Escape Room

by Maren Stoffels

  Where is It?

  Something’s wrong. Alissa’s cycling way faster than normal. I want to ask her about it, but her snappy comment is still fresh in my memory. I’m worried she’s going to call me panicky again. If she does, I might just burst into tears.

  She hasn’t brought it up again, and I haven’t asked her about her evening with Miles either.

  I told my mom and dad that we’re having a movie night at Alissa’s. It didn’t feel good, but I know they hate things like Escape Rooms and they might have made a fuss. Gotten worried.

  As we ride our bikes over there, Alissa still doesn’t say a word. I don’t think she’s even noticed that I’m wearing makeup for the first time in my life.

  Things have changed.

  Mint and Alissa don’t say a word to each other as they come cycling up. Mint’s wearing makeup and she’s put her hair up. She looks like a different person.

  “Looking good,” I say as she locks up her bike.

  Mint blushes. “Thanks.”

  Miles is the last one to arrive on his scooter. He gives me a quick wave and then leans in close to Alissa.

  For a moment, I think his kiss is going to land on her cheek, but then he kisses her on the lips.

  They mix like watercolor paint, becoming one color.

  How did I ever think I had a chance?

  “Should we go in?” Mint’s suggestion makes Miles and Alissa finally release each other. I try to pull myself together, but it’s as if my body is slowly crumbling. All the hope I had is gone.

  Mint pushes open the wooden front door and we step into a long corridor, which is pretty dark. The only light is coming from tea lights in holes hacked out of the walls.

  Halfway down the corridor, there’s a waiting room with a jukebox and two shabby sofas. On the wooden crate that’s serving as a coffee table, there are flyers for the Escape Room.

  The adrenaline I felt when I first read the flyer surges through my body again. I have to focus. I’m not going to let those two ruin my evening.

  “Where’s the staff?” I ask Mint, but then I suddenly hear a voice behind me.

  “Good evening.” A young woman with platinum-blond hair holds out her hand to shake mine. “I’m Cleo from the Escape Room.”

  I’ve been waiting for this moment for more than ten months.

  And now It’s standing in front of me, in the flesh.

  I shake Its hand.

  It has no idea who I am.

  I have to use all my willpower not to stare at It.

  It’s just a player, just like the other three.

  I shake Cleo’s hand, but I barely look at her. My mind’s on Dad, on the things I said to him.

  Why didn’t he react? It’s making me feel guilty, and that’s making me even madder.

  Mint must have noticed something was wrong, but she didn’t ask me about it. Instead, she just rode along beside me, looking completely different. I did notice her makeup, but I don’t know what to think about it. I liked the way she’s always herself, never tries to be someone else.

  “I know you,” I hear Mint say to Cleo. “You were jogging in the park last week.”

  “Maybe.” Cleo looks around our group. “Shall I explain the idea to you?”

  Then she proceeds to tell us so much that I only remember about half of it. I hear her say that we can buy hints with special coins if we can’t work it out, and that she’ll be watching everything that happens in the Escape Room on camera.

  “What’s the record?” I hear Sky asking.

  “Thirty-five minutes and thirteen seconds,” Cleo says from memory. “And we add extra time for each hint you buy. But believe me, beginners often need them.”

  * * *

  —

  We have to leave all our stuff in a locker, and I feel strangely naked as we head down a long corridor and into the Escape Room.

  Cleo stops in front of a steel door, which looks like something from a prison. There’s a hatch in it, like the ones that guards use to give prisoners their food.

  “The Happy Family is through this door. Good luck, guys.”

  Suddenly I realize what’s ahead of us. We’re actually going to be locked up for sixty minutes and we have to try to escape. What if there’s no bathroom in there? I already need to pee.

  Cleo pulls the door open, and Sky steps into the room, closely followed by Mint. Miles is the third to go in, but I stay where I am.

  “Something wrong?” Cleo asks me.

  I don’t know why I’m not moving. It seems like my legs don’t want to.

  Am I scared? I don’t like cramped spaces. In Miles’s apartment block, I deliberately took the stairs instead of the elevator, and at home I always pee with the bathroom door slightly open.

  Miles holds out his hand. “Alissa?”

  He must think I look like an idiot. Mint’s already inside. If she can do it, then I can too, right?

  “You just got your nose pierced. That sounds way scarier to me,” I hear Cleo say.

  I let Miles pull me inside.

  The room is the complete opposite of what I’d expected. We’re standing in the middle of a family doctor’s office.

  Behind me, the door closes and a clock on the wall starts ticking. Fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The Escape Room has begun.

  I did it.

  I can see It on my screen.

  The time has finally come.

  Let the game begin.

  I absorb all the details of the room. This office is, as the flyer promised, super-realistic. In the middle of the room, there’s a desk of dark wood with a drawer, but it’s locked. There’s a rug on the floor and two huge bookcases on the back wall, reaching to the ceiling. By the side wall, there’s an anatomical model like the one in our biology classroom at school, where you have to put the internal organs in the right place, but this one is empty.

