Kai wasn't at the north doors when I got there. She's usually inside the vestibule by 7:40, backpack on one shoulder, looking at her phone. Today there were just other people.
I badged through and the air curtain hit me, that wall of warm nothing, and then I was inside and the building smelled the way the building smells. Warm plastic, floor cleaner, whatever the filters miss. Mr. Reeves told us once that the filters catch ninety-something percent of the particles. He said it like he was sorry about the rest.
Kai was already sitting down in first period. She didn't turn around when I came in. I sat two rows over and one back and watched Mrs. Alderman pull up something about the Missouri Compromise.
The monitor by the door said 847, green circle. That's the carbon dioxide, which really just means how many people have been breathing in the room. Particles were 6. Outside was 189 on the app but nobody checks the app. It's been orange or red for nineteen days and the number doesn't change anything that happens in here. The building is the building.
Kai had done something different with her hair, pulled it up higher, and I could see the back of her neck. That's the kind of thing you notice when you've been looking at the same person from the same angle for nineteen days.
She'd been sitting with Olivia Park at lunch since Thursday. Four days. I'd counted.
Before that we sat together every day at the table by the far wall, where the windows are sealed but you can still see the parking lot through the haze, and past the parking lot the trees along Division Street, gray shapes like they're behind frosted glass. Thursday the light was coming through orange and Kai sat down next to Olivia and I stood there with my tray for maybe two seconds. Then I walked to the other end and sat with Priya and Dani.
I hadn't asked her about it. I kept waiting for her to explain it, or to just come back like it hadn't happened. She kept not doing either.
Pre-calc was warm. It's always warm by second period. Someone told me the system does the filtering before it does the cooling, and I don't know if that's true but it feels true. That room runs high because it's small and full. 1,140, yellow circle. Ms. Torres keeps a fan on her desk pointed at herself. By 9:30 every room feels like it's been breathed in too many times.
During passing period Kai was at the water fountain with Olivia. Olivia said something and Kai laughed, a regular laugh. The hallway was full because the hallway is always full now. When the air's okay people spread out after class, the courtyard, the steps by the science wing. In smoke mode the hallway's the only place to be between rooms, so everybody moves slower, stops to talk, leans on lockers. You learn to read it. Who's standing with who.
I went the other direction to my locker, which I didn't need anything from. I opened it and looked at the inside of the door and closed it.
Third period is movement. That's what they call gym in smoke mode. Mr. Haskell used to coach cross-country. Now he stands with a clipboard while we walk laps around the auxiliary gym, which is about a twelfth of a mile, and do resistance bands in pairs. He clicks a counter and says good pace to everyone regardless of pace. You can tell what he thinks about it without him saying.
Kai and I always partnered for bands. Today she was across the room with Olivia before I had my shoes changed. I partnered with a girl named Suki who I barely know. She was nice about it. She didn't ask why I wasn't with Kai, which meant she'd noticed, which meant other people had.
The auxiliary gym has no windows. The lights are the flat white kind that make everybody look slightly off. Suki held the band while I did rows. The rubber smelled like rubber and the mat smelled like whoever had it before me. Around us twenty other pairs were doing the same thing, bands stretching and snapping, shoes squeaking on the floor. Tessa, who I've had classes with since sixth grade, was doing bicep curls by herself near the wall, her partner apparently absent. She caught me looking and I looked away.
"You okay?" Suki said.
"Yeah. Just tired."
"Same. I think it's the air."
"Probably."
Everyone's tired by week three. You sleep fine and wake up like you didn't. By afternoon your head's heavy and your eyes are dry and you want to be outside in a way that isn't urgent, just a low thing sitting behind everything else. The monitors say the air's fine and the air is fine.
Fourth period I had a free. I went to the library, which is where everybody with a free goes because there's nowhere else. The tables were full. I sat on the floor by the biography section with my back against the shelves and tried to do calc. A sophomore boy across from me was doing the same thing with his notebook balanced on his knees, headphones on, mouthing something. He looked comfortable. I don't know how you get comfortable on the floor of a full room, but he'd gotten there.
I went back through the last three weeks looking for what I did. Something I said, something I didn't, a text I answered wrong. I couldn't find it, which was worse than finding it, because at least then I'd know what to fix.
At lunch I got my tray and walked into the cafeteria and looked at our table. Kai was already there with Olivia next to her. There was an open seat on Kai's other side.
