"All right," Syx says in a low, rapid voice, under cover of Wayne leading everyone in an off-key rendition of 'row row row your boat' (they're trying to do it in a round—it's really terrible). "You're going to want to pour out a line of baking soda onto the construction paper, and then roll the paper up into a tight tube—Minion, is anyone looking at us?"

Minion, in his sphere on the floor, facing back into the classroom, moves his body side to side in an approximation of a head shake.

"Good; keep looking, Minion—so you roll up the paper and then you fold over the edges so it's sort of sealed. We'll need three of those. I'll mix the paint and the vinegar." He unscrews the top of the mold cleaner and sighs. "I'll have to empty this, I suppose," he says in a disappointed way.

"Is that bad?" Roxanne whispers, rolling the paper rapidly.

"Well, if I kept it," Syx says, pouring the mold cleaner out onto the classroom floor, soaking the carpet, "the bleach in it would mix with the vinegar and produce chlorine gas. Lots of smoke–which would, of course, be a nice addition to the paint bomb!"

"What are you getting rid of it for, then?" Roxanne asks, folding the edges of the first paper tube up. "Keep it; I want to see the smoke!"

"I know, right?" Syx says. "Unfortunately, though, chlorine gas is toxic. To humans. Minion and I would be fine, but—" he glances at Roxanne, then looks away again, "—yes, definitely not worth the risk. Can you hand me the paint?"

Roxanne reaches into the cabinet and pulls out the big jug of blue paint. Behind it and the other paints, shoved to the back of the cabinet, is a large red fire extinguisher. Syx, reaching to take the paint from Roxanne, looks up and sees the extinguisher. His eyes light up.

"Oh, yes," he says, setting aside the now-empty drain cleaner bottle and pulling out the fire extinguisher. "Please be—" there's a thick layer of dust on the extinguisher. He swipes his hand across the metal body, wiping the dust away from the label, looks down at it. "Excellent."

"What?" Roxanne whispers.

"Okay, look," he says, tapping the label. "You remember what this is?"

Roxanne looks at the label. CO2. She frowns, trying to recall, then—

"Oh! It's a—a chemical symbol, right?"

"Exactly, yes!" Syx points at the C. "Carbon atom. Covalently bonded with—" He points at the O2. "Two oxygen atoms. Which makes it?"

Roxanne tilts her head, remembering.

"Carbon dioxide?"

"Correct! And! Fun fact about carbon dioxide," Syx says in an excited whisper, "when the liquid—" he gestures to the fire extinguisher, "—is expelled under great pressure, like when you turn on the extinguisher, the expansion of the gas cools it enough to turn it into carbon dioxide's solid form: dry ice! We're going to need a cloth bag of some sort to collect it. It's extremely cold; you'll need to make sure not to touch it because it can cause frostbite in seconds. Maybe we should—yes, I'll handle the bag; you can operate the extinguisher."

"What are we going to do with this dry ice?" Roxanne asks, gamely looking around for anything they can use for a bag.

"Dry ice sublimes when added to room-temperature liquids!"

"Sublimes?"

"Rapidly turns from solid to gas without going back to liquid first!" Syx smirks sidelong at Roxanne. "Still want to see some smoke with the paint bomb?"

Roxanne grins back at him.

"We can use the hood of my sweatshirt as a bag," she says.

"Ah! Yes, good idea! All right, lets make the paint bomb first. We won't have much time after we start using the fire extinguisher; they're bound to notice the sound of it."

He begins pouring the paint into the empty mold cleaner bottle, then adds vinegar. He caps it, and gives it a brief, vigorous shake, then uncaps it again. He pours the rest of the paint into the vinegar bottle, shakes that, and then pours some of the mixture into the empty paint bottle. Roxanne, finished with the last two construction paper and baking soda tubes, helps him to tape the three bottles together.

"We'll need a separate container for the dry ice mixture," Syx says, pulling a bucket from the cabinet. "And some more liquid." He unearths a large jug of apple juice from the depths of the shelves.

"We can't just add the dry ice to the paint bomb?"

"Well, we could," Syx admits. "It would actually make the whole thing more, you know—" he unscrews the cap from he jug of apple juice and begins pouring it into the bucket, "—explod-y. But. It might be a little too explod-y? Lots of shrapnel, dangerously loud. We're already going to be using carbon dioxide gas for the smoke, which makes it hard to breathe; we don't want to hurt anybody. Just make them blue."

"And scare them," Roxanne adds. She finds she's looking forward to the scaring part. They deserve to be scared.

She pulls off her sweatshirt and hands it to Syx.