  There’s a board on the wall with four names on it with empty sections below, which we’ll probably have to fill.

  On the other wall, there’s a big sideboard, but that’s closed too, with two locks.

  Where should we start?

  I look around. There’s a camera in every corner. Cleo said she’d be keeping an eye on us. She predicted that we’d need hints, but I want to put that off for as long as possible. If only to prove the opposite.

  “Right.” To my surprise, Mint takes the lead. “We’ll all look around for five minutes, and we’ll put everything we find on the desk.”

  She pulls a folder out from under the rug. “Here.”

  It’s as if that makeup has changed her inside too, as she starts frantically searching the room.

  I take all the books off the shelves, one by one. I leaf through some of them, but don’t find anything interesting.

  “I think this belongs in that anatomical model.” Mint comes and stands behind me, with a plastic lung in her hands.

  “Where on Earth did you find that?” I ask in astonishment.

  “It was in the pocket of that coat.” Mint points at the rack by the door and the long trench coat hanging from it. “So do you think we have to find all the organs?”

  “Looks like it.”

  At that moment, I feel something hard behind the row of books. When I bring it out, it turns out to be a plastic kidney. It feels a bit like when I was little and searching for Easter eggs in the backyard. Whenever I saw that pastel plastic, I always got a tingle of excitement in my tummy.

  A few minutes later, all the organs are on the desk. It’s a macabre still life.

  Mint pops the organs into the model, one at a time. It’s clear who out of the four of us paid the most attention in biology class, because she doesn’t make a single mistake.

  Last of all, Mint slots the heart into position. There’s a click, and t
he dummy’s mouth drops open. On the tongue, there’s a small silver key. The adrenaline rushes through my body.

  “W-wow…,” I stammer. “This is cool.”

  “This key is for the sideboard.” Mint opens the first lock. “But we need two of them.”

  Together with Miles, I leaf through all the books again. Meanwhile, Mint searches the entire room, from the hollow chair legs to behind the board with the names on it.

  When I’ve searched through the last book, I put it down on a table with a sigh. Nothing.

  We’ve looked absolutely everywhere. So where can the key be?

  “Up there.”

  All three of us turn around at the same moment. Alissa has barely moved since we got in here, but now she’s pointing at something above my head.

  I know I should be helping, but I can’t. Ever since that door closed, it’s like something heavy is lying on my chest.

  So this is how it feels to be locked up.

  I need to stay calm, but the four walls seem to be closing in on me. I know I’m not good with small spaces, but this is so much harder than I’d expected.

  I look at Mint, who’s searching furiously.

  The three of us were supposed to go to the county fair together not long ago, but Mint canceled at the last minute. That’s my best friend for you—I had to go on all our school trips without her.

  But the Escape Room seems to have given her wings. It’s as if she never found anything important enough to join in until now.

  I look around, trying to find the second key. My friends have already searched through everything, but from where I’m standing I can see a book on the top shelf of the bookcase. It’s not visible from where they are.

  “Up there,” I say, pointing.

  Miles stands on the bottom shelf and manages to grab it. It’s a medical textbook, and there’s a small compartment cut out of the chapter about burns. A silver key is glinting away inside.

  “Good spot,” Miles says to me while Mint opens the second lock.

  In the sideboard, there are four boxes of medicine, which Mint holds up to the board on the wall.

  “We have to link these to the right patients.”

  I often can’t follow Mint. She’s so incredibly smart. I frequently copy her notes at school, because they’re always right.

  “Mommy?”

  There’s a girl’s voice in the room, so clear that it’s as if she’s standing behind me. I spin around, but there’s no sign of anyone. Of course not, the voice is coming from the intercom next to one of the cameras.

  “Mommy,” says the voice again. “Will you come play with me?”

  Goose bumps pop up on my arms. This Escape Room really is super-realistic. I look at Mint, who’s listening carefully. Sky is staring up at the intercom, open-mouthed, and Miles is frowning.

  “I don’t have time right now, Lia,” a woman’s voice answers.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m working. Go ask Daddy.”

  We hear footsteps and a door squeaking open and closed. Then it’s silent again. Only the clock on the wall goes on ticking. We’ve been at it for just over six minutes.

  “What was that?” Sky wonders out loud.

  Mint smiles triumphantly. “It’s the story of the Escape Room. Now we know why it’s called the Happy Family. The story is about a family with a daughter. The mother’s probably a doctor.”

  Smart Mint, always grasping everything just a little bit faster than everyone else.

  “The voices are a distraction,” I say. “The name of the room doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it does…,” begins Mint. She always thinks she knows best.

  She even thought she knew Miles better than I did. She warned me about him. What was she thinking?

  “Don’t think so.” I snatch the boxes from her. “Let’s move on.”

