The knock on Michael’s door was as concerning as it was unexpected.

He looked up from the homework on the kitchen table, at the hallway that led to the front door. He certainly hadn’t given Sarah his address, and she wasn’t going to come over today anyway. She already knew that yesterday’s evidence sweep hadn’t panned out, but she had also already given him a direction to pursue, and he wasn’t going to spontaneously pivot unless she genuinely thought it was worth drastically shifting the focus after only a day of investigation.

All that aside, he also wanted to head off all his homework before the weekend struck and he had to deal with even more assignments.

He jotted down one more answer on the worksheet and stood, making his way to the door. The block of kitchen knives were near the edge of the counter, there was a letter opener in the chest of drawers by the bottom of the stairs, and the vase of flowers atop said chest was ergonomic enough to throw or to bash with. Whoever was there, he would be okay.

Upon looking through the peephole in the front door, though, all of his questions were gone, if only to be replaced with more questions.

Michael opened the door.

“James, what are you doing here?”

James smiled at him and adjusted his backpack straps. “It’s a homework check.”

“You waited an hour and a half after school ended to come and find me, just to do a homework check?”

“I just wanted to check in on your homework, you know? History has been really rough this week, and I want to make sure that I got the right answers.”

“It’s not actually that bad. I’m sure you got the right answers.” Michael looked around for somebody else outside, lingering just beyond the line of sight from his door, only to come away unsatisfied. “Why are you really here?”

“Mikey, dude, I told you. I just want to do a homework check.” James slung his backpack off and held it up for Michael to see. “And I don’t want to do it alone, you know? Thursdays are such boring days.”

Michael just gave him a flat look. “James. Is this a front for something else?”

“Mikey, it’s just homework. Come on, man.”

He took one more look around the street, taking in James’s car next to his on the driveway and how absolutely lonely he looked on the front walk, the only figure outside on the entire street. The sky was blue, the trees slipping from green to gray, and the sun already a few steps into its dancing descent behind the woods. The shadows were stretching, but this time, there was nobody hiding in them.

“Alright.” Michael stepped aside. “Come on in.”

James beamed with happiness and nearly hopped the few steps it took him to get inside, kicking his shoes off to the side of the front door and going straight for the kitchen table. “Is this the trig stuff? I hate that class so much. Are you really just eyeballing all of this?”

Michael locked the door and moved back to the kitchen, reassuming his seat. “Mr. Sprigg said that we wouldn’t need protractors on this homework, and he was right. I’ve just been checking the sine charts the whole time.”

“Wow, that blows.” James’s homework was already spilling out of his backpack over the table, a morass of worksheets and printouts from school. He was staring at them with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other, hunting for any connection between papers. Michael wrote a few more answers on his own paper from the chart, before getting up to turn on more of the lights in the kitchen. He could work okay in the dark, but James was worse at it than him, and it did not hurt him to bring a little light in.

He returned to the table, and the two of them continued working in semi-silence for several minutes, the shadows cast through the pickets of the backyard fence growing ever longer. James occasionally muttered out a confused question, and Michael answered, shifting from trigonometry to copying answers onto a separate worksheet out of his biology notebook. It was basic work, but the weekend assignments would be much worse once they were assigned, leaving this as the only thing left to be knocked out quickly.

There was a final sigh from James as he shoved his homework off to the side, and spoke. “There was something I wanted to ask you.”

“I knew it.”

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“There’s a party next weekend, and I know that sounds bad,” he continued as he raised his hands to ward off whatever Michael was about to say, “but I promise there’s no murder this time. Ken won’t even be there, it’s a smaller one, we’re just going to be hanging out and drinking a bit. Or you can not drink! You don’t have to drink. It’ll just be neat little party to go to.”

“No thank you.”

“Oh, come on, man, please,” James pleaded. “Nobody you hate’s going to be there! It’s just hanging out with some people and drinking a little if you want. Smaller party, nothing serious, it–really, it’s not that bad.”

“I’m not interested, James.” Michael pushed his notebook away from him. “I have no interest in going to a party full of people that I barely know for no reason besides attempting to network with them on a surface level. They do not want to get to know me, and I have no reason to want to get to know them.”

The silence returned for a second, before James spoke again, hushed and concerned. “But it would help. We need friends, don’t we? There’s still more years of high school ahead of us, and we’re not going to get through that on our own. We’ll just…need a lot, you know?”

His reply was a shrug. “Social climbing doesn’t matter. You know it as well as I do.”

“But Mikey, friends do. Come on.”

Michael looked at him, a skeptical gaze under lidded eyes. James had an ulterior motive, this lingering desire to ingratiate himself with all the people at the top of this school. He wanted to be a part of the in crowd, as if being with a different group of people would change anything about the rituals they went through and the drag of being in the same place, the same state, every day. Just changing who you were around wouldn’t make this any more entertaining.

James looked away first, letting out a sigh of disappointment. “Alright, okay, fine. I’m not gonna fight you on this. After that last party got somebody killed I can barely blame you, even if I do think you should have more friends. But I’ll leave you alone.”

“Good.” Michael looked back down at his homework and resumed work on it. James didn’t say anything, and so he was expecting him to pack up his things and leave, only for a ball of paper to smack him in the head.

He jerked up, panicked, but James was just tearing pages out of his notebook. “What?” He asked. “You looked grumpy.”

“So you threw a ball of paper at me?”

“Mhm.” James smiled and threw another one at him. Michael tried to swat it away, but missed, and it hit him right on the nose.

“Stop it.”

“Nah. Fight back.”

“Fight back?”

Another ball to the head. “Yeah. Fight back.”

“James, I’m not–”

Thwack. “Fight back.”

“I will not–”

Thwack.

“James. I am not going to begin fighting you because you think I need cheering up due to expressing my disagreement with your weekend plans. Every part of that plan is foolish. I just want to do my homework.”

James smiled like he’d lost his sense of hearing and raised an arm.

Thwack.

“Okay, that’s it.”

Michael ripped a sheet out of his own notebook, balled it, and threw it at James in a second. It hit James right between the eyes, and he squawked, wildly pitching the ball in his hand at Michael. It missed, and Michael grabbed his notebook and dropped into a crouch under the table. James started throwing wildly over it, and Michael threw at his legs, only for James to start underhanding paper balls that were far less well constructed at him.

Michael tried to retreat, and he had no idea what was going on. James was throwing paper balls at him from all over the kitchen, he was throwing them back and trying to retreat to the living room, at some point he had grabbed a spare pack of looseleaf paper from the closet and begun using them instead of his notebook. James tried to take a stand above the stairs, but Michael sniped him from between the poles of the banister, at some point he began attempting to steal James’ backpack, he was losing track of it. If knives were being thrown and true violence being applied, he would have been deeply focused, but on this, he wasn’t. He was trying to not destroy all of the paper in his notebooks and that was it.

James threw his entire history notebook at him, and it caught him right in the jaw. Michael fell onto the couch and laughed, tossing a handful of looseleaf at James’s vague direction. James laughed too, collapsing onto the other side of the couch and letting his now noticeably lighter notebook fall to the floor. They both kept smiling as the adrenaline wore off, just quietly chuckling at each other as they tried to catch their breath.

“You still mad?” James asked.

“I wasn’t,” Michael answered.