The week before Fall Semester Exams, Welton Academy, December 1959

Steven Meeks closed his American history textbook and let his hands rest on the cover for a moment. There had been a time, not so long ago, that he'd believed without question every word written in a textbook.

Now? He wondered about every one of them.

Except math, of course. Math was solid, it would hold, it just existentially was. Physics, too. Hard science was solid ground; you could stand there without worrying whether it would hold you up.

He still wanted to help build a space ship, someday. The Russians had just taken pictures of the far side of the moon, in October. What would it be like, to build a craft that could go to the moon? He drifted, then, imagining the equations. The metal, the radiation, the parabola . . .

He lifted his gaze to the night sky outside his room, where a waxing moon hovered over the fields around Welton. The snow, even trampled and uneven as it was, had gone silver in the moonlight.

TO THE MOON

Bush and vale thou fill'st again
With thy misty ray,
And my spirit's heavy chain
Castest far away.

Thou dost o'er my fields extend
Thy sweet soothing eye,
Watching like a gentle friend,
O'er my destiny.

The Goethe poem went on, but that was all Steven could remember. My spirit's heavy chain. Quick tears sprang to his eyes. His chest did feel heavy now, all the time. It took effort to get up, to walk to class, to study, to eat. Had Neil felt that way?

Did he still feel heavy, being dead?

A quick glance at the clock on his desk told him curfew was eight minutes away. Knox would come in just before lights-out, dreamy-eyed from talking to Chris on the phone, and sigh twice in bed before turning over and starting to snore. Even now, Chris was all Knox could think about.

Or maybe especially now, Steven thought, girls being in every particular preferential to the grind of Hellton discipline without enlivening flashes of Keating, and the heaviness of a world Neil had removed himself from. (Why? We didn't know. We could have stopped you, if we'd known. We could have told you how much we valued you, how much we needed you! Of course that's why you didn't tell us, but – why, Neil? Why why why.)

And English class was a disaster now. It had reverted to that suck-up Cameron raising his hand to answer questions, and the rest of them sitting silent and resentful, not answering unless directly addressed, and if addressed, parroting back as much as possible of what Dr. Nolan had said earlier in the class. It wasn't learning. It wasn't even useful. Nolan the Nose was considerably more pedantic in the classroom than he was as headmaster, and that was damn well saying something.

Steven had always thrived on order, on knowing how to diagram and parse and conjugate, how to set up the equation and work the equation. One idea progressed to another. So much of the material one studied could be logically understood, and if one had a logical brain like Steven, one could tackle just about anything.

But some things . . . oh, some things were inexplicable. One had to feel them – one had to be open to feeling them. It was a truth Steven had known deep down, even before Mr. Keating woke them all up to it. "Lift your heads, lads," he'd told them. "Lift your heads and look at the stars. Look at the moon! You can walk among them, if you like."

Well, Steven liked. And if math and physics could get him closer to the glory of the heavens, so much the better. It was all one universe: glory, plus math.

The Pritchard textbook rubric for poetry greatness felt like it would destroy his soul, if he did more than glance at it out of the corner of his eye. And poor Pittsie, who could work out the physics problems almost as fast as Steven could himself but struggled with anything involving words, had lost a good deal of his short-lived confidence.

The Nose had set them an essay before term exams: identify a poem in the textbook which meets the Pritchard criteria for greatness, and explain why it does so. It was due in two days, and Steven hadn't started it. He'd flip through the textbook and lose focus. He'd hear the voices of his friends reciting poetry. He'd see Neil's face on the blank pages of his notebook.

He kept hearing Neil's voice speaking Shakespeare. He kept thinking about the moon. Gravity and weightlessness and the heavy feeling in his own chest.

The door opened. Knox said, "Hey, Meeks, still hitting the books? I don't know why you bother." He kicked off his shoes, stripping down to his underwear before rooting his balled-up night things out of a drawer.

Steven didn't answer. He got into his pajamas and took off his glasses, then as soon as Knox was in bed, he turned off his desk lamp and slid under the cold sheets as well.

"Meeks?"

"What."

"Seriously, why do you bother studying? Nolan's just gonna fail us. The four of us, I mean. You, me, Pittsie, Todd . . . not that fink Cameron."

Steven had already considered the matter. "No. He won't fail us out-of-hand like that. He'll want us to behave just like Cameron, yeah. Knuckle under and do what he wants, and if we do that, we'll be fine because we will have proved he was right and Mr. Keating was wrong down to the bone."

Silence. Knox was never the most logical thinker. Which boded ill, Steven thought for the hundredth time, for the possibility of Knox making it through law school, wealthy successful attorney father or no. Thank God his own father worked at GE, designing motors for blenders and washing machines and freezers. Steven was both capable and well-suited to follow his dad's engineering profession, and everybody was happy about it.

"I feel guilty," Knox said into the dark.

Steven sighed. "Me too." Thinking of Mr. Keating made his stomach turn over with shame. "Knox, listen. I wish I hadn't signed that paper. But I did it. And you did it. And the rest of us did it, too. We can't undo it. Now we have to . . . we have to live with it, and make the best of it, or we're spitting in the face of everything Keating taught us about reaching for excellence. Which means, I think, doing a creditable job on the shit assignments Nolan gives us and keeping our heads down long enough to graduate."

His brain showed him scenes he would rather not see: Mr. Keating, making them kick soccer balls while reciting bits of inspiring prose. Pitts, kicking the ball, undaunted for once in his life. Neil, wearing that crown of twigs, saying, "If you pardon, we will mend."

After a pause, Knox said, "That makes me feel guiltier."

"I know."

"I can't sleep."

"I know. Shut up, Knoxious." He deliberately used Charlie's nickname for his friend, feeling guilty for that too.

Nine minutes later, Knox sighed twice and turned to the wall. Thirty seconds after that, he began to snore.

That night, Steven Meeks dreamed of the moon – round and shining like a silver half-dollar coin. Craggy with mountains and valleys barely visible from Earth. Inconstant, changing ever in her circled orb.

Just out of his reach.