The news had set in before the rigor mortis.

The story of the assault, the weapon, the specific chain of evidence about the shattered knife, and the payback had all become public knowledge by midnight on Saturday. Michael’s involvement was an integral part of the entire thing, the feature that had spread more than any other part of the story. Joe’s target, his means of attack, even the date may have been in question, but his fate was not. Everybody may have known that Michael had killed him, but they would not do anything about it.

It had been payback. They could not do anything about it.

Michael had known that Brad would be fuming, given his reaction. Walking into school on Monday morning, he was unsurprised to see him in the center of a crowd of his friends, his voice raised and expression visibly upset. He fell silent in his ranting as Michael walked past on his way to his first class, only resuming at an even louder volume once he believed himself to be out of earshot. He wasn’t, but Michael wasn’t listening to him.

There was nothing that Brad could actually do to get back at Michael in any way at all. Not while still holding true to the rules that he valued so much. Payback was the part that could never be violated, as it was what kept everything in check. The threat of constant violence at every chance was held back by an agreement of vulnerability, that you left yourself open to just as much damage as you could have inflicted. A system that kept the peace with promises of reciprocated destruction.

Revenge killings were not exactly uncommon, granted, but with them always came the stopping power of skill disparities, of those who had less proficiency with violence being fearful to challenge those more experienced. If you failed and ran, then the payback rule would count. It was a thin line, but a sharp one.

It did nothing for reputation, though. Everybody in his class looked at him as he walked in and sat down, either glances from the corners of their eyes or full on stares they believed to be far more subtle than they were in reality. His own responsibility to the payback rule left him as the one everybody blamed for an execution of the rule, though in this case, it was correct. He had killed Joe Walnut and buried his body in the woods on Saturday night, in a spot that only he had known. The body would have gone stiff and relaxed already, but the news had spread so fast from those who had been at the party that it would not have made any difference if he had done it then or today. People would have figured everything out soon anyway.

Sarah had called him almost immediately after he had called Jane to inform her of a done deed, and he had simply told her to let Monday sit, that they could resume lessons on Tuesday. She seemed eager for it, which was something he could understand and appreciate. The lessons provided entertainment for him, something novel and new that he enjoyed on those grounds, if nothing else. Though he was enjoying something of how little she cared for Ravenville. It was refreshing, to find somebody that gave the rules as little meaning as he did.

Somebody walked up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder, and he politely turned around to see who it was.

“Yes, James?”

“Hey Mikey.” James looked tired. “Can we talk?”

The entire class was visibly gawking at the both of them now, any hint of subtlety gone from their actions, and Michael shrugged. “Sure.” He stood up and walked out into the hallway, James close behind, only stopping when they were at a bank of lockers on the other side of the hallway and several feet down from the door.

“What is it?” He asked.

“Are you ever going to chill out?” James hissed.

“Is this about Saturday–”

“Yes, this is about Joe!” He pulled the sleeves of his graffiti-patterned hoodie tighter around his wrists. “Do you know how many bridges that burned? Brad’s looking at me like he wants to see me as a corpse in a bathtub. Ken, I haven’t even been able to find Ken, but Aaron’s mad at me, Louis is mad at me, Emily’s mad at me, all the people that I was trying to become friends with are upset because they know that I know you, and I didn’t stop you. I can win them back, probably, but I’m not the guy that killed one of their friends!”

“Why do they care?” Michael inquired. “It was payback. They know that rule cannot be violated.” Not that he really cared, but a rule was a rule, even if it was boring and almost meaningless.

“Because we’ve got two more years here, man! You can’t just keep going through the whole time without anybody on your side. If you want to make any friends, you need to give people slack, let them get away with things.”

“That’s the point. I don’t want to be friends with any of them. Social climbing is boring, and frankly, pointless.”

“Mikey, you didn’t end up as the guy that everybody goes to for payback because going to parties was pointless. You’re the most lethal guy in this whole town, and you don’t care about any of it!”

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“I ended up with this responsibility because of people coming to me specifically, and because there was nothing of true importance here. I’m here because I ended up here.”

“That’s really reductive of this whole damn thing.”

“It’s true.” Michael did not shrug, but he did meet James’s gaze. “I’m here regardless of if it matters or not. It does not.”

“But you’re still there.” “Yes.”

