The first bell rings, shaking me out of my thoughts.
“So?” Megumi folds her arms. “When are we breaking into Lockhart’s office?”
I let out a deep sigh. “How about I give you a nice, safe lookout post or something where there’s no chance of getting caught?”
She raises her eyebrows. “I’m not worried about getting caught. Are you?”
“No,” I say a little too quickly. “But I don’t have a choice. I have to go in there. Why would you want to risk it?”
She shrugs. “Maybe I want some excitement in my life, like Ronin Girl. Or maybe I want the thief to get caught too.”
Those are two pretty good reasons—not that I have any idea what kind of excitement Ronin Girl gets herself into, since I haven’t read it yet.
“Fine. You can stand guard by the door while I watch the video.”
She raises her eyebrows at me like I just claimed I could fart the national anthem.
I’m getting annoyed and I have to get to class. The last thing I need is to be tardy and end up in the principal’s office for the right reason today. “Did I say something funny?”
“Kinda. Do you think she just has the video sitting on her unlocked desktop with a big play button on it? She’ll have some sort of security.”
She’s right! I spent so much time planning the part about getting Lockhart out of the office, I never thought about what I would do if I actually got in.
“And I suppose you know how to get around it?”
She smiles. “If this school uses the same formula for passwords that they used over at Trondson, which they probably do, I can get in.”
“How do you know the password formula?”
She looks me up and down. “How do you not? It’s last name plus their school district employee number. Most of them don’t bother to change it. It’s worth a try.”
I fight back the smile that pulls on my cheeks. Who is this kid? The sound of students rushing to class is dying down. I probably have less than a minute to get to mine, not enough time to convince her to tell me Lockhart’s employee number. “All right, you can come,” I say. “But if you get caught—”
“I know, I know. You’ll disavow any knowledge of my activities.”
I pick up my bag. “Also . . . ,” but when I turn to finish, Megumi is already gone.
Between morning classes, I see the Arch in the halls a few times. Each time, I throw him a raised eyebrow, and each time he looks away quickly. He probably just doesn’t want anyone to see us making nice, but it doesn’t make me feel superconfident either way. I pass him again on the way to fourth period, the last class before lunch. I want to make sure he’s totally on board, so I shoot him an extra-hard eyebrow that he can’t miss. Right before he ducks into a stream of kids, he answers me back with a tiny nod. It’ll have to do.
Fourth-period science takes slightly longer than it took humans to evolve from single-cell paramecia. I pack my bag with five minutes left in the period so I can be out the door and ready to go the second the bell rings. When it finally clangs, I race to my locker, stash my bag, and then zoom downstairs to meet Megumi.
She’s already in the foyer. She examines the trophy case, especially the bare spot on the middle shelf.
“Lockhart’s still in there,” she says when I get next to her.
“Is her door open?”
Megumi nods. “I think she likes to eavesdrop on the kids in the hall.”
“Perfect,” I say. We get in our hiding spot behind the trophy case so Lockhart won’t see us if the plan works and she dashes out the door for the coffee shop.
Right on cue Sizzler and the hatted McQueen appear in the hall together. I give them the thumbs-up, and they initiate Plan B.
They walk slowly by the office and stop at the water fountain. In a voice loud enough to hear inside Lockhart’s office, Sizzler says, “Jenny Parker’s mom just texted her. She’s at that coffee shop around the corner, and the guy who made the Boogerloo is there.”
I strain to see if I can hear the sound of heels coming from her office.
The McQueen replies. “Patchouli is there now?”
Sizzler covers his mouth to keep from laughing, regains his composure, and says. “It’s Wa-hoo-lie. And yeah, he’s just chilling over at that coffee shop on Madison right now.”
Now there is a commotion coming from the office. The familiar sound of items being thrown in a purse for a quick departure. Sizzler and the McQueen hear it too, and vacate the hall to take up their lookout spots for the next phase of the plan.
