We loved him before we walked into the room. We loved him when we saw his name on our schedules. Mr. Sorent says, "All right, this is going to be a special class." We love him because of the music and movie posters on his walls, the black stud earring in his left ear, his shoulder-length hair. We love him because of those black horn-rimmed glasses, the same glasses we see people wearing on TV and in movies. We love him because he looks like us.

He stands at his podium. We love him because bumper stickers, many with political messages we want to understand, cover that podium. He says, "Because you guys are seniors and you're going to be outta here and out there," and he points out the window with his miniature baseball bat, and we love him for that, too, "we're going to learn more than just AP American History." We love him because he wears jeans. We love him because he makes fun of teachers we don't like. We love him because he plays guitar and he knows our songs.

There are only eight of us in his very special class. Four girls and four boys. We sit at a circular table. There are no desks. His is the only room in the school designed this way. He passes that smile around the circle. That smile we share, that smile we hoard for ourselves. He says, "We will be doing things outside of the book; special lessons. These lessons won't be every day or even every week, but they will be important. They will have weight and meaning. Certainly more meaning than the AP test you'll take next May."

We love him because he tells us the truth. Mr. Sorent leaves the podium and sits on a stool. "Just know the after-school rules apply to our special lessons." We love him because he lets us talk to him after school. He lets us be confidential. He lets us talk about beer and parties and drugs and parents and abortions. "This is so exciting. I really can't wait. Maybe we'll have a lesson tomorrow." We love him because he is the promise that growing old doesn't mean becoming irrelevant.

*

At dinner Mom asks me about my soccer game even though she watched it. She's dressed in a sweat suit that is as bright yellow as our kitchen. She leans over her plate to hear my answer. She's eager. She wants the coach to put her in the game. I tell her it was good because we won. Mom then answers her own question by announcing that those girls on the other team were playing dirty. Dad apologizes for missing the first game of the year, but it's perfunctory. He's wearing a yellow sweat suit too. He doesn't want to be left out. I tell him its okay and there'll be other games. My brother Lance is six years old and stirs around the unwanted green beans. I stare at his dinosaur plate and Spider-Man fork and wonder why everything has to be something. It's my turn to ask Lance how was his day. This is what we do at dinner. We ask about each other's day as if it was an actual object, something that could be held and presented. Lance giggles, covers his face, and tells us normal stuff happened. Everyone smiles even though we have no idea what normal stuff is. Dad asks me more questions and I try some humor; I say, "How could I possibly describe my day in a manner that would truly communicate my individual experience and world view concerning what had happened in that randomly delineated time period?" My parents laugh, and make we're-impressed faces. Dad says, "Did you learn that in school today, Kate?" He manages enough sarcasm for my approval. Mom shakes her head, then grabs my nose. Her fingers are cold. I look just like Mom. Right there, in the middle of my stir-fry, I make a solemn promise to never color my brown hair auburn, or wear a yellow sweat suit.

After dinner, I go to my room to do homework and to instant message my friends on the computer. Dialogue boxes pop up all over the screen. We type messages. We don't capitalize. We use bad grammar and code words. We chat about who is seeing whom and how far each couple has gone. We chat about TV and we chat about Mr. Sorent. We chat about weekends past and future and we chat about nothing, and it's a comfort. I don't hear my friends' voices but I know all their secret names.

*

A TV on a rolling stand replaces his podium. Mr. Sorent is a live wire. His hands are pissed off birds that keep landing on his face and then flying away. We sit and whisper jokes about Molly's short skirt and Miles's porn mustache, but we don't take our eyes off Mr. Sorent.

He says, "There will be more films and even some live demonstrations, but today's clip is the arc of the course." One of us turns out the lights without being asked, and the TV turns on.

A black and white security video of a classroom. There are finger paintings and posters with big happy letters on the walls. Stacks of blocks and toys and chairs that look like toys are strewn on the floor. There is no sound with the video, and we don't make any sounds. Five pre-schoolers run around the room, two more are standing on chairs and trying to knock each other off. The teacher is a young woman. She wears white, unflattering khakis and a collared shirt with the school's logo above the breast. Her hair is tied up tight behind her head, a fistful of piano wire. She breaks up the fight on the chairs, then another child runs into her leg and falls to the ground. She picks up the squirming child, grabbing one arm and leg. She spins, giving a brief airplane ride, but then she lets go. Mr. Sorent pauses the video, and we know the teacher did not simply let go.

