by Chris Pasley
My smile quickly fell.
They were quiet at first, but once they saw it was okay to laugh at, the rest of the students broke out into loud guffaws, laughing not at Conyers, who had trumped the joke by taking it for himself, but at me. Subtle or non-subtle, I had let it be known that it was me who had kicked off the manufacture of the silver suns, that tonight was the night I was going to make my mark on Conyers. Dave had casually let it leak, and I'm sure Kate hadn't been tight-lipped about it either. Conyers had beaten me effortlessly and the whole Quarantine saw it. He was brazenly and openly winking at me, shaking his head as if to say sorry kid, better luck next time.
I held my head in my hands, covering my face. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dave's stricken expression, Kate's pitying head-shake.
Conyers let his last laugh fade out, then declared "Let's get this party started! Ms. Hutchins, you'd better save me a dance!" Then, clapping and laughing, he took a step towards the edge of the riser. The din of the students instantly hushed, an audible sucking sound as everyone gasped. Conyers teetered in mid-air for a second, but then he fell to one knee, the glue I had coated the riser with releasing his shoe only reluctantly. He threw down his one hand to catch himself and everyone could hear the slimy smack as it sank into the glue.
I raised my head now, no longer needing to hide my laughter.
Conyers looked confused at first, but as he tried to tug his arm free I could see the understanding widening in his eyes. The glue I used bonded only lightly with rubber and leather, but glommed onto human skin like a starfish. Another of my hidden tricks, a gift from James hidden in the bottom half of three of my tubes of toothpaste. I know, it was a juvenile stunt, a stupid sitcom trick, but I'll be darned if it didn't work like a charm. Conyers raised his eyes to me, horror in his face.
I held up one of Dave's silver sawblades and pantomimed sawing my right arm off.
The students laughed. It wasn't the polite, friendly laughter Conyers had gotten earlier. This laughter was ugly, mocking, the cackle of a servant who had seen his unjust master fall face-first in the mud. They all spun their saw blades on their fingers.
Rage filled Conyers face and he actually drooled as he pointed his stump at me and shouted: "Solitary! Solitary, now!"
The two guards flanking him burst into action, grabbing me up by my elbows, ripping the silver sun from my finger and tossing it away. I exited to cheers as the guards kicked open the court doors and hauled me off.
And I smiled all the way.
Solitary was just that. The Quarantine was two stories of sectioned fortress hallways built of gray brick and iron bars, but the bank of Solitary cells seemed to have been a late addition to the structure, a squat, ugly metal tumor on the Social Studies hall exterior. The Bell, as the students called it, housed six Solitary cells, where only the worst of juvenile offenders went when they crossed the line. The door stood like a monolith in the hall, a slab of metal straight from a million Cold War prison biopics. Once you breached the door, the interior was a simple circle ringed by six lozenge-shaped hatches. Very nautical; it felt, many said, like what they thought the inside of a diving bell would feel like, hence the name. Each door boasted only one window, a porthole window with six-inch-thick glass.
The psychology behind the Bell was a bit strange, I thought as the guards waited for the door to unlock. This hub of prison doors was the most secure in the Quarantine. Any teen going Beast in there had no hope of escape, even at its strongest. Yet here is where the unruly were kept, as if by the very bucking of authority they had marked themselves for Beastdom. I remembered Conyers's claims and wrinkled my nose. No one could tell who was going to go Beast, and so far, as I understood it, no one in the Bell ever had. More likely the Bell was an abandoned experiment in effeciency. Can we just lock all the kids up in seperate cells and just not worry about it? Turns out, no, not if you wanted sane adults at the end of it.
I knew both people in Solitary. Remi, obviously, but one other, a girl named Susan who had gone to Quarantine six months ahead of me. I had known many of the other students all my life. This Quarantine was fed by two different middle schools, so half of them were strangers, but there were a lot of familiar faces. What was more interesting was how Quarantine changed everything. There were kids here at whose houses I had spent the night, boys I had played ball with in kindergarten, girls I had pretended not to like while in reality liking them very much. But they weren't the same people. You could see it in their eyes. The walk past the metal detectors changed you. These people weren't my friends anymore. The only friends I had shared a room with me. Dorm cell groups tended to bond very tightly.
