The desks had been laid out in four identical rows, a series of dark brown splotches against the eggshell-coloured walls and roof. In the centre of the floor was a square of light, filtered through a window on the ceiling. Sully didn’t try looking up – he knew the harsh glare would only sting his eyes. His brother, a few years ago, had told him that if he really tried, he might get tall enough to poke his head through the window, the rest of his body stretching from the roof to the floor. Then, in front of the sun-draped fields outside, he would finally be able to see the light.

As always, each desk had been labeled. The piece of paper on it was a perfect white, neatly cut, and taped to the smooth, plastic chair the desk was attached to. Sully walked a straight path through the arrangement of the classroom. One of the notes was adorned with a series of sharp scratches that made up his name, or at least, what it was supposed to be. He hadn’t told the person who marked the desks that nobody ever called him Solomon.

The door opened, and the room seemed to breathe. Other children trickled inside – a boy with thick glasses and a set of bracelets that jangled around his wrist, someone wearing a bright red raincoat, and a girl with an outburst of dark, swaying curls. The people behind them blurred into a faceless mass as they took their seats. The last of them was a grown man, with shoes that clicked as he stepped across the wooden floor. Sully hurried to find his desk, discovering he had been placed in the first row. Only a few steps from him, the man stood, tapping a desk with his finger at the front of the room. Sully tried to avoid eye contact – the man had pupils so deep they seemed to carve a hole straight down his neck and into the pit of his stomach.

Sully never sat in the front row when he had a choice; he detested the feeling of being blind to all the people behind him. The only one who could see the face of everyone was the man – the preacher – at the front of the room. Sully didn’t focus on his words. He never did. Instead, he followed the direction of his eyes as they flitted from him to the girl next to him to the rest of the room. He wondered what could be happening for his eyes to move so vigorously and reminded himself of a beach lizard, who moves quickly no matter the occasion. Sully couldn’t be sure the preacher was following a beach lizard, but he didn’t check behind him because then he would know it wasn’t true. Then the preacher would be nothing more than a hunter, scanning the room while he spoke for the first sign of movement. Of transgression.

It was several minutes until the man said something that Sully’s ears retained. Speed limit. The man had gotten the number wrong; Sully knew because he had read the driver’s manual countless times. Though it would be many years before he could drive, Sully had devoted himself to memorizing the manual after his brother’s crash. He remembered the night of the accident well, all the shouting, crying – then again, how could someone forget something like that? It was when his parents started praying, more than they had ever before. One night, in the hospital, Sully had seen both his parents prostrate next to his brother’s unconscious body. When his brother eventually woke up, his parents were overjoyed.

That was why Sully was at this place, after all, to learn about the prayers his parents were convinced had saved his brother. He often dreamt about a world in which his family reacted much the same as he did – all of them, reading the driver’s manual, together. If that had happened, they wouldn’t have sent him here, to listen to a man tell him an incorrect speed limit. The preacher kept saying it wrong, again and again. Keep your mouth closed¸ Sully told himself. It would be easier that way. But the flashes of the driver’s manual appeared in his mind. The words on the page, engraved into his mind, were blaringly loud.

“You’re wrong,” Sully blurted out.

The preacher locked eyes with him.

━

Sully didn’t tell his mother that he had been sent home early. He didn’t tell her how he had been dragged out of the classroom, screaming. He didn’t tell her of the hour he had spent in the office, telling the preacher that he was wrong about the speed limit. They didn’t even check, in the end. They had only told him that his behaviour was inexcusable.

The kitchen at home was illuminated by the dull blue of the television, the light bouncing off the metal of his brother’s wheelchair. Sully was almost getting to be taller than him, now that his brother was unable to stand. On days like this, it was harder than ever to ignore the trash piling around the edges of the apartment. The rest of Sully’s family didn’t seem to notice. His mother stood in the kitchen slicing up apples, his father was out, probably with the group of men that took him gambling, and his brother stared at the television. His mother’s knife gleamed with each cut, a dull sound that echoed through Sully’s skull. It was obvious that his brother wasn’t paying attention to the TV. The light beamed onto his eyes before dripping off, forgotten.