Mr. Sorent doesn't say anything until we're all looking at him. He says, "I don't want to say too much about this." He edges the video ahead by one frame. The airborne child is a boy with straight blond hair. We can't see his face, and he's horizontal, trapped in the black and white ether three feet above the carpeted floor. "Your individual reactions will be your guide, your teacher." The video goes ahead another frame. The boy's classmates haven't had time to react. The teacher still has her arms extended out. If someone were to walk in now and see this, I imagine they'd want to believe she was readying to catch the child. Not the opposite, not what really happened. Mr. Sorent moves the video ahead another frame and a wall comes into view, stage right. Class ends, and none of us will go see Mr. Sorent after school.

*

At dinner we eat spaghetti, and we're quiet. Everyone's day is a guarded secret. My parents missed my soccer game and when they ask about it, I tell them I scored a goal when I didn't. My parents are smart; I think they know I'm making it up, but they don't call me on it. They're still dressed in their work clothes, not their usual sweat suit dining wear. Mom sits up straight and I can almost hear her spine straining into its perfect posture. Dad crouches behind a glass of water. Lance won't speak to us. He shrugs and grunts when we ask him questions. Dad sighs, which means he is pissed. Mom tells Lance it's okay to have a cranky day. I imagine Lance flying through the air, toward a wall, and I get the same stomach dropping feeling I get sometimes when I think about the future.

I don't eat much and I go up to my room early to instant message my friends. They're all here on my computer. No one talks about the video. We know the rules. But no one knows what they're supposed to write in their notebooks. Mr. Sorent handed us special-lesson composition notebooks that he wants us to decorate. We're supposed to write down diary entries or essays or stories or doodles or anything we're moved to do after reflecting upon the lesson. My notebook is open but empty, a pen lying in the spine. I've tried to write something, but there's nothing, and I get that afraid-of-the-future feeling again.

*

Days and weeks pass without another special lesson. We've had plenty of time to waste. Our first term grades are good and we lose ourselves in the responsibilities of senior year; of college recommendations and applications and social requirements.

On the first day of winter term the TV returns. Mr. Sorent doesn't have to tell us what to do. We pull our chairs in tight and put away our books. Mr. Sorent says, "Lesson two, gang."

There is a collage of clips and images, nothing in focus for more than a second or two, of car accidents. The kind of stuff some of us saw in driver's ed. The images of crushed and limbless and decapitated bodies are intercut with scenes from funerals, and there are red-eyed family members, the ones who never saw any of it coming, wailing and crying and breaking apart. Then the video ends with a teenage boy, alone in his room. There's no sound. His head is shaved to black stubble and he wears a sleeveless white tee shirt. The room is dark, and he scowls. There's no warning and he puts a handgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. A dark mist forms behind his head and then he falls out of the picture. Mr. Sorent switches to the pre-school video, still paused where he left it. He runs the video for a frame, then a second. The boy is still floating and horizontal, but getting closer to the wall. On the wall, bottoms of the finger paintings are curling up, heading toward the ceiling as if everything could fly. None of the boy's classmates know what is happening yet. But we know.

Mr. Sorent says, "Don't forget to do your homework."

*

There was this time I was waiting for Mom to come home. I had a little league game in an hour. I wore my white uniform and black cleats, ponytail sticking through the back of my hat. I was in front of my house skipping rope even though I didn't like skipping rope, but I liked the sounds my cleats made on the pavement. I was nine years old but if anyone asked I pretended I was ten. Three neighborhood boys, three teammates dressed in their white baseball uniforms, came by, grabbed me, and forced me into one of their back yards. I didn't resist much as they used the jump rope to tie my arms behind my back, but I screamed a little, just enough to let them know that I didn't fully approve, especially since they never talked to me at baseball practice or games because I was a girl. They led me toward the edge of a stranger's wooded property, to a woodpile buried in dried pine needles and spider webs. They'd hanged a bullfrog by its neck from a piece of twine. It was as big as a puppy and kicking its legs out and covering itself in web and debris. The jump rope went slack on my arms but the boys didn't care. They told me to watch. They threw rocks. They had a BB gun and shot out one of the frog's eyes. Then they took turns pulling and pinching the frog, dancing at the base of the woodpile in their bright white baseball uniforms. Everything was white. They had a book of matches.

I left the jump rope in the grass like a dead snake and walked home and sat down in front of the TV. Nothing was on. Mom was late coming home and we missed the first inning of my game. When it was my turn to be the pitcher, I closed my eyes before releasing every pitch, afraid of what might happen.

*

Jake sits in a chair at the front of the room. Jake is elderly and has no hair. His face is a rotting fruit, and he moves like a marionette with tangled strings. He grins. Big yellow teeth break through his purple lips. He wears only a hospital gown, blue and white socks, and brown slippers. None of us want to be here. Jake says, "Thanks to the loving support of family and friends, even if I don't beat this disease, I'll still have won, you know what I mean?" We don't know what he means. We couldn't possibly know. He says more heroic things, things that win us over, things that speak to the indomitable human spirit we always hear about, things that inspire us, that make us want to be better people, things that make us believe.

