Monday morning smelled of chalk dust and floor polish, the way Whitfield Middle School always smelled at the start of the week. Jalen stood at the front gate with his bag over his shoulder, looking at the brick building, the flag on its pole, and the clusters of children pouring in through the doors, and he felt his stomach tighten in a way it never had before. He had always liked school. Now he was not sure whether school still liked him.
"Ready?" Grace asked. She had walked him to the gate, as she used to when he was smaller, and she had not made a fuss about it, which he was grateful for.
"Ready," Jalen said, though he was not entirely sure.
Grace squeezed his shoulder. "Remember," she said, "you are the same boy who walked through that gate last week. The story changed. You did not."
She left him there, and he walked in alone, down the corridor with its scuffed floor and its noticeboards full of spelling lists and football fixtures. At first, everything seemed normal. His locker opened with the same stubborn squeak. His maths book was where he had left it. Then, at the corner near the water fountain, a boy from the year above pointed at him and said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, "Hey, it's the millionaire!"
In his first class, the teacher, Mrs. Bennett, smiled at him warmly and said, "Welcome back, Jalen. We missed you on Friday." She did not make a speech. She simply started the lesson, and for a while Jalen could almost believe that nothing had changed. Then, during group work, a girl he barely knew leaned over and whispered, "Is it true you can remember anything? Can you remember my locker combination?"
Jalen smiled politely. "I remember numbers I practise," he said. "I don't go around collecting other people's."
At break, the playground was worse. A group of boys surrounded him near the fence, not threatening, but close, and full of questions.
"Did you really open a safe?"
"How much money did you get?"
"Are you going to buy a car? A mansion? A football team?"
Jalen answered as simply as he could. "I opened a safe, yes. The money is in a trust for school, and for a foundation. I am not buying a football team."
One boy snorted. "Trust? That sounds boring."
"It sounds sensible," said a voice behind him, and there was Maya Torres, pushing through the group with her lunchbox under her arm, her expression calm and unimpressed. "And if you lot are done interviewing him, Jalen and I have a maths puzzle to finish."
"Thank you," Jalen said quietly, as they walked towards the bench where they always sat.
"For what?" Maya asked.
"For being normal," Jalen said.
Maya shrugged, in the way only an eleven-year-old friend can shrug, as if normal were the easiest thing in the world. "You are normal," she said. "You are just normal with a strange week behind you. Everybody has a strange week sometimes. Mine was when my little brother cut his own hair and blamed the dog."
At lunch, more children came up to him, and some of them were genuinely kind. A quiet boy from his class said, "My mum cleans houses too," and did not say anything more, but his eyes said the rest: that he understood, and that he was glad. A teacher stopped Jalen in the corridor and said, "If it gets too much, you come and tell me. That is what we are here for." Jalen thanked her, and meant it.
By the last lesson of the day, the fuss had faded to a background hum, like the sound of the radiators in winter. Jalen answered a question in maths, got it right, and felt the familiar pleasure of a number falling into place. He helped Maya with a problem she was stuck on, showing her the steps slowly, without rushing, the way Ruth Ann had taught him to teach. When the bell rang, he packed his bag, and walked out into the afternoon light, where Grace was waiting at the gate, as promised.
"How was it?" she asked.
Jalen thought for a moment. "Loud," he said. "And then normal, mostly. Maya was Maya. That helped more than anything."
Grace nodded. "Good friends do that," she said. "They remind you who you are when the world is busy telling you who you must be."
As they walked home together, past the live oaks and the corner shop, Jalen thought about the settlement, and the foundation, and the small house not yet chosen, and he realised something that made him stand a little straighter. School on Monday had been a test, and he had passed it — not by opening a safe, or by remembering numbers, but by being himself, and by letting a true friend walk beside him. That, he thought, was a kind of opening too, and it had taken longer than sixty seconds, but it was worth just as much.
Chapter 18: The Brother