by Zoe Aarsen
And worst of all, if I didn’t connect with my friends that night, I’d have no way of getting in touch with them to let them know I was unable to get off campus. They’d be idling along the side of the highway, having no idea what was going on. Our whole plan for the night had been very carefully constructed around the obstacle of communication. Henry couldn’t call me at school. He could only leave messages for me in the principal’s office, which was not ideal. Pretending to be Mrs. Emory, I’d called Trey’s school on the prepaid phone card that Henry put money into my commissary fund for me to purchase to request a two-day leave of absence beginning Wednesday, the twenty-second. Of course they had asked for my pass code, and luckily, “turquoise” seemed to have worked. I had been shaking the whole time I’d been on the phone with the administrator there, all the while trying to sound convincingly like a middle-aged mom.
What stressed me out the most in the damp, overheated laundry room was that no matter what, for both me and Trey, sneaking off of our respective campuses was going to result in irreversible trouble. It was dire that we make it to Michigan without any snags, because if we weren’t successful in breaking the curse this time, there wouldn’t be any future opportunities. Without private phone or e-mail privileges or another way of keeping in contact with Henry, I wasn’t even sure what precautions he’d taken to protect Mischa, or if she was still alive. Although I’d been in a constant state of worry since arriving back at Sheridan, asking the pendulum regularly about her health and safety, its responses weren’t as reassuring as speaking to Mischa would have been. I hadn’t seen her since the moment she’d dropped Cheryl and me off after Violet’s party, and that had been twenty-two days ago. The next new moon was in two days.
The bus bound for Michigan would depart from Willow High School the next morning.
I carefully matched up the sleeves on the T-shirt I was folding, lost in thought. I was going to have to drop off the back of the line on the way upstairs, or figure out a way to be dismissed from laundry duty early. The dormitory building was old and complicated, and I had no idea if there were any doors in the basement near the laundry room through which I could make my way outside. But I was going to have to take that risk, even if it meant running halfway across campus in twenty-degree weather without a winter coat.
Winnie, a girl from Kenosha who had physically threatened her last foster mother, folded laundry across the table from me. Starting trouble with her (or any of my classmates) was a last resort, but if there was a way I could get Guard Robinson to send me up to the admin office early, that might be my best shot at escaping from campus before roll call upstairs.
Staring at Winnie until I caught her eye, I reached into the pocket of my uniform jumpsuit and withdrew an old tube of Blistex. It was the one small luxury from home that I’d been allowed to bring with me to Sheridan because my lips had been cracked and bleeding when Mom had dropped me off on New Year’s Day (probably from having been out in the cold walking across the Simmonses’ property the night before). Knowing that I had Winnie’s attention, I applied the Blistex slowly, tauntingly.
“Hey,” she said firmly. “Gimme some of that.”
Even though it had been my intention to start an argument with her, now that I was well on my way, I was a little afraid of what she might do. “No. It’s mine,” I answered, and slid the Blistex back into my pocket. I returned my eyes to the pile of shirts I was folding.
“Come on. Don’t make me take it from you,” Winnie continued, staring me down.
Out of the corner of my eye, I stole a glimpse at Guard Robinson. Of course she’d heard Winnie and could see what was going on, but wasn’t going to say a word to the girl unless she absolutely had to. Even guards were afraid of Winnie; she had shoulders like a linebacker, and I’d heard that she had a tendency to bite.
“It’s from my doctor, for a medical condition. You can’t have it,” I said, trembling inside my loose jumpsuit. I wanted to be sent to the admin office to be disciplined, not to the infirmary because Winnie had bitten my ear off.
After stealing a glance over at Guard Robinson, Winnie put down the pair of socks she was bundling and walked around the end of the table to my side. She grabbed my wrist and twisted my right arm around my back.
“I told you to give me that lip balm,” Winnie growled at me.
