Before going to lunch, the class decides that, because they don’t want the authorities to know the class has no teacher, the best way to keep the secret is to tell all the other sixth graders and make them feel like they’re in on the plan. In the cafeteria, Rachel sits with Missy, Rhonda, and Miranda, a girl from a different class. As Missy tells Miranda about how they have no teacher, Rachel listens to the other kids in the cafeteria. The whispered words felt like “little flames she could feel licking her insides” (75), and she feels “the pressure of words in her chest that wanted to get out but somehow could not come out” (75).

Chapter 16 is written from Bastian’s perspective. During lunch, he tries to call home and finds out the number has been disconnected: “All at once it hit him. He was moving” (74). Bastian walks out of the school building, and nobody stops him as he thinks about how when he moves “he would go through his own kind of quarantine” because nobody will know him (75). He ends up at his best friend John’s house. John is playing hooky from school that day, and Bastian tells him he needs to come to school to help their class party since there are no adults watching them.