"And scare them," Syx agrees."Minion, are we still clear?"

Minion bobs in confirmation.

"Minion," Roxanne says, thinking of something suddenly, "could you roll over to the other side of the room without anybody seeing you and cause a distraction?" She looks at Syx. "How much time will we need?"

Syx tips his head thoughtfully.

"About forty-five seconds if you handle the paint bomb and I deal with the dry ice. Thirty seconds to discharge the extinguisher; fifteen seconds to throw the paint bomb and finish the dry ice smoke bucket. We'll go ahead and put the baking soda tubes in the paint bomb now; the chemical reaction will take a minute or so to build up enough force to explode. Forty-five second distraction in exactly one minute, Minion?"

Minion, already rolling away, smirks at them over one fin.

"Baking soda tubes," Syx says, turning to Roxanne, who is already ready with them.

She sticks them into the bottles; she can hear a fizzing sound starting. Syx caps each bottle, then picks up the whole bomb and gives it a shake. Syx puts down the bomb and pushes the extinguisher into Roxanne's arms.

"Three, two, one," he says under his breath. "Pull the pin!"

Roxanne pulls the plastic pin from the handle of the extinguisher.

A terrifying screeching noise rends the air. Roxanne jumps; Minion, she realizes, screaming from beneath a desk on the other side of the room.

"Squeeze the trigger!" Syx says, holding the hood of the sweatshirt over the nozzle.

Roxanne obeys; the extinguisher begins to spray.

"—eleven, twelve, thirteen—" Syx is counting the seconds.

Roxanne can hear a ruckus behind her; Minion still screaming, several of the kids shouting, the sound desks being overturned. She wants to look, but Syx said dry ice is dangerous and she doesn't want to get distracted and accidentally spray him—

"—twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty! Drop it!"

Roxanne throws the extinguisher aside. She sees a bunch of white powder, almost like snow, collected in the hood of her sweatshirt, but she can't stop to really examine it because she's turning away and picking up the paint bomb.

The bottles are so distended that they're actually hard to the touch, but Roxanne, turning to the classroom, gives the bomb one last shake for good measure.

Wayne overturns another desk; Minion's beneath it. Wayne lunges for him.

Syx, bucket in one hand, improvised sweatshirt bag in the other, leaps over a desk and lands in the center of the room, then drops the bucket, drops the sweatshirt full of dry ice into the bucket, and ducks under Wayne's arm, reaching out for Minion.

Smoke is pouring over the top of the bucket now; the children and Miss Simmons are shrieking, pointing at the bubbling, smoking bucket. Wayne grabs Syx's collar, goes for Minion.

"Hey, Wayne!" Roxanne screams. "Catch!"

And she throws the paint bomb at him.

Wayne lets go of Syx's collar and turns in surprise, hands going out reflexively.

He catches the paint bomb.

Syx scoops up Minion and races back over to the cabinet, pushing Roxanne behind the door of it and—

The bomb explodes in Wayne's hands.

Roxanne, shielded from the blast by Syx's body and the cabinet door, gasps, and then cackles in delight, shocking herself.

It's glorious.

Blue paint is everywhere. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. Miss Simmons and the other students, screaming and flapping their arms in an attempt to dissipate the fog, are liberally splattered with it. Sam S. is shouting that his new shoes are ruined. Annie is wailing in terrified outrage.

Wayne, still hovering in place, is covered from head to toe in blue paint. And the expression on his face: utter horror, utter shock—it's so funny and Roxanne cannot seem to stop herself from laughing.

Syx, head turned to look over his shoulder, begins to laugh, too. He looks back at her, and something in his expression strikes Roxanne as unbelievably hilarious, so she laughs even harder, and Syx evidently sees the same thing in her face, because he's laughing harder, too. The two of them clutch at each other and they laugh and they laugh and they laugh.

And that's how Roxanne's parents and the Warden from Syx's prison find them all when they arrive at the school: the room in a thick fog, Miss Simmons screeching, the children screaming, Wayne frozen in outrage, everything covered in blue paint, and Roxanne and Syx holding each other up and laughing like maniacs with Minion in the Bad Corner.

"—cannot tolerate violence of any sort in this educational setting," Miss Simmons says shrilly, looking at Roxanne's parents. They look back at her, clearly dumbfounded. The Warden, seated next to Syx, merely looks resigned.

He's looked resigned the entire time he's been here, actually. He'd taken one look around the pandemonium of the class room, had sighed, and put his hand on Syx's shoulder, leading him to the door, clearly intending to take Syx back to the prison with him on the prison bus without protest. But Roxanne's father, seeing him, had dragged him into his own argument with Miss Simmons—

"I'm a perfectly reasonable man! The Warden here can tell you that, and he doesn't even like me. Isn't that right, Warden?"

