Warning: General spoilers, and more specifically general spoilers related to All The Wrong Questions up through "Shouldn't You Be In School?"

Content Warnings: Smoking cigarettes. Fire, blood. Underlying themes of child abuse, neglect, and abduction. Related references to starvation, violence.

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Any profound revelations I have come to in my life, I have come to because I was led there. Any wisdom I may spout has had to be poured in first, and boiled.

It is difficult to pin down moments of clarity. Often they are midway breaks, cleverly disguised as an end point, years removed from the onset of unnoticed progress.

But memory is a funny thing. I sometimes find it useful to let the crucial details of time and place melt away, leaving only the brightest points against an unmoving background.

If I close my eyes, I can see myself and another person, standing outside a brick building. I am about nine, or twelve, or fourteen, and the other person is slightly older than me and smoking a cigarette. The brick building is a firehouse, even though I know better than that.

"Snicket," the other person says, leaning on the brick wall. They look like the person that tv specials tell you not to emulate because they are not nearly as cool as everyone thinks they are. They look like they should not be saying my real name out loud. "Do you know why they recruit us so young?"

"For the same reason that it's generally more difficult to become fluent in a new language as an adult," I reply, prompt and callow, a word which here means 'definitely nine, maybe even seven, and parroting an instructor.' "It's easier to learn new things while our brains are still developing."

"No," my associate replies, blowing smoke across the sidewalk squares between us. "I mean, yes. But that's not the only reason."

"Then why?" I ask, coughing.

"For the same reason," they say, "that they recruit so many of us at a time. Have you noticed, Snicket, how many more students and apprentices we have than full members? They don't expect us to last."

I'm still coughing. There is more smoke than there should be, from one cigarette. The smoker keeps talking. "What's one of the first things they teach us, Snicket? What do we do when there's a fire? What do we shout?"

"Help has arrived," I cough.

"Help has arrived," they echo, in a mean and hollow voice, like they started making fun of me but then got distracted being sad about something. "Where is the fire? They don't teach us to save ourselves, Snicket. They teach us to help."

"We're volunteers," I protest, waving the smoke away from my face with a hand that might be eleven. "We make sacrifices to make the world a better place."

"You don't know what that means," the other person barks, throwing down their cigarette and trembling angrily at me for a moment before lighting up another one. They take a drag and calm down. "Nobody volunteers to be a volunteer, Snicket. They drag us away by our ankles."

I don't have a response to that. It's a question we all tried not to ask. Even this amalgamous inner coping mechanism of an associate has skipped over the asking and gone straight to angry, unanswerable statements.

"I know what sacrifice is," I say quietly.

The person spits out their new cigarette and steps on it. Smoke curls out from under their shoe. I wait for them to light the next one, but they don't. All they do is cross their arms and look sad. "No you don't, L."

I stare. They stare back, and then they light the next one. "You don't, but you will."

"I will," I say, and my voice is angry and thin and not quite thirteen. "I do."

"Not yet, Snicket," they say. "Not yet."

"My sister-" I snap, but they snap right back:

"Is not you, Snicket. You know what it is to make choices, and you know what it is for those choices to hurt other people. But you don't get to call their pain a sacrifice. Not on your part."

"I have my own," I say. I want to sit down but it's raining now. The sidewalk is wet. "I have my own pain." I am thinking of my hair being too long and my stomach too empty. I am thinking of blood in my mouth and luggage left in the city. I am thinking of a girl I cannot take my eyes off of, because she might do something treacherous.

I am thinking of sleepless nights pondering the meaning of treachery, of what it means to be loyal to someone or something in a way that happens to contradict a friend's loyalty to someone or something else.

I look at the wet sidewalk. "I have my own pain."

The person is two squares away. They tap their cigarette against the brick building and then drop it, and it burns out with the others, dim orange fizzling to nothing under the growing deluge.

"Not yet, Snicket." The smoke is pouring out of their mouth. "Not yet."