We don’t have to wait long before Lockhart flies from the office and out the front door in the direction of the coffee shop. Right on her heels, Mrs. Osborne scurries out to go do her lunch monitor duties, only slowing down long enough to lock the knob on the office door. Before she’s even around the corner Megumi dashes for the closing door and catches it just before it closes. I check the halls one last time, then slip into the empty office.
As soon as the door shuts behind us, I slap my head when I realize the mistake I just made.
“I forgot about the camera!” I whisper.
Megumi looks annoyed. “I put a gym towel over it before you arrived.”
“How’d you get up there?”
Judging by the look on her face, these are stupid questions. “I climbed it.”
It looks like bringing her along was the right call.
It’ll take Lockhart about four minutes to walk to the coffee shop where our fake Wahoolie is waiting for her. When she walks in, the Arch is supposed to let her see him, then duck into the men’s room and sneak out the window while she waits for him to finish. If he plays it right, it’ll buy us a few extra minutes. I figure we have at least eight minutes before we need to listen for Moby’s birdcall warning us that she’s almost here.
The inside of Lockhart’s office smells like tea and the despair of three hundred kids. I race around one side of her desk and Megumi goes around the other. Megumi makes an ushering gesture toward the keyboard. I poke a key and the lock screen appears. Her username is filled in, but it’s demanding a password.
I look at Megumi. She was right; without her along, I’d be toast right now.
“I got this.” She pokes away at the keyboard. “Go listen so we don’t miss the signal.”
I take up a post by the door and keep my ear out for the cry of a whippoorwill as Megumi presses keys faster than a courtroom reporter.
“Uh, Chub.” She looks worried. “It’s not working.”
“You said you knew how to do it!”
“She isn’t using her assigned password. She changed it to something.”
Without the password this is a suicide mission. I’m about to call the whole thing off when something catches my eye: the little vomit-nado teacup Lockhart wanted me to see when she brought me in on the first day of school.
“Try ‘wahoolie.’ ”
She shrugs, so I spell it out for her and she punches it in. She stares at the screen for a second, then gives me the same desperate look. “Nope.”
I run back to the desk. “Let me try.” She looks over my shoulder as I try capitalizing it.
Megumi snaps her fingers. “Wait! It has to be at least ten characters.”
My mind goes blank. I check the clock. She’s been gone four minutes. It’s time to pull the plug. “Let’s go. We’ll figure out a different way.”
Megumi doesn’t move. “What’s her first name?”
“I don’t know! Mizz?”
“Very funny. It’s gotta be written somewhere.”
I glance at the wall and the first thing I see is what I need. I run over and read the name off her doctorate of education. “It says Gunborg Lockhart. Is that a name?”
“Worth a try.” Megumi punches her new idea into the keyboard.
She looks up at me, crosses her fingers, and with the other hand punches the enter key. I expect to see the same disappointed look on her face again, but there’s a smile instead.
“We’re in!”
“No way.” I race to the desk
“Way!” Lockhart’s desktop is unlocked.
“What was it?”
Megumi makes a sour face. “GunborgWahoolie.”
“How did you . . . ?”
“My password used to be MegumiBieber.”
“Gross!”
“Don’t judge me! Look.” She points at the screen, and there in the upper right corner is the icon for the security camera. Megumi clicks it and the program opens, but the view screen is blank.
“What’s wrong with the picture?” I ask.
“Towel, remember?” She finds the menu and opens the camera’s control panel. She highlights Archived Footage and clicks. Finally, something goes right; there’s only one thing saved, last Friday, two forty-five p.m.
She hovers the mouse over the file. “There it is.”
“Click it and let’s get this over with.”
She double clicks the file and the blank screen is replaced with a distorted shot of the hallway and the trophy case. Kids race through the halls in every direction, eager to escape after seven hours in school.
We’ve been in here too long. “The Boogerloo is still there. Fast forward.”