Then Mr. Sorent says, "Okay, Jake." Jake drops the curtain on his yellow teeth and he slouches into his chair; his marionette strings cut. He tells us everything he's just said is bullshit. He tells us to fuck off. He hates our fucking guts because of our health and youth and beauty. He hates us because we expect and demand him to be brave in facing his own withering existence, because we expect him to make our own lives seem better, or tolerable. He tells us we're selfish and that he'll die angry and bitter if he wants, that he's not here to die the right way for us, fuck you you fucks he tells us, he doesn't give two shits about us and he tells us that we'll all die the same way he will. Alone. He limps out of the room, limbs shaking and moving in wrong directions.

Mr. Sorent says, "Look here," and he points with his bat. We hate that stupid bat now. We want to steal it or break it or burn it. It's meaningless to us. The bat points at the TV screen tucked away in a corner of the room, framed by all those posters that are no longer cool, but trying too hard to be cool. We want to destroy those too. We want to destroy everything. Mr. Sorent is still pointing with that ridiculous bat at the floating-boy video. It moves ahead another frame. Class dismissed.

*

I help Lance with his homework. Lance sighs like Dad whenever we finish a problem, as if he'd just completed the world's most demanding task. I tell him he better get used to it. His eyebrows are two little caterpillars fighting on his forehead. I want to tell him about the bullfrog and about pitching with your eyes closed.

My cell phone rings and Lance ducks under the couch cushions. He thinks he's funny. Caller ID says it's Tom, my boyfriend, and I crawl under the cushions next to Lance. Lance giggles and tries to push me out, kicking me in the head and chest. Tom hasn't called me all week. I hold the ringing phone against Lance's ear, and mock screams mix with his giggles. My last date with Tom was a movie. We watched the previews intently. During the movie, I wouldn't let him stick his hand into my jeans. I told him to stick his hand in his own pants. I thought I was funny. He pouted the rest of the night. I don't and won't answer Tom's phone call. I'm going to break up with him. He's starting to scare me. Lance and I emerge from the couch after the phone stops ringing, and Lance rushes through the rest of his assignment, his eights looking like crumbling buildings.

I go upstairs and to the computer. I tell everyone that I'm going to break up with Tom before I tell Tom. Tom hears it from somebody else and he yells at me through cyberspace; capital letters and multiple exclamation marks and no smiley faces. I make jokes about him masturbating to porn. I make jokes about the size and smell of his dick. I don't do any homework for Mr. Sorent's class.

*

All eight of us in Mr. Sorent's special class, our grades aren't good anymore. We are not in good academic standing. Some of us drink. Some of us smoke. Some of us will fuck anyone and everyone, or we punch and kick and destroy, or we drive really fast and late at night, or we stay locked in our rooms. Teachers openly talk about the changes, our senior slides, our early spring fever, and they pretend to be more knowing than they are. But they don't know anything and they won't do anything.

Mr. Sorent has stopped teaching us AP American History because we don't listen. Most days he sits at his desk and reads the paper, smelling of old cigarettes and something else, something organic none of us cares to identify. His hair is greasy and formless. His jeans don't fit his waist correctly, not cut to the length and style we want. He doesn't shave and his beard grows in patchy and rough. He wears old glasses now, the lenses too big. He is an old man trying to act young. He's a fraud. He knows nothing. He can teach us nothing. We know this now even if we didn't know it then. We've stripped his podium of the bumper stickers, stolen his CDs and his miniature bat.

We only listen to Mr. Sorent during the special lessons. One class he showed us a PowerPoint presentation of crime scene photos: there was a man beaten to death with a bat, his sausage-sized lips the only recognizable part of his face, and there was an old man hacked to death with a samurai sword, and there was a woman who shot herself in the chest with a shotgun, a junkie so withered you couldn't tell she was female even with her shirt off. Another class was war footage, soldiers and civilians in pieces and burnt and eaten away by the chemicals neither side was using. Another class was snuff and torture films and the sound was the worst part. In other classes we saw the Columbine video, terrorists beheading kidnap victims, grainy newsreel stuff from Chernobyl and Hiroshima, and from Auschwitz and Cambodia and Rwanda and Kosovo and their endless piles of bodies.

And there's still the floating-boy video. Moving only frame to frame with each new day. Some days we can believe there has been no progress, as if that boy will be trapped in the amber of TV forever, but that's not right. He has progressed. He's almost at the wall.

