NORRIS LLAMARADO & THE COMMENT SECTION ADVENTURES Book One: The Feed CHAPTER 1 The Tuesday Morning Incident It is a scientific fact that boredom is heavier than lead. I know this because I was currently being crushed by it—slowly, methodically, like a hydraulic press squeezing the life out of a watermelon on one of those satisfying video compilations. Except there was nothing satisfying about Room 204 of Conejo Valley Middle School at 9:47 AM on a Tuesday morning in late October. I sat in the third row of Mr. Henderson's Science class, vibrating. Not metaphorically vibrating. Actually vibrating. My left leg was bouncing against the metal support bar of my desk at approximately 180 beats per minute—I had counted. My pencil was tapping a counter-rhythm against my spiral notebook, creating a polyrhythmic masterpiece that nobody appreciated. My brain was running a marathon, a triathlon, and an extreme obstacle course simultaneously, while my body remained imprisoned in a hard plastic chair that smelled like Lemon Pledge furniture polish and decades of accumulated teenage despair. The classroom was a sensory nightmare designed by someone who hated children. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a frequency that burrowed directly into my skull—a persistent, electric whine that made my teeth itch. The walls were painted the exact shade of beige that hospitals use when they've given up on making patients feel better. Educational posters lined the room with aggressive optimism: SCIENCE IS FUN! one declared, featuring a cartoon beaker with googly eyes. Another showed the periodic table arranged to spell out BE AMAZING! using element symbols. Be-Am-Az-In-G. Beryllium-Americium-Astatine... wait, that didn't work. The poster was lying. Science was lying. Everything was lying. "Gravity," Mr. Henderson droned from the front of the room. He stood beside the whiteboard like a man who had accepted his fate long ago. Mr. Henderson was a person who looked like he had been ironed—not his clothes, though those were immaculate, but his actual soul. His button-down shirt was crisp enough to cut paper. His tie was a precisely centered stripe of navy blue. His khaki pants held a crease sharp enough to slice bread. But his eyes... his eyes had the flat, distant quality of someone who had explained the concept of gravity to seventh-graders approximately 4,000 times and had died a little inside with each repetition. "Gravity," he continued, turning to write on the board with a dry-erase marker that squeaked in a way that made three students visibly flinch, "is the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass." The marker squeaked again: G = 9.8 m/s² I stared at the equation. The numbers stared back at me, smug and certain of themselves. They knew exactly what they were doing. They had purpose. They had meaning. They weren't trapped in a plastic chair wondering if this was all there was to existence. "Boring," I whispered. It came out louder than I intended. Whispers have a way of doing that when you're a llama with wool that apparently amplifies sound waves. "Did you say something, Mr. Llamarado?" Mr. Henderson's voice cut through the fluorescent hum. Thirty heads swiveled toward me with the synchronized precision of meerkats detecting a predator. I could feel their eyes—some curious, some annoyed, some grateful for any distraction from the soul-crushing monotony. Maya Chen in the front row was already smirking. Derek Thompson, two seats over, was recording on his phone under his desk. Of course he was. I adjusted my sunglasses. Yes, I wear sunglasses indoors. It's a lifestyle choice. Also, the fluorescent lights genuinely give me a headache that starts behind my left eye and spreads across my skull like spilled grape juice on a white carpet. But mostly it's a lifestyle choice. My therapist calls it a "coping mechanism." I call it "having excellent taste in eyewear." The sunglasses in question were vintage Ray-Ban Wayfarers, slightly scratched on the left lens from an incident involving a ceiling fan that we don't need to discuss. They made me look mysterious and cool. Or at least, that's what I told myself every morning when I put them on and my sister Nora told me I looked like "a confused tourist who got lost on the way to the beach." "I said," I improvised, pushing back my chair and standing up because sitting felt impossible now, "that gravity is a SUGGESTION!" Twenty-nine students inhaled sharply. Derek Thompson's phone tilted upward to capture better footage. Mr. Henderson sighed. It was a long, weary sigh—the kind of sigh that contained multitudes. It was a sigh that said I have a master's degree and I was going to be an astronaut and why did I choose education all at once. "Sit down, Norris." "But think about it!" I stepped into the aisle between desks. The energy was building inside me like a shaken soda can, like a balloon stretched to its limit, like a volcano that had been dormant for exactly forty-seven minutes and couldn't take it anymore. "Why do we just accept falling? What if we just... refused? What if the whole concept of 'down' is just peer pressure from physics?" "Norris," Mr. Henderson warned. His hand moved toward his desk, where a yellow referral pad sat like a threat. "Has anyone actually tested the hypothesis of just saying 'No thank you' to gravity?" I was pacing now, my hooves clicking against the linoleum in a rhythm that matched my racing thoughts. "I mean, birds figured it out! Planes figured it out! Helium balloons figured it out, and they don't even have brains!" "Technically, those all still operate within gravitational—" "I have a theory!" I announced, spotting a glass beaker on the lab table next to Maria Gonzalez's desk. It was empty, clean, and absolutely perfect for what I was about to do. "A hypothesis! Isn't that what science is about? Testing things?" I grabbed the beaker. It was cool and smooth in my hooves. "Mr. Llamarado, put the beaker down." "Observe!" I held