She presses the fast forward button and the hallway empties out in record time. She flips it back to normal speed right after Lockhart strides through the frame and out to the parking lot to supervise the kids getting on the buses.
I check the clock. It’s 11:43. She’s been gone for eight minutes. She could be back any time now.
I glance at Megumi, and for the first time she looks nervous.
On the footage a shadow falls in front of the trophy case. The thief! My pulse pounds in my ears. The shadow gets smaller as the thief approaches. He or she is almost in the frame when a noise makes me jump.
From the hallway comes a sound like a chicken being hit with a sledgehammer.
Moby. But I’m too close to walk away now.
Megumi grabs my arm. “I think that’s the signal. We gotta go, now!”
I anchor myself to the desk. “Three more seconds.”
And then the thief steps completely in front of the camera. I recognize them immediately. Actually, I should say I recognize it. I watch, frozen, as the Gatorade-stained arm of our school’s old kangaroo mascot slides open the trophy case, grabs the Boogerloo, and then, before it hops away, waves directly at the camera.
With a numb finger I close the camera program and lock the computer. Another chicken scream echoes in the hallway. It’s already too late. I’m planning my next move as I follow Megumi out into the main office. I’m about to tell her to split up and meet by the Dumpsters after school when something stops us both in our tracks.
It’s the sound of a key unlocking the office door.
CHAPTER 13
We’re trapped like a pair of cockroaches in the middle of the office, and the lights are about to be flipped on. The sound of the key fumbling in the lock makes my pulse redline. My feet are frozen.
Megumi, however, is not. She hops up onto the counter in front of Mrs. Osborne’s desk like a cat, then springs again onto a stack of file cabinets. She turns to me, her eyes wide, clearly shocked that I’m just standing there instead of trying to escape. But there’s nowhere to go. Her eyes plead with me, but I’ve already given up on trying to hide. Now I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to say when Lockhart walks through the door.
I glance at Megumi again as the key struggles with the lock.
She mouths “hide,” but it’s too late. The knob clunks and the door starts to swing open.
Then a buzzing noise hits my ears like a snap of thunder. My first thought is that Lockhart has sounded some sort of secret principal alarm. Then I remember I’ve heard the sound once before, when the Arch lit the track uniforms on fire last year. The fire alarm. Whoever was opening the door quickly pulls it shut. Over the clanging of the alarm I can barely make out the sound of high heels moving away down the hall.
Megumi bounds down from her perch next to me. “Fire drill?”
I let out a deep breath. “I guess.”
“We should wait a minute to make sure the coast is clear,” she says.
I nod. My head feels like a bowling ball on a stick. I’m still in shock over how close we came to getting caught. I wait a few seconds, and then creep to the door, inching it open just far enough to see a sliver of the hallway. Halfway down the hall I spot the gray form of Lockhart’s pantsuit. Her back is to us as she directs the kids coming from the cafeteria out the door toward the parking lot.
I’m about to tell Megumi this is our chance when she yanks the door wide open and dashes across the hall toward the courtyard. I check one more time to make sure Lockhart’s back is still turned, then follow her, making sure to pull the office door closed behind me.
Outside, the fire alarm isn’t as deafening. A herd of kids are making their way out of the building in an orderly fashion, so we take up a spot at the back of the group. The adrenaline makes it almost impossible not to grin as we try to look like a pair of ordinary, noncriminal fire drill participants.
As we move through the breezeway that leads from the courtyard to the parking lot, I look at Megumi to make sure she’s okay. She seems completely calm, not so much as a bead of sweat on her forehead.
“That was pretty cool, the way you hopped up on the cabinets,” I say.
“It’s parkour. It’s kinda like martial arts, except instead of kicking and punching you use your environment to jump and climb and stuff.”
I consider telling her I’m a bit of a martial artist myself, but after what I saw in there, I doubt she’d be impressed. “Where’d you learn that?”