—And so now all of them: Roxanne, her parents, Syx, and the Warden, are sitting in the classroom with Miss Simmons, the other children having been sent home on account of the sheer impossibility of cleaning up the mess that day.

"Not only," Miss Simmons continues, "have your children been involved in an attack on several other students, the two of them actually built and detonated an incendiary device in this classroom!" She pushes a strand of still blue hair behind a blue-splattered ear. "In such circumstances as these, I'm sure you'll understand that expulsion is the only option! Both children's scholarships with be revoked, and—"

"Wait a sec, wait," says Roxanne's dad, "Come on now, don't you think 'incendiary device' is a little too strong a term for a bunch of paint getting thrown around?"

"The damage," Miss Simmons says icily, "will be quite expensive to repair."

Roxanne kicks her heels against the legs of her chair. She hopes the damage is impossible to repair. She would hope that Miss Simmons might be stuck being blue forever, except the color blue had never done anything to deserve being stuck with Miss Simmons.

"—don't seem to understand that your daughter has been caught setting off a bomb!" Miss Simmons says, voice raised.

Roxanne feels her skin go hot all over, and then cold.

She set off a bomb, didn't she? She set off a bomb. People get arrested for that kind of thing, oh god, she really is going to have to take to a life of robbing banks with Syx and Minion because even McDonalds isn't going to hire her after they find out that she set off a bomb and the worst part of it is, the worst part is, she can't find it in herself to be sorry (the bang of the bomb going off, the splatter of blue paint), and what does that say about her?

She can't breathe—

(trapped in her own hood, dangling in the air with Wayne's grip on her collar cutting off her breathing)

Vaguely, she notices Syx glance at her with a concerned expression on his face, but it's sort of hard to think about that, impossible, really, to think about anything but the fact that she can't seem to get enough air—

Syx places Minion's ball on Roxanne's lap. Instinctively, she takes hold of it, one of her hands settling atop Syx's on the curve of the sphere.

(electron shared, bonded, balanced, a molecule, a unit)

Roxanne breathes.

She breathes.

She focuses.

"—blow this out of proportion!" her dad is saying.

"Be that as it may," Miss Simmons interrupts Roxanne's dad's attempts to convince her that the paint bomb was just a 'harmless prank, kids, you know, they just get carried away sometimes'. "Be that as it may, Mr. Ritchi, fighting in school—"

"Oh, fighting," Roxanne's dad turns his charming smile on again and waves a deprecating hand. "I'm sure your school charter doesn't proscribe immediate expulsion for a first offense like that!"

"The charter does not specifically mandate expulsion upon a first offense, no," Miss Simmons admits, and then gives Roxanne's father a sweet smile with a sting in it. "But this is hardly your daughter's first time acting out here at school."

Roxanne's mother frowns.

"You mean that note you sent home with her?" she asks. "But that was months ago!"

"I was not merely referring to that instance," Miss Simmons says, "although it did mark the beginning of a disappointing lack of respect in your daughter's attitude towards myself. What I find most disturbing, however, is the general trend of antisocial behavior exhibited by both of these children." She gives Roxanne's parents an earnest look, only briefly glancing at the Warden, who just sighs heavily, as though it's what he's expected all along. "The two of them deliberately and habitually isolate themselves from their classmates; I have been forced to reprimand them for bullying their fellow students, and they are strangely reluctant to join in any group activities, even going so far as to refuse to participate in gym class!"

"Refuses to participate in gym class?" Roxanne's dad asks, in a tone of utter disbelief. (The Warden frowns at Miss Simmons, as though she has, for the first time, said something unexpected.) "Why would she refuse to—"

"Why weren't we told any of this before?" Roxanne's mother asks incredulously. "If you were having problems like this with Roxanne, then why on earth weren't her parents notified?"

An expression of irritation, quickly suppressed, comes over Miss Simmons' face for a moment. Clearly, this conference is not going exactly as she would like.

"Forgive me, but I believe," Miss Simmons says, deftly changing tactics, "that the two of you are recently divorced?"

"Yes," says Roxanne's mother, "but I don't see what that has to do with—"

"Divorce can be difficult for children to deal with, emotionally," Miss Simmons says. "Perhaps you might consider taking your daughter to a psychologist."

Roxanne's parents startle back as though she has thrown cold water in their faces.

