Tobias Chen had his own reasons for keeping his phone out that day, reasons that had nothing to do with Malcolm and everything to do with his older sister, Vivian.
Vivian Chen had gone through Mrs. Vance's program six years earlier, in its gentler, better years, and had loved it — until her senior year, when a research placement she'd been quietly promised for eighteen months went, at the last minute, to a donor's daughter with a third of Vivian's qualifications. Vivian had never made a fuss about it. She'd simply gotten quieter about the whole program, graduated, gone to a state school instead of the research university she'd hoped for, and never talked about Jefferson High again if she could help it.
Tobias had been twelve when it happened, too young to fully understand, old enough to remember his sister crying in the bathroom the night the placement letter came, insisting through the door that she was fine. When he'd enrolled in the same program four years later, it was partly curiosity and partly something closer to reconnaissance — a quiet, persistent itch to understand what had actually happened to his sister, and whether it might still be happening to somebody else.
He'd never found proof of anything. Mrs. Vance was, whatever else she'd become, not stupid; the unfairness lived in vague, deniable spaces — a tone of voice, a pattern of small preferences, nothing you could screenshot. He'd almost given up looking, had almost convinced himself he'd built his sister's story into something bigger than it really was.
And then he'd watched her rip a scholarship letter in half over a boy's desk and tell him, out loud, in front of witnesses, exactly what she thought people "like him" belonged to.
His hands had been shaking when he hit record. They stopped shaking, completely, the moment he hit send.
Principal Harmon's office, twenty minutes later, held four people and a silence thick enough to stand on: Harmon herself, behind her desk; Malcolm, sitting very straight in the chair across from her, the torn halves of his letter now carefully taped back together on the desk between them, a small, stubborn act of restoration; Tobias, standing near the door because he hadn't been offered a seat and hadn't wanted to ask for one; and, arriving last, out of breath and defensive before she'd even sat down, Eleanor Vance.