Dev looked at her for a long time. Then he said: "I need to think about it. Can you give me a day?"
"Yes," she said. "But Dev. Whatever this is — carrying it alone for this long isn't good for any of you. I can see it."
He looked at his hands. Then at her. "Twenty-four hours." He wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it across the table. An address. "After school Thursday. Four o'clock."
She took the paper. "Is it safe for you to tell me?" She meant it specifically — she had been watching these students being managed, and she did not know who was managing them.
"I'm thirteen," he said, in a very flat voice. "No one is threatening me. They don't have to. We all agreed. We all thought it was the right thing. But three weeks later—" He looked at his book. "Some of us are having second thoughts."
She stood up. At the library door she looked back at him — a thin boy with the face of someone carrying a problem that had been adult-sized from the moment it arrived.
"Thursday," she said.
"Thursday," he said, without looking up.