"Antisocial behavior," continues Miss Simmons, taking the opportunity to press her advantage, "can be a warning sigh of all sorts of other psychological—"

"Now hold on one second!" Roxanne's dad says. "You're telling me that Roxanne is showing signs of 'antisocial behavior'; you've complained that she doesn't associate with any of the other children, but clearly—" he gestures at Syx and Roxanne, "—clearly she's got at least one friend! I mean, you might not like the results of the friendship—" he flaps a hand at the paint-splattered classroom, "—but you can't argue that it's not there."

"You misunderstand me, Mr. Ritchi," Miss Simmons says, smiling so sweetly that Roxanne's teeth hurt. "I certainly do not deny the close association between the two of them." She looks at the Warden, a swift, calculating glance; he's looking stoically off into the middle distance. This appears to afford her some satisfaction. She looks back at Roxanne's dad and her smile is back in place. "But, in my opinion, it is a friendship only on your daughter's side."

Roxanne gasps; Syx's hand jerks beneath Roxanne's on Minion sphere.

"The…child…," Miss Simmons says with distasteful delicacy, "known as 'Syx' has been a disruptive influence in the classroom since his arrival. Indeed, I am sure that the legal guardian—" she looks at the Warden, "—will attest to this disruptive influence being a well-established behavioral pattern at home."

The Warden winces and then nods heavily.

"Fires have been repeatedly set, school property repeatedly destroyed, my own safety threatened, and now the attack on my students! It is simply not safe to allow this sort of thing to continue! But," Miss Simmons continues, "I have noticed that your daughter's behavior was model until the start of this…unfortunate association. It is my belief that your daughter became involved with this—boy—in a misguided attempt to help it. But in her emotional vulnerability, she has allowed herself to be manipulated and negatively influenced by it instead. Well, I believe that, when the source of the bad influence has been removed, she will once again return to her natural, normal state."

She smiles expectantly at Roxanne's parents, and Roxanne realizes, all at once, what this means.

She's being let off the hook. Syx is getting expelled, but she—she's not. No more bank robbing for her, no more working at McDonalds, everything back to normal.

She looks at her parents, sees the relief showing naked in their faces. She looks over at Syx, whose face is set in a curious, blank resignation.

Roxanne feels a great wave of black rage against the injustice of it all rise up inside of her, sweeping everything else aside, all of her fears and her worries and her doubts, making everything clear and bright and terrible. She fixes her gaze on Miss Simmons, narrows her eyes.

"What do you mean 'it'? Roxanne says.

Miss Simmons blinks at her.

"I beg your pardon?" she asks.

"You," says Roxanne, quite loudly and very clearly, "called Syx 'it'."

Miss Simmons blinks again, smile slipping.

"Don't be silly, dear," she says cloyingly. "Of course I didn't."

"Yes," Roxanne says, "you did. Twice. I heard you."

"Nonsense!"

"Liar," says Roxanne. "You called him 'it'. You thought nobody would notice, but I did. I noticed. I am always going to notice."

"I did not call—"

"I think," Roxanne's father says slowly, "that you might have, you know."

Miss Simmons smiles again, all honeysuckle and light.

"I apologize if I misspoke," she says, "but—"

"Do you want to know why I decided we shouldn't participate in gym class?" Roxanne asks loudly, still looking at Miss Simmons. "Do you want to know why we don't play with the other kids?"

"Kiddo—" her dad begins.

"It's because every time we play with them, Wayne hurts us," Roxanne says.

An explosive silence follows.

"Wayne the dodgeball kid?" her father asks.

"Wayne Scott?" the Warden asks.

"What do you mean," Roxanne's mother says, slow and dangerous, "hurts you?"

Roxanne looks at Syx. He meets her eyes, and then gives her a tiny nod.

She takes a deep breath and tells them.

She tells them everything.

"—throws too hard and it hurts and—"

"Now, really," Miss Simmons says, smile cracking around the edges, "during physical activity, there's bound to be—"

"Show them your shoulder, Syx," Roxanne says, watching the expression on Miss Simmons' face fracture.

Syx pulls his collar aside and peels the bandage off his shoulder.

Roxanne's mother, her father, and the Warden all inhale sharply.

"How—" Roxanne's mother begins. "That looks like a burn."

"—just walking to the jungle gym and—" Roxanne swallows convulsively, tears starting in her eyes, "—they were all around us. And they said—they said—"

"They said," Syx says, "that I wasn't a real person. They said that what I was must be contagious because—" Roxanne pauses in wiping away her tears to hold up her wrist, the one marked with blue paint. "—yes, that, because of that. Which is—is paint, by the way. If you didn't—I'm an alien, it's—not contagious, you don't have to worry—"

Roxanne's mother presses a hand to her mouth.

