The boy died on the first of April, so the police were slow to respond. The first of April was a big day for false alarms. My mother worked dispatch for Alachua and fielded all the calls. Every year, she listened to teenagers report cases of mammoth erections and spontaneous combustion. Maybe twice a decade, a kid would do something inventive with bath salts and launch himself into juvie. But most of the calls were total jokes. Still, my mother’s job was to send the police like a good little Samaritan. Her officers quickly stretched thin. That year, a representative from the department stopped by our school to speak over the intercom about making smart choices on April Fools’ Day. “It’s a crime to fake a crime,” he said, but he didn’t tell us what the punishment would be if we got caught. Or maybe he did. I was too busy looking out the window to listen. A pair of enormous crows was picking apart the unlucky carcass of an armadillo, which felt like big news at the time — I didn’t yet know about the boy. I was in Discrete Math, a low-level half-course for borderline morons who didn’t need to take Pre-Calculus. No one in Discrete Math was graduating on time. Sixteen of us had to repeat the year. The school had concocted a whole schedule of specialized courses to convince us it was still worth our while to wake up at six AM five days a week. My desk mate, Nick, threw a penny at the intercom, but it fell very short and struck Ms. Galanis in the chest. She was flat enough that the coin dropped immediately to the floor. It might as well have hit the wall.