Something About Alex

The new kid arrived on a Monday, which everyone agreed was the worst possible day to start a new school, and introduced himself as Alex Brennan, which Zoe immediately wrote in her notebook under the heading THINGS THAT ARE PROBABLY NOT TRUE.

"You cannot just write that," said her best friend Cass, reading over her shoulder.

"I can and I have," Zoe said.

"You do not even know him yet."

"I know that he has been at three different schools in two years," Zoe said, "which Mrs. Okafor mentioned while showing him around and which he clearly did not want mentioned because he looked at the floor. I know his school bag is brand new but his pencil case is ancient and has someone else's name half-rubbed-off on it. And I know he gave the register his name as Alex but when Cory dropped his lunch tray and everyone turned around, he was the only person who did not turn around, which means Alex is probably not what he is used to responding to."

Cass stared at her. She had known Zoe for four years and was fully aware of what Zoe was like, and it still occasionally surprised her.

"You got all of that from one morning?"

"One morning and a lunch period," Zoe said. "Also his shoes are the wrong size. They are slightly too big. He is walking carefully to avoid tripping, which means he got them in a hurry and they were not fitted properly."

Their other friend Dom, who had been listening from the other side of the table with growing alarm, said: "Or he just has big feet."

"His feet are not big," Zoe said. "The shoes are."

Dom considered this. "So what are you saying?"

"I am saying," Zoe said, closing her notebook, "that something about Alex Brennan is not quite right and I intend to find out what."

"Could we do that," Cass said carefully, "without being weird about it?"

"I am never weird about things," Zoe said.

Cass and Dom looked at each other across the table.

The investigation, which Zoe refused to call an investigation out loud because she was aware of how that sounded, began on Tuesday.

The investigation had three rules, which Zoe wrote in her notebook before she went to sleep on Tuesday night.

Rule one: do not make Alex uncomfortable. Whatever his situation was, he had not asked to be investigated by three twelve-year-olds and he deserved to go about his school day without feeling watched.

Rule two: do not tell anyone outside the three of them. Whatever they found out stayed between them.

Rule three: if at any point the investigation started to feel wrong, they stopped. Full stop. No arguments.

She looked at the rules. Then she added rule four: if Alex ever asked them to stop, they stopped immediately and pretended the whole thing had never happened.

She thought rule four was the most important one. She also thought it was the kind of rule she hoped she would never need to use.

She sat near Alex in English and studied him with the peripheral-vision technique she had been practising since year four, which involved looking slightly to one side of a person so they did not know they were being observed. Alex sat with good posture, answered questions when called on, and was polite to the teacher in the precise careful way of someone who had learned that being polite to teachers was the fastest way to avoid drawing attention.

His handwriting, she noticed when he wrote the date in his planner, was slightly different from how most people wrote. Rounder. Not the handwriting of someone who had learned in England, she thought, or at least not only in England. She filed this away.

He had no stickers on his pencil case. No keyring on his bag. No drawings on his planner. Nothing personal at all, which was either because he was extremely tidy or because he was extremely new and had not accumulated things yet, or because he was specifically not accumulating things.

The three of them had a very specific dynamic that worked because they each did different things. Zoe noticed things. Cass talked to people. Dom asked the question that everyone else was thinking but nobody had said yet. It had served them well over four years of friendship and it served them well now.

At lunch Cass sat down next to him first, before Zoe could stop her, and introduced herself, because Cass's approach to mysteries was to simply talk to the mystery directly, which Zoe found both effective and alarming.

"I am Cass," Cass said. "That is Zoe and that is Dom. Do you want to sit with us?"

Alex looked at the three of them. He had brown eyes and a careful expression and the slightly braced look of someone waiting for something to go wrong.

"Sure," he said.

"Where did you move from?" Dom asked, because Dom's approach to mysteries was to ask the direct question immediately and see what happened.

"Up north," Alex said. "A small town. You would not know it."

"Try me," Dom said. "I know lots of small towns."

"Harwick," Alex said, after a very small pause. The pause was under a second. Zoe clocked it.

Dom thought about it. "Never heard of it," he said.

"I said you would not," Alex said. And for just a moment, the careful expression slipped and something that was almost a smile appeared underneath it.

Zoe wrote Harwick in her notebook under her desk. Then she wrote: pause before answering. Then she wrote: almost smiled at Dom. She added a small star next to that last one.

Dom had texted that night: so what's the verdict. Zoe had replied: still gathering evidence. Dom had replied: you are literally the most intense person I know and I mean that as a compliment. Zoe had replied: I know.

