Chapter Twenty-six
The School's New Groove
I was amazed at the faces sitting around the lunch table as the week progressed. Bobby smiled quietly. Tish, Erica, Jessie, and Dougie, however, were doing happy dances. The plan had worked better than expected. Even students I didn’t know had begun rebelling against the bullies. The Dweeb League was growing.
“Did you see their faces?” Tish asked.
“Angel’s face was blurred out on Greensburg Action News that night, but you couldn’t mistake her squawky voice,” Bobby said. “The video we made was awesome. We nailed her.”
Erica clapped her hand on the tabletop. “Angel’s dad wouldn’t even come out of the house when the reporter wanted to interview him. How cool is that?”
Whatsisface jumped to his feet. Holding a pencil to his mouth like a microphone, he pretended to knock on a door. “Toby James, reporting on what appears to be a drug bust at the high school. Mr. Angel, how do you respond to these allegations? Mr. Angel? Mr. Angel? Hello? Is anybody home?”
Tish laughed and shook her head. “No, I mean today. I saw them this morning in the hall. Talk about your new attitude! Everybody is talking about it. Something is finally being done. The whole school is different today.”
The school was different, but some things never changed. Tammy’s father had pulled strings, as expected. He said that the evidence was circumstantial, that Tammy was set up, and that he would personally sue the school district for allowing his innocent daughter to be exposed to dangerous drug dealers. Mrs. Bagley was livid that the school board wouldn’t let her expel Angel. But like Tish said, Angel had a new attitude. Which I saw right through. She was a Knight, and the personality change was part of the deception. She was still going down.
“Yeah, even Mason is acting weird,” Bobby said. “He hasn’t hit anybody or stuffed them in a locker…nothing. He even apologized to me. But I’m not falling for it.”
I hadn’t discussed Mason with Bobby. I hadn’t told him that the Memory Lash did what it was supposed to do. Bobby was a smart kid. He’d figure it out on his own. Mason was changed, and the change felt deep.
“Hey, what’s up with you and Egon?” Bobby said.
“What do you mean?” My heart sped up.
“He says he asked you out, but you’re too busy.”
“Busy? That’s not what I told him.” He hadn’t asked me out since the day we hung out at the hospital. Of course, I hadn’t really been still long enough for him to ask. As soon as my mission was complete, I had to make time.
The bell rang and everyone headed for class. I followed the Dweeb League out of the cafeteria and right into a traffic jam of ninth and tenth graders. Rubric was twisting a girl’s arm and had her in tears.
“Please, stop, it hurts!” the girl pleaded.
“I said five dollars,” Rubric bellowed. “Are you people deaf?”
“Air a little thin up there in the bozone layer?” It took all my self-control to not rip Rubric’s arm out of the socket. But I didn’t want detention, so I speared my fingertips into his elbow joint instead.
Rubric’s eyes grew wide. He let out a little yelp and released the girl, then started jumping around holding his arm. His hand opened and closed involuntarily. “What’ja do ta me?”
“Not what I wanted.” I helped the girl to her feet and wiped her tears away. “Are you okay?”
“No!” The girl glared at me, rubbing her arm, then turned and kicked Rubric hard in the shin. “Now I am.”
“Hey!” Rubric shouted, switching his grip to his shin. “What is with you people? This is my hall. You want to pass, you gotta pay.”
“I’m surprised your brain has enough voltage to make your lungs work,” I said.
Rubric stopped jumping and glared, holding out his open palm. “Pay the toll to the troll.”
“Too stupid to realize he just insulted himself,” Bobby said under his breath. “This is scary.”
“Be careful,” Whatsisface whispered. “He’s as strong as he is stupid.”
“I’m the strongest in this school,” Rubric said, smiling. “Except for Chuckie.”
I burst out laughing. “Let’s go, it might be contagious.”
Rubric held out his hand. “Five bucks. Each.”
“No,” Bobby said.
Rubric reached out to smack Bobby on top of the head. Bobby slapped his arm away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Are you and your girlfriends gonna stop me?”
