He had to admit it, running from the cops, watching Jay's hair as it bounced around his baseball cap, watching buildings fly by as he ran past them, he had to admit he'd been a bit unanchored since he broke up with Emma.

"Come on, Cameron!" Jay called as he pulled even further in front of him. His legs were longer. Sean could almost feel the cops' breath on his back and he pushed himself to catch up to Jay, to get away from the cops, to get away with this stealing and not get sent to juvie, or jail.

He had no breath to answer him as he forced his legs to go faster, as he sucked air into his lungs. His lungs felt like weak balloons, inflating past their limit.

Around a corner and he saw Jay duck into a doorway, and he felt the cops loosing whatever speed they had gained and he took a breath for his final sprint, like a runner pushing hard for the last ten feet of the race. He dove for the doorway Jay had gone into and he felt Jay's rough hands on his jacket pulling him further into the shadows. He tried not to even breathe as the cops pounded past them, and even when he knew they were gone he stayed perfectly still until the relief flooded his body.

"We did it, buddy," Jay said, smiling his evil smile. Sean looked up at him with his characteristic sullen expression. In his jacket pocket was the stolen CD's and DVD's and X-box games. He could feel their slick plastic surface under his fingertips. Why did he feel the need to steal these things? Because Jay suggested it? Because he wanted them and couldn't afford them? Because he felt the world owed him? Because he knew it would piss Emma off?

"Yeah," he said, looking down, feeling something, but not exactly guilt. It was almost like an inverted pride, a secret pleasure. He saw this feeling reflected in Jay's ear to ear grin.

Ooooooooooooooooooooo

Shop class. This class was home to him. This was the one place he understood everything. Not like English class with all those Shakespeare plays that might as well have been written in Chinese. All that talk of metaphors and similes and foreshadowing. Why couldn't those novels and stories and plays just say what they meant? A car engine didn't try to deceive you like that. It was what it was, and if it didn't work there were reasons why. That's how he liked things. He liked the hope of some solution.

"Hey, man," Sean looked up as Craig came in. He knew he'd kind of lost touch with him this year. But he remembered last year, remembered hearing Craig's dad scream at him and pound his bedroom door with a golf club while Craig strived for casual on the phone. He shook his head at the memory. He'd thought Craig was pretty cool and maybe that was why. He had problems that rivaled his own. But once again Craig was coddled and protected by Joey. He licked his lips. Tracker was gone. He was on his own. Emma walked by then, he could see her in the hall gliding by in her blond glory, her head raised high, her ballerina figure there for an instant and then gone.

"Hey," he said, "what's up?"

"Nothing," Craig said, and shot a troubled glance at the engine he was working on. Sean could immediately see all the problems with it. This stuff didn't come easily to Craig, he knew. It almost made him glad, because he remembered that Craig had said this was supposed to be his easy class. Well, maybe it wasn't that easy. Maybe just because no one else in his family had graduated high school didn't mean that he was as stupid as the rest of his family, and if a smart kid like Craig, whose father had been a frigging surgeon, couldn't get it, then maybe that might mean he was smart in some way. He was almost tempted not to help Craig with it, either. Sink or swim, buddy, he thought, but then he shook his head at the thought. He knew that wasn't right. Even if he and Craig weren't exactly friends now they had been, and he couldn't let him screw up that engine that badly.