She looked up Harwick that evening and found a small town in the north of England with a population of about four thousand people and no obvious reason to move away from it. She found no record of an Alex Brennan associated with the town. She found no record of an Alex Brennan at any of the three previous schools she had identified from Mrs. Okafor's comment, which she had cross-referenced with the county school transfer database, which was publicly accessible and which she had found by spending forty minutes going through the council website.

"You spent forty minutes on the council website?" Cass said, on the phone that evening.

"It is poorly organised but the information is there if you look," Zoe said.

"Zoe."

"The point is there is no Alex Brennan at any of those schools. The transfer records show a student with no previous school listed, which is unusual, which means whoever enrolled him provided incomplete information, which schools normally push back on."

"Unless someone with authority told the school not to push back," Cass said slowly.

"Exactly," Zoe said.

"Also," Cass said, "can we talk about the fact that you cross-referenced the county school transfer database at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night?"

"It was nine forty-five," Zoe said.

"That is not better," Cass said.

"The database was very easy to navigate once you found it," Zoe said. "That is the important thing."

There was a pause.

"Zoe," Cass said. "Is Alex Brennan in witness protection?"

"I think Alex Brennan might be in witness protection," Zoe said.

Another pause. Then Cass said: "Dom is going to absolutely lose his mind."

Dom did, in fact, lose his mind.

"Witness protection," he said, at lunch the next day, slightly too loudly. Zoe and Cass both looked at him. He lowered his voice. "Witness protection," he said again, quieter, with equal intensity. "Like in films."

"Exactly like in films except real and presumably less dramatic," Zoe said. "And we do not know for certain. It fits the evidence but there could be other explanations."

"What other explanations?" Dom said.

"I cannot think of any," Zoe admitted.

Alex was sitting at the other end of the table, eating a sandwich and reading a book with complete concentration. He was reading it from the middle. Not from the beginning, not from the end, from the middle, which was either because he had read it before or because he had picked it up and started wherever it fell open. Neither option told her much. She noted it anyway.

He had, Zoe had noted, positioned himself with his back to the wall and a clear view of the canteen door, which was either coincidence or habit.

"We cannot tell him we know," Cass said. "If he is in protection then his safety depends on people not knowing."

"We are twelve," Dom said. "We are not going to tell anyone."

"We are not going to tell anyone," Zoe agreed. "But I want to know if I am right. I want one piece of confirmation. Something that tells me the evidence adds up and I have not just invented a complicated story about a kid who moved schools a lot and buys shoes that do not fit."

"How do you get confirmation without asking him directly?" Cass said.

Cass said: "I just want to be clear that if he is in witness protection and we accidentally blow his cover I will never forgive myself."

"We are not going to blow his cover," Zoe said. "We are twelve. Nobody thinks twelve-year-olds are a security risk."

"That is either reassuring or the saddest thing you have ever said," Cass said.

Dom said: "Okay but what if we are wrong and he is just a kid who moves schools a lot and has bad shoe-buying habits."

"Then we never say anything and nothing happens," Zoe said. "That is why we are not asking him directly."

"Right," Dom said. "Good system.""

"Thank you," Zoe said. "I designed it."

Zoe had been thinking about this since the previous evening. She had a plan. The plan was, she thought, either very clever or very stupid, and the only way to find out which was to try it.

"I am going to ask him something only he would know how to answer," she said. "If he is who I think he is."

She sat next to him in the library the following afternoon, when he was there alone, and opened her own book, and waited until the silence felt settled and normal.

There was a moment in the library, about twenty minutes in, where Zoe almost lost her nerve. Not because she doubted her theory but because she was suddenly aware that if she was right then she was sitting next to a person who had been through something genuinely difficult, something she knew nothing about, and who had had to leave everything and become someone new. And she was about to poke at that.

She reminded herself of rule four.

Then she said, without looking up:

"Do you find it hard? Moving around so much?"

A pause. "A bit," Alex said. Careful. Noncommittal.

"The thing about starting somewhere new," Zoe said, still looking at her book, "is that you do not know which people are worth the trouble yet. And you cannot find out without trying, which is risky when you are not planning to stay."

Alex said nothing. She could feel him paying attention.

"I think," Zoe said, "that you are worth the trouble. And I think you might stay longer than you expect." She turned a page. "I also think that your name is probably not Alex, but I am going to keep calling you Alex because it is the name you chose and that matters."

