Double Cross

by Beth McMullen

  “Jeez,” I mutter. “Thanks.”

  “Whatever they were,” Izumi says, “they’re gone now. It’s probably the heat.”

  “It was not the heat,” I insist. “There was something weird about those butterflies. And there’s something weird about this place.”

  “Because they have nice bathrooms?” asks Charlotte. “That feels judgy.”

  Right now, my instincts twitch. Not all is as it seems. But my instincts have been wrong before. And those butterflies left no evidence behind. Maybe I do smell like a flower?

  “Everyone here is really nice,” Toby says, in defense of Briar. “Especially Jane Ann. She gave me a tour of the computer facilities, and they are first-rate. She also said one of the teams participating in the Challenge built a nuclear weapon detection device that the government now uses.”

  “The bar is high,” Izumi says.

  They have moved on from my killer butterfly paranoia. They are probably right. I’m freaking out over nothing, just some impolite insects. Big deal. I should concentrate my freaking out on the Challenge competition, like everyone else. Still, I wish I’d caught one so I could figure out what was weird about them and prove to my friends that it wasn’t the heat or my imagination.

  At five o’clock, the Challenge teams gather in the gaudy, enormous theater for the headmaster’s welcome. The air-conditioning struggles in the heat. But it’s the first time we get a good look at the competition. There are thirty teams of two, three, and four students. They come from all over the country. About one hundred of us pack into a single section of the theater, with the remaining seats filled by Briar students. The atmosphere is unhinged carnival. After all, the entire school gets the week off to spectate. There’s a lot of cheering and yelling and high-fiving.

  We sit directly behind Poppy and Owen Elliott. Owen Elliott offers a weak smile as greeting. It’s possible Poppy has forbidden him from speaking to us. I pick out two Briar teams in our ranks. They chat amiably with the teams around them. Like Toby said, they are really nice. Jane Ann, our enthusiastic tour guide, sits a few rows away. Her hair is so shiny. How does she do that? She glances my direction and flat-out busts me for marveling at her hair. She offers a shy smile, and I return my gaze to the back of Owen Elliott’s head.

  On the ample stage, the Briar headmaster, a bald man in the same T-shirt and cargo pants as the students, calls for quiet. It takes a while. This is a rowdy crowd, willing to cheer just about anything.

  “Welcome, visitors,” Baldy begins, his amplified voice booming like thunder. He makes it sound like we are aliens in from outer space. “Are you as amazed by Briar as we are?” Cheers erupt. Baldy waggles his bushy eyebrows. “Two years ago, Briar was a nothing campus, a backwater, sad and irrelevant. But determination turned it around. Mark my words, we will be the premier boarding school in all the land!”

  I glance at Charlotte, who grimaces. They are certainly piling it on. The team section responds with muted clapping because we don’t really care about Briar being premier or platinum or whatever. Baldy’s pate glistens with sweat. His face glows red. If he keeps this up, he might keel over. I bet that will get a lot of cheers too.

  Onstage, Baldy shifts gears to the Challenge rules. No cheating. No bullying. No bribery. Bribery? The Challenge is meant to foster the spirit of camaraderie by means of healthy competition. Those of us sitting in the teams’ section glare at one another, making it clear that camaraderie and health have no place in the Challenge. This is for blood. Win or die trying. The kids here are no joke.

  “While you are with us on the beautiful Briar campus,” Baldy drones, “we want you to feel at home. What is ours is yours. You may come and go as you please, use any of the facilities and enjoy your time here.”

  “They have a pastry chef on staff,” Charlotte whispers. “Did you know that?”

  “He makes croissants,” adds Izumi. “Fresh. Everyday!”

  My friends have fallen in love, and the object of their affection is Briar. Who knew they could be had for a decent croissant? Baldy invites us to join him for a special teams dinner at the main dining hall. He says it will be a good opportunity for us to get to know one another before the competition begins tomorrow.

  “Good to know your enemy,” Charlotte murmurs, squinting at the competition.