I stood there long enough to feel myself standing there. A girl with a tray deciding where to sit, visible from every direction in the room. Then I walked to the other end.
"She's being weird," Priya said.
"I don't know what's happening."
"Did you do something?"
"No."
"Did she say something?"
"No."
Priya looked at me. "So ask her."
The cafeteria is loud. Everybody who'd be outside on the steps or the courtyard is in here instead and has been for nineteen days. Tables that used to have empty seats don't. People sit on the floor along the wall by the vending machines. The sound comes off the sealed windows and the tile and turns into one thing that isn't any conversation in particular. Two tables over a guy was showing something on his phone and four other guys were leaning in. A girl at the next table was trying to study with her hands over her ears. Near the door a couple was having some kind of quiet argument, faces close together, voices lost in it.
I ate my sandwich and looked at Kai. She was eating and talking to Olivia and she looked fine. She looked like herself. She wasn't upset and she wasn't avoiding my eyes, she just wasn't looking at me, which is different from avoiding, except after four days it stops being different.
Through the windows behind her the trees on Division were hazy and still. The light coming through was the color of weak tea.
Bio is sixth. Kai has bio too and the seating chart puts us near each other. She sat down and I sat down and she said hey and I said hey, the way you'd say it to anybody.
Mr. Reeves started in on cellular respiration. The monitor said 1,206, yellow. He looked at it and opened the door to the hallway for a minute, which doesn't bring in outside air but lets the room trade with the corridor. It dropped to 1,140 and he closed the door.
I wrote her a note on the corner of my notebook. Not a text. A note, on paper, the way we did freshman year before it felt childish. Are you mad at me?
I tore it off and folded it and waited until Mr. Reeves turned to the board and reached across the aisle and put it on her desk.
She read it. I watched her read it. She didn't look over. She wrote something and folded it back.
No. Just need space.
I put it in my pocket and my face was hot and I looked down at my notebook. Mr. Reeves was on ATP and I copied it without hearing any of it, the words going from the board to my hand without stopping anywhere.
She needed space. I was two rows over and one back, and that was as much as either of us was going to get. I couldn't leave the building. She couldn't leave the building. Tomorrow we'd be in the same rooms and the same hallway and the same cafeteria with the same tables. I couldn't give her what she asked for. There wasn't any way to.
By seventh the monitor was at 1,340 and orange. That happens by the end of the day. The rooms have been full since 7:50 and the system does what it can do. The vice principal came on the intercom and said they were running the supplemental scrubbers in the east wing and to please keep doors closed. Nobody looked up.
I walked to the north doors at 2:45 and badged out through the vestibule and the air curtain hit me going the other way. Then I was outside and the smoke was there the way it's been there. The sky the color of an old t-shirt. The sun a flat disk you can look straight at. Everything smelling faintly like a campfire three miles off, which it has for three weeks.
Kai came out maybe thirty seconds behind me. She went toward the pickup lane and I almost said her name. Out here there was enough room to actually give her what she wanted.
I let her walk.
My mom's car was in the second row. I got in and she asked how my day was and I said fine. She pulled out of the lot and we drove home with the windows up and the cabin filter light glowing green on the dash.
The trees along Division were still there through the haze. You could see them if you looked. I watched them until we turned.
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Schools as smoke buildings: EPA's guidance for schools during wildfire smoke recommends building-specific smoke plans covering filtration, indoor PM2.5 monitoring, cooling during simultaneous heat, and temporary cleaner-air spaces, though performance depends on the whole operating configuration, not just the equipment list.
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Fire weather that persists: A 2026 study in Communications Earth & Environment defines "fire weather waves" as sustained extreme episodes and finds they accounted for roughly 4% of classified days but coincided with 26% of burned area and nearly half of the most energetic forest fires in the studied ecoregions.
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What recirculated air does: ASHRAE's position document on indoor CO2 and ventilation warns against treating a classroom CO2 reading as proof that CO2 itself caused headaches or fatigue, noting that warmth, accumulated bioeffluents, and reduced outdoor-air dilution together drive the perception of stale air.
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Retrofitting old schools for air: Boston reported that the 121-year-old Otis Elementary lacked electrical capacity for air conditioning or fresh-air systems before its retrofit added heat pumps, HEPA filtration, and weatherization, part of a push that brought cooling to more than 100 school buildings citywide.