Dougie stepped forward. “N-n-now that you mention it, we are, D-d-d-umbelina.”
“Die, Dweeb.” Rubric pushed past Bobby and dove at Dougie. Whatsisface stuck out his foot and Rubric landed flat on his face. The ninth grader whose arm he had twisted jumped on his back and began beating his head with her book bag. Then the other kids joined in. Before Rubric could get up, he was buried beneath a stomping, punching, laughing mob.
“Get off me,” his muffled voice screamed.
I almost felt sorry for Rubric as he lay under the pummeling heap of kids, all former victims of the school’s bullies, finally able to release years of pent-up frustration. Almost.
Heads popped out of doors all the way down the hall. One of them belonged to Mrs. Bagley. She stepped out and came toward us, walking like a gunslinger at high noon. In place of a six-shooter, she carried a yardstick.
“Students!” she barked. The bell rang and the hall became silent.
The pile of bodies got to its feet. All except Rubric, who lay there unmoving.
“Mr. Rubric,” Mrs. Bagley snapped. “Arthur! Please get up off that filthy floor.”
Rubric stirred and looked up. “Get lost, Old Bag, before you get hurt like the rest—”
“Mr. Rubric!” She broke her yardstick over his head. “I asked you to get up. Don’t make me ask again.”
Rubric mumbled a filthy word that only people with deflated brains use. He dragged himself to his feet, raised his fist and took a step toward Mrs. Bagley. Before I could stop him, the mob of kids swarmed, forcing themselves between him and Mrs. Bagley.
“You touch her, you touch us.”
Rubric lowered his fist. His face became bright red. “I’m outta here.”
“Just a minute.” Mrs. Bagley pulled a pad from her pocket. She scribbled something and handed the paper to Rubric.
He slowly reached out. “What’s that?”
“That is your detention slip, Mr. Rubric. Fighting is forbidden. I would like to expel you, but then I couldn’t keep an eye on you. Instead, you will serve two hours after school for the rest of the school year. If you refuse, I will turn you in to the police, and your parents will be fined. I know they don’t care about money, but they certainly won’t like the publicity when the story is in all the newspapers. Now go to the office.”
Rubric turned and walked away. “Don’t think I won’t get even.”
“Yeah,” Tish said. “Even more of what you just got.”
The hall remained silent. We all looked at Mrs. Bagley.
“Students.” Mrs. Bagley shook her pad of slips at us. “The bell rang, and you are late. You are aware, I am sure, of the rules against tardiness.”
Wonderful. I didn’t have time for detention.
Mrs. Bagley wrote quickly and tore off a slip, handing it to me, the slightest hint of a smile cracking across her face. “You’ll all need late passes to get into class.”
…
I took a little detour before meeting Bobby in study hall. With everything that had happened since the Spring Fling, I needed to regroup. Normally, I would have talked with Kathryn. Thanks to Tammy Angel, I didn’t have that option. So Plan B. I snuck into the girl’s bathroom, opened a stall, and plopped down on the closed lid.
See, here’s the thing. The kids at school were pulling together, which was good, and Angel had been arrested, which was also good. But her father had connections. Which stunk. Tammy was acting all proper, but that’s just what it was, an act. I knew she was a Knight
, but without her Amplifier, I couldn’t prove it. I had to get into her head without letting her know that I was the Morgan girl she was hunting. A life without secrets would have been so much easier.
Then there was Egon. He’d been such a sweetheart through this whole thing, but apparently felt like I was neglecting him. I really needed to spend time with Egon if our relationship was to go anywhere. Maybe it was time to rethink my priorities.
Speaking of time, I peeked at my watch and panicked. My late pass couldn’t buy me enough to sort this out, so I rushed out of the bathroom and into an empty hall. Or so I thought.
“Hey.”
Mason’s voice sent such a fright through me that I let out a tiny shriek. He sat on the floor, cross-armed against the wall, like he had been waiting for me. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder to see if we were alone. Terrifyingly, we were.
“Got a sec?”
No. I didn’t. Not even part of one. Between planning the downfall of the forces of evil and wallowing in self-pity, I was booked. But I was actually glad to see him. Maybe I could learn something about Miliron. “Always.”