  Baldy wraps it up with boring but important details—how to find the dining hall, how to get clean towels, how to access the Wi-Fi. I glance around. By this point, everyone is hot and dazed. Even the rowdy Briar students offer only limp cheers for the towels. Sweat runs from my scalp down my neck. My head itches. The idea that a swarm of butterflies could be attracted to my stink is really not that far-fetched. I scratch at my itchy head. There’s something stuck in my hair. Great. Probably Poppy spat a wad of gum in there while I wasn’t paying attention.

  But it’s no gum. A single glittery killer butterfly falls into my hand.

  Chapter 8

  Dirty Laundry.

  THE DINING HALL REFLECTS THE party mood. Brightly colored banners embroidered with the names of all our schools hang from the ceiling. Dozens of rectangular tables cover the floor. Outside, torches flicker and reflect off the glass walls.

  We sit at a table with Team OP and insult each other’s chances of winning while collectively swooning over the food. Owen Elliott agrees to swim naked laps in the Cavanaugh Family Meditative Pond and Fountain if we even place in the Challenge. Poppy doesn’t think naked swimming cuts it and wants a different, more humiliating task for us if we lose. This is getting ugly. Halfway through her sandwich, Poppy whips out a red leather notebook and starts writing frantically.

  “What’s that?” asks Charlotte.

  “My idea book,” Poppy says. “I just thought of something brilliant.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she scoffs. “It’s my intellectual property. It’s valuable.”

  “Is she kidding?” Charlotte asks Owen Elliott.

  “Not at all,” Owen replies glumly.

  “How many ideas do you get in a day?” I ask, unable to remember the last time I had even one good idea.

  “Twelve today,” she replies, “but sometimes as many as thirty or forty.”

  “I just lost my appetite,” Charlotte says, shoving her plate away.

  The butterfly is tucked safely in my pocket. I want to examine it up close before I show it to my friends. If it turns out to be a regular old butterfly, there is no need for me to suffer more humiliation for my freak-out.

  We spend the rest of the evening in the palatial Briar games room. Pool, Ping-Pong, air hockey, classic video games like Pac-Man and Asteroids. Nothing violent but practically everything else. One wall contains shelves stacked high with board games and card games. My Smith comrades visibly drool, discussing the possibility of a midyear transfer. Even the Briar cheese fries, something Smith does well, are a step above. More humiliation.

  Toby wants to have a confab about the competition tomorrow, but it’s hard to concentrate when surrounded by all this fun. Finally, he threatens to quit, leaving us high and dry. This gets our attention. We follow him out of the game room.

  “You guys are impossible,” he says, exasperated.

  “But I was about to get the high score on Pac-Man!” Izumi yells. “Sabotage!”

  Toby forces us to sit down on some steps outside the building. I think they’re marble steps, which is ridiculous, right?

  “Tomorrow is a big deal,” Toby begins. He’s going to lecture us on being serious and doing our best. Sometimes he sounds like Drexel, even though I know better than to say that aloud. “We need to go in there and work hard. Statistically, whoever wins the first Challenge task, wins the entire competition. We can’t mess up.”

  “Do we have any idea what the task will be?” asks Izumi. “I mean, I know it’s secret, but can we guess?”

  Toby grins. “I can do better than guess,” he says. “An analysis of past Challenges points toward clean water being a t
opic this year.”

  “Water?” I ask. That is not very exciting.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but almost a billion people on planet Earth don’t have access to clean water,” Toby replies. “And drinking contaminated water leads to all sorts of diseases and a lot of death. We will likely get a box full of junk, like duct tape and plastic piping and pieces of screen and things, with the task of inventing a water purification system that costs practically no money to make.”

  “This is scaring me,” Charlotte says.

  “Or,” Toby says thoughtfully, “it might be toilets.”

  “Huh?”

  “They might want us to build a toilet. 2.3 billion people in the world don’t have access to a decent toilet. That means more contamination, more disease, and more death. Yeah. My bet is on water or toilets.”

  “Last Challenge theme was space travel,” Izumi mutters. “They had to figure out a way to live on Mars.”

  “And we get toilets,” Charlotte says flatly.

  “It’s more important than Mars,” responds Toby. “It’s also important to get enough sleep. We need to be our absolute best tomorrow. Now everyone go to bed.”

