Spellcheck

The first day of Grade 10 began, the way most things in Toronto began, with the TTC being slightly on fire.

Not actually on fire. There was just a smell. A hot, electrical, burnt-toast smell on the 29 Dufferin bus at 8:14 in the morning, and the bus sitting dead at a green light while the driver announced a short delay due to a mechanical issue, which everybody on board knew meant the brakes, and a man in a Leafs jersey saying "Every single year" to nobody, with deep feeling.

Elias stood by the back doors with a backpack that still smelled like the store and a timetable printout from the school website folded into a tiny square, and thought, not for the first time, that being fifteen was mostly standing around waiting for things to happen to you.

The bus lurched on. It was packed. Elias got wedged between a woman with a cello case and a kid in a Garrison Creek hoodie who was asleep standing up, which was a skill Elias intended to learn this year. Across Bloor. Off a stop early, because of the smell, into the bright September morning, where the air smelled of hot asphalt and someone's coffee and the first faint dry hint of leaves, and then the long walk north past the bakeries and the phone repair shop and the place that sold only dumplings and the place that sold only socks.

Elias had walked this way every school day for a year now, and still liked it: the way the street changed every block, Portuguese bakery, Korean grocery, Ethiopian café, a Polish deli with a hand-painted sign, a vintage shop with a mannequin in the window wearing a raccoon hat, and every single one of them with a little laminated sign in the window that said, in three or four languages, some version of Back to school! Ask about our student special!

And there it was. Garrison Creek Collegiate Institute.

It had been built in 1912, and it looked like it: three storeys of dark red brick with tall windows and a stone arch over the front doors with the name carved into it in serious capital letters, and a little bell tower with no bell, and ivy that the board kept trying to kill. Under it, everybody knew, ran Garrison Creek itself, which had been buried in a pipe a hundred years ago and still, on wet days, made the basement smell like a pond. Out front, on the lawn, a sign on two posts, brand new and very shiny, said:

WELCOME BACK, GRIFFINS! THIS YEAR AT GCCI: PROOFWISE IS HERE! WRITE SMARTER!

Under it someone had already added, in neat Sharpie, WHY.