All Chapters of SIR: Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

181 Chapters

#1: Good Old Spontaneous Combustion

The thing about stealing is that the hard part was never the taking. It was the getting away with it. "Left, left, left!" Emma hisses beside me, her ponytail whipping across my face as we round the corner. "I heard you the first time!" I snap back, tucking the folded test papers tighter against my chest as we sprint. The manila envelope crinkles with every stride and I want to scream at it to be quiet, but that would require slowing down, and slowing down is not something I can afford right now because two of Westbridge Academy's finest security personnel are thundering behind us and they are, unfortunately, more athletic than their faces suggested. "They're gaining!" Emma breathes. "Thank you, Emma, I would never have figured that out on my own." She ignores my sarcasm, which honestly, after four years of friendship, she's gotten very good at. We skid around another corner and I catch the exit sign at the end of the hallway, green and glowing and beautiful, and for exactly t

#2: He Knows

He knows. I don’t know how he knows, I don’t know who in this building has a death wish severe enough to gossip to Elias Arden about my business, but he knows, and he’s sitting there with that barely-there smile like he’s already won something and we haven’t even been in this room for five minutes. I turn back to my notebook and write absolutely nothing on the clean page in front of me because I can’t remember what class this notebook is even for and my brain is too busy formulating ways to make the next two weeks survivable. The proctor, whose name tag reads Ms. Finch and who has not looked up from her paperback once, clears her throat at the front of the room for no apparent reason and then goes back to reading. The fluorescent light buzzes faintly overhead. Someone two rows ahead is clicking a pen in a rhythm that I am going to need them to stop immediately. “You’re not going to ask me how I know?” Elias says, without looking up from his book. “I’m not going to do anything you

#3: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Emma is waiting at the bottom of the steps with her bag clutched to her chest and the expression of someone who has been rehearsing an apology for the last two hours and is now unsure which version to lead with. Beside her, Priya is on her phone, and Chloe is eating from a bag of chips with the unbothered energy of someone who was not, in fact, the one who spent the afternoon in detention. "How bad was it?" Priya asks without looking up from her phone. "Two weeks of detention." Chloe stops chewing. "Two weeks?" "Yup. Every day starting today, so technically I've already served my first sentence." I start walking and they fall in around me the way they always do, Priya tucking her phone away, Chloe folding her chip bag closed, Emma falling into step beside me with that guilt still written all over her face. "It's fine, I handled it, Mercer and I came to a civilized understanding. Can we go eat now?" "Lucia," Emma says quietly, an

#4: Alone

There are four of them. My brain registers this with a clinical detachment that lasts approximately two seconds before the fear moves in and makes itself completely at home. They materialize from the edges of the alley the way things do in nightmares, unhurried, spreading out as they come, and even in the dim light I can see enough to understand that these are not boys playing at something. These are men who have done this before and are comfortable with how it goes. I stop walking. Running is not an option I'm evaluating yet because there are four points of entry and I came from the only clear one and it's already closing behind me. The heels I wore tonight because Jason said we were going somewhere nice are four inches of complete tactical disadvantage on wet pavement. Think, Lucia. Think right now, think fast, think better than you've ever thought about anything. "Nice night for a walk," one of them says, and his friends find this funnier than it is. I swallow, and lift my chi

#5: Not A Good Day

Eli’s POV The 6 train smells like the end of a long day and Eli is intimately familiar with both. He gets a seat somewhere between 86th and 77th, which never happens this time of evening. He takes it as the universe’s one act of generosity toward him today and drops into it and lets his head fall back against the glass. His bag is between his feet, his blazer is folded across his lap because wearing it on the commute home feels like a lie he doesn’t have the energy to maintain, and the car rattles and shudders through the dark tunnel the way it always does, indifferent to everyone aboard. Two hours and fourteen minutes, door to door, on a good day. This was not a good day. He thinks about Lucia Ellis for approximately three stops and then stops, because thinking about Lucia is a waste of processing power he doesn’t have. She is, objectively, the most irritating person he has ever been in a room with, and he has been in rooms with his mother’s ex-boyfriend who used to practice harm

