This is a copout. A God Damned, undeniable waste of energy, top to bottom, stem to stern, where a sea of dusty mice, recently slaughtered by neighborhood cats, bite and rip into unsuspecting children while they frolic in an otherwise pristine sandbox. Kyle wonders about his valiant method of running away, cowardice at its most honorable, and sighs. The point, the whole reason for skipping lunch and hiding in the boiler room—a door unlocked and unattended since he found it on his first day—involved tearing asunder Dr. Z's story, and producing something wholly different, possibly even combative against Rue and his ilk.

But there was no use. The school's badly maintained, gigantic cast-iron boiler screeched and banged somewhere under the stairs where Kyle sat, throwing an oppressive aura of heat that threatened to drive Kyle outside, regardless of the currently dangerous wind chill that canceled recess and forced the school to bar the outside doors. For the sleepy, plebeian drones barely conscious as they trudged through the halls, escaping the cold was a reprieve, but to Kyle, it was utter torture. Kyle wanted, needed to walk outside, to digest the staggering weight of how literary pursuits were affected—or, not affected—by whatever distored, tainted, and corrupted this town and its hapless denizens.

But was Kyle any different? Really? As he'd already observed, if not for his dad, Fantastic don't forget your Kewpie Doll kids Frank, he'd be just like the rest: absorbed into the engine—fuel for the inevitable hellfire.

Fuck that.

So what else was there? The moldy basement, lit weakly by a lonely 60-watt bulb hanging forlorn somewhere near the boiler, had no answer aside from a steadily thrumming creak of heat-stressed pipes and occasional bangs that rung clear into the third floor as mounts slipped by mere millimeters. Tammond Dale's school was old, the boiler room stunk worse than a roof freshly tarred with excrement spread over stale corpses, and still Kyle sat. Aside from his infamous endless pacing, sitting was a distant second, reserved only for dire circumstances.

Well, this certainly qualifies. Kyle wondered if he'd think about this thirty or forty years from now, toothless and senile, and discover some esoteric insight borne only by "wisdom" and the borderline decrepit corpses that claimed that elusive right of passage. The rats probably thought so, squeaking warnings to each other in the grainy, insufficient light. Those rodents, true rodents unrelated to rabbits at all, scampered and remained ultimately ignorant of the outside world, that distant galaxy of stomping creatures, and the hulking fat bastard who stoked and fed the insatiable stove that steamed and cooked the children inside Lincoln Way.

Somewhere in the back of Kyle's mind, an old lecture reared its filthy mug, rising from the discarded ashes of old tests and forgotten C's, declaring rabbits were lagomorphs, not rodents as he'd previously labeled his ever-present tormentor. As if that made any difference.

As if having a smaller set of teeth behind the front incisors meant anything significant, aside from academic conjecture and technicalities conjured only by graduate students and historians searching to apply a vast, worthless compendium of Latin to commonplace animals. It's a rabbit, you stupid, pretentious assholes.

So there was only one real solution: find Rue, kill Rue.

Kill a rabbit? What was this, preschool? Cake. Not just cake, mushy, old-man cake that a drunk baby could accidentally suck through a crazy-straw. A delicious, soup-like mix of sugar and frosting that came naturally to every school-age citizen from toddler to teenager verging on banal adulthood. Where was the challenge?!

Despite his bluster, Kyle was uneasy. More than uneasy, petrified of the tattered bag of rotten meat lurking in his nightmares, shadowing his waking life, somehow embedded below visibility, and ultimately omnipresent through all of Tammond Dale. Watching, seeing, and plotting to obliterate this latest insect mucking up its fly-paper. Was there anything worse than being constantly hunted, awake or asleep?

No, Kyle decided, there isn't.

But God Damn, he still had his plan. Talk to Dr. Spizer, talk to Adriana, talk to his parents, encounter or challenge Rue, save the day, win a doll, or a disturbing clown face that ejected water from a pinhole carefully etched into a gruesome caricature of a mouth. At least something. Kyle shuddered at the chaotic aside; carnivals can go to hell, too. Accolades, victory, escape; he'd take any of those at this point.

And Frank? This was all his fault! If he hadn't, somewhere between a billion years ago and when Kyle was eleven, told him the importance of learning from the past, blasting through his mistakes to strike subservience into them. Frank always said, "Kid, if you read this a year from now and don't consider your past self an utter fool, you're not trying hard enough." Was that supposed to be wisdom? From a guy who slept through a life that would crawl over a busload of injured nuns and orphans, just to give him a winning lottery ticket? The guy who never, ever overcame a single iota of adversity?!

Try again, old man. Let's see how you fare when life and dreams merge into a filthy miasma, dragging you into something that's gorged itself on an entire town. Kyle tapped his leg impatiently on the dense wooden stair, having basically gained no insight, despite wasting his entire lunch period with fruitless contemplation.

Maybe not fruitless, but nothing new. Still his mind demanded him to confront Mr. Spizer about Japan, ingratiate himself with Adriana, and neutralize Rue, the rabbit his journal labeled as a threat beyond comprehension—at least, if he believed the dreams.

Oddly enough, in this dank, musty, rat-infested hole that served to provide heat to the entire school, Kyle found believing hazy memories forged through too many late-night snacks and incessant radio-shows, secondary. Find the hare, win the stare. What could be easier?