He went through the files almost at random for a while, unsure of what to look for next. He had imagined these files as being much juicier—these were Mr. Zuraw’s personal files, after all, and if the guidance counselor was really the kingpin behind Jake’s persecution, there must be some kind of incriminating evidence somewhere—but they seemed to be nothing more than what they presented themselves to be. Simple personnel files.
There were files on all the students, as well. Jake held out little hope for finding anything truly interesting there, but he had to check anyway. Cody’s file was there, and so was Megan’s, and they were perfectly normal. He went to the Ms next, intent on finding out if his own file was as boring as everybody else’s.
It would have been, except for one detail. It contained his class picture (hair combed severely over, one eye slightly shut) and a not saying he was expected to become class valedictorian, but there was no mention of the Pass/Fail Curriculum at all, no evidence, no list of his PASSes and certainly no list of what the remaining tests might be like or how to pass them. The one weird thing about the file, the one thing he couldn’t explain, was that it was labeled MCCARTNEY, JAKE H.
Jake’s middle name was Thomas. There was no file for MCCARTNEY, JAKE T. So the H didn’t refer to his middle initial, he could tell that much. Beyond that he was mystified. He knew the Proctors called him H—the Proctor outside of Classroom 187, the one with the portable telephone, had referred to him that way. But why?
He considered taking the file with him but if he did so it would guarantee Mr. Zuraw knew he’d been in there, something he wanted to avoid. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be anything in the file he could take to the police, or even to his parents, to help explain what was going on. So he gave up on the files and moved into the office proper. He could see Cody through the glass window inset in the door. His friend was trying to watch both ends of the hallway at once. It looked like he hadn’t seen anyone, yet. That was good. Jake went to Mr. Zuraw’s desk and started pulling open the drawers. He found the pistol very quickly—the pistol that would be used to execute him, if he failed too often—and left it alone. He didn’t even like looking at it, and he certainly didn’t want to touch it. Another drawer held perfectly innocent office supplies: rubber bands, paper clips, carbon paper. The bottom drawer held a manual typewriter.
There was one more drawer. It had a prominent lock on it, but when Jake tugged at the handle it popped open freely. Apparently Mr. Zuraw had forgotten to lock the drawer the last time he used it. Inside the drawer sat a simple plastic box, about a foot wide and maybe nine inches deep. It was only an inch and a half thick, but it had hinges on one side and a push-button clasp on the other.
It was surprisingly heavy when Jake took it out of the drawer. He placed it on top of the desk and opened it up. Inside were two things he’d seen before often enough but never in such close proximity. The box folded open on its hinge like a big notebook. Its lower half resembled a typewriter keyboard, though there was no place to put the paper. The top half looked like an impossibly thin television screen—but where was the tube?
The box wasn’t plugged into anything—it didn’t even seem to have a plug, though he could see where one might be attached to its side—but the screen flickered to life even before he had it all the way open. It surprised him so much he barely heard Cody tapping on the door, warning him that someone was coming.
Chapter Twelve
Jake glanced down at the television screen attached to the thin box. An animated clock face appeared with the hands spinning around their dial, while a blue bar grew from one side of the screen to the other.
At the door Cody’s tapping grew more intense. Jake had to get out of there. He had no illusions about what he was doing. Being caught in Mr. Zuraw’s office had to be an automatic failure condition—an instant death sentence.
Still… the screen cleared and a new image came up, showing pictures of file folders scattered around the left side of the screen. They had intriguing names: H_TESTING, H_EVALUATION, H_SYSTEMICS, Y_SYSTEMICS, JM_DOSSIER. He was pretty sure the H in front of most of the file names referred to himself, and the JM almost certainly did.
He had no idea who Y might be, or if the initials before the file folder names meant anything meaningful. He had no idea why the television would be showing pictures of file folders—he’d seen no files with those names in the file room.
The screen flashed and a rectangular box appeared in the middle of the screen. It had two smaller white rectangles inside it, labeled respectively PLEASE ENTER USERID and PASSWORD. A short vertical line blinked inside the first white rectangle.
Jake stared at the winking line, then down at the typewriter keyboard attached to the screen. There had to be a connection, right? He tapped the H key.
A capital letter H appeared inside the first white rectangle.
“Jake!” Cody hissed, from out in the hall. “Get out of there!”
Jake was looking at the screen, though. The device seemed to require two entries, a USERID and a PASSWORD. He needed to move the blinking line down to the second rectangle to enter the password, so he tapped the RETURN key on the keyboard, thinking it would act just like a carriage return on a typewriter.
The screen went dark, then a new rectangle came up, displaying a simple message:
THE USERID OR PASSWORD YOU HAVE ENTERED IS NOT RECOGNIZED BY THE SYSTEM. SORRY, JAKE. YOU’LL HAVE TO TRY HARDER THAN THAT.
Jake gasped and jumped back. How had the machine known his name? He’d only entered a code letter—
“Jake?” Cody called from the door. Jake looked up, expecting to see his friend’s face in the window. Instead, he saw Megan peering in, her face aghast.