#6: Go To Bed

The ceiling of Mount Sinai’s third floor is a particular shade of off-white that I have now spent enough time staring at to have opinions about, and my opinion is that whoever chose this color has never had to look at it from a hospital bed while their face throbs and their palms sting and the events of the last three hours replay on a loop they haven’t figured out how to stop yet. I’m fine. That’s what I’ve decided. I decided it somewhere between the cab and the admissions desk and the examination room where a very kind nurse cleaned the gravel out of my palms with a gentleness that almost made me cry, which I did not do, because I was fine. My cheek has been treated. My knees are bandaged. Nothing is broken. Physically, by every available medical metric, I am fine, and I am going to keep being fine, and the fact that my hands won’t stop trembling slightly is just adrenaline and adrenaline fades and I am going to be completely fine. Zeke is sitting in the chair beside my bed like

#7: Whole Lot Of Time

Three days is apparently how long my parents need to decide that the world is safe enough for me to eat breakfast in it again. I spent Saturday mostly in bed, which I allowed because my body requested it in terms I couldn’t argue with, and Sunday I spent on the window seat in my room with a sketchbook I barely touched and a cup of tea that went cold three times. My mother came in and out with things, food, extra blankets, the kind of gentle hovering she does when she’s worried but knows that smothering me will produce the opposite of the intended effect. My father I heard mostly through walls, the low register of his voice on phone calls that he took in his office with the door closed, which is how I knew they were about something he didn’t want echoing through the house. I didn’t ask what it was yet. I was picking my moments. Monday morning I come downstairs dressed and ready for school, because lying in that room for one more day with n

#8: Hoping And Praying

I sit very still for approximately four seconds, which is the amount of time it takes my brain to process what Eli just said. I’m just here, hoping and praying this is one of his cruel pranks. “Try not to look too excited,” Elias says, wearing a smile so bright that means he’s genuinely enjoying himself and that tells me the most brutal truth of all. It isn’t a joke. “Shut up,” I snap. “Five minutes ago you were mad at me for not talking to you, now you want me quiet,” he shrugs a shoulder and picks up his pen. “You’re gonna have to start being much clearer if we’re gonna be besties.” It takes everything in me not to punch him, meanwhile he just returns to writing. My new bodyguard. Elias Arden. Who has spent the better part of two years finding increasingly creative ways to get under my skin. That person is going to be living in my house, following me to school, standing outside my bedroom doo

#9. Call Me David

Eli’s POV The numbers won’t change no matter how many times he looks at them. This is a thing Eli has known since he was old enough to understand what numbers meant, that staring at them longer doesn’t produce different results, that the math is the math and wishing it were otherwise is a luxury that costs more than he has. He knows this. He still opens the banking app and closes it and opens it again, because the alternative is sitting at the kitchen table at seven in the morning with nothing to do but listen to the apartment breathe. He lays it out the way he does every two weeks, Notepad, pen, phone face-up for the calculator. Rent on the left column. Utilities. Groceries, estimated. His mother’s kidney medication, which is not estimated because it doesn’t vary and cannot be reduced and is, by itself, more than their combined food costs for the month. Then a gap for the boxing money on the right column, which should be there and isn’t, because last night he didn’t make it to

#10: Old Debts

The first thing I see when I walk into the kitchen Monday morning is Eli at my family’s breakfast table, sittng where Zeke used to seat, and eating Maria’s rosemary bread. The second thing I see is my eleven-year-old brother Lucas sitting directly across from him, leaning forward with both elbows on the table and the expression he gets during particularly riveting episodes of whatever documentary series he’s currently obsessed with, which apparently this morning is Elias Arden in the flesh. “But what’s the difference between a hook and a cross?” Lucas is saying, with the intensity of someone who needs this answered before they can continue with their day. “Setup versus power,” Eli says, and he gestures with his fork in a way that somehow communicates the mechanics of it. “Hook comes from the side, shorter range, more snap. Cross goes straight with full rotation behind it, that’s where the real damage is.” “Which one did you use on those guys in the alley?” “Lucas,” I say, from the

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