Wrapped

WRAPPED

Leo closed his locker and we started down the hall. “So, how bad was it?”

I didn’t answer right away. My backpack felt heavier than usual.

“Worse than mine?”

“Probably.”

He whistled and shook his head, worried but oddly relieved.

“That’s not great,” he said. “They’re looking for math guys.”

“I’m supposed to be one.”

“You still could be.”

He forced a smile. One of those quiet, practiced smiles people give when they know you’re not good enough but are too afraid to say it.

I didn’t smile back.

A few students walked ahead of us, but silence gripped the hallway. Spotless lockers lined both sides, the gray tiled floor so clean it seemed completely untouched. The only sounds were the hum of the lights and the churn of the vents in the walls and the soft clicking and whirring of the surveillance nodes inside their little black domes on the ceiling. The building had its own rhythm; it didn’t need us.

A government-run placement academy designed to separate the algorithmically useful from everyone else, I had tested in by some fluke; an anomalous score on an evaluation I knew I couldn’t replicate. I kept waiting for someone to notice. Most days it felt like they already had. Counselors constantly “checked in” on my progress, teachers handed back papers with sighs or shaking heads, even the maintenance staff eyed me sideways like I was homeless and had just wandered in to use the bathroom. Everyone but Leo seemed to notice the gap between the real me and who the school expected me to be.

“Does your mom know?”

I nodded.

“What did she say?”

“Not much.”

That was a lie. She had said a lot. About how I was running out of chances. About not living up to my potential. About how important math is. About how I needed to focus. She wasn’t wrong about any of it.

Leo lowered his head, scratched the side of his curved nose. His dark hair an uncombed mess, his freckled face paler than usual with eyes baggy from lack of sleep. Like mine.

“She told me it’s just a phase,” I continued. “That lots of kids struggle. That there’s still time.”

“My mom said that too,” he muttered. “She stayed up all night writing out schedules. Said I just need more structure.”

I could picture it: the kitchen table, light blue vinyl placemats and a vase with wilting carnations. His mom in her robe and her planning face, fingers tapping loudly while she stared at a messy spreadsheet and a rerun of an old show played on the TV in the living room.

“I don’t think they believe it, though.” I said.

“No, but they have to act like they do.”

We turned the corner past the vending machines. Someone had restarted them. The little LED display blinked uselessly, waiting for instruction. The snacks inside were all lined up with unnatural precision, like nobody ever actually bought any.

Something about the symmetry made my brain scrunch. I started thinking about how easily things could be reset; shelves reorganized, names changed, formulas restructured. And then about what exactly happened to their original states. They were just…gone forever.

And that’s exactly why I struggled. I saw connections others didn't, patterns in places where there weren't supposed to be any, but they didn’t matter to anyone but me. The way sections of the randomly colored wall tiles mirrored the setup of the parking lot. How the school bell always rang exactly thirty-eight seconds after the minute. The correlation between the number of birds I saw outside my bedroom window in the morning and the time my dad got home from work that night. I always noticed things like that, but I couldn't translate them into the rigid formulas that were demanded of us; formulas that would keep me safe. One of my math teachers once said I had "unusual spatial reasoning," before mentioning the possibility of remedial sessions. As if the way I saw the world was a disability.

They didn’t want insight or intuition. They wanted output: buildings, defense systems, algorithms that could track movement and predict behavior. But I still believed my skills meant something. That if I worked hard enough, the right pattern might show me how to stay ahead of the system. Not by solving it the way they wanted, but by understanding it in a way they couldn’t.

We passed the teachers’ lounge and I heard the low hum of voices inside. One stood out. Soft, flat, perfectly spaced. Our homeroom teacher, Ms. Reed.

Round-faced and a little soft around the edges, with auburn hair and tortoise shell glasses that sat on the end of her nose, she had a warm voice and the sort of attitude that made her seem like your friend’s aunt; the type who baked a lot and asked how your weekend was even if she didn’t really care and didn’t listen to the answer. Most days, she wore comfortable cardigans in washed-out colors and walked the halls with her folder and old coffee mug.

As we passed the lounge, her voice floated through the slightly open door.

“I know. He’s been slipping for a while now.”

I glanced at Leo, wondering if he’d heard her, too. He didn’t seem to. Just rubbed his thumb over his knuckles, fidgeting like he always did when a million thoughts ran through his head.

“Do you think any will come today?”

I shook my head. “They don’t come this early in the semester. Or at least, they didn’t last year.”

“No. But last year the deficiencies weren’t so bad.”

He was right about that. There weren’t any reassignments at all in the entire county last year. Just a few recalibrations. And while those were bad enough (nights spent hooked up to the “cognitive stimulator”, forced to do targeted revisions until your brain bled) at least those kids got to come back to school, to their families. At least they stayed themselves.

“And I’m worried, you know,” Leo said, “about the presentation last week. Reed didn’t seem too impressed.”