it up like a trophy, like the Holy Grail, like the answer to everything. "If I spin this beaker fast enough, the centrifugal force will theoretically counteract the gravitational pull, creating a localized field of..." I trailed off. I didn't actually know what it would create. But that had never stopped me before. "Norris." Mr. Henderson's voice had dropped to that dangerous, quiet register that teachers use when they've given up on yelling. "Put. The beaker. Down." "SCIENCE!" I shouted instead. And I started spinning. Here's the thing about being a llama: we are built for endurance. We can carry heavy loads across mountains. We can survive in harsh climates. We can spit with remarkable accuracy when provoked. What we are not built for is ballet. I spun. My wool flared out like a disco ball made of cream-colored fluff. The beaker whizzed around my head, catching the fluorescent light and throwing tiny rainbows across the beige walls. For exactly 2.3 seconds, it was genuinely beautiful. For exactly 2.3 seconds, I felt like I was proving something important about the nature of the universe. Then physics happened. My left hoof caught on a loose floor tile—one of those industrial squares that schools use specifically because they're cheap and ugly and apparently also deadly. My right hoof tried to compensate but overcorrected. My center of gravity (ironic) shifted catastrophically to the left. The beaker flew from my grip. Time slowed down—another physics phenomenon I should probably study if I survived the next three seconds. I watched the beaker sail through the air in a perfect parabolic arc. It tumbled end over end, catching the light, beautiful and doomed. It was heading directly for the model of the Solar System that had hung from the ceiling since approximately 1987, when the school was built and optimism still existed. CRASH. Jupiter fell first. It was the biggest planet, which meant it had the most dramatic impact when it struck Mars with the force of a small asteroid. Mars, already having a rough century, surrendered immediately and slammed into Earth. "THE APOCALYPSE!" someone screamed. I think it was Derek Thompson, which was rich coming from the guy who was still filming. Venus hit Mercury. Saturn's rings detached and spun through the air like deadly frisbees. Uranus—which someone had graffitied a small smiley face onto at some point—plummeted toward the front row, where Maya Chen dove under her desk with the reflexes of someone who had survived Norris Llamarado's previous experiments. A plastic Saturn bounced off Mr. Henderson's head with a hollow bonk. The room fell silent. The only sound was Pluto—poor, demoted, eternally disrespected Pluto—rolling across the floor toward the door. Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle... It came to a stop against Mr. Henderson's shoe. He looked down at the tiny gray sphere. He looked up at me. He slowly, methodically removed Saturn from where it had lodged itself against his shoulder. I was frozen mid-fall, my wool tangled around my own legs, my sunglasses somehow still perfectly positioned on my face. I tried to smile. It probably looked more like a grimace. "So," I said weakly, "I think we can conclude that centrifugal force does NOT, in fact, negate gravity. Science!" Mr. Henderson didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He simply picked up the yellow referral pad, wrote for approximately thirty seconds without breaking eye contact with me, and tore off the slip with a sound like a guillotine blade dropping. "Principal's office," he said. "Now." I untangled my legs, collected what remained of my dignity (approximately 3%), and walked toward the door. "And Norris?" Mr. Henderson added, just as I reached for the handle. "Yes?" "Please ask Principal Stern to call your mother. Again." The Walk of Shame is a lonely journey. I've made this walk enough times to have mapped its emotional geography. There's the initial spike of adrenaline as you leave the classroom—a brief, sharp high of at least something happened. Then comes the hallway, stretching out before you like a beige-carpeted highway to doom, and the adrenaline drains away, leaving behind a residue of dread that coats your stomach like cold oatmeal. My hooves clicked against the linoleum in a rhythm that sounded like idiot-idiot-idiot-idiot. The hallway was decorated with the artifacts of academic achievement I would never earn. I passed the trophy case first—a glass shrine filled with golden figures frozen mid-sport. Football players. Basketball players. Soccer players. Swimmers. Tennis champions. Not a single trophy for "Most Creative Interpretation of Physics" or "Best Unintentional Planet Destruction." I paused at the "Student of the Month" board. Twelve frames, twelve photos of students who had figured out how to sit still and raise their hands and turn in homework on time. Maya Chen's photo was in the October frame—her smile was perfect, her wool was brushed, her eyes radiated the calm confidence of someone whose brain didn't constantly scream GO GO GO DO SOMETHING ANYTHING. My photo was noticeably absent. It had been absent for all three years of middle school. It would probably continue to be absent until I graduated or was expelled, whichever came first. I started walking again, but slower now, because Principal Stern's office wasn't going anywhere and I wasn't in a hurry to arrive. That's when I saw them. The others. They weren't a squad yet. They weren't even really friends yet. They were just... islands. Four separate disasters floating in the same sea of seventh-grade misery, completely unaware that we were about to crash into each other and form a very weird continent. Riff was first. He sat on a bench outside the library, his black hoodie pulled up despite the school's no-hood policy, reading a book with a title I could just barely make out: The Heat Death of the Universe: A Fun Guide for Kids. His fur was the color of a sunset giving up—dark orange