He took a few more steps forward, propelled now by a burning anger that he’d never managed to escape. His mind slipped back to a multiple-choice test question he’d been asking himself for more than a year: Whom do you hate? A) Him; B) Her; C) Yourself? It never worked to add extra choices: (D) All of the above; E) A and B; F) A and C; or C) B and C? Because then the question just became, Whom do you hate the most?

Stop it! Trey commanded himself. Just pretend you’re Lee.

Trey’s friend Lee had been an illegal third child like Trey, but Lee had grown up out in the country, on an isolated farm, so he’d been able to spend plenty of time outdoors. He’d almost, They thought, grown up normal. As much as Trey feared and hated being outdoors, Lee craved it.

“How can you stand it?” Trey had asked Lee once. “Why aren’t you terrified? Don’t you ever think about the danger?”

“I guess not,” Lee had said, shrugging. “When I’m outdoors I look at the sky and the grass and the trees, and I guess that’s all I think about”.

Trey looked at the sky and the grass and the trees around him, and all he could think was, Lee should be here, walking up to Mr. Talbot’s door, instead of me. Lee had been in the car with Trey and Nina and Joel and John until just about ten minutes earlier. But Lee had had the chauffeur drop him and another boy, Smits, off at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere because, Lee had said, “I have to get Smits to safety.”

Trey suspected that Lee was taking Smits home, to Lee’s parents’ house, but Trey was trying very hard not to think that It was too dangerous. Even thinking about it was dangerous.

And thinking about it made Trey jealous, because Lee still had a home he could go to, and parents who loved him, and Trey didn’t.

But Lee would be dead right now if it weren’t for me, They thought with a strange emotion he barely recognized well enough to name. Pride. He felt proud. And, cowardly Latin motto or no, he had a right to that pride.