I shook my head.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re safe,” I told him. “I’ve checked a bunch of times. Your assessment scores, attendance, genetic history, and even your height and shoe size. You just don’t fit the profile of someone who’d be reassigned.”

“I know,” he took a deep breath and turned to me with a smile. “I trust you.”

He always said that when I tried to help. Since fourth grade, when I told him the solution to some weird geometry puzzle wasn’t a trick, just a spiral. “I trust you,” like a secret code phrase. Hearing it always settled me, made me feel like maybe I really did belong.

The hall ended at our classroom. 2C. When we got there, the door hung open. Three kids were already inside. Nina and Casper, sitting in the back whispering, and Alden, slouched at his desk casually flipping a pen between his fingers.

Leo walked in and went straight to his desk in the second row. I followed and found my seat next to him.

The classroom looked the same as always; light gray walls, orderly desks, the whiteboard with its faint leftover smudges. The usual smell of dry erase markers and laminate filled the air.

But something felt off. Nina looked at us, or maybe past us, as we sat down; eyes wide and lips tight. I hooked my pack to the back of the desk and watched her. She nodded towards something and I turned and saw.

There, just under the whiteboard, was the body.

Wrapped tight in opaque, olive-green plastic. Long and narrow, flat on its back. It lay completely motionless, but the longer it sat there the more I expected it to twitch and writhe.

A reassignment.

They happened, everyone knew that. But students almost never saw the body.

And for a second, I just stared.

It shouldn’t be here. I would’ve known it was coming. I would’ve seen it. Some pattern would have emerged, bits of data would’ve jumped out at me.

Unless I was too close to it to see.

“Maybe it’s for Mr. Hall’s class,” I heard Nina whisper with a forced hopefulness.

Casper shook his head. “They don’t do tenth grade this early.”

“I know, but my sister said sometimes they–”

“It’s for us,” Alden interrupted without raising his head. His hand slipped, and the pen dropped to the floor with a sharp clack.

I had known Alden for years. Took the same classes, lived on the same street. He’d always had this effortless confidence, breezing through our lessons, always finishing with near-perfect scores. I’d never seen him drop anything; his act, his class rank, his composure. But now he stared blankly as his pen lay on the floor, his fingers empty.

Footsteps echoed from the hallway now.

Ms. Reed stepped into the room, mug in hand and folder tucked under one arm.

“Good morning!” she said as she walked straight to her desk and shuffled some papers around.

Then I saw her eyes move to the front of the room, to the plastic-wrapped shape beneath the board. She sighed through her nose and rolled her eyes.

“Of course,” she muttered. “They didn’t even call ahead.”

Alden finally raised his eyes. Nina shifted in her chair.

Ms. Reed moved to the phone on the wall. She picked it up, pressed a button, and waited.

“Yes. It’s Reed. 2C. I have one still wrapped.” she said.

A pause.

“Got it. I’ll wait here until she arrives.”

She hung up and shook her head.

Then she went back to her desk and started flipping through the folder again.

The room settled into dull, unbreathing silence. Vents clicked, a chair creaked. A door slammed and echoed down the hall, but no one reacted.

Nina pulled her sleeves over her hands and stared at the corner of her desk. Casper chewed the eraser on his pencil. Alden leaned back in his seat, one foot jittering under the desk.

I glanced at Leo. He stared straight ahead, jaw tight, eyes slightly unfocused, no part of him moving at all; like he wanted desperately to become part of the room itself.

And for a moment, the classroom disappeared. We were 8-year-olds building a clubhouse out of old, used doors; dragging them across his backyard and setting them up around the base of the big tree behind his house. He planned everything; measured angles with sticks, sketched out diagrams in the dirt with his finger, calculated how to lean the doors just right so they wouldn’t fall. He said it was all about weight distribution and “dead loads”. I didn’t understand half of what he was doing but I followed along, hauling things and finding tools and hammering nails where he said to. Even back then, Leo seemed to know how things fit together.

I remembered the wooden sign we hung outside. He insisted we call it “Command Polygon Alpha,” and wrote it in block letters and put a pie chart in the corner (to show the “probability of structural failure,” or something like that).

I remembered the way he laughed when it stood on its own and we crawled inside and sat in the dusty light that filtered through the gaps, realizing it would actually hold. A laugh deep and genuine and full of life.

Now he sat there, still and pale and silent.

The clock on the back wall ticked. There were cleared throats and nervously shifted positions.

We probably only sat like that for a few minutes, but it felt like 12 hours before Ms. Aldridge, the principal, arrived. Despite the excessive silence, nobody heard her coming. She stood outside the room for some time, just watching; like she was waiting for the right silence to step into.

Finally, she walked in. She wore a dark blazer and an expression so composed it felt programmed. Her hands were clasped loosely behind her back. Ms. Reed stood up and straightened and gave a small, practiced bow. Aldridge remained completely upright and didn’t even acknowledge her.

