Undercurrent by Paul Blackwell

for today. But starting Monday you will have a replacement teacher.”
    The whole room was in shock. “Why?” we demanded to know. “Where did he go?”
    “That’s none of your concern,” the principal told us sternly. But seeing our alarmed faces, he softened a little. “Guys, Mr. Schroeder is fine. He has taken a leave of absence for personal reasons. Hopefully he’ll be back at some point. But I can’t say that for certain.”
    He never did come back. And we never found out the story behind his leaving. A rumor started that he’d gone crazy. A few students claimed to have seen him hanging around the bridge above the falls and gazing down for hours.
    And then one day Bryce and I spotted him at Electronica Veronica, riffling through the wall of old electrical components and muttering to himself. At least we thought it was him, assuming his twin would have less of an interest in such things.
    “Diodes, diodes, diodes,” he was saying. “Where are you hiding, my pesky little friends?”
    One glimpse of the wild expression on his face and we got the hell out of there before he saw us.
    Meanwhile, back at school, we got a new teacher, and the class became mostly boring again. Which meant I could turn my attention to Willow, who turned her attention to inking pretend tattoos on my hand during class until we were finally yelled at. Then we started passing notes and drawings and managed to never get caught again.
    I think more about Willow and about the strange phone call. It was like she didn’t know me at all. I decide to look for her messages, which she sends on the computer most days after school. We tried video chatting once, but the PC I inherited from my father is all old and screwed up and useless for anything but homework at this point. Dad promised to buy me a new one, but then I let down my part of the bargain by not coming through with the grades.
    I press the Power button and sit back as the machine slowly chugs to life, making its cranky noises and flashing its little lights. When it’s finally finished starting up, I type out my password and press Enter.
    The password is rejected.
    Hmm. Thinking I must have typed it wrong, I try again. Once again it’s rejected. I press Caps Lock. No luck. I try an older password. And then another. And another. I try every combination of passwords I can remember using during my entire life. Each time I’m locked out.
    I slap the side of the monitor in frustration. How am I going to get into this stupid thing?
    I decide to pound out the most disgusting word I can think of on the keyboard, something I call Cole when I’m really mad.
    And that’s it—I’m in.
    I’m still feeling weirded out when the desktop finally appears. There’s another picture of a hot girl on it. This time she’s posing on a red couch and wearing a ridiculous number of black pearl necklaces and not much else. It’s the same girl who is up on the wall, I think, but it’s hard to tell from the heavy makeup and wig she’s got on.
    I think I might recognize her—she’s an actress, though I’ve never seen any of the movies she’s in. Chick flicks, mostly, that even Willow won’t watch.
    I decide to snoop around the computer. I recognize folder names organized the way I’ve always done it. I look back at the homework and remember some of the topics from last year. But reading them, I don’t remember working on any of these assignments.
    Most of them seem hurried, which is my style, all right. Only I like using bigger words to help disguise my laziness, while this stuff is sparse and misspelled. A few recent assignments look like they took quite a lot of work, though, something I can’t imagine doing.
    I launch a web browser. Most of my bookmarks are missing. But even stranger, there are sites in my history that I’m not interested in at all. There’s a bunch of links related to sports, and football in particular—which like the collection of trophies makes no sense to me. I’m just