Mason smiled. “I just wanted say I’m sorry for…you know, for that day in the park. I didn’t know what I was doing. And the hundred years before that. Everything is different now. I want you to know.” Then he gazed up at me with sad eyes and patted the floor. Before all this happened, my Bad Guy Meter would have seriously pegged, but the batteries must have been dead. I sat down beside him.
Mason stared blankly and shook his head, like he was totally lost. “I can’t stop thinking about the things I’ve done. About my mother. She had problems. But I loved her.” He leaned a little closer, and gazed right into my eyes. His breath warmed my cheek. “I just wanted her to love me back, but all she ever did was tell me what was wrong with me. When I came home from a friend’s, she never said hi, or asked me if I had fun. She’d show me the toy I didn’t put away, or tell me my socks didn’t match. Or ask me why I didn’t wear a different shirt. I was never good enough for her. She always compared me to my brother.” Mason’s eyes filled with tears. “Rinnie, I never had a brother. My mother was sick.”
I wanted to tell him I knew, that I saw it.
“Everybody thinks my mom is being treated at the asylum. She’s not. What I told you and Kathryn that day in the lab is true. She was murdered. I watched it happen.”
“That’s awful.” I had only vague memories of my parents’ murder, and they scared the pants off me. From what the Memory Lash had showed me, Mason’s recollection was completely clear. “That had to be a horrible thing to see.”
“It was. But it’s not what I saw that bothers me. It’s what I felt.”
“Shock? Grief? Mason, that’s normal.”
“No.” He shook his head and took my hand in both of his. “Liberation. It was like this big iron chain I had been carrying around my neck all my life just fell off. I watched a man beat her to death with a shovel, and all it made me feel was relief. My mother was right. There’s something wrong with me.”
What I had felt in Mason’s memory was sheer terror, not relief. I noticed he didn’t mention that the murderer had a rotting skull for a head.
“Dad thought I’d killed her, and I couldn’t convince him it was somebody else. So he covered it up. That’s when I knew I could get away with anything. My poor father. What I put him through. But that day in the park… I see things differently now. What did you do to me?”
Uh oh. This was why he wanted to talk. “I, uh…maybe you hit your head. You were high, weren’t you?”
Mason raised an eyebrow. “I guess we both have secrets.” Then his face softened. “I tried to apologize to Bobby, but he won’t talk to me.”
“You tried to bash his head in with a baseball bat. That probably put a strain on your relationship.”
“Maybe.” Mason closed his eyes. “But I never meant for you to be hurt. I’m sorry for the way I treated you since, like, forever ago. You never did anything to deserve it. I’ve been a total idiot. I was hoping that maybe you could give me a sec— Maybe we could start over. Be friends. Or something. I mean, I understand if you can’t.”
“We’ve been arch enemies for how long? Do we even know how to be friends?” Before the Memory Lash, I had only heard rumors of the horrible childhood that made him a total bonehead. Now I knew the truth in a way that nobody but Mason could appreciate. And I understood why the Lash had brought up that memory. Not because Mason blamed himself for his mother’s death, but because he felt like a monster for being glad she was gone. I understood. It was like we had gained a special connection that day. Like our souls had touched. And now he was being all sweet. Maybe the Memory Lash wasn’t such a nasty weapon.
Forgiveness was supposed to be heavenly, so I could only assume that I had suddenly been zapped by divine intervention. After the abuse I had tolerated, after the nights spent crying on my bed because he picked on me so relentlessly, after that nasty nickname that had spread like thorns because of him. After all that, my heart wanted desperately to forgive him. Being friends would be so…strange. But what the heck? “Everybody deserves a second chance. Especially you.”
Mason’s entire face smiled, like the Grinch when his small heart grew three sizes. “Cool.”
“But why me, Mason? Why were you always so mean to me?”
His cheeks turned pink. “I thought you were pretty.”
I think mine turned pinker. “You had a funny way of showing it.”