"Oh, my god, the paint bomb," Roxanne's father says, in a tone of dawning realization. "It was blue. That's why it was blue."

"—and then he threw me down again and told me to stay down this time and called me a freak of nature, so I, well. Sort of spat blood at him and told him to go fuck himself." He glances at the Warden. "Sorry," he adds.

"Jesus, kid," the Warden says blankly.

"—told us we were expelled and made us stand in the Bad Corner so we made the paint bomb. And honestly!" Syx adds to Miss Simmons, "What could you have been thinking, sending me to Quiet Time every day when the Bad Corner faces into an open supply cabinet full of chemicals? The things I could have been doing all this time! The experiments! The explosions! But I haven't! You have no concept-ion how much willpower that took!"

Roxanne makes a mental note to explain how to pronounce 'conception' later, since now isn't exactly the time.

There are several seconds of silence, and then—

"—the hell kind of a school is this? I've never—"

"—completely unfit to deal with children—"

"—never heard of anything so—"

"—will take this up with the board of trustees!"

"'Lil Gifted School," Miss Simmons says snippily, "does not have a board of trustees. We are very private. Very exclusive."

Roxanne's dad narrows his eyes.

"Who hired you, then?" he asks, in a tone that makes it clear he thinks whoever it was is an idiot.

"Our backers prefer to remain anonymous," says Miss Simmons.

"'Prefer to remain anonymous'?" Roxanne's father repeats incredulously. "What kind of run-around bull—"

"Fine," Roxanne's mother cuts him off, sitting up straight and clutching her purse as though she may at any moment wield it with deadly intent. "You can keep your secret backers; the people I want to talk to are this Wayne Scott's parents. When will they be joining us here?"

"Yes," the Warden says, "Why aren't Wayne Scott's parents in here?"

"As the authority in this classroom," Miss Simmons says, looking flustered and uncomfortable, "I see no reason to involve Mr. and Mrs. Scott in this matter of disciplinary action—"

"No reason to involve them? Their kid has been systematically bullying ours for months—"

"—and don't think that I didn't notice that it's the two scholarship children who have been singled out here—"

"—classism as well as racism—"

"—lawsuit, and let me tell you—"

Roxanne, Syx, and Minion share a a look of sheer and utter satisfaction.

Miss Simmons is in hysterics by the time they leave. It's excellent.

Somehow all of them wind up taking the prison bus to a diner so the adults can continue their furious discussion. It's a weird meal. Roxanne's parents are both shouting, but for once they're in complete agreement, and the Warden and Roxanne's dad appear to have progressed from a cool professional dislike to bonding over their mutual outrage to deciding they should go out for drinks sometime after work.

Syx, and Roxanne, squeezed into one corner of the booth, with Minion in between them, take advantage of the adults' distraction to order waffles and sodas and milkshakes (Roxanne gets chocolate; Syx asks for half chocolate, half strawberry, and then proceeds to empty most of the table's sugar packets into his shake. Roxanne looks on, horrified and impressed.)

By the time their waffles arrive, he's sketching out explanatory diagrams of the self-cleaning water molecules in Minion's sphere for Roxanne on a napkin with maple syrup.

"—osmosis, see, except—" He looks up at Roxanne and sees her grinning at him. "What?" he asks.

(On the other side of the table, the adults are still talking loud enough that the people in the diner are staring at them instead of Syx.)

"Nothing," Roxanne says, still smiling so hard her face is starting to hurt. "Nothing. I'm just—I'm really happy that we're friends, is all."

(Later, Mr. Scott's personal lawyer will call both Roxanne's parents and the Warden and offer to pay for Roxanne and Syx's tuition to any private school of their choice in exchange for them not pressing charges, and later Roxanne's parents will get into a screaming match—let our daughter be a normal kid, Steve; we tried it your way, with the fancy private school once and look where it got us—and later Syx and Roxanne will have to argue the Warden into letting Syx go to the public school with Roxanne —no, I do not wish to skip any grades, either, Warden; yes, I am sure—and later things will be complicated and scary and maybe not entirely safe, but right now—

Syx smiles like sunlight piercing through dark clouds and presses their shoulders close together. Minion, in his sphere on the table, rolls over to bump against Roxanne's hand.

"I am very happy about that, too," Syx says.

—right now everything is perfect.

This au continues! The next story in the series, entitled Safe If We Stand Close Together: Happy Returns, is now up!

To see the illustrations for Safe If We Stand Close Together (Syx's 'home' watercolor and his oil painting of the ocean), go to the link in my profile.

Thank you for reading!