fading to rust, perpetually looking like it needed to be brushed. His expression was the facial equivalent of a shrug that had learned to walk. A teacher—Ms. Patterson, I think, from English—walked by and paused. "Smile, Riff!" she chirped with aggressive positivity. "It's a beautiful day!" Riff looked up from his book. He didn't say anything. He just... stared at her. His eyes were dark, flat, and conveyed an existential disappointment that seemed far too sophisticated for a twelve-year-old. The stare went on for three seconds. Then four. Then five. Ms. Patterson's smile faltered. Her step hitched. She walked away faster, glancing back once with an expression of genuine concern. Riff returned to his book. Further down the hall, I spotted Tina. She was tucked into an alcove near the water fountains, phone out, ring light somehow attached to her ear despite being against regulation, trying to film a dance video. She was a pig—one of those pink, perfectly round ones with ears that were basically built for scrunchies. She was wearing a denim jacket covered in so many sequins it functioned as a strobe light when she moved. "Okay, five, six, seven, eight—" She did a spin. Her hoof caught on the tile. Her phone flew out of her grip, and she lunged for it with the desperation of someone watching their entire social empire fall. She caught it. Barely. Two popular girls walked by—I recognized them from the volleyball team, tall and coordinated and everything Tina was trying so hard to be. They looked at her. They laughed. Not loud, not pointed, just a small, cutting exhalation of amusement that said oh, you're trying, how sad. Tina's face did something complicated. Embarrassment flashed across it, then hurt, then a rapid reconstruction as she plastered on a smile so bright and fake it practically had a filter already applied. "Nailed it!" she announced to no one, checking her phone screen for cracks. And then there was Gregory. Gregory was impossible to miss, because Gregory took up approximately 40% of any space he occupied. He was a rooster, but calling Gregory a "rooster" was like calling a monster truck a "vehicle." He was massive. His chest was approximately the width of a refrigerator. His legs looked like they could kick through concrete. His feathers, instead of being fluffy and cheerful, lay in flat, armored plates that gleamed under the fluorescent lights. He was standing at his locker. He was trying to open his locker. "Come on," he whispered, his voice a low rumble like distant thunder. "Gentle. Be gentle." He reached for the dial with one enormous finger. He tried to pinch it delicately between his thumb and forefinger. The dial snapped off in his grip. Gregory stared at the broken metal in his palm. His face crumpled—not with anger, but with a profound, familiar disappointment. Like this happened every day. Like breaking things was just the background radiation of his existence. He tried the handle anyway, hoping the mechanism would still work. RIIIIIIIIP. The entire locker door came off in his hand. "Oh no," Gregory whimpered, holding the twisted metal door like a giant, embarrassing shield. "Not again. Not again, not again, not again." He looked around frantically, like he could will the locker back together if nobody had witnessed his destruction. His eyes were huge—too huge for his massive face, too soft for his intimidating frame. He looked like a bear who had accidentally stepped on a butterfly and was now contemplating the nature of mortality. He tried to put the door back. It clattered to the floor with a sound that echoed through the entire hallway. Three kids from the basketball team looked over, saw the carnage, and gave Gregory a wide berth as they walked past. One of them muttered something about "that Tank kid" and the others laughed. Gregory shrank—which is remarkable when you're built like a young mountain. I watched them. The Cynic. The Performer. The Tank. We were all disasters. We were all glitches in the operating system of Conejo Valley Middle School, errors that nobody knew how to debug. Riff was too sad. Tina was too loud. Gregory was too big. And I was just... too much. I wanted to say something. I wanted to walk up to each of them and say, "Hey, I just destroyed the solar system, and you look like you're having a day too. Want to grab lunch and talk about how none of us fit anywhere?" But I didn't. I kept walking. I always kept walking. Because talking to strangers was hard, and being vulnerable was harder, and what if they thought I was weird? What if they looked at me the way Maya Chen's friends looked at me—with that particular mix of pity and fascination and relief that they weren't me? The Walk of Shame continued. Principal Stern's office smelled like stale peppermint and judgment. Continuing with the rest of Chapter 1 and moving forward: Principal Stern's office smelled like stale peppermint and judgment. The peppermints lived in a crystal bowl on her desk—the fancy kind that grandmothers keep in living rooms where children aren't allowed to sit on the furniture. They had been there so long that some of them had fused together into a single peppermint mass, like a candy glacier slowly advancing across the bowl. Nobody ever took one. Taking a peppermint would require making eye contact with Principal Stern, and making eye contact with Principal Stern was like staring directly into the sun, if the sun was disappointed in your life choices. I sank into the chair across from her desk. The chair was deliberately uncomfortable—too low, too hard, positioned so that you had to look up at Principal Stern like a supplicant before a throne. The leather was cracked and cold against my wool. Principal Stern was a hawk. Literally. A red-tailed hawk with reading glasses perched on her beak and a blazer that probably cost more than my family's television. Her feathers were immaculate—every single one aligned with military precision. Her talons, currently wrapped around a manila folder