She takes a deep breath. “I’ve never told anyone this. Can I trust you?”
Does she really need to ask after what we’ve just been through? I nod.
“When I was four my father sent me away to a secret martial arts school high up on Mount Tanagawa. He left me there until my eighth birthday. They taught me ancient fighting styles and some modern ones as well. My final test was to survive a tiger pit without any weapons. Thankfully, I’d taken parkour as one of my electives. If I hadn’t, I’d be tiger poop right now.”
“Really?!”
She stops walking and puts a hand on my shoulder. “No. I taught myself by watching videos on YouTube.” She gives me a cheesy grin that shows all of her teeth, then starts walking again. “I told you, my dad leaves me alone a lot. I try to channel my energy so I don’t go getting myself in trouble when I’m not supervised.”
With every kid at Alanmoore in the parking lot, it isn’t easy to find my homeroom group. I steer a wide path around Lockhart, who’s still busy directing traffic, and eventually find Mrs. Badalucco and the rest of our homeroom class over by the buses. While she counts heads, I look for the rest of the Cadre. I find Shelby first; her giraffe-like neck makes her easy to spot in a crowd.
She sees me too and pushes toward me. “Chub, what happened in there? Did the fire drill ruin everything?”
“Actually, Lockhart came back early, and it saved us from getting caught in the office.”
Shelby straightens up and gives me her patented bird-girl stare. “Who’s ‘we’?” I don’t have to answer, because right then she spots Megumi behind me. “First you bring in the Arch, and now her? I thought you didn’t like to improvise.”
“I didn’t have a choice. I’m actually lucky she was there.”
“Well. Isn’t. She. Something?” Shelby says.
Thankfully, Moby appears and breaks up the awkwardness. “What the heck?! Didn’t you hear my birdcall?”
I wrinkle my forehead at him. “Oh, I heard something.”
He shrugs. “Yeah, I tried to figure out a whippoorwill last night, but my lips are too chapped to whistle, so . . .”
I shake my head.
“Also,” he says, “I don’t know how to whistle. So that pretty much leaves chickens or crows. A crow inside a mid
dle school, that’d be weird right?”
I wave my hand, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter. The fire drill saved us so there was no harm done.” Other than some collateral damage to my underwear. “The Arch must not have made a very convincing Wahoolie. She was barely gone eight minutes.”
Shelby looks miffed. “Well, the costume wasn’t the issue.”
I agree. I saw the dress rehearsal; it was pretty good.
I’m about to ask if anyone else knows what happened when a voice comes from the other side of the ivy-covered fence. “Chub?”
I turn and try to look through the leaves. “Archer?”
“Yeah. It’s me and Sizzler. Is she around?”
I don’t need to ask who “she” is. I quickly scan the parking lot and spot Lockhart walking around the corner with a firefighter who responded to the alarm. Mrs. Badalucco is distracted talking to the new band teacher. “No. What are you doing?”
The ivy thrashes and a second later both of them drop over the fence.
“What the heck happened?” I ask.
The Arch is short of breath. “What happened is she’s the fastest old lady alive!”
“Did she catch you?”
“No, but it was really close. I was in the coffee shop waiting for her. I saw her a block away, and she saw me. She got this weird smile on her face, and before I could stand up and push in my chair, she was right there, in the coffee shop.”
Shelby folds her arms and gives him a dubious look.
“I’m not kidding. She’s like the T-1000 and the Predator had a baby! She was pounding on the bathroom door when I went out the window.”
Sizzler takes over from there. “I wasn’t even to my lookout spot yet and Archer flies by me, booking it back here to warn you.”
I look around to make sure we aren’t overheard. “What’d you guys do?”
The Arch says, “We sprinted up the alley behind Hong’s market and cut through the gym. Sizzler was ahead of me, so he went to signal the McQueens, you know, like we’d talked about. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just pulled the fire alarm.” He stops to catch his breath again.
Electric Boogerloo Page 9