Exposure Point: A gripping small town mystery. (The Candidates Book 1)

by M. D. Archer

  Gabby Santino and her bestie, Steph Blackburn, had stopped next to where I was sitting. I didn’t know either of them very well, but Gabby was pretty much nice to everyone.

  “Sorry about your injury.” A frown creased her brows. “You’re still going to be a dancer, though, right? I always thought that was so cool.” Her eyes were bright. I lifted my shoulder, a vague gesture. Her mouth turned into a sad pout. “And Isaac’s gone, right? Poor you.” She dropped down into the seat in front of me.

  Steph languidly eased into the chair next to her, suppressing a yawn as she checked her phone. “This is boring,” she muttered under her breath.

  Gabby smiled. “You think everything is boring.” She swiveled around to wave happily at someone farther down.

  Steph suppressed another yawn. “Did you see the health centre volunteer cruising around campus? He is super hot,” she said. “Capital S, capital H.”

  Gabby turned back. “I heard he, like, saves orphans in his spare time.”

  “Orphans?” I frowned.

  “Apparently he’s Mr. Perfect. I heard he won this, like, top academic scholarship a few years ago and that he might be in the next Commonwealth Games.”

  “For what sport?” I asked, still frowning.

  “What’s he doing here, then?” Steph said.

  “He’s pre-med or something.”

  “I thought I saw him—”

  “He’s here right now?” I blurted, whipping my head around. Once I’d regained control of my neck muscles, I turned to see the two of them suppressing smiles.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.” Steph grinned. “What does having a Cole status mean, anyway, Callie?”

  Oh God, she saw that?

  “That was… nothing… I—” I said as my cheeks caught fire.

  Steph waved her hand with a smile. “I totally get it. No need to explain.” She lifted a chunk of her hair and inspected the red-streaked ends.

  “Hey, did you get in trouble for your hair?” Gabby asked Steph, who rolled her eyes and nodded. “But it looks awesome,” Gabby added. “Totally worth it.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed quickly. Gabby was right—it made the sepia hue to Steph’s skin look even prettier—but I also wanted to change the subject.

  A teacher appeared and absentmindedly handed us each a wad of papers. Steph rolled her eyes. “I should have known there would be paperwork.”

  “Hey, that must be the new principal,” Steph said, gesturing to the woman standing at the front. “What’s her name?”

  “Ms. Michaels,” I replied.

  “Her face looks like Mom’s did after her facelift,” Gabby whispered.

  Ms. Michaels was power dressed in a crisp black suit and ankle boots with some pretty serious inches. She wore thick-framed glasses—but the trendy kind—and had neat, shoulder-length hair. Her mouth seemed unnaturally full, as if she’d drawn her lipstick over the line, or maybe used a lip plumper. Did high school principals get cosmetic surgery?

  “Welcome, everyone. You should all have your information packs by now.” Her voice reached us in fits and starts through our crappy speaker system. She fiddled with it and was rewarded with a burst of feedback. Her irritated sigh was picked up loud and clear. “Please work through the questionnaire at the front and then, once completed, hand it back to one of the teachers and take a seat outside for the class photo. You’ll have time to visit the information kiosks before we start the seminars.”

  After a minute or so, the hall quietened down until only the sound of shuffling paper remained. Mrs. Pemberton was nowhere to be seen, so I turned my attention to the questionnaire—I was curious. After the first personal information and student ID type page, there were a series of statements, and I was supposed to rate how accurate each was. I worry about things; I make friends easily; I have a vivid imagination; I trust others; I get angry easily; I love big parties….

  After a while I stopped wondering where Mrs. Pemberton was and focused on the questions. Weirdly, answering them reassured me. As if I might know how to exist in a world beyond dancing. At least, on paper.

  I had just finished—Steph and Gabby were still working on theirs—when across the hall, I saw Mrs. Pemberton come back through the doors. I stood quickly and hurried over to where I’d stashed my bag under the table. I had just enough time to shove my completed questionnaire inside and straighten before Mrs. Pemberton reached me. If she asked me why I’d filled out that questionnaire, I didn’t know what I would say. It felt weirdly personal.