with my name on it, were manicured to lethal points. She didn't speak immediately. That was her technique. She let the silence stretch until it became a living thing, until it pressed against your ears and made you want to confess to crimes you hadn't even committed yet. The clock on the wall ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. The folder in her talons was thick. Distressingly thick. I could see tabs sticking out—color-coded, because of course Principal Stern color-coded disciplinary files. "Norris," she finally said, tapping the folder with one talon. The sound was like a judge's gavel. "This is the third time this week." "Technically—" I started. "Monday." She opened the folder. "You attempted to see if the water fountain could be carbonated by introducing a chemical compound you had created in your garage." "It was baking soda and citric acid! It's basically a bath bomb! I was trying to make hydration more fun!" "You flooded the east hallway with fizzy water. Three students slipped. The janitor filed a complaint." "Mr. Rodriguez and I talked about it. We're good now. He showed me pictures of his grandkids." "Tuesday." She flipped to a new page. "You dismantled the pencil sharpener in Mr. Henderson's classroom to, quote, 'upgrade the torque ratio.'" "It was SO SLOW, Principal Stern. Do you know how much collective student time is wasted waiting for pencils to sharpen? I calculated it. Fourteen minutes per student per week. That's—" "You left pencil shavings and small motor components across six desks. The sharpener is still non-functional." "I was going to put it back together! I just needed more time and possibly a soldering iron—" "And today." She closed the folder with a sound of finality. "The Solar System." I had no defense for the Solar System. The Solar System was indefensible. "That model has been hanging in Room 204 since 1987," Principal Stern continued. "It survived the Northridge earthquake. It survived three floods. It survived budget cuts that eliminated the actual science equipment." She leaned forward, her hawk eyes boring into mine. "It did not survive Norris Llamarado." "I'm sorry," I whispered. And I meant it. I actually, genuinely meant it. Not just because I was in trouble, but because I could see now, in the cold peppermint-scented clarity of her office, how stupid it had been. How I'd taken something that generations of students had looked up at and wondered about and turned it into debris. "Norris." Principal Stern's voice softened slightly—not warm, exactly, but less razor-sharp. "Why is it always something? Why can't you just... do the assignment? Sit in the chair? Be..." She didn't say normal. But the word hung in the air between us, heavy and invisible, like a ghost that had taken up permanent residence in the conversation. Be normal. I stared at the carpet. It was industrial gray, flecked with darker spots that might have been design choices or might have been decades of accumulated tears from students sitting exactly where I was sitting. "I don't know," I whispered. "My brain just... goes. It's like there's this engine inside me that never turns off. And when I try to sit still, when I try to just be quiet and listen, the engine gets louder and louder until I feel like I'm going to explode. So I try to do something—anything—to let some of the pressure out. And then..." "Planets fall," Principal Stern finished. "Yeah." The clock ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. "I'm calling your mother," Principal Stern said, reaching for the phone. "You're going home early. Again." I nodded. There was nothing else to do. As she dialed, I stared out the window at the quad, where normal students were walking to their normal classes with their normal brains that apparently came with volume controls. A group of girls was laughing about something on a phone. Two boys were tossing a football back and forth with easy, coordinated movements. I didn't know that in about six hours, I would be fighting a digital demon with a rubber chicken. I didn't know that the "broken" parts of me—the energy, the chaos, the absolute inability to sit still—would be the only things that could save the world. Right now, I just felt like a kid who ruined everything. "Norris?" I looked up. Principal Stern had her talon over the phone receiver. "Go wait outside. Try not to dismantle the bench." I walked out. I sat on the bench. I didn't dismantle it. But I did vibrate. Because even when I felt small, even when I felt broken, the energy was there. Waiting. Humming. Rattling against the cage of my ribs like a bird that had never learned that windows were solid. It wasn't a defect. It was fuel. I just needed to find the right engine. CHAPTER 1.5 The Silence of the Lam-borghini (It's a Minivan) My mom's car is a silver minivan named Gerald. I don't know why she named it Gerald. When I asked, she said, "Because he looks like a Gerald," which explained nothing but also somehow explained everything. Gerald was a 2015 Honda Odyssey with a dent in the rear bumper from the Great Mailbox Incident of last spring (not my fault) and a perpetual smell of lavender hand sanitizer mixed with lost Cheerios that had rolled under seats and been forgotten. Usually, Gerald was a vessel of chaos. The radio would be blasting Mom's "80s Power Anthems" playlist. Nora would be reading facts about bridges or architecture or whatever her current hyperfixation was, reciting them out loud whether anyone asked or not. I would be in the back seat practicing beatboxing very badly while Nora threatened to report me to the United Nations for crimes against music. Today, Gerald was a tomb. I buckled my seatbelt. Click. The sound echoed like a gunshot in a library, like the hammer of a judge's gavel, like the final nail in the coffin of my already-dead reputation. Mom didn't say anything. She just put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. She was wearing her "I Had To Leave Work For This" face. It's