  Mint picks up the folder from the desk, which was the first thing she found. “The diagnoses of the patients are in here. It says here, for example, that Marie van Hillegom suffers from panic attacks. We need to see which drug goes with that.”

  Panic attacks.

  I can see Dad sitting up in bed. One time I made the mistake of going into my mom and dad’s bedroom when he was screaming. He looked completely wild and was thrashing around like someone was attacking him. My mom yelled at me to go away, but I stood frozen in the doorway.

  “Diazepam,” I mumble.

  Mint looks up in surprise. “What did you say?”

  Did I say it out loud? I don’t want to talk about this, but Mint holds up one of the four boxes, with Diazepam written on it in big letters.

  “How did you know that?”

  Dad had bottles of pills on his nightstand. They calmed him down, but made him kind of groggy too, as if my dad was somewhere deep inside, but would never come back again.

  All that time, I wanted to talk to my friends, but they never asked me about it. Even tonight, when I came out with my eyes all red and puffy, Mint didn’t say a word. She accuses Miles for no reason, but she won’t talk about my sick dad. Why not?

  “I read it somewhere.”

  I look up at the intercom, where the voices were just coming from. The little girl’s voice cut straight through me, like she was standing right here in the room.

  What else is in store for us?

  “So what’s the code?” Sky says, fiddling with the lock on the desk. The boxes are in the right order for the patients, but it turns out that it’s not the entire puzzle.

  “Maybe we should use the first digits of the barcodes?” Mint suggests.

  “Nope. It’s not that either, Mint,” I hear Sky say a little later.

  Mint sighs. “We’re going to have to buy a hint. This is taking too long.”

  Mint. So that’s her name. Since I got here, she’s looked at me a few times. No, more like stared. I hate it when people do that. It reminds me of the psychologist Julie insisted I go see.

  Julie thought it would do me good, but the conversations didn’t work. The half-truths I told were no use to the psychologist. I don’t share my inner self, not with anyone.

  What about Alissa? Yesterday, in my room, I told her more than I meant to. She’s getting dangerously close to me, but at the same time it felt good. I felt less alone.

  “Fine, we’ll get one hint.” Sky reluctantly gives me a coin.

  When I put it in the slot, nothing happens at first, but then there’s a rumbling sound. A plastic ball drops out of the chute and I catch it just in time.

  My heart is thumping away like crazy. It looks like one of those gifts from a gumball machine, which Dad sometimes used to buy me when I was small. I was always delighted and usually too excited to get them open. Dad never helped me right away though. He let me sweat for five minutes first. And when he managed to get the ball open after the five minutes, I was even more delighted.

  I can feel tears burning in my eyes. How can a dumb ball summon up such a powerful memory?

  “What’s inside it?” Alissa’s voice brings me back to the Escape Room.

  I can feel that Mint’s still keeping an eye on me. Why is she staring at me like that? Does she think I haven’t noticed?

  Nervously, I twist the ball open, and I read the note out loud:

  The four boxes make a nice set, but don’t forget the alphabet.

  I don’t get it, but Mint’s eyes open wide.

  “The alphabet, of course! That code game we used to play. The letter A stands for one, B for two, and so on. So Diazepam stands for four, and the drugs are…” Mint looks at the boxes. “The code’s six-eight-four-two.”

  I don’t think anyone quite understands how she arrived at that code, but when Sky puts it in, the lock springs open.

  “And we have…this.” Sky holds up a handle
, the kind that’s normally used to wind an awning up and down.

  “What are we supposed to do with that?” Alissa sighs. She’s less enthusiastic than her two friends. I really thought she wasn’t going to come in. I literally had to drag her through the doorway.

  “I think it goes in here.” Mint points at a hole in the side of the bookcase on the right.

  Sky inserts the handle and starts turning. At first, all we hear is creaking, but then the whole rear wall swings aside, including a framed certificate from a first-aid course.

  I’m looking down a long, badly lit hallway. There’s a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and I can make out three doors.

  Three new Escape Rooms.

  That means three new rooms full of puzzles. Searching for three times as many solutions.

  I keep a sly eye on Miles. My stomach is way less painful than it was yesterday, but it feels like the pain might come back at any minute.

  He was acting really strangely just now with that ball, like he might burst out crying. Did Alissa and Sky notice that too?

  Sky tries the door on the right and the door opposite us, but they’re both closed. The door on the left does open though.

  It’s a typical little girl’s room, with brightly colored lights, a disco ball on the ceiling, and a loft bed. Two ballet shoes are hanging from the mirror above the dressing table.

  “This must be Lia’s room.” The way the pieces of the puzzle are coming together is addictive. Too bad we only get sixty minutes, because I could spend way longer exploring this Escape Room.

  “So what are we looking for now?” Sky says.

  There’s no sign of locks of any kind in here. The whole room is accessible, including the drawers in the dressing table, which simply slide open.