James sighed, reaching up to pinch his nose. “Mikey, dude, why the hell are you like this. It’s not–it’s not all pointless and shit. We’ve got two more years, we’ve got people to meet, connections to make. We’ve got so much stuff to do, and we need friends. Why are you acting like doing anything like…” He mimed a slice across the throat. “That, is boring?”

“Because it is, James. Because there is no point.”

“Oh my fucking god I–” James threw his hands up in the air. “Bleeding hell, man. We used to be good. You used to be racking up bodies left right and center. You’re the reason the senior class is so small! Why did all that stop?”

“I figured out that there wasn’t a point to it, James.” Michael’s voice was even and bored. “I figured out that the whole thing was boring. And I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again when I knew that there wasn’t a point.”

“Is that where your new friend is from?” James spat. “Is it because there’s no point to me?”

“She is not my friend, James,” he said. “She asked me to teach her what I knew. I accepted because it was a novel idea, and her rhetoric of not caring at all for the rules is interesting. She’s also so unskilled and unfamiliar with violence that it’s entertaining to teach her. I don’t care about her personal crusade or whatever she wants to pull off, she is merely a source of entertainment.”

“What, you don’t care about people anymore?”

“I do,” Michael protested, “but I want entertainment in all this boredom.”

James glared at him, his mouth clamped shut, and stalked off down to the hall. Michael waited a few seconds for him to stop and turn around before going back into his classroom. Everybody stared at him once again as he returned to his seat, the bell ringing as he began taking his notebook out from his backpack.

They were all eager to learn more, learn why, discover the details of how exactly he had killed Joe, but he had no intention of giving it to them. They wouldn’t do anything new with the knowledge, just gawk and marvel, spectating a distantly relayed report of a grim undertaking. There was nothing he would gain by telling them how he did it. No social leverage, no invites to parties or further cementing of his reputation beyond what was already existing and out there. Even if there had been something, it would have been hollow. Pointless. Something emptily connected to the violence for no reason beyond that it was there.

He didn’t want the emptiness, the repetition of stale patterns. The stares from the hallway as he walked between classes were not notable, they were not something that he hated or enjoyed. They were simply markers of an event that had been repeated many times before, and would be repeated many times again, for reasons that might be different in the future, or could just as easily be the same. The result would never change. The payback rule required violence, in all aspects, and violence necessarily required the same end result of spilled blood and the termination of a process. Movements of weapons always concluded with lives.

For all the expertise, for all the skill and ways he could have tried something new, he didn’t want to. Michael was bored, seeking anything new or unique. The sameness of class, the rules that everybody followed, the way that people pretended to know nothing of a dead man even though any pretense of innocence was long vanished from the faces he saw at lockers and sitting around his desk. They would be the same no matter who died, no matter if it was from a first strike or the repercussions of payback or from finally being caught. People would play along as they waded through blood.

Maybe something would change. He imagined it, the math class cutting off as somebody else began to speak of something new. A clash in the cafeteria turning into something previously untouched and unknown, an unfolding of something truly new emerging in the center of a stasis-filled morass. The superintendent walking in with an announcement, of truth, of hidden depths, of a deeper meaning and revelation to everything that flowed within the cement-walled, dust-choked labyrinth of faintly rusted metal, old wooden doors, creaking faucets and musty textbooks. Of inexorable truths charging faster than death. A new angle to direct the execution of violence toward, a shift in the direction of the blood-filled gutters. Somewhere for the bodies different than a shallow hole in the woods.

But that wouldn’t happen. He went through classes, ate lunch, went back through classes. He listened to the gossip, endured the awestruck gazes and the eyes upon him narrowed while clutching polished handles and gnarled metal knuckles. It was the same as it ever was. The whispers, the realizations, the further solidification as the payback dealer, the one responsible for so many deaths. All for something inscrutable at best, the optimal outcome outside of his understanding, and at worst, all for nothing at all. He didn’t know which would be the preferable option.

Michael didn’t know what he wanted. Entertainment, novelty, uniqueness. If he would remain in his place, simply because that was where he was. If there even was something after high school, with how fast everything began being whittled down before graduation. If there was something truly new in Ravenville that wasn’t everything he knew wasn’t there at all.

Perhaps it was because those felt like the only things meaning anything in Ravenville.