Gary divorced Gabriela over what he termed as her ‘lack of support for my shoe choices’. In the settlement, Gabriela kept the house, and Gary moved into the Capri Village Apartments. Now single, he felt freer to explore his shoe preferences. Taking a walk, he noticed a shoe store around the corner. “What a stroke of luck!” declared Gary, eyeing his chipped wobbly clogs.

Theft can be so cliché. “Don’t move.” “Gimme me all your money.” Blah blah blah. Occasionally, however, you run into a criminal with panache. A maverick among the immoral, who surprises with a command like: “Give me those spectacular Italian shoes. Or you’re deader than Olga Knipper.” Now that’ll send you reeling. Especially if you are a Russian symphony conductor with a penchant for Anton Chekhov trivia and weakness for custom leather. Even more so if you don’t realize this information is on your Wikipedia bio.

Let’s cut to the chase: Milky (16) likes Joe and Joe (17) likes Milky, but since they’re teenage boys who have known each other for half their lives and who talk mostly about video games and homework and breasts, neither one knows how the other feels, and anyway neither of them is too sure about that gay shit (spoiler: they both end up liking it enough to stick with it). This, however, is not their story, although anybody could assure you it’s a rollicking good one, with drama and intrigue and a fair amount of make-up sex.

Instead, it is a story about their friend, Hallelujah (16), who has fallen in love with Mr. Farneaux (39), her period three English teacher.

Jonah sat before the panel of blinking red lights. Merry Christmas, except not merry and not Christmas. It was a hot July night, and he’d just started the second of a double shift.

“Pedantics,” he said, taking the next call.

Jonah could remember when teachers still used red pens. There were moans and groans and no-fairs every time a paper was returned. “God,” his friend Emmett complained after class. “She’s a million years old and half-blind; how can she even see such a tiny mistake and who the fuck even cares?”

Although I’m alone in thinking this, it all started in a small pub at half past closing time. Several drinks in and an unspecified number of brain cells down, we approached the topics of the day with all the swagger of emperors and kings.

It was Madeleine who broached the question first. She wrote it on the back of a beer mat, refusing to buy the next round until we’d considered her words with what she considered to be a suitable measure of gravitas.

The beer mat read:

A vast meteorite heads towards the earth. Then scientists announce it is actually a gigantic poo.