Free The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

were”—she pauses, collects herself—“
begging
for it.”
    I jump up. “That’s a lie!”
    I won’t let him have the last word.
    I turn to T.S. “Take me to the Mockingbirds.”

QUARTERS
     
    Physics that afternoon is worse than lunch because Carter is in my class. The vein in my forehead beats so hard I’m afraid everyone can hear it. I’m convinced it’s going to burst, explode in a shower of blood in class, and everyone will turn around and say, “For a good time, call Alex.”
    But Carter doesn’t notice me, and we’re all taking furious notes anyway while Mr. Waldman goes on about the Meissner effect, magnetic fields, and superconductors. The only saving grace is we have assigned seating. Carter sits in the front row and I’m all the way in the back next to Martin. I spend the entire class thinking
don’t turn around, don’t turn around, don’t turn around
as I invent new ways to use Martin as a potential shield if Carter so much as moves a muscle in my direction.
    I know Martin well enough. I remember seeing his face a lot last year because he was a runner in some of my classes. But I didn’t meet him officially until T.S. and Sandeep started dating after spring break sophomore year. Pretty soon, we all were sharing a table in the caf, and since T.S. and Sandeep live in their own little bubble most of the time, Martin and I talk to each other more than to them. Martin’s goofy, like with the birdbrain thing, but also very driven. He’s tall with kind of shaggy brown hair, slightly a bit mussed up, and brown eyes that have tiny flecks of green in them. He’s wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and a wristband or something. He leans in, whispers so low I can barely hear, “You know, you can levitate stuff with the Meissner effect.”
    I give a silent laugh, then whisper super quietly, “Maybe you can, but I definitely can’t.”
    “I’ll show you sometime. You know, since I’m a science geek and all,” he says as if it’s an insider’s secret, his being a science geek. Then I notice Martin reach into his front jeans pocket. He swipes out his cell phone surreptitiously so Mr. Waldman doesn’t notice. He flicks open the screen, then closes it shut just as quickly as he opened it. His shoulders tense; he rests his forehead in his hands for a moment. I’m about to ask if he’s okay when he moves his hand down the spiral-bound paper, writing at the bottom of the page in neat, blocky letters:
I WILL SEE YOU AT EIGHT.
    I furrow my brow.
WHY?
I write back in my notebook.
    He answers:
I AM ON BOARD OF MOCKINGBIRDS.
    “Oh.” It slips out softly from my mouth, but Mr. Waldman doesn’t notice. He’s busy drawing a magnet on the board, the bald spot on the back of his head glaring out at us. It never occurred to me Martin would be involved. It never occurred to me
who
would be involved. Politics, issues, and stuff that doesn’t involve dead composers have never been my thing, so I’ve barely given a second thought to who was in the Mockingbirds. The irony is I
should
know more about the Mockingbirds than most students.
    My sister started it when she was a senior here. I didn’t know it at the time, since I was only in eighth grade and living at home in New Haven. But she had told me about them a week before I left for Themis. She was busy packing for her first year of college, and I was practicing a complicated Liszt piece on the piano, planning to impress my music teacher the second I set foot on campus.
    Casey popped downstairs and sat next to me on the bench, a rare public appearance for her. She’d spent most of the summer in a bad funk, holed up in her room and barely interacting with another human being.
    “There’s something you need to know about Themis,” she said. “You have to watch your back because the teachers and administration won’t do it for you.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Casey told me about a group of seniors from the NationalHonor Society who got bored one