The other girls around us kept folding, none of them saying a word or even daring to look my way. My hand was pinned between my shoulder blades, and I leaned over the table in pain, praying that Guard Robinson would jump in already. I fixed my eyes straight ahead on the ugly yellow tile wall behind the row of dryers, kept my mouth pressed firmly shut, and tried to hold as still as possible because I was all too aware that Winnie was capable of snapping my arm if she felt like it. She reached into both pockets of my jumpsuit and found the stick of lip balm, and then shoved me so forcefully that I almost hit my head on the table.
“What’s going on over there?” Guard Robinson finally inquired with minimal interest. She barely moved a muscle even though she must have seen that Winnie had put me in a hold. The guards at Sheridan ignored trouble, thereby fostering it. In their defense, they probably weren’t paid enough to put their own lives at risk trying to keep the more violent girls subdued.
“Nothing,” Winnie lied as she walked back around the table to where she’d been folding laundry. I looked down at my laundry pile and saw Guard Robinson’s ugly orthopedic black shoes next to my own feet in my peripheral vision, but didn’t relax just yet—at Sheridan, even interference from an authority figure didn’t mean you were safe.
“Is that true?” Robinson asked me. “Did I just see her grab you, Brady, or was I imagining things?”
The moment of truth. There was a chance Robinson wasn’t going to send us to the principal’s office and Winnie was going to beat me to a pulp later, but I was going to have to take it. “She stole my lip balm,” I answered.
“I didn’t steal anything,” Winnie lied. “She stole it from me, and I just took it back.” She produced it from her own pocket and flashed it so that Robinson could see it. “See? Mine.”
There no way Guard Robinson actually believed Winnie, but she obviously just wanted to defuse the situation without Winnie’s wrath turning toward her. Guard Robinson put her hands on her hips and told me angrily, “Get on upstairs and report to Carlitos for isolation until lights-out.”
Success! A solo walk to my floor was ideal.
“Bitch,” Winnie muttered at me as I hung my head and passed her on my way out of the laundry room. I struggled to maintain a normal pace when all I wanted to do was burst into a run before Robinson changed her mind and assigned someone to escort me.
As soon as I slipped through the laundry room doors and into the hallway, my eyes darted around wildly. It would be at least eighteen minutes before everyone on the second floor of the dorm would line up to be led to dinner. If I were lucky, it would take them another ten minutes to figure out that I hadn’t gone to Guard Carlitos’s office as I’d been ordered, and realize that I’d instead made a run for it. That was almost half an hour to get out to the street to meet my friends. Before I’d left Willow, I’d emphatically stressed to Henry the importance of being on time.
Rushing, I pushed open the nearest door, which led to the boiler room. Inside, it was dark. There were water heaters and some kind of electrical control panel—but seemingly no exterior door. I tried to picture the layout of the building on the first floor and where the doors were in relation to where I stood in the basement, but it was impossible. I was way too anxious. My heart was throbbing. I stepped back out into the hall and dashed in the opposite direction of the staircase that would have taken me up to the first floor.
There was a bathroom, which I considered, but there was probably only one way in and out of that room, so it was a trap. Then I heard footsteps behind me on the stairs, echoing off of the hard cement floor and walls. As soon as whoever was descending the staircase reached the bottom, they’d see me wandering th
e hall alone and immediately know something was up. The next door on my right was marked STAFF ONLY, and I gently twisted the handle to see if it was locked. It opened, and without a second to spare, I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.
I dared to click on the light after I entered, unable to tolerate the thought of passing a few minutes in complete darkness. With light from a bare bulb overhead, I observed that I was in a janitorial supply storage room. Metal utility shelves held large quantities of drain openers, powdered detergent, laundry supplies, light bulbs, and floor wax. Uniforms hung on a rack in one corner, and buckets were stacked next to a row of ladders in various sizes. Like lightning striking my brain, it occurred to me that whoever was coming down the stairs was probably headed for the very storeroom in which I was hiding, so I rushed down the first row of supplies and turned right. There were four more rows of utility shelving in the small room, and past the fourth row of shelving, next to a wall painted dark gray, there was an old desktop computer on a cheap particleboard desk.