a very specific expression—I've catalogued them all. Her jaw was set in a tight line, like she was trying to physically hold words inside her mouth. Her eyebrows had formed a V-shape that conveyed disappointment not just in me, but in all my ancestors who had led, through various reproductive choices, to my existence. She was still wearing her work badge. It had her photo on it—Mom smiling in front of a neutral background, looking like someone who had everything under control. The badge said MARIA LLAMARADO, PROJECT MANAGER in neat block letters. She had been in a meeting when Principal Stern called. I knew because she'd told Principal Stern, "I am in a meeting right now," in a voice that could have frozen the Pacific Ocean, before saying "I'll be there in fifteen minutes" and hanging up. The meeting had probably been important. Meetings were always important when you were a Project Manager at a tech company. I had cost her something today—not just time, but credibility, and professionalism, and the ability to say "my kids are fine" when coworkers asked. "So," I said, testing the waters like a person testing whether a pool is full of sharks. "The solar system model was actually very inaccurate. Did you know the scale was completely wrong? Jupiter was represented as only twice the size of Earth, but in reality, Jupiter's volume is over 1,300 times—" "Norris." Mom's voice was quiet. She didn't look at me. She kept her eyes on the road with the focus of someone who was afraid that if she looked away, she might say something she couldn't take back. "Not now." "Right. Not now. Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver. Awkward car rides are... bronze?" Nothing. Not even a nostril flare. I stared out the window instead. The suburbs of Conejo Valley rolled past in a beige blur—identical houses, identical lawns, identical mailboxes standing at attention like soldiers in a very boring army. A man was walking a dog that somehow looked exactly like him. They had the same tired shuffle, the same vaguely disappointed expression. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and watched the world stream by. The vibration of the engine hummed through my skull, settling into my teeth. It felt like the buzzing inside my brain—that constant, electrical hum that told me to spin the beaker. The same buzzing that had told me to see if I could climb the flagpole during recess. The buzzing that had convinced me that carbonated water fountains were a public service. The buzzing that made me... me. "Principal Stern said you were disruptive," Mom said finally. Her voice wasn't angry. It was just tired, which was somehow a thousand times worse. Anger had energy. Anger meant she still cared enough to fight. Tiredness meant she was running out of fuel. "I was enthusiastic," I corrected weakly. "There's a fine line." "She said you broke the solar system." "Gravity broke the solar system. I was merely the catalyst." We stopped at a red light. The silence stretched. A bicyclist crossed in front of us, completely unaware of the emotional apocalypse happening inside Gerald the Minivan. Mom turned to look at me. She took off her sunglasses—normal person sunglasses, not cool Ray-Bans like mine—and I could see her eyes properly for the first time since she'd picked me up. They were sad. Not angry-sad. Just... sad. The kind of sad that comes from watching someone you love struggle with something you can't fix. "Mijo," she said softly. "Why is it always something? Why can't you just... do the assignment? Sit in the chair? Be..." There it was again. That word she didn't say, hanging in the air between us like a held breath. Be normal. "I tried," I whispered. My throat felt tight. "I really tried, Mom. I went into class today and I told myself, 'Norris, you're going to sit still. You're going to listen. You're not going to do anything weird.' And I did! For like forty-five minutes! But then Mr. Henderson started talking about gravity, and my brain started going, and I couldn't stop thinking about centrifugal force and what would happen if—" "If you spun a beaker," Mom finished. "My brain gets itchy, Mom. That's the only way I can describe it. Like... if I don't move, if I don't do something, I feel like I'm going to explode. Like there's too much electricity inside me and it has nowhere to go. So it just builds and builds until I can't think about anything except making it stop. And then I try to do something cool, and it turns into..." "Jupiter hitting Mr. Henderson." "Yeah." The light turned green. Mom put her sunglasses back on, which meant she didn't want me to see whatever her eyes were doing. She reached over and smoothed the wool on top of my head, the way she used to do when I was little and had nightmares about falling. "You have a big heart, Norris. And a big brain. Both of them are good things." She put her hand back on the wheel. "But sometimes... sometimes you are just a lot to handle." A lot. The words settled into my stomach like cold oatmeal. Like the peppermint glacier in Principal Stern's office. Like something heavy and permanent that I would carry with me for a very long time. We drove the rest of the way in silence. When we pulled into the driveway, I didn't wait for her to turn off the engine. I unbuckled and scrambled out of Gerald before the van even fully stopped rocking on its suspension. "I'm going to my room!" I shouted, already halfway to the door. "Homework!" she called after me. "And no screens!" I ran inside. I ran up the stairs. My hooves thudded against the carpet in a rhythm that sounded like too-much-too-much-too-much. The house felt different when you were supposed to be at school. Quieter. Emptier. The afternoon light came through the windows at unfamiliar angles, making everything look slightly wrong, like a photograph that had been tilted three degrees. I paced around my room. The buzzing was back. Louder than ever. It was screaming at me: DO SOMETHING. FIX IT. PROVE THEM WRONG. PROVE