*

No one talks at dinner. Just forks on plates. Mom says she already ate and then goes out wearing heels and sunglasses and not her yellow sweat suit. Dad takes off his tie and unbuttons his shirt and dumps Lance in front of the TV with his dinosaur plate and Spider-man fork. Lance has dark, purple circles under his eyes, his skin carrying something heavy. In all the hours of TV Lance has already logged, I wonder if he's seen the floating boy. Dad disappears into his bedroom, and then the master bathroom. Both doors shut at the same time. I'm the only one eating at the table. Maybe this is how it always was. I go upstairs. Online I find my friends arguing without me. Tomorrow is our last class with Mr. Sorent. Its arrival will be unheralded and inevitable. I still haven't written anything in my notebook. I can't decide if I want that to mean anything. If I were to write something down, I'd tell Mr. Sorent about the bullfrog. No, maybe I'd just tell him about me pitching in the little league game. Tell him how when I closed my eyes, I hoped the ball would stop somewhere between me and the catcher and just float. I would hope so hard I'd believe it was really happening. With my eyes closed I'd see that ball just hovering and spinning and I'd follow the path of those angry red stitches along with everyone else, we'd all stare it for hours, even when it got dark. But then I would hear the ball hitting the catcher's mitt, or the bat, or the dull thud of the ball smacking into the batter's back, and open my eyes.

*

Mr. Sorent has shaved and cleaned himself up, has a new mini-bat, bumper stickers back on his podium. He's a cicada, emerging fresh from his seven-year sleep. He says, "You think you know why I'm doing this. But you don't," which is something so teacherly to say and utterly void of credibility or relevance. "So let's begin again."

We're tired and old, and we've experienced more and know more than he does. We know we can't ever begin again. We hand in our special notebooks. They are decorated and filled with our blood, except for one notebook that is empty. One of us closes our eyes after releasing the empty notebook, refusing to watch its path to the teacher's desk.

Mr. Sorent turns on the TV and the floating-boy video. The boy's head is only inches away from the wall. Some of his classmates are watching now, but they probably don't know what is really going on, or even what is going to happen. We hope they don't know. We hope they aren't like us. The teacher has retracted her arms and is facing the boy and the wall. Her face is blurry and because we haven't seen the entire video at normal speed, we don't know if this means she's trying to look away or if it's just a quirk of the video or if there's some other meaning that we haven't unearthed, or if it's all meaningless.

Mr. Sorent rewinds the video, the boy flies backward and into the teacher's embrace. We know it won't last. He says, "I need a volunteer."

This isn't fair. He is trying to break us apart, turning we into me. Doesn't he know that we'll hate the volunteer? The volunteer won't be able to rewind back into the we. We will never be the same. Maybe we are being melodramatic but we don't care. We believe the volunteer to be irreversible; there is no begin again, Mr. Sorent, why can't you understand that? But I volunteer anyway.

I leave our circle and it becomes their circle. I walk to the front of the class, next to the TV and I imagine the floating boy finally hitting his wall and then smashing through the right side of the television and into me, into my arms.

"Stand here and face that wall."

I do as he says. I feel their eyes on me. Them who used to be we.

"Please walk halfway toward the wall. Everyone else watch the video." I take four steps and stop, the TV is behind me so I can't see the screen. "Please halve the distance again, Kate." I take two steps. When I move I hear the DVD player whir into action and then pause when I pause. "Again, Kate." I take one step. I could touch the wall now, if I wanted, and rip down the movie posters that we once tore down.

"If you keep halving the distance, Kate, will you ever get there? Is forever that far away, or that close? What do you think, class?" He says class like it's the dirtiest of words. I close my eyes, and take a half step, then a quarter-step, an eighth-step, and I still haven't hit the wall.

"That's good enough, Kate." I don't move, but not because of what he said.

"Go back to your seat and we'll let you decide whether or not this little boy will ever hit the wall." I don't move. My eyes are still closed and I'll stay here until I'm removed. I haven't touched it yet, but the wall is intimately close. It's impending, and it's always there. Mr. Sorent says something to me but I'm not listening and I'm not going to move. I'll stay here with my eyes closed and pretend that where I am is where I'll always be. Where am I? I'm at the dinner table discussing days with my dissatisfied parents. I'm helping Lance and his caterpillars with homework. I'm at the computer instant messaging secrets to secret friends.

"Return to your seat so we may finally watch the video, Kate."

No. I'm staying where I am. I'm the baseball pitch that stops before home. I'm an empty notebook. I'm half the distance to the wall. I'm the video with an ending that I won't ever watch.