I randomly stepped into the third row of shelves, in between paint cans and a shelf holding extermination supplies, just as I heard a key being inserted into the metal doorknob. The door creaked open, and someone entered whistling. Through the spaces in between cans of paint, I watched someone in a beige one-piece uniform take a few light bulbs off the shelf in the first aisle and stack them in her arms. She then absentmindedly wandered to the end of the aisle and turned right. Needing to move before I got busted, I tiptoed down to the other side of the third row and dodged around the end of it. Hoping not to be noticed behind the circular tubs of industrial-grade rock salt, I crouched down and clung to the shelf to maintain my balance. I held my breath and then dared to look over my shoulder. The janitor was examining cans of paint. She set down all of the light bulbs she was carrying in a paint tray, added a roller to the tray, and lifted one can.
I almost passed out with relief when she turned the lights off and clicked the door shut upon her exit. After she left, I waited a few minutes, wondering if there would be any value in putting on one of the beige custodial jumpsuits either as a disguise or as outerwear. I decided against it. They were too large, too cumbersome, and would only impede my ability to run if it came to that. It would have been an amazing stroke of luck if the janitorial storage room were also where the custodial crew hung their winter coats while on their shifts, but that was not the case.
Ready to see if the coast was clear, I took a deep breath and turned the doorknob. It didn’t budge.
I was locked in.
This cannot be happening, I thought to myself over and over again. This is not real.
The door must have locked from both the inside and outside. I also had no idea how long it would be before another janitor would visit the closet—although presumably not until after dinner service ended at eight o’clock. There was no way Henry would wait on the side of the road for me for an hour and a half. He’d assume something had gone wrong and change the plan.
I looked around the storage room, frantic. I went to the desk and pulled its top drawer open in search of keys. Inside was a heavy key chain, but most of the keys were labeled as having something to do with outdoor equipment—a key to the riding lawn mower, a key to the sports equipment shed. I palmed that key chain while I pawed through the other two drawers, but found nothing more exciting than some ancient, rock-hard grape bubblegum and a mess of useless office supplies.
At the door, I tried each of the keys on the key chain, but they were all too large to fit into the keyhole in the doorknob. Cursing at my predicament, I looked around. This time, I spotted a long lanyard with a bunch of keys hanging on a peg behind the rack of uniforms. I lifted it and examined the keys on its end. They were all labeled as exterior keys—the key to the front doors of Huron, the key to the front doors of the dorm for younger girls. They wouldn’t help me release myself from the storage room, but watching them dangle on the lanyard suspended from my fingers, I had a terrible idea. It was a long shot.
“Pendulum, show me yes,” I commanded in a hoarse whisper.
Unlike my own pendulum, which was hidden upstairs in my dorm room in my pillowcase, the long lanyard began swinging the keys forward and back in a linear motion. I was so happy with its response I nearly shouted for joy.
“Pendulum, am I going to make it out of this closet in time to meet Henry by the side of the road?” I asked it, terrified of the answer.
It continued swinging back and forth, back and forth. Yes.
Encouraged, I asked, “Pendulum, can you help me get out of here?”
The lanyard shifted the direction of the swinging keys to point to the door. I walked slowly toward the door, and the swinging grew faster. What do I do next? I asked myself.
I grabbed the swinging keys and inspected all of them—they all looked too big to fit in the keyhole, just like the keys on the other key chain. Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, I held the doorknob steady with my left hand and tried to insert one of the keys with my right hand. Nope, just as I suspected, the key was way too large.
“Pendulum, can you contact my sister Jennie and ask her if she can do anything to unlock this door? Or Olivia Richmond? Or anyone?” And just like that, I felt the doorknob click in my left hand.
“No way,” I mumbled to myself. I turned the doorknob all the way to the left, and somehow, miraculously, it was open. Maybe there was something to what Kirsten had insinuated about my being a medium!
