She’d been reluctant to enroll him, but then he said he would start calling random governmental numbers in the blue pages and tell whoever answered that his mother refused to let him attend school. “Of course you’d never do that,” she said, more plea than assertion.

Fresh from the bath, Will found his favorite clothes laid out on his bed like a steamrollered boy. He went to his closet and picked his second-favorite clothes as a statement. Over a five-course breakfast of slow-cooked steel-cut oats, fresh bread, eggs hardboiled in the kettle, and sliced pineapple, she warned him of real tests, which were mind games to prove how smart you were. Will looked forward to them. He would surely get As. At home they often did “Creative Challenges,” which he graded himself, always checking either “amazing” or “stupendous” on the evaluation forms she typed up on her Underwood.

In the orange burn of dawn he followed the sidewalk toward the asphalt path that wound up the tall hill on which the school stood. It was an impossibly huge structure, like five entire houses all bound together, encased in cinder block. Other kids were approaching the school, mostly girls in neon swishy jackets. He climbed and entered the colossus randomly through one of its heavy steel doors, into a hallway strewn with tiny dazed children. He wandered giant-like between them until happening upon the office. The perfume-soaked secretary walked him to his classroom.

He hung his coat and lunch bag in the cloakroom, where many of the same kind of jacket lined the walls: felt with leather sleeves and patches. Hockey jackets, he surmised, from their insignias of variously paired stick and puck.

His teacher, Mr. Miller, a gap-toothed man with glasses thick as the double-paned windows in Cairo, ushered him to his desk. This teacher was strange in two ways: one, he was a man; and two, he was old. Will had had little contact with men beyond signing clipboards and writing checks, and the deliverymen were prevailingly young.

“You can sit in Jonah’s desk for now,” Mr. Miller said, his teeth whistling faintly. “But you’ll have to move when he returns, if he does.”

Will crammed his legs into the desk as a wall-mounted speaker emitted an amplified breathing. “This is your morning announcements,” said the quaking voice of a student, who described an upcoming hot dog day and impending hockey registration. Next came “O Canada,” which Will had heard a few times before, then The Lord’s Prayer, which he’d never. Sometimes, when feeling especially chipper, his mother sang “500 Miles,” a song he liked, though it was about being poor and far away from home, a condition he hadn’t much experience with, until recently, anyway. When she cleaned she put on The Rite of Spring, which sounded like a heinous multicar accident, except the cars were built out of orchestra instruments. To Will, it was the distilled sound of Black Lagoon.

During the prayer, Will didn’t know where to look, how to tilt his head. He attempted a solemn, respectful face. He preferred it to the anthem: juicier words, especially the word trespasses, a Marcus word, even if it was something that necessitated forgiveness. There wasn’t much of anything in the classroom: no masterpiece supplies, no exercise equipment, no slow cooker. A picture of the queen, who he recognized from the dollar. A map of Canada, pink as a cartoon pig, the top a confettied mess of either islands or icebergs—he was never sure. A pencil sharpener bolted to a shelf near the window. The rest just greenish seas of blackboard.

“And may I introduce Will Cardiel,” said Mr. Miller when the announcements concluded. “Will comes to us from …” He scanned down his sheet. “Where do you come to us from, Will?”

“Home,” he said, and the man jumped. Will realized instantly he’d yelled it. He had no clue how loud he needed to talk in this big Inside for so many people to hear him, how to make enough sound to feed all those ears.

“No, I mean which school,” Mr. Miller asked while folding his arms.

“Oh,” said Will, in what he realized was a whisper. Kids were torqued in their desks, and Will hoped they could make out the forehead scar Marcus gave him enough to admire it. That morning, his mother had cautioned him on revealing too much to Outside people about their living situation. “Um, you wouldn’t know it,” he said, juicing his memory for places he knew about. “It’s in San Francisco.” This conjured an image of him cuddling with his mother in their bed, and just as quickly he drove it from his mind for fear everyone could tell.

“Well, well. All the way to old Thunder Bay from Californ-I-A. Aren’t we lucky,” replied Mr. Miller. “Why don’t you say a little about yourself?”

Will was unsure if he was allowed to stand, but talking loudly while seated would feel gross in his belly, so he tried to rise and rammed his kneecap into the metal bar that fixed seat to desk. He lurched to the other side and managed to get upright.

He considered reciting a poem, something his mother taught him by this woman she liked named Emily something. Yet like a burglar in a vacant house, Will’s mind found nothing to grab and commenced tearing the place up.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Mr. Miller said.

Desperately Will unearthed from his pocket the masterpiece blueprint he’d drawn of his ideal school. She’d called it visualization and said it helped with stressful situations. “But I’m not stressed, Mom,” he replied, to which she knowingly said, “Not yet.”

Will heard himself describe the blueprint’s features, holding it high so all could get a look, especially at its extensive legend, which curved because he’d run out of space at the edge. Mr. Miller was holding a ton of air in his chest as though about to cough. Will raced to sufficiently describe the varying depths of the indoor wave pool he’d included.

“—Okay, Will,” interrupted Mr. Miller.

“Okay?” Will said. He hadn’t even described the sniper tower yet.

“Very creative, great, and we’ve plenty to get through today.” Mr. Miller turned and padded in soft shoes over to his desk as Will’s classmates smirked into their laps, shoulders bucking.

“How about I drink chocolate milk out of your skull?” Will said to his teacher, but only in his mind, with black acid foaming in his chest and a hateful heat over him like a hood. Will vowed to burn the blueprint but knew he couldn’t do it publicly, which would be the incident’s perfect comedic conclusion.

Mr. Miller then commenced a speech about something called the Canadian Shield, which wasn’t at all an energy force that protected the entire Outside from alien attack. Will quickly lost track of the speech, instead imagining a shield erected over his house, sheltering it from both meteors and the Black Lagoon. When the bell rang, children launched from their desks like pieces of toast. Will retrieved his coat and followed them Outside. He stood for a while near the doors—the sky huge and ruffled with high cloud—awaiting further instruction. There was only one teacher, a pallid middle-aged woman in a wool beret, covertly smoking behind a playground structure. He stood near her until she shot him an uncomfortable smile, stepped on her cigarette, and walked off across the grounds.

Boys from his class swarmed the rough tennis court, where a road hockey game congealed around an orange ball that sounded hard as ceramic. Will stood at the chain link, unseen, imagining it wasn’t because nobody cared about him but because the visible part of him was still Inside and would soon catch up. Then some retarded kids led by another teacher walked past, all wearing Helmets, and Will tried not to think about what cruel comparisons the hockey players would draw if they ever found out he’d only just yesterday stopped wearing his own at home.

Now Will turned from the fence and stood near the doors, where some toddlers trotted in figure eights, screaming at some pretend disaster. Because his house was his way of measuring time, a giant sundial they lived inside, without it Will felt like he’d been at school for weeks. He’d expected more people for him to befriend here, not less, and he wondered if this achy sensation at the back of his skull was what people called loneliness and how long it would last. Already he missed the crisp thwack of his mother turning pages in her reading chair, the jet-engine scream of her morning vacuum, how they tangoed expertly around each other through the hall of London.