I stare into space while Christine plays Tetris on her cell phone. I think about what you told me once—how in order to get through high school, you needed to have tough skin and flowers in your eyes. That was on the day you pretended to be my older estranged brother at the parent-teacher interview I never told Mom about, to discuss the classes I skipped that I also never told Mom about.
     And now you skipped life altogether and I have no one to tell on you.
     “Are you okay?” Christine looks at me from her phone. I tell her I’m fine. She narrows her eyes again.
     “I know you better than that,” she says. For some reason, that makes me want to cry.
     Christine waves goodbye at her stop. More people squish in. Business people and college students breathe down my neck while I finger your USB in my coat pocket. My stop is next, but I don’t move. My headphones fill my head with lyrics and rhythm but I’m hearing nothing. A blind man and his dog walk in. A woman and her daughter leave. I am a turnstile and people move right through me.
     The PA announces the last stop and I am done deciding. I put on my schoolbag and walk up the platform.
     Tomorrow is Saturday. I’m breaking into your office tomorrow.

     I’m standing under Point X right now. If I squint my eyes and tilt my head at a thirty-degree angle (thank you Mr. Eisen), I can make out three dried drops of my mother’s blood still on the pavement. It sounds morbid, but that’s the sort of stuff I look for nowadays. Evidence.
     So there’s this trick I can do with a hairpin, a switchblade, and a locked door. You put the looped part of the hairpin into the center of the hole, and turn left. When you hear a click, use the switchblade and push it between the doorframe and the lock. You taught me this, so you heard and did all of those things.
     “I can’t make copies of the firm’s key,” you said.
     “It’s against the policy,” you said.
     “I’ll teach you how to compromise,” you said.
     You are the reason I am climbing up the back stairs inside a locked law office on a weekend afternoon. You are the reason I am opening the third floor door and inhaling stale cigarette smoke. You are the reason why I try to pick the lock on your office at the end of the hall--and find that somebody had unlocked it already.