The F-Class Student Is Earth's Hidden Weapon

Chapter Six: Deacon

Noah

The day after the boiler, running on maybe three hours of sleep, I remember all over again why Deacon Reyes is the one person who can still make me laugh on a day like this. He's been banned from the school cafeteria twice, and both times it was over pudding.

"They're overreacting," he tells me at lunch, like this is a totally reasonable thing to say about a school-wide pudding-cup boycott he organized in ninth grade to protest "portion size discrimination." "I stand by my actions."

"You started a riot over pudding."

"I started a movement, Noah. There's a difference."

I've known Deacon since second grade, since the day he sat down next to me at a lunch table nobody else wanted and asked if I wanted to trade my apple for his fruit snacks, a trade so obviously in my favor that I still bring it up sometimes just to see him get defensive about it. We've been best friends ever since, through elementary school, through his parents' divorce, through the year my dad died and I stopped talking to basically everyone except him for about four months straight. He never asked me to explain that silence. He just kept showing up at my locker every morning with something dumb to say until eventually I started talking again.

His family doesn't have much more than mine does. His mom works two jobs same as mine, though she's around during the day more, teaches part-time at the community college and picks up shifts at a grocery store on weekends. His Aunt Isabel lives further out and never misses his birthday, mails him a card every year with exactly the same amount folded inside, twenty dollars, like clockwork, and Deacon spends it the same way every year too, on something completely impractical.

"What'd you get this year?" I ask him, because his birthday was last week.

"A remote control car shaped like a shark."

"You're eighteen."

"The shark doesn't care how old I am, Noah. The shark just wants to swim."

This is what I love about Deacon. The world could be actively falling apart and he'd find a way to make you laugh about it before finding a way to fix it, usually in that exact order.

"Still thinking about what the Kesslers pulled at the cafe," he says, quieter now, dropping the joke for a second. "Denny ever say anything else about it?"

"Denny sided with them. Obviously."

Deacon's jaw tightens, just slightly, the only sign he ever gives that something actually bothers him. "One day," he says, "and I mean this with my whole chest, one day those two are gonna mess with the wrong person and it's gonna be beautiful to watch."

"Wrong person meaning you?"

"Wrong person meaning karma. I'm just hoping I get front row seats."

We sit in comfortable quiet a minute, the cafeteria noise washing over us, and I think about how different this table feels from every other table in this room. Nobody here is performing. Nobody's calculating who's worth talking to. It's just Deacon eating his sandwich with the crusts torn off because he still hasn't grown out of that from childhood, and me picking at cafeteria fries that taste like cardboard, and somehow it's the best part of my day, every single day, without fail.

"You good?" he asks eventually, out of nowhere, looking at me a little too closely. "Like actually good. Not the fine-I-say-when-I'm-not-fine good."

I think about lying. It's easier, most days, to just say I'm fine and let the conversation move somewhere lighter. But this is Deacon, and Deacon's earned better than the easy lie.

"Tired," I say. "Tired of the Kesslers. Tired of teachers assuming I cheated on a test I didn't cheat on. Tired of watching Serena look at me like she wants to say something and then not saying it."

Deacon nods slowly, chewing, thinking it over with the same seriousness he'd bring to an actual crisis. "Okay. Real talk. You want my honest opinion on Serena?"

"Not really."

"Too bad, here it is anyway. That girl likes you. Actually likes you, not just nice-to-you likes you. But she's scared, and scared people make bad choices, and one day you're gonna have to decide if you're willing to keep waiting around for her to get brave."

I don't have an answer for that. I don't think I want one yet.

"Anyway," Deacon says, mercifully changing the subject, "you seeing this weird stuff on the news? My mom's been glued to it all week. Some kind of lights in the sky thing over in Europe."

"Probably a satellite."

"That's what they said about the last three sightings too."

I shrug it off, because honestly, in a week where I got accused of cheating, had coffee thrown in my face, and fixed a forty-year-old boiler alone at midnight for zero credit, some blurry lights on the news don't even crack my top five concerns.

Deacon pulls out his phone anyway and shows me a shaky video, some grainy clip of a bright line streaking silently across a night sky somewhere outside Berlin, way too slow and way too straight to be a shooting star.

"Weird, right?"

"Weird," I agree, and go back to my fries.

Neither of us thinks much more about it. Why would we. It's just lights in the sky, some far-off blip in a world that's already given us enough to worry about at ground level.

We have no idea, not even a little bit, how wrong that assumption is about to turn out to be.