THAT YOU'RE NOT BROKEN. My room was a museum of previous attempts to do something. Half-built inventions covered every surface: a robot arm I'd started making from old electronics, a homemade telescope pointed at nothing, a machine I'd been designing to automatically sort my laundry by color that had so far only succeeded in flinging socks at the wall. I looked at my desk. My science notebook was open to the chapter we'd been covering: Gravity and Resistance. I looked at the window. The roof was visible just outside—accessible, high, a perfect platform for empirical data collection. I looked at my hands. They were shaking slightly. They always shook when the energy had nowhere to go. I didn't want to be a disruption. I wanted to be a Scientist. Scientists weren't "too much." Scientists were geniuses. Einstein was too much. Newton was too much. Galileo literally got in trouble with the Pope for being too much, and now there were craters on the moon named after him. If I could prove something—if I could document a real breakthrough—then they'd have to see. They'd have to understand that I wasn't broken. I was just... experimental. I ran to the kitchen. I grabbed the bread. I grabbed the peanut butter. I grabbed the turkey from the cold cuts drawer. And then, in the back of the refrigerator, I saw it. The tuna can. It gleamed under the refrigerator light like a beacon. Heavy. Dense. Significant. "Perfect," I whispered. I wasn't just going to drop a sandwich. I was going to drop a legend. CHAPTER 2 Operation: Tuna Drop Accessing the roof required tactical precision. This was not my first covert roof operation. I had a system. I had protocols. I had, on one memorable occasion, created a detailed schematic of the house's structural weak points, which my mom had found and hidden somewhere I still haven't located. I crept down the hallway, my hooves silent on the carpet (I was wearing socks for stealth purposes—they had tiny rockets on them, which felt appropriate for a scientific mission). My payload was secured in a reusable grocery bag that smelled faintly of old onions and environmental responsibility. I passed Nora's room. The door was open a crack—it was always open a crack, because Nora believed closed doors created "inefficient air circulation" and also because she liked to be able to hear if I was doing anything stupid so she could document it. Through the gap, I could see her sitting at her desk, organizing something. I squinted. She was color-coding her socks. They were laid out on her bed in a perfect gradient: white, cream, ivory, eggshell, bone, beige, khaki, tan, light brown, medium brown, dark brown, chocolate, espresso, black. Each pair was folded into a precise rectangle. She was currently comparing two socks that looked absolutely identical to me, holding them up to the light to check for microscopic variations in hue. "Blue," she murmured to herself. "Dark Blue. Midnight Blue. Navy. These are not the same thing. This is why people fail at fashion." "Nerd," I whispered affectionately, though not loud enough for her to hear. I continued down the hall. The window at the end was my entry point. It opened onto the trellis—a wooden lattice covered in bougainvillea vines that my mom claimed were "ornamental" and that I had long ago realized were "basically a structural ladder." The vines had thorns, yes, but science required sacrifice. I slid the window up. Screeeeech. The sound cut through the afternoon silence like a cat's claws on a chalkboard. I froze, every muscle locked, ears straining. Downstairs, the TV continued to murmur softly—some afternoon talk show. The washing machine kept up its rhythmic thump-thump-thump. The coast was clear. I squeezed through the window. It was a tighter fit than I remembered—either the window had shrunk or I had entered some kind of puberty growth spurt that nobody had warned me about. My wool snagged on the latch. "Tactical snag," I muttered, wiggling my hips like a llama doing a very undignified dance. "Deploying wiggle maneuver. Wiggle... wiggle... more wiggle..." Pop. I came free and grabbed the trellis. It groaned under my weight with the sound of a ship's rigging in a storm. I am, as previously established, a dense llama. Built for endurance. Not built for stealth climbing. The bougainvillea had opinions about my ascent. Thorns snagged my sweater vest—yes, I wear sweater vests, it's a look, don't judge me—and scratched at my cheeks. Leaves slapped my face with enthusiasm. A startled spider rappelled past my nose and disappeared into the foliage below. I hauled myself over the gutter (which bent ominously) and rolled onto the roof. Safe. I lay on my back for a moment, staring up at the October sky. The shingles were warm from the sun, rough against my wool. The air smelled like autumn—dry leaves and distant barbeques and the faint chemical tang of someone's pool a few houses over. From up here, the Conejo Valley looked almost interesting. The cars on the streets below were Hot Wheels. The people were Sims, wandering through their programmed routines. The world was a grid, orderly and contained. And I was the player character. "Laboratory is open," I announced to the clouds. "Dr. Llamarado will now conduct Science." I set up my station with methodical care. The Notebook: Spiral-bound, college-ruled, stolen from Nora's supply closet. I opened it to a fresh page and wrote at the top, in my neatest handwriting (which is not very neat): EXPERIMENT 47: THE VELOCITY OF LUNCH. The Stopwatch: Also stolen from Nora, specifically from her gym bag. It was pink with little hearts on it, which slightly undermined the scientific gravitas, but it had millisecond precision and that was what mattered. The Subjects: Three sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, sitting on the shingles like offerings to the gods of gravity. Peanut butter and jelly. Turkey and swiss. And the crown jewel—the tuna. I put on my sunglasses. They were scratched, yes, but they added +10 Charisma to any situation. "Subject One," I intoned, picking up the PB&J. "Peanut butter and jelly. Texture: sticky. Aerodynamic coefficient: poor. Structural integrity: moderate. Predicted fall pattern: vertical with minimal spin." I held it over the edge of the roof, directly above the concrete patio below. "Drop in three... two... one." I released the sandwich. I clicked the stopwatch. The PB&J fell exactly as predicted: straight down, no drama, no flair. It hit the grass next to the patio with a dull, anticlimactic thump. I checked the stopwatch. 