The library was very quiet. Someone returned a book at the desk. Outside a football bounced against the gym wall twice and stopped.

"How did you know?" Alex said. His voice was very quiet.

"The shoes," Zoe said. "And the pencil case. And the fact that you did not turn around when Cory dropped his tray."

"The tray thing," Alex said, half to himself. "I keep forgetting about the tray thing."

"For what it is worth," Zoe said, "nobody else noticed."

"You are not nobody else," Alex said. He said it without any particular inflection, just as a fact, the way you stated something that was simply true. Zoe found that she did not entirely know what to do with that, so she turned another page and kept her expression neutral and said nothing, which was harder than it usually was.

After a moment Alex said: "Cass and Dom. Do they know?"

"They know what I know," Zoe said. "Which is nothing specific. Just a theory."

"And you are not going to tell anyone."

"Of course not," Zoe said. "It is none of anyone's business."

Alex looked at his book. He was quiet for a while. Then he said: "My name is actually Jake."

"Hello, Jake," Zoe said.

"Hello," he said. And this time the careful expression went all the way and the smile underneath it came through properly, real and slightly surprised, and Zoe thought that was probably the first genuine smile he had produced at this school and possibly at several schools before it.

She went back to her book. He went back to his. The library was quiet and ordinary around them.

Outside the gym wall the football started up again.

The next morning Alex arrived at school at the same time as the three of them and fell into step beside them without making it a thing, which Zoe thought showed good instincts, and Dom immediately started telling him about a football match he had watched the previous evening and Alex said actually I think that call in the second half was wrong, and Dom said THANK YOU, and just like that it was established.

She had, technically, got confirmation. He had said my name is actually Jake. That was confirmation. She had been right about all of it and she sat in the library with that knowledge and felt the particular satisfaction of a theory proved, which lasted about four seconds before it was replaced by something more complicated and harder to name.

She thought about a person who had been through something difficult enough to require a new name, new shoes, a new school bag, a whole new version of themselves built from scratch. She thought about practising not turning around when someone said your old name. She thought about the tray thing.

She closed her notebook.

Zoe wrote in her notebook that night: confirmed. One word. She looked at it for a moment and then wrote underneath: be normal about it tomorrow.

She drew a box around that second instruction because she knew from experience that she needed the box to make instructions stick.

She told Cass and Dom that evening, and they had the reaction she had expected: Cass said oh, quietly, in the way she said things when she was moved by something and did not want to show it. Dom said I knew it, which was not true but was allowed because Dom needed to feel that he had contributed, which he had, because his question about small towns had produced the pause that had been the first real crack in the story.

"Is he okay?" Cass asked. "Like, actually okay?"

"I think he is managing," Zoe said. "He is good at it. He has had practice."

"That is a sad thing to be good at," Dom said.

"Yes," Zoe agreed. "But he is here now. And we know. And we are not going to be weird about it."

"You said earlier you are never weird about things," Dom said.

"I meant it both times," Zoe said.

She also thought, and this surprised her slightly, that she was glad she had been in the right seat on the right day. Not because the mystery had been interesting, although it had been. But because Alex, or Jake, whoever he was building himself into, was going to need people who were normal about it. And the three of them, she thought, were specifically good at being normal about things that other people found hard to be normal about.

On Thursday Alex sat with them at lunch without being asked and ate his sandwich and argued with Dom about football and borrowed Cass's pen and did not give it back, which Cass said was fine because it was a spare, and Zoe wrote in her notebook: Alex. Here. Staying.

She thought about crossing out Alex and writing Jake underneath. She decided not to. Alex was the name he had chosen for this place, for this school, for this version of his life that was still being built. Jake was the name he had trusted her with, which was different and private and not hers to put in a notebook.

Zoe looked at her notebook on Friday afternoon. The last entry was Alex. Here. Staying. with the star next to it. She turned back through the previous pages. Three different schools. Harwick. The pencil case. The shoes. The tray. The pause before answering.

She thought that mysteries were satisfying when they resolved cleanly, when the evidence pointed one way and that way turned out to be right. She thought this mystery had resolved cleanly but also had turned out to be about something that was not a puzzle at all.

It was about a person who was doing something very hard very quietly and needed people around them who would be normal about it.

She thought she could do that. She thought Cass and Dom could do that. She thought the three of them were, between them, reasonably good at most things that mattered.

She drew a small star next to the entry instead.

The same kind she used for things that had worked out better than expected.

This one had worked out considerably better than expected.

The End