  “We’re doing the photo next.” She handed me a clipboard. “Can you take attendance once everyone is seated on the bleachers?”

  “Sure.” I took it from her and went outside.

  I marked off students I recognized as they trickled out, and for the ones whose names I couldn’t remember, I casually handed the clipboard over and asked them to check themselves off.

  Twenty minutes later, I was all done. When Mrs. Pemberton emerged from the rec hall, I waved at her, and she came over to join me. “Here you go. All finished.”

  “Thank you,” she said, squinting at me against the morning sun. “Ms. Michaels has asked me to come back to the office with her right now, something important that can’t wait, so you’re in charge, all right? You’re to stay here and oversee the photograph. It’s all set up, just make sure the photographer has everything she needs. And once that is done, you can take a break. You’ve worked so hard.”

  Mrs. Pemberton waddled away, and I looked over at the photographer. She held up her index finger as if to say she needed one more minute, then leaned down and continued to fiddle with her camera.

  I turned to check that all the students were seated and noticed that right next to me, Ava Smythe had taken a seat at the end of the row. I hardly knew her, except that she was in grade eleven. “Hey.” I tried to make my voice nice but authoritative. “The photo is grade twelve only. You should be in class.”

  She didn’t move, instead eyeing me with a challenging glare. “I want to hear about the options as well. Just because I’m grade eleven… why don’t we get a futures session?”

  “I’m pretty sure you do, just later in the year,” I said. “But either way, this photo is for grade twelve only.”

  She stood up. “Fine.” As she leaned back down to give her friend a quick hug, I caught her eye roll which seemed to say what a buzzkill.

  The photographer clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s have everyone smiling and looking straight at the camera first,” she said, clicking away as she called out instructions for people to face her, or smile, or put down their phones. “Okay, great,” she continued, “now—”

  Squealing tires drowned her out.

  I whirled toward the noise.

  A truck screeched through the school entrance, swerving side to side, as if ricocheting off invisible barriers.

  “Stop,” a teacher yelled uselessly.

  It careened down the path toward the school, heading right for where we all sat.

  As a scream pierced the air, everyone seemed to realize at the same time that it wasn’t going to stop in time.

  The bleachers became a writhing mass of struggling and scrambling.

  The rumble of the engine grew louder and louder. Metal groaned and strained like an animal in pain. Then, with a shriek of brakes applied too late, the truck collided with the concrete edge of the front steps.

  Boom.

  Almost instantly, an acrid yellow cloud of smoke billowed out and streamed toward us, spreading like a fog. A chemical smell filled my nose. The pushing and struggling intensified as people tried to get away. Someone slammed into me from behind, knocking me to my hands and knees. The smoke was on me, all over me, swarming and engulfing. It choked my throat. I coughed, a violent, hacking sound.

  “Get inside,” someone screamed as a gust of wind blew the smoke in a different direction and I could see the wording on the side of the truck: HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS.

  6

  W
e’d been quarantined inside the rec hall for two hours and counting.

  Agitated chattering had finally given way to normal conversation, and it was almost as if I’d imagined the whole thing, except the smell of smoke had seeped into the fabric of my clothes and still lingered in my hair.

  “Excuse me, everyone. Your attention, please.” Ms. Michaels stood at the front of the room with Logan, who had a phone up to his ear. “I have an update. The driver is in hospital and he is conscious, but we don’t know what caused the crash. Cytec Industries have briefed us on the contents, and as you are already aware, you have been quarantined because the truck did contain a potentially hazardous chemical and we have to follow the protocols.”

  There was a burst of restless noise.

  Logan leaned in and handed Ms. Michaels the phone. “One moment, please,” she said, stepping away from the microphone to take the call.

