled at first bell went. What came in was cold and clean, and under the clean was something sweet that he didn’t chase down.

His fingers were on the edge of a desk that wasn’t there anymore.

Then he was standing on tile.

It was hard under his shoes and cold through the soles, and it went on past where he could see. There was a light at the far end, not close. There were doors.

Milo did not move. He stood where he was and let the dark be dark for a second, and he counted what he had, and the count came back the same.

Hollis watched the room instead of the individual rows — a habit from his first year — and that was how he saw it: a wash of amber from the back corner, and thirty heads coming around at once.

Amber. Not blue, not green. Amber was the color the panels went for A, and he had seen it exactly once before, in the spring of his third year, and the boy who did it that time had known exactly what he was doing.

The chair at the back was empty. The panel was still lit, still glowing, still waiting, MERCY GENERAL in a line under the color, and the weight of a thumbprint in the middle of it going slowly gray now that it had been used.

He counted the desks. He always counted the desks.

One out.

Hollis put his hand on the phone box bolted to the front desk and pressed the call button down with his thumb and lifted the handset.

“Grant—“

The bell went off.

It was the exam bell, louder than it was on any other day, because it meant something. It rang into the handset and out of the ceiling speakers, and the room came apart into noise — chairs, zippers, thirty kids standing up at once.

The panel at the back stayed lit. The chair at the back stayed empty. The boy’s notebook was still on the desk with the corner of a page turned down.

Hollis kept his thumb on the button.