“Thanks, pendulum,” I said, setting it down gently on a shelf, not wanting to let go of the doorknob. I opened the door a crack and stuck my head out. I was just about to step into the hallway when I heard the booming voice of Guard Robinson down the hall in the laundry room.
“Two lines, ladies. No funny business tonight. It’s turkey potpie night, and I know none of you want to miss that.”
I eased back into the janitorial closet, keeping the knob turned all the way to the left so that the door wouldn’t lock again. It was six fifteen already! I only had fifteen minutes to get down to the edge of the road, and there was a possibility that Henry was already there, waiting, probably making Mischa and Trey suffer through the hip-hop he loved while they waited for me to come sprinting out of my school.
It felt like it took forever for all of the thumping of footsteps up the stairwell to end. When it seemed my classmates had finally all made their way to the first floor, I stepped out of the closet. After a moment’s hesitation, I took the janitors’ keys on the lanyard back off the utility shelf and stuffed them into the pocket of my navy jumpsuit before letting the door shut behind me. It couldn’t hurt to have a makeshift pendulum with me during the rest of my escape. At the end of the hallway, there was an unmarked door on the left side, and a door with a metallic decal with a B on it stood on the right side. Not really wanting any more surprises that night, I took the lanyard out of my pocket, dangled it from my index finger, and asked, “Pendulum, can I get out of the building through the door at the end of the hall?”
It swung back and forth, so I crept down the hall and entered.
The door led to another hallway. The fluorescent lights above flickered and buzzed, and I could tell I was getting closer to a door leading outside because the temperature was dropping. The hallway turned at the end, and a few feet farther down, a gray door appeared with a red EXIT sign affixed over it. It had a long push bar on it beneath a dead-bolt lock.
“Pendulum, will an alarm sound if I open that door?” I asked. The lanyard swung from left to right. No. No alarm will sound.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered to myself as I twisted the dead bolt open and pushed the bar to open the door outward. The door opened into an exterior stairwell, which fortunately had been recently cleared of snow. It led up to the ground level. No alarm sounded—sweet relief!
The snowy evening beckoned at the top of the stairs. Why, oh why, of all days, did I not wear a T-shirt beneath my jumpsuit? I reprimanded myself as I climbed up
the steps, already shaking just seconds after leaving the warmth of the building.
Having no other choice but to keep going once the door closed behind me, I trotted around the back of my dorm, checked to see if anyone else was walking around outside, ran as fast as I could toward the back of one of the younger girls’ dorms, and then waited. There was a parking lot behind the cafeteria with cars in it, presumably belonging to the nonstudent cafeteria staffers. All of the women in the cafeteria were much nicer than the guards and teachers at Sheridan, but I still couldn’t risk one of them spotting me if they stepped outside for a cigarette break. None of them would choose aiding me over their own job security.
When I was sure no one was watching, I snaked across the parking lot in between rows of parked cars, ducking the whole way. At least the lot had been plowed, making it the only part of my unpleasant journey that didn’t involve trudging through a foot and a half of snow. The sounds of clanging pots and running water coming from the kitchen heightened my sense of urgency, and when I reached the other side of the lot, I leaned up against the freezing-cold brick exterior of the building to catch my breath until I realized that the chill cut right through my jumpsuit and made my bones ache. My breath escaped my mouth in gusts of white steam. Even just standing still for five seconds made my legs feel wooden, so I sprinted back into the snow to make my way around the building that contained the gymnasium and most of our classrooms.
Beyond that were the long, sloping hill and sprinkling of pine trees that separated our campus from the stretch of highway where Henry would be waiting. Knowing that I was almost there made the burning sensation on my feet a little more tolerable, but I was already so infuriatingly cold that I promised myself that I’d run back to Huron and turn myself in if Henry wasn’t waiting where we’d agreed to meet.
Three weeks had passed since we’d formulated this plan. I wasn’t sure if I believed he’d actually be there, but it was too cold to stop and ask the keys for an answer.