He hadn’t seen the girl since that morning, since before his big test. It felt like a lifetime ago. He was very, very relieved to see her now. He’d expected to see Mr. Zuraw smiling down at him. Or worse—maybe he would have seen a masked Proctor pointing a gun.
He ran to the door and unlocked it, then pulled her inside. Leaning out he glanced up and down the corridor, then at Cody. “Keep up the good work,” he said.
Cody stared at him, open-mouthed. Then he shrugged and pressed his back up against a row of lockers. He did not look very happy.
Neither did Megan.
“Jake? What’s going on? What are you doing in here?”
“It’s going to be hard to explain, even when I do have time,” he told her. “Which is not right now. What are you doing here?”
She shook her head as if she wanted to refuse to answer. Then she wrapped her arms around her chest and said, “I have an appointment.”
“With Mr. Zuraw?” Jake asked.
“Yes, of course. He’s the guidance counselor. I think he wants to talk about my college plans.” She frowned and looked at him as if she was about to ask another question. Another one he couldn’t answer.
He thought about just kissing her to keep her from speaking. He’d seen that done in a movie once, and honestly, in the midst of the overpowering relief he felt at not being discovered, he almost had the nerve to do it.
Instead he just shushed her.
It was probably a mistake. Her face darkened and her arms gripped her shoulders even tighter.
“I’m… sorry,” he said. “I’m just a little—hey. Hey, you’re from out of town, right? I mean, you just moved here.”
“That’s right. From Chicago.”
“Yeah.” He reached down to the desk and swiveled the weird typewriter-television hybrid around so she could see the screen. “Do they have these in Chicago?”
She stared at it for quite a while. She picked it up and looked at its underside, then its various features. “I don’t think so,” she said. “What is it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know either. I think it’s some kind of machine that organizes files. Beyond that—”
“Jake,” Cody said, leaning in through the door, “Someone’s coming!”
A cold shiver ran do
wn Jake’s spine.
“That’ll be Mr. Zuraw. Coming for my appointment,” Megan told him. “I’m starting to get the impression you don’t want to be here when he arrives.”
“Yeah…” Jake closed the plastic box and shoved it back in its drawer. He looked around to see if he had disturbed anything else, desperate to hide his presence in the room.
“I’m going to want to know more about this,” Megan said. “I’ll cover for you with Mr. Zuraw, if you want. I owe you that much. You have to tell me everything, though.”
Doing so might put her in a bad position—it could even put her in danger. Jake nodded quickly, though. “Cody,” he whispered, “get out of here. I’ll see you later.” Then he headed for the file room, intending to go out the way he came in. To Megan he said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Maybe tomorrow, we can—”
She grabbed his shoulders and pulled him toward her. Before he knew it her mouth was on his, warm and soft, and her arms were around his waist.
He sank into the kiss, putting his arms around her, too. Her body crushed up against his. It was confusing. It was alarming. It was scary, because he knew he was out of time. It was the first time he’d ever kissed a girl. It was pretty great, he admitted to himself.
“I owed you that, too, and it didn’t seem like you were going to get around to it anytime soon. In Chicago the guys knew how to talk to the girls, at least. Now, go. But tomorrow you’re telling me everything.”
Chapter Thirteen
Of course, when he tried, he couldn’t tell her anything.
He wanted to. Jake would have loved to have another confidante. He had Cody, who had already proved himself invaluable. Cody had been his friend as long as he could remember and he could talk to Cody about anything. He could even talk to Cody about the way he’d felt when Megan kissed him. How it had felt so natural, so right—how for a second, if only for a second, he had forgotten how much danger he was in, how he would gladly have braved Mr. Zuraw’s wrath for just one more kiss.
He would have loved to talk to Megan about that, if nothing else. Yet when he saw her again the next morning, on their walk to school, nothing of the kind had come out. Mostly he hadn’t talked at all. Everything he thought to say sounded so stupid, or like it might offend her in some way. He worried he would come across as too forward, that asking her for another kiss might be a terrible mistake. What if that first kiss had just been an obligation, a reward for saving her life? Maybe she wasn’t interested in him at all. Maybe she just felt like she had to give him a chance.
And now he was blowing that chance, and he knew it.
“This strong silent thing you have going on, it’s very sweet,” she said, sounding exasperated. “It worries me, though. I know there’s something different about you. You aren’t like the other guys at school.”
“No,” he admitted, but he couldn’t think of any way to explain why.
She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at him. She stared straight forward, clutching her books to her chest like a shield. She swung her legs in long strides, hurrying them toward school—he moved along side of her stiffly, keeping pace with her but never finding a good rhythm for his steps.
“No, indeed,” she sighed. “Normal boys don’t break in the guidance office. Maybe they cut classes. Maybe they sneak off to be with their girlfriends and make out for a while. Maybe they go off to do drugs, I don’t know. You’ve got something else going on, and I want to know what it is.”
“I can’t tell you,” Jake blurted out. “I mean, I’d like to. I really would. But you could get in trouble, just knowing too much about me. Please don’t ask me so many questions. Can’t we just—hang out? Can’t we just be friends?”