  “We have good news,” Ms. Michaels said when she turned back to us. “The risk of the chemical being toxic to us without direct application to the skin is small. But as a precaution, we will do a pinprick blood test on all of you to make sure there is no evidence of the chemical in your system. Given our resources and our links with the Public Health Department, we have approval to do this onsite at the health centre. Your parents are being informed, and the tests are on their way now. You’ll be called to visit the health centre in your homeroom classes.” Ms. Michaels paused and looked around. “Those of you not in homeroom groups but here now, such as teachers and other staff, you’ll still need to be tested, so go to the health centre, but make sure you check in with Mr. Kerry first as soon as you get there.” She leaned away from the microphone for a moment, then stepped back. “Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine,” she finished with a tight smile.

  It wasn’t super convincing.

  ***

  Inside the health centre, Cole and the school nurse were calling people one by one to do their test. Logan hovered in the foyer with a clipboard. He scanned the room, checked the clipboard, and nodded to himself. I was supposed to go over and check in with him, but there was no way. When I saw Cole leading Ava Smythe out of one of the consulting rooms, I hurried over to him.

  “Calliope?” Cole said, coming to stop next to me. His eyes dropped down to the clipboard in his hand. It had a list of students, a lot like the one I’d just used to tick off people for the grade photo.

  “I, uh, I’m not on there,” I said. “But—”

  “Actually, you are. At the bottom here.”

  “I am?”

  He smiled. “This way.” He gestured for me to follow him down the corridor. “Here.” He opened the door to consulting room B and pointed at the chair. “Back in a sec.”

  I looked around the room, taking in the various clinical-looking containers and a hospital-type bed along the far side. As I continued to wait, tension started to bunch my shoulders. Was it the drama of the truck crash, the impending ‘pinprick test’, or that I was about to be in an enclosed space with Cole?

  I rolled my shoulders a few times, but it didn’t help. I straightened and took a few belly breaths, focusing on expanding the lower part of my stomach as I inhaled and exhaled through my nose. Nope, still on edge. I rested my hands on the back of the chair, stretched the toes of my left foot, and then wriggled those on my right. For the first time in a while, it felt good to be thinking about what my body was doing instead of focusing on my thoughts. I glanced behind me once more, then, pulling in my stomach and leaning all my body weight onto my left foot, raised my moonboot-clad right foot up behind me in arabesque, taking my hands off the chair and reaching one out in front of me, raising my foot higher and my chest lower to complete the position. I was a little rusty, but it wasn’t too bad.

  “Wow,” Cole said from behind me.

  Abruptly I dropped my leg and turned. “Oh—”

  “Not good at sitting still, huh?” He carried on past. “Me neither.”

  “I, uh—”

  I didn’t know what to say. He had to think I was a weirdo. How could he not? Every time he saw me, I was doing weird things.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

  I sat down as he took the seat opposite me. “A bit freaked out, but okay.”

  He wore a lab coat and gloves, and the coat was definitely working for him. And why did he always smell so good?

  “Can I get you to move a bit closer?” he said, taking hold of my hand and pushing up the sleeve of my sweater. He turned my arm so it faced upward. One of his hands continued to hold mine, his face only inches away. Would he take my pulse? I hoped not; they might admit me immediately, the way my heart was thumping inside my chest. But then he released my hand to open one of the test kits.

  “I’ll take a small drop of blood from here.” He tapped the inside of my elbow. I flinched. “It shouldn’t hurt too much, but you will feel a pinch,” he added, misinterpreting this as being in anticipation of pain.

  “I thought it would be in my finger.”

  “Yeah.” Cole paused and looks at the delicate white contraption. “They are a little different,” he mused, then shrugged. “Are you ready?”

  I nodded, looking away as he leaned over my arm. The small needle darted in and out. It only stung a bit and he immediately applied a small plaster. He didn’t say anything else except to ask me for my surname and student ID, reciting it back to me as he wrote it on the front of an official–looking specimen bag. He went to the fridge and placed it inside.

