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from her. I don’t know her last name or where she lives.For some reason, this makes me feel horribly depressed.
    I get up and go down to the basement. Dad is setting up a miniature historic battle of some kind, meticulously arranging hundreds of tiny painted figures on a large landscaped table.
    I touch the smooth hard surface of a lake. “Cool. How’d you do that?”
    â€œEpoxy.” He glances at me. “Don’t touch it; you’ll leave fingerprints.”
    â€œNo I won’t.” I wipe the surface with my sleeve. “Is Brad coming over?”
    â€œLater. Yeah.”
    Dad’s friend Brad lives a few blocks away, in a house that is absolutely identical to ours. Once a week or so, they get together and play these war games until about three in the morning. It’s a little weird, but I guess it’s something to do.
    â€œDad? This course Mom wants me to take...”
    â€œMmm.”
    â€œCan you, like, talk her out of it?” I know it’s hopeless but I have to try.
    â€œOh. Well. You know, when your mom gets set on something...”
    â€œYeah, but...”
    He frowns. “Maybe she’ll forget. If it’s just a passing thought, you know, it might be better not to mention it.”
    He just doesn’t want to argue with her. He hates conflict. Most people wouldn’t consider a slight difference of opinion to be conflict, but he does. He’s a wuss.
    I pick up a little soldier and pretend to examine him closely. “Okay, I won’t mention it.”
    Dad frowns again. “Make sure you put him back in the same place.”
    I sigh, put the soldier back and head upstairs. Mom’s sitting on the couch watching TV . She pats the couch beside her. “Come and watch with me.”
    I shake my head. “I’m going for a run.”
    The rhythm of my feet against the smooth road calms me. I run past a hundred identical houses, head into the next subdivision over and run past a few hundred more. Thousands of houses that all sprang up at once, a virtual forest of conformity that stretches all the way to the highway. Surely it wouldn’t have been that much more work to vary them a little. Although we do seem to have one of the few houses with no pool. If I have to be stuck here, a pool would have been nice.
    Dante Alighieri should have designated a special circle of hell for the builders who designed this place.
    I think about Dante’s
Inferno
a lot. It’s funny, because it’s all about the afterlife, and my family isn’t at all religious. My dad says he’s a humanist, and my mom says she believes in some kind of higher power but not in heaven or hell. As for me, I’ve been an atheist since I was about eight. There’s something appealing about Dante’s vision though: everything laid out so neatly, a circle of helldesigned for every kind of sinner, the punishment tailored to fit the crime.
    The builders should be sentenced to an eternity in the suburbs. Backyard barbecues with Jell-O salads and pineapple cheese bakes. Bumper stickers that say
Support Our Troops
and
I heart my honor student
. Inground sprinklers in every lawn, all controlled by a central unseen switch. Stepford wives at every front door.
    I slow down, thinking of Parker and how she’d echoed my thoughts about GRSS, right down to the high school movie idea. I wish I could tell her about Dante’s circles of hell. I bet she’d like it.

SIX
    When I arrive at school
the next day, the first thing I do is look around to see if Parker has brought the sign. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening. Just the usual crowd of people hanging around, waiting for the bell to ring. Pavlov’s dogs, minus the drooling. I sigh and kick a pebble along the asphalt.
    â€œHey.”
    I look up, hoping for a second that Parker has come back. But it’s just Linnea, one of my stoner acquaintances. Closest thing I have to a friend