She paused at the body, barely long enough to acknowledge it. Then turned to us.

“Good morning. I’m here because of the early arrival. Thank you all for remaining calm.” Her voice was calm and polished, like the kind used to explain policy changes or deny refunds.

She stepped forward until she stood beside the body.

“Let’s get this taken care of, shall we?”

She crouched and hovered over it, head tilted slightly, inspecting it like a robot verifying inventory in a grocery store.

Then she reached for the seam in the plastic.

It made a wet, sticky sound, catching slightly as it pulled free and released a stench of preservatives and antiseptic and bleach with something sicklier and more putrid underneath, like rotting medical waste. She peeled it back slowly, carefully, as if the body would disintegrate if she moved too quickly.

A shoe. A pant leg. A hand.

Then a face.

Dark hair. Freckles. Curved nose.

Leo.

There was no way. How could I have missed it? Data hurtled through my mind. He passed the mid-term, turned in all his work. It was Tuesday, 8:30, two blue cars on the way here, 177cm, a brother, an uncle 39-years-old, O-positive…none of it added up. It had to be a mistake.

It had to be.

Leo turned to me. Slowly.

His face was almost completely white, eyes wide, glassy, shimmering.

“You said I was safe,” he whispered.

My mouth hung open, but nothing came out. Not a word, not a breath.

I wanted to tell him why I said that, why I had honestly believed it. I was convinced there was a pattern. That the system could be outsmarted and I had figured out how.

But nothing in the math could prepare me for this; for the moment your best friend looks at you like you’re the one who wrapped him in plastic yourself.

The door opened again. A man stepped inside. He wore no uniform, no badge. Just a gray shirt, tucked in. He didn’t say a word.

He walked over to Leo, placed a hand lightly on his shoulder, and guided him to his feet.

Leo twitched, but didn’t resist. They walked out together. The door shut softly behind them.

The room felt drained, like all the air had been taken with him. A sharp, piercing ring filled my skull; I don’t know how long it had been there. Louder and louder and louder until I thought my head would burst and my brains would spill out onto the floor where they belonged. I stared at I don’t know what for I don’t know how long before it finally began to quiet, and the only sound then was the node inside the little black dome on the ceiling in the back of the room, whirring back and forth.

Ms. Aldridge turned back to face us.

Her voice didn’t change. Not even a little.

“As I’m sure you understand,” she said, “strong mathematical performance remains the most reliable indicator of future contribution.”

She surveyed the room, her gaze lingering on me.

"Some believe they can find patterns where none exist," she continued, measured and calm. "In wall tiles, or bell rings, or birds outside their window.”

My brain froze. I choked on something, stopped breathing.

She knew. They all knew.

“But true pattern recognition isn't about seeing connections that aren't there, or wondering about items in vending machines. It's about discipline. Structure. The ability to work within established parameters."

She paused, making sure I felt it.

“And when those skills are lacking, when deficiencies persist, adjustments must be made.”

“This is not punishment,” she added. “It’s placement. Reassignment protocols ensure students are matched to roles more aligned with their demonstrated cognitive utility. We all have roles. The system only works if we honor them.”

Her eyes landed on me again.

“I trust,” she said, smiling faintly, “that each of you knows what’s expected.”

My throat tightened.

She didn’t blink.

“And I’m confident that no further adjustments from this room will be necessary.”

I felt the weight of her words press on my soul.

Then she gestured toward the now half-wrapped figure, the new Leo, on the floor. "This event was outside of our standard operating procedure. Consider it a reminder of consequences."

"The replacement vessel will require several days of preparation before activation and integration. Until then, the desk will remain unassigned."

As if on cue, two uniformed attendants appeared at the door with a stretcher. They lifted the body with practiced movements, the plastic crinkling softly as they secured it.

Ms. Aldridge kept her hands clasped and her back straight. When the body left the room, she turned to Ms. Reed.

“All yours,” she said, and left the room.

The door closed behind her with a soft click. Leo's empty desk stood beside me, already wiped clean. I stared at the blank space where my best friend had sat just minutes before, my mind cycling through numbers that may or may not have had meaning. Thirty-eight seconds. Four near-failing test scores. Twelve birds this morning, 6:05pm. Two weeks until the next assessment.

But now I wasn’t sure if I was tracking them, or if they were.

Ms. Reed cleared her throat and turned to the board, marker in hand, squeaking softly against the surface. I couldn't bring myself to look at what she was writing. Instead, I focused on my breathing, trying to make it as quiet and unnoticeable as possible, as if being perfectly still might somehow make me invisible to the system that had just taken the Leo I had known my whole life.

The pattern was clear, and Leo was a warning. I didn’t know how many birds would fly by the window before it was my turn. It didn’t matter. I stopped counting.