He dropped the spiral on the floor in front of him and slid it across the room. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in months and now rushing into his head were scripted questions about product use and frequency. He began yelling, furious at the invasion going on inside him. He picked up the box with the few spirals inside and threw it across the room, then pushed over the bookshelf and stomped on the backside of it.

“God damn you! God damn that shit! I walked fucking thousands of miles away from it and it’s right there! The fucking script! What else is all this: four times six is twenty-four—a fucking script. They teach it to you from day one in these rooms.” He looked around quickly and found the crumbles of chalk that had fallen out of the box when he threw it.

“Here’s a new script…” he said as he grabbed a piece and walked down the hall, into the classroom. He faced his imagined audience of students. “Here’s what you need to know.”

He turned to the board, wrote “LEAVE” and turned back around. “The world wants to get in your head and run your life. It has a script for everything, so you can’t think for yourself or be your own person. And it won’t ever let you alone, it won’t give you a second to just be at peace. Even if you try to think outside the script and make sense of the world, it would blow itself to shit just to spite you. That’s sick. The only place at peace is away from it, and you’ve got to start moving now, and I don’t know where to, because I thought I went far enough but got outrun five minutes ago. Just get moving.”

Weeks later, a farmer driving through town slowed down as he passed the old school. A few remnants were still standing beside the mess of boards, heap of insulation and tangle of pulled wires. Along the fence, behind the ruins, he saw a jumble of old tools and the blackboard propped up almost like a huge headstone. There had been two gentle rains in the past week, so the farmer could not read the word “LEAVE” or what Adrian had written just before he walked away: “Adrian is gone.”