1.2 seconds. "Disappointing," I noted, scribbling in the notebook. "Subject lacks dramatic impact. Requires more mass." I picked up the turkey and swiss. "Subject Two: Turkey and swiss on wheat. Texture: dry. Structural integrity: compromised by excessive lettuce. Aerodynamic coefficient: unknown. This lettuce is floppy. I predict deviation from vertical due to air resistance on leafy components." I dropped it. The lettuce caught the wind. The sandwich spiraled, twisting like a frisbee with an identity crisis. It drifted right, then left, then landed in the rosebushes with a soft crackle. "Deviation confirmed!" I noted excitedly. "Wind resistance is a significant variable! The lettuce acts as an unintentional airfoil! Next experiment: sandwich with wings. Note for future: do not tell Mom about the sandwich wings idea. She will not understand the scientific value." I reached for the final subject. My hands trembled slightly. "Subject Three," I whispered, unwrapping the tuna with the reverence it deserved. "The Titan. The King. The Tuna Melt... without the melt... on sourdough." It was glorious. The bread was already soggy from mayonnaise saturation, creating a structural density unmatched by its lighter competitors. The tuna itself—three scoops of Bumble Bee chunk light in water—provided ballast. I had added pickles for texture, onions for aerodynamics (I wasn't sure how, but they felt important), and a single lettuce leaf for symmetry. It weighed approximately one pound. It smelled like the docks of a fishing village. "This is it," I said, my heart pounding. "This is the data point that changes everything." I stepped to the edge of the roof. Below me, the concrete patio stretched like a gray canvas waiting for my masterpiece. The afternoon sun cast my shadow long and heroic across the shingles. I held the Tuna out at arm's length, presenting it to the sky like Simba on Pride Rock. "Calculating wind speed..." I licked my finger and held it up. The air was still, with just the faintest breeze from the northwest. "North by northwest, approximately three miles per hour. Adjusting trajectory for maximum impact zone coverage." I leaned over the edge. My hooves gripped the gutter. "This sandwich is dedicated to science," I announced. "And to everyone who ever said I was too much. Watch me be exactly the right amount of—" That's when the back door slid open. My mom stepped out onto the patio. She wasn't just stepping out. She was lumbering. She was carrying the laundry basket—the big one, the industrial-sized plastic beast that held an entire week's worth of towels and Dad's work shirts and the endless parade of socks that Nora went through in her quest for the perfect gradient. The basket was stacked so high she had to peer around it to see where she was going. She looked tired. She looked like a woman who had left work early to pick up her disaster of a son, had probably apologized to her boss for the third time this month, and now just wanted fifteen minutes of peace to hang laundry in the backyard and pretend her life was normal. She walked directly under me. Time did that thing again—that slow-motion stretching that happens right before something terrible and irreversible occurs. I could see every detail with crystalline clarity: the gray hairs at her temples she kept meaning to dye, the coffee stain on her blouse she hadn't noticed yet, the way her shoulders slumped under the weight of the basket and also probably the weight of having me as a child. "Abort," my brain screamed. "ABORT MISSION. ABORT. PUT DOWN THE TUNA. ABORT ABORT ABORT." But my hand didn't listen. My hand had committed to the science. My hand, operating on some autopilot of pure chaos that existed entirely separate from my rational mind, released its grip. "Gravity," I whispered as the tuna left my fingers, "do your thing." The moment the sandwich departed my hoof, I knew I had made a catastrophic error. It didn't flutter like the turkey. It didn't thump like the PB&J. It dove. The tuna fell with terrifying velocity, accelerating at exactly 9.8 meters per second squared just like Mr. Henderson had promised. The bread, weakened by mayo saturation, began to separate mid-flight. The sandwich transformed from a unified food item into a spinning disc of destruction—tuna chunks and pickle slices and mayo creating a spiral pattern like a very disgusting galaxy being born. "MOM!" I screamed, leaning so far over the edge I nearly followed the sandwich down. "INCOMING! MOVE! ABORT! MAYDAY!" She looked up. Her face—I will never forget her face. It cycled through every human emotion in approximately 0.3 seconds: confusion, recognition, horror, resignation, and finally a kind of zen acceptance that came from being my mother for twelve years. She didn't have time to move. She only had time to close her eyes. SPLAT. The sound was wet. It was aggressive. It was the sound of a pound of mayonnaise-soaked fish meeting concrete at terminal velocity, approximately two inches from my mother's left foot. But tuna is not a solid. Tuna is a semi-liquid. Tuna, upon impact, does not simply stop. Tuna explodes. A geyser of fish and condiments erupted from the point of impact like a mayonnaise volcano achieving final eruption. It sprayed upward and outward in a radius of destruction that would later be measured at approximately four feet. Mom's shin: coated. Mom's favorite cardigan: splattered. Mom's face: currently