If Sully had told his mother the truth, she would have only recommended him to listen to the men at the school. It’s not a school, he would want to declare. His old school had been a school. That was before the crash, before his family had changed so much. Most of their time now, it seemed, was meant for praying. His mother liked to say that his brother’s accident had brought the whole family closer together than ever. Sully couldn’t accept that. But everyone had to believe in something, and his family had chosen differently than he had. If there was anything to be learned from the preacher, it was that.

It was hard, however, not to wish things could be as they were before. Under the wheelchairs and sermons, it was still Sully’s older brother. The only one he could ever have.

Sully’s favourite thing to do when trying to go to sleep was to follow the lines on the ceiling with his eyes. In the dark, the light reflected off the ridges so that they formed the trails of small arrowheads, zooming across the room and leaving through the glass window. He told himself that if he fell asleep, he could sooner wake up, walk outside, and see where they had landed.

The next morning, Sully trudged out of the house and examined the grass; he continued to survey the surrounding area from his home to the school.

            The land around the school was flat, so that if Sully strained his neck he could see for what seemed to be forever. It must be nice¸ Sully thought, to be a bird. Not a thing in the sky to block a flight path.

            Click. Click. A pencil, tapping against a wooden desk. There was no way for Sully to leave the bounds of the classroom, not for too long, even in his mind. There would always be something to bring him back.

            Today, the preacher was talking about weather patterns, drawing on a whiteboard with dry-erase markers. The classroom had lost the eraser many years ago, so the preacher had to use his hand to clear the whiteboard when he made a mistake. Sully’s hands grasped the thin papers of the driving manual through the pocket of his desk. He couldn’t grip it too hard; the audible crumple would draw attention that he didn’t want on him. There was some difficulty in restraining himself – he wanted either to rip the manual apart or hug it close to him, though it was hard to tell which was which.

When the arrows of the clock above the preacher’s head had made a full rotation, people began to lift from their seats. We can’t go outside, someone was saying, some sort of storm. Sully moved with the stream of kids through the hallway, still holding the driver’s manual. On the double doors that lead outside the building was a laminated sign, informing the children that the winds were too strong to exit without danger. Two adults stood on either side, looking disgruntled but not allowing anyone to get close.

Though he was standing far from the door, Sully could feel, on the skin uncovered by his socks, a draft, quick and cold. It was pushing past him – there was a purpose, a goal to this wind. Sully backed away from the crowd, lowering his socks more to better feel the breeze.

He followed the wind’s direction away from the door, leading back into the hallway and dispersing near a staircase. He couldn’t feel the draft anymore, but bounded up the steps, certain there would be something waiting for him. There, on the second floor, with the lights off: an open window. The air of the building was being slowly filtered out through the window and into the open air, something Sully could feel through the hairs on the back of his head.

There was something admirable to Sully about the open window. It didn’t make any noise, but when he stuck his hands out he could feel the strength of the whipping air. There was a storm, that much was true. The grass in the distance swayed and tilted, stray leaves trapezing through the air. In his hands, the driver’s manual flicked wildly back and forth, hitting the wind like a new type of percussion instrument.

In an instant, Sully loosened his hands. The manual darted into the sky, the paper becoming a distant dot almost as fast as he had let go. Sully looked away and closed the window, not bothering to watch as the driver’s manual inevitably kissed the ground.

━

That night, Sully dreamt, deep and vivid. He was moving, he could tell. It was so fast he couldn’t catch the air to breathe. Or maybe he didn’t need to. His hands were on a steering wheel, his foot pressed down on a gas pedal. The street around him was warped, all the lights and concrete mixing together. He must have been well over the speed limit.

In an instant, the car stopped. Sully’s seatbelt dissipated into the air, the whiplash launching him out of the vehicle. There were voices in the air, colourful things that swirled around his ears. He didn’t need them.

He wasn’t like his brother. He took in each particle of light that was shot by him, entering his body, lifting him further up. Nobody could force him to turn. There was only the rush, the flight.