  We murmur agreement and say our good nights. And when Toby disappears around a corner, we immediately dash back to the game room and stay there until campus-wide lights out at ten o’clock. Finally, alone in my room, I pull out the butterfly and place it on the desk. It really does look like just a dead butterfly, even up close, and this is probably because it is. I poke it with a pencil. Nothing unusual. I need to get it together. I swipe it into my garbage can and go to bed.

  At midnight, a persistent buzzing pulls me out of a bizarre dream about unicorns playing Fortnite. I rub my eyes and flick on the light. My phone, on the desk, is silent, and I didn’t set the alarm on the clock beside the bed. What’s making that noise? A dull blue light blinks on and off in the garbage can. I peer inside. My butterfly is buzzing and glowing, even though butterflies don’t buzz and don’t glow. And don’t come back from the dead!

  Gingerly, I scoop it out of the trash. Every time its body flashes blue, it emits a sharp buzzy tone. What does it mean? Is someone searching for it, or calling to it? Suddenly, having this drone butterfly in my room seems like a very bad idea. Holding it in the palm of my hand, I creep into the hallway. As I move toward the back of the building, the beeping quiets and flashing light weakens. Interesting. I swing around and head down the hall in the other direction. The light gets brighter and the beeping faster and louder. It must be homing in on its flight of butterfly friends. Or they are calling it home. Either way, I have to see what’s on the other end, which means I have to get out of this building.

  Like the Smith dorms, the doors here are locked and alarmed. Unlike Smith, the windows are alarmed as well. This is a problem. The window has always been my go-to escape route. Now what? I tiptoe down the hallway, assessing my options as the butterfly buzzes away in my closed fist. There aren’t even any heating or air-conditioning ducts I can crawl through. The only way out is the laundry chute. At Smith, we are responsible for our own laundry. Each dorm has a collection of sad washers and dryers in the basement, and if a girl comes armed with four hundred quarters to feed the machines, she might eventually be rewarded with clean socks. Mostly, we just recycle stuff until it can walk to the laundry room of its own accord. But here at Briar, they have laundry service. Students bundle their dirty clothes in mesh bags labeled with their name and room number and toss them down a chute that leads, hopefully, to a way out of here.

  I peer down the chute. It’s really dark, and I will likely break a leg. And how do I explain that? I can’t very well say I accidentally fell down the laundry chute. Briar already has a poor opinion of every other school on the planet, and this will be confirmation that we are all idiots. Or maybe there is no way out of the laundry room and I have to wait for the service to show up tomorrow and collect the dirty clothes before I can get out. This will make me late for the nine-o’clock Challenge kickoff, which will lead to Toby killing me, which is worse than a broken leg. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Just go down the chute and see what happens.

  It doesn’t take long to figure out this is a bad idea.

  Chapter 9

  Chutes. No Ladders.

  JENNIFER LOVES WATCHING How the Grinch Stole Christmas. She laughs so hard at Max the dog that sometimes I worry she will hurt herself. But the Grinch and his too-wide-for-the-chimney butt would empathize with how I’m stuck fast in the laundry chute. Or he’d mock me on account of his too-small heart. Either way, I can’t move. Gravity has abandoned me.

  The strong smell of lavender wafts up from below, and I gag. Twisting my torso, I push my shoulder into the sheet metal for leverage, which just makes everything worse. What next? How does a person shrink the width of her shoulders while wedged in a laundry chute? It’s possible this question has never been asked in the history of the universe. I’m an original! And screaming for help will just get me busted. The butterfly glows dimly in my pocket.

  In the end, it’s wiggle for the win. Inch by agonizing inch, I squeeze down the chute. After many long minutes, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. I must be near the bottom. My reaction is to breathe deep with relief, but that expands my upper body enough that I can’t wiggle. Take shallow breaths, Abby, or stay in here forever.

  When I finally tumble out into a cart of dirty clothes, sorted and ready for laundering, I’m both thrilled and grossed out. My face lands in a dirty pair of socks, and my legs tangle in muddy soccer shorts. I scramble free of the cart.