hosting a pickle slice that had achieved enough velocity to stick to her glasses with a wet thwack. But the chaos didn't stop there. Our cat, Whiskers—a orange tabby with exactly two brain cells and both of them devoted to napping—had been sleeping on the patio table. The explosion of fish-scented shrapnel hit her like a flavor bomb from her wildest dreams... and also like a terrifying surprise attack. Whiskers shrieked. It was not a normal cat noise. It was the sound of a feline who had been peacefully dreaming about birds and had suddenly been teleported to a war zone that smelled like Subway. She launched herself straight up, a furry orange rocket of panic. She landed on the laundry basket. The laundry basket, already precariously balanced in Mom's arms, tipped. Clean white shirts—Dad's nice work shirts, the ones Mom had just spent an hour ironing—tumbled onto the patio in slow motion. They landed in the blast radius of the tuna. They absorbed mayonnaise and fish oil and pickle juice like expensive cotton sponges. Whiskers, still in full panic mode, scrambled for traction on the falling laundry. Her claws caught the handle of the garden hose, which was coiled on its holder next to the door. The hose holder, which had been loose since last summer and which Dad kept saying he was going to fix "this weekend," finally gave up. CLANG. The holder fell. The hose unspooled. And the nozzle, which had been left in the "on" position because I had been watering plants yesterday and had gotten distracted by a interesting beetle, landed pointing directly at my mother. FWOOOOSH. A jet of cold water blasted her in the legs. Mom stood there. Soaking wet. Covered in fish. Blinded by a pickle. Surrounded by ruined laundry. Being hosed down by her own garden equipment while her cat continued to yowl and ricochet off the patio furniture. The silence that followed was louder than the explosion. I lay flat on the roof, pressing my face into the shingles. Maybe she didn't see me. Maybe she thought it was a tuna meteor. Maybe if I stayed very, very still, I would become one with the roof and achieve a state of being that didn't require having this conversation. "NORRIS." Her voice didn't come from her mouth. It came from somewhere deeper—somewhere primal, somewhere that contained the collective fury of every mother who had ever raised a difficult child since the dawn of civilization. I peeked over the edge. She had peeled the pickle off her glasses. Her eyes found mine with the precision of a guided missile locking onto its target. "Get. Down. Here." "It was for science?" I squeaked. "NOW." I scrambled down the trellis so fast I left wool on three different thorns. I slid the last five feet, landed in the rosebushes (ow), extracted myself from the rosebushes (ow ow ow), and presented myself before the court. Mom looked like a creature from a lagoon. Water dripped from her hair. Tuna clung to her cardigan in clumps. The smell was... indescribable. It was mayonnaise and cat panic and shattered dreams. "Explain," she said. One word. A death sentence. "I was testing the effects of mass on gravitational acceleration?" I tried to smile. The smile did not land. "I hypothesized that tuna, due to its density and structural moisture content, would fall faster than turkey or peanut butter? The results were... conclusive?" "Conclusive." "Extremely conclusive. Mayo-based sandwiches should never be dropped from height. The splash radius is significant. I have documented this for future generations." Mom closed her eyes. I watched her lips move as she counted. Uno. Dos. Tres. Cuatro. Cinco. She opened her eyes at diez. "You are too much," she whispered. It wasn't angry anymore. It was just true. "You are a hurricane in a sweater vest." "I prefer 'tropical storm.' It sounds more—" "I need you to leave." "Leave?" "Go to the café. Take your sister. Use your allowance. Buy something with sugar in it. Do not come back for two hours." "But I can help clean—" "If you try to help clean, you will somehow set the hose on fire. I don't know how. But you will find a way." She pointed toward the side gate with one dripping arm. "Go. Now. Before I figure out how to ground you until you're thirty-seven." I nodded. I grabbed my bag. I ran. I burst into the house, grabbed Nora by the arm—she was still organizing her socks, now alphabetized by brand—and dragged her toward the front door. "What did you do?" Nora demanded as we speed-walked down the driveway. Her planner was clutched to her chest. She had grabbed it reflexively, because Nora without her planner was like a fish without water—technically possible but extremely stressful. "Scientific breakthrough," I panted. "Results inconclusive. High casualty rate." "Did you drop something on Mom?" "Maybe." "From the roof?" "Perhaps." "Was it tuna?" "It might have been tuna-adjacent." Nora sighed. She opened her planner, flipped to today's date, and made a note in her tiny, precise handwriting. "Tuesday," she said. "3:47 PM. Norris disaster. Right on schedule." "I'm on a schedule?" "You're always on a schedule. You're the most predictable unpredictable person I know. I have a whole tracking system." She showed me the page. There was a chart. The chart had categories: "Property Destruction," "Bodily Harm (Minor)," "Bodily Harm (Major)," "Parental Emotional Damage," and "Other." Today's incident had already been categorized under "Other" with a sub-note: "Tuna-related. Investigate." "You're terrifying," I told her. "I'm prepared," she corrected. "There's a difference. Now come on. If we're going to the café, we might as well make it educational. I want to review my bridge architecture notes." We walked down the street toward the only place in Conejo Valley that would take us. The Bandwidth Café. I didn't know it yet, but the tuna drop was the last normal thing I would do for a very long time. I thought I was in trouble. I thought my day couldn't possibly get worse. I was so, so wrong. It was about to get weird.