“I knew you’d never want to be with somebody like me. I did whatever I could to get your attention. You only noticed me when I knocked your books down.” He smiled. “Rinnie, I have a hole in my heart the size of you. It’s always been there.”
A meteor could not have flattened me more completely. The situation had suddenly spun a one-eighty from the “friend” direction, and was speeding toward “awkward.”
He brushed his fingers across the back of my hand. “I know you’re with Egon, but I was hoping that, maybe, you know, if that doesn’t work…maybe we could hang out? I know a good pizza place.”
Suddenly his cell phone buzzed.
I leaned back, feeling a smile pull across my lips. Saved by the mobile communication device ringtone. “Hey, I gotta get to class. This pass is gonna expire soon.”
We both jumped to our feet.
Mason’s cell buzzed again, and he dug it out of his pocket, blushing even worse than I was. “Okay. See you around?”
“Definitely.” I turned toward my next class in a state of perplexification while Mason took his call.
“Hey, no problemo,” I heard Mason say. “Delivery tomorrow. It’s finished. Yeah. Old Torrents will be pleased.”
I spun and glared at him. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.
“One day, I hope I understand how I can be so stupid!” I shoved past him and stomped down the hall, not caring that I was headed in the wrong direction, trying hard to keep from destroying the universe with a stray thought. Not that I could actually do it, but I was mad enough to maybe knock down a loose ceiling tile or something.
“Rinnie, what’s wrong?” he called after me.
I ignored him and kept going. What was wrong was that I was a complete bozoid. I always had to see the good in people, even when they obviously had none. I really wanted to believe that the Memory Lash had changed him. But facts were facts. He had gotten high on Psychedone 10 and attacked Bobby. He was connected to the Knights, the nastiest people the world had ever seen. And now he was about to help Old Torrents make more of that garbage that put Kathryn in the hospital. He was so not helping the mentally ill. Either he still didn’t have a clue about the Class Project, or his change of heart was a total hoax.
Time to sabotage a high school science project and find out the truth about Mason Draudimon.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Excuse Me, I Fluffed
Bobby and I walked out of study hall with a plan.
“We have fou
r minutes between classes. That leaves us three in here.” Bobby ducked into the chemistry lab with me on his heels. The shelves at the back were full. That had to be the shipment Mason was setting up.
“It’s in the cabinet,” Bobby whispered as I followed him across the lab.
He tried the double doors of the supply cabinet, but they were locked. “Crud, now what?”
“Got it covered.” I pulled my Amplifier out of my belt.
“What are you gonna do with that?”
“Kathryn told you everything else about me.” I focused and a smoky blue blade of pure psychic energy exploded from the end of my Amplifier. “Didn’t she mention my favorite weapon?”
“Cool!” Bobby reached out toward the Thought Saber.
“Don’t.” I put my hand out to stop him.
“Doesn’t look like it’ll cut me.”
“It won’t. It’ll short-circuit your brain.” I spun the Saber in a short arc and slashed between the cabinet doors. They swung open with a click, and I extinguished the Saber. “But it’ll cut steel. We’re in.”
Bobby examined the lock. “Wow. Looks like it was cut by a laser.”
“Gotta have a sharp mind in this business.” I giggled. I always wanted to use that line. Andy would have been so proud.
“Ha ha.” Bobby pulled out the bottle of DMSO and handed it to me.
I uncorked it and poured a drop into the first bottle on the shelf labeled PASS. A stench like an open sewer filled the air. Memories of Kathryn flashed through my mind, and I burst out laughing. “Excuse me, I fluffed.”
“Right in Angel’s face,” Bobby said.
We worked swiftly, contaminating the entire pass rack before moving on to the rework rack. Finally, we contaminated all the remaining flasks of ergot.
“This place smells like the boy’s bathroom after Rubric leaves,” Bobby said.
“The Knights’ Psychedone 10 production is officially in the potty. And we have a whole minute to spare. Let’s get to class.”
“What a week. We got Angel arrested, shut down Chuckie and Rubric, ruined their drug production…”
“Only one more thing to do,” I said.
Psi Another Day (Psi Fighter Academy) Page 21