  “We’re all done here,” he said with a professional smile. “You can go. Unless—” He paused to grin. “—you have any other injures you want me to check?” He lifted his eyebrows and smiled so his dimple appeared. “Like, from falling off a chair, for instance?”

  He was making fun of me.

  “Um….” I stood up and bumped against the table. “Ow.”

  “Or your hip?”

  Oh my God, Cole’s looking at my hip?

  “Um. I’m fine… everything is fine.” I picked up the strap of my bag, but it had looped around the chair leg, so when I brought it up to my shoulder, the chair flipped over, a loud clattering sound. “Oh, uh, whoops.” I righted the chair and extracted my bag, but I staggered to the side with the momentum before finally getting myself upright again.

  Cole’s mouth tugged up into a smile. “I could have sworn I just saw you being graceful.”

  “It was the moonboot.” I said quickly, gesturing at my foot. “And, uh, the chair thing from the other day was too. It, uh, it messes with my centre of gravity.”

  His eyes flickered with amusement, but then he looked past me and went all professional again. “Hey, I’d better see the next person.”

  “Oh. Right. Sure. Uh, see you later.”

  As I exited the small room, I saw the photographer standing with Logan, gesturing and pointing in my direction. I stopped. Was she talking about me? Was I in trouble for not checking in first?

  “It’s fine,” I heard Logan say, taking her hands in his and squeezing them as he smiled at her. “All in due course,” he added. “Just give us some time to get the students done first.”

  She smiled back but looked uncertain when he walked away. Chewing her lip as she turned in my direction, she suddenly lurched into motion, hurrying over to where I was. “Is that where the testing is happening?” she said, pointing at the consulting rooms.

  Before I could answer, Cole reappeared, rubbing disinfectant on his hands. “Everything okay?”

  “I need to get tested as well. I don’t want to wait,” she said, virtually hopping from one foot to the other.

  Cole glanced over to where Logan stood outside the doors talking on the phone. He hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. In here.” He gestured inside the room and followed her through. He turned at the last moment. “Catch you later, Calliope.”

  “See you.” I turned away—I had to; my face had become hot.

  I couldn’t stop smiling. Even with everything, this after
noon hadn’t been so bad.

  ***

  When I got home, Mom was sprawled on the couch.

  “Hey, what are you—” I stopped. There was a bowl next to the couch. It was empty, but based on the green tinge to Mom’s face, I could probably guess what it was for.

  “Stomach flu, lamb. You didn’t hear me get up last night?”

  I shook my head. “You’re okay?”

  “The last twenty-four hours hasn’t been fun, that’s for sure, but I’m on the other side of it now.”

  “I guess you haven’t heard about the truck crash.”

  “The school texted, but I only got the message ten minutes ago when I woke up. But I spoke to Mrs. Pemberton, and she told me everything. She said you were fine and on your way home.”

  “Pretty freaky huh?”

  She nodded, but her eyes dropped down to my foot. “Take off the moonboot, would you, lamb?”

  I froze. “Why?”

  “So I can have a look. It’s fine, don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”

  Mom carefully raised my foot and eyeballed it. “Lift the other one, please?”

  My stomach was flip-flopping all over the place.

  She beamed at me. “It’s healing so nicely. We should take you back to the doctor and find out when you can take the boot off and return to training. It might be sooner than they thought. I’ll make an appointment.”

  “I can do it,” I blurted.

  Mom looked at me in surprise.

  “You’re busy, plus… I need to start doing stuff like this on my own. You know, for my future.”

  Mom looked impressed as she nodded. “Just make sure to tell me when the appointment is in case I can make it too.”

  I eyed her, waves of uncertainty rolling through my body. “Sure.”

  What if the doctor told me my foot had healed?

  What if I was out of time?

  ***

  I lurched awake, a surge of nausea washing through my stomach.

  “Oh, God.” I clutched my mouth. I was covered in sweat but shivering. “Mom?” I croaked. My head swam. “Mom!” I croaked louder, trying to decide whether or not to make a run for the bathroom.