  “That was too intense,” I mutter, looking around. I pull out the killer butterfly. It’s still intact but very quiet, meaning I must be farther away down here from the butterfly hub. Or the walls are too thick for the signal to penetrate. There are several industrial-size washing machines and dryers. A long table covered in neatly folded clothes stretches from wall to wall. It smells sweet, like fabric softener, and the air is charged with static electricity. There are no windows. It’s like a cinder-block prison cell.

  “At least our laundry room has windows,” I say, even if we don’t have a planetarium and our headmaster is a lunatic who makes us wear ties. The only door to the outside is alarmed, of course, and, after the chute, I have to work hard to convince myself to consider the ducts behind the dryer. My heart beats wildly at the idea.

  The dryer is as tall as I am and weighs five times as much. Shoving it out of the way is not an option. When I’m in impossible situations, I often try to look at things from my friends’ perspectives. What would Izumi do? Or Charlotte? Or Toby?

  “Okay, calm down now, Abby,” I say to the empty room. “Izumi would just muscle the thing aside. Charlotte would sweet-talk it, and Toby would take it apart and invent a dryer bot or something. Argh! This is not helping.”

  But maybe if I come down from the top? How about that? I flip over one of the carts to use as a step stool and climb up on the giant dryer. From here, I kick the silver duct hard enough to disconnect it from the machine, raising a cloud of thick dust. It’s like swallowing a mouth full of tiny bugs. I cough and hack dramatically, just to put off having to crawl in there. Stop thumping, heart!

  It doesn’t. I push myself off the top of the dryer and slip into the duct. It’s about the same size as the chute, but because I’m horizontal, I make like Superman and push with my feet and pull with my hands. When movie characters crawl through heating ducts, they’re usually burgling a giant diamond or something. And they make it seem glamorous when really it’s just disgusting. Just when I’m about to give up hope, I spill face-first into the wet grass.

  Freedom! The butterfly buzzes frantically in my pocket. I pull it out and, sticking to the shadows, set off in the direction of the planetarium. But the butterfly doesn’t like that idea, so I turn toward the dining hall. Maybe it’s hungry, because this gets it super excited. It buzzes and flashes all over the place.

  I skirt around the b
uilding to the kitchen loading dock, where the food is delivered. The door is propped open with a plastic crate used to deliver gallons of milk. I slip inside. And suddenly, my butterfly goes bananas, pricking my palm with what feels like tiny little lasers.

  “Ouch!” My hand flies open, and the butterfly zooms away. Oh, no! I dash after it through the gleaming industrial kitchen, complete with stainless steel walk-in refrigerators and massive prep tables. Pots large enough to swim in are stacked beside an eight-burner range. Three double-size ovens line a wall. My butterfly performs an acrobatic barrel roll and disappears around a corner. I’m about to rush after it when voices halt me in my tracks.

  “Oh, look! Another one! Such busy butterflies.” Laughter follows. I drop low and crawl around the corner to get a better view. It must be a pantry, a space twice the size of my dorm room stacked with staples like flour and sugar. Awkward towers of cans teeter precariously. Inside, two kids sit on large plastic containers labeled PEACHES and TOMATOES. Peaches holds what looks like an Xbox controller. My butterfly darts right for him, hovers, and then drops into his lap, still. He plucks it up, examines it, and finally tosses it into a bag that is filled with similar butterflies.

  “Cool,” says Tomatoes.

  “Yeah,” agrees Peaches. “I sent a bunch down to the lake today. Dive-bombed some kid. Hilarious!”

  “Dude,” chides Tomatoes. “That’s, like, platinum-level stupid. You could have gotten caught.”

  “But it was fun.”

  Tomatoes shakes his head, as if Peaches is a total lost cause. Peaches grins like an idiot.

  And suddenly, there is Jane Ann coming right toward me. I slither around the corner, out of sight as she strides purposefully into the pantry. What is she doing here?

  “Did you retrieve all the butterflies?” she asks, without even saying hello. Wait a minute. Perky, rah-rah Briar Jane Ann has been replaced by terrifying cyborg Jane Ann. Tomatoes and Peaches cower under Jane Ann 2.0’s withering gaze. Tomatoes clutches his butterfly bag to his chest.