Had he been able to step out of his body and look at himself from a distance, just then, he probably would have punched himself in the face. Of all the stupid things to say.
Megan stopped in mid stride. She drew her feet together and drew herself up to her full height, her chin sticking out. She looked straight up in the air. “I see,” she told him.
“You do?”
She nodded. Still not looking at him. “I do. You don’t trust me. You have some secret that I’m sure is very dark and dangerous, at least, you think it is, and you don’t want to let me in where I might find out it’s actually very silly. You don’t trust me. I don’t blame you.”
“You don’t?”
“Not at all. You barely know me. You have no reason to trust me. I nearly wrecked your house when I crashed my car. I caught you in the middle of something very important and very secret, and then I demanded information from you. I even kissed you to try to get you to tell me about it.”
“You did?”
“No. That wasn’t why I kissed you,” she said. She hadn’t moved an inch. “But I can’t expect you to believe me. For all you know I’m trying to seduce you to get at your secrets.” She shook her head. “You want to play at being a secret agent or something. That’s your game. Okay. That doesn’t concern me. I’ll try to make this very easy for you. I’ll leave you alone from now on. You don’t have to talk to me anymore. We don’t have to say hello to each other in the hallway, if you don’t want to. If you think I’m a threat to you for some reason. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. So I’ll pretend like we never met, if that’s what you want.”
“You will?”
“If that’s what you want. But it’s not what I want. I’m not afraid to tell you what I want, you see. I want you to ask me out on a date. I want to go on a nice, normal date with you, where we try to act like normal people and have some kind of normal evening.”
“You do.”
“Yes. So ask me. Right now. I promise I’ll say yes. But it has to be what you want, too. For real.”
Jake felt muscles all over his chest contract. He felt like he was having a heart attack. He couldn’t get the breath together to actually speak, so he whispered instead. “Do… you… want to go to…”
She stared into his eyes and he felt like if he had been on fire, if his clothes had caught fire then and there, he wouldn’t have been able to look away.
“To,” he continued, a little louder, “a movie. With me. On Friday night?”
“I’d love to. I’ll pick the film. You can drive. Does that work for you?”
He nodded. There were no more words inside of him.
“I’m going to dress up a little. I’d like it if you did, too. That’s what normal people do on dates. Jake, I want to make this as easy as possible on you. So I’m going to tell you in advance, I don’t normally kiss on the first date. In your case I’m going to make an exception.”
He didn’t feel like he had control of what came next. It felt like he was being directed from outside, like a puppet with someone else pulling his strings. He took a step closer to her, which made his heart start thudding ominously in his chest. When she didn’t move away he put his hands on her waist. He could feel his palms sweating but it was okay, the touch was very, very light. Then he leaned in and kissed her. Very quickly, very softly. Just long enough to count.
“Nice,” she said. Her eyes were closed. He wondered if he should close his own eyes, but he didn’t have that kind of control at the moment.
Then as if nothing had happened they drew apart and started walking again toward the school. After a few minutes of silence she reached over with her free arm and slid it through the crook of his elbow. She did it so easily he didn’t really have a chance to shy away or do anything stupid, and suddenly they were walking arm in arm.
“I think you’re starting to get the hang of this,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
He had chosen Friday for the simple reason he thought of it as the night people went out on dates. It was still four days away, and each morning the two of them kept walking to school together. Sometimes they kissed, though only briefly, one gentle, quick peck before they reached the school door. Most of the time they talked—or rather, Megan talked, and h
e listened. He liked hearing her stories, though she was convinced they were boring and of no interest to him. She told him all about the lives of the other students in their school: who was going out with whom, who was theoretically sleeping with whom, who had betrayed their friends and who had just gone shopping that weekend or away with their parents on a ski trip. It was all very simple and mundane, very basic stuff that must have seemed like life and death drama to the kids involved but to him it sounded like paradise. To live in a place where you didn’t have to worry all the time about being executed because you didn’t pass enough tests. To know who you could trust—and to know that even if they betrayed you, there was always the possibility of forgiveness, of making up.
“They’re just people,” Megan told him, when he expressed his admiration for his classmates. “Like me. I just a person. You could be one, too, Jake.” She looked deep into his eyes, then shook her head wildly. “That could be my secret mission, couldn’t it? To help you figure out how to have a normal life.”
It made him feel good, when she said that. It made him want to go and pass some tests. He got his chance just a few days later. Friday morning, in fact. The morning before his big date with Megan.
He was learning that the tests came about once a week, though he was careful not to start expecting them every seven days. Mr. Zuraw had even told him that they would come at times that seemed random, and that no two would be alike. He was almost at a point where he wasn’t surprised when they happened. Almost.
He still jumped when Mr. Dzama in History class announced that they were going to have an unscheduled test. Of course, Mr. Dzama just meant the class was going to have a pop quiz. Most of the students groaned but Jake just sat back in his chair, slightly relieved. He had done some of the reading—probably more than most of his classmates—and anyway, he knew that whatever grade he got on this test wouldn’t count. He was on a pass/fail basis, and he could score a zero on this quiz and it wouldn’t affect him at all, except for a little hurt pride.
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