The metal slab clacked and opened, Conyers's two guards backing me up to give the door room to swing. The door was controlled by an operator in the Security Office, an unseen part of the school, behind the steel fences of the Security Wing. The interior was shaped like the top of a mosque, walls all curving toward a central high point at the top. A lectern at the center was ringed by a low handrail, placed so that the occupants of the cells could press their faces against the glass of their porthole windows and recieve their lessons from the Solitary Shift Teacher, who was rotated in and out on a weekly basis.
Two of the six hatches had green "Occupied" stickers over them, and I was shoved roughly next to one occupied cell and directly across from the other. I surveyed the room as the hatch slammed closed with an ear-splitting clang of metal on metal. A scraping corkscrew sound was the guard spinning the wheel on the door that would seal the latch closed. The room was about seven feet long and six feet wide. The walls were metal, but not steel. The green corrosion next to the tiny sink bolted to the wall made me think it was copper. A toilet was pinned in uncomfortably between the sink and the twin-sized metal cot that took up most of the space. I would either have to sleep with my head by the john or risk turning over with my feet into the water. There was no seat cover.
"Hey Sam," Remi's voice called, wafting up from a vent shaft on the floor. "Wondered when you'd find your way in here. You here legit, or are you here to bust me out?"
I couldn't help but grin. If Remi thought I was badass enough to bust him out of the Bell, then things were going just fine. "Legit. I glued Conyers to a riser at Homecoming."
It was several minutes before Remi could catch his breath as his laugh richocheted around the metal structure, amplfied into a mad cackle. I laughed too, more at Remi's unabashed glee at hearing of Conyers's embarassment than at the Principal's unfortunate demise.
"Jeez, man, how do you do it?" Remi coughed, sucking in air. "I was waiting for you, you know. I didn't know it, but I was waiting for you to come."
My smile fell. There was a certain desperate tone to Remi's voice, a straining only barely controlled. Hero worship I wanted. Idolatry was another matter altogether.
He continued on. "I been here a year now, in and out of classes, in and out of solitary. I want out! Out, man! Do you know the last time I stayed in one place for a year? Never! But you...you make me want to stick around, just to see what you're gonna do next."
"What if there is no next?" I flopped onto my futon, heard the boards creak. "I had to take Conyers on this time, Remi, but I don't want to spend the next five years locked up in here. He's holding all the cards. The keeper of the keys. If I keep antagonizing him..."
Remi was quiet a moment. "You don't mean that, Sam."
"Yeah, I do. Hit the hornet's nest once and don't get stung, you're lucky. Twice and it's a miracle. Only a idiot hits it a third." I sighed.
Remi snorted loudly and banged his fist on the wall, making me nearly jump off the thin mattress. "You don't mean that!"
I fished my pillow out from under the futon and ground it into my face. "Jesus, Remi. Fine. I don't mean it."
"Good man." Remi stopped banging.
"Crafty crafty crafty crafty," another voice, a girl's, called. "They got you too, huh?"
I slid off the futon and pressed my head to the porthole. I couldn't
see anyone in the cell directly accross from me, but I knew who it had to be. "Susan? Yeah, they got me."
"I'm surprised, I'd have picked you as a ringer for the ninth circle. A liar, you know." Her voice was pleasant and floaty. She'd always had a sing-song way of speaking and even though I had never really been friends with her, I knew her voice well enough to notice that something was terribly off.
"What?" I tried to wipe some of the dust away from my porthole to get a better view, but much of it was on the outside.
"Don't bother," Remi drawled. "She's nuts. That's why they put her in here. They didn't know what else to do with her."
"Did you see a demon, Sam? I saw two! Two demons, masquerading as men. The Devil's work is never done, even here, I guess, but they didn't last long. You hear? They went away! Good news for our side." Suddenly I saw a blur of black hair at her porthole and heard a repetitive thud as she banged her forehead slowly against the glass. “But sometimes they come back.”
I shook my head, incredulous. "I don't get it. I've known Susan for years. She was kind of a barbie girl. Do you know what happened?"
Remi shook his head. "She had a completely different class schedule than me. Didn't know her. Still, she rants about her two demons a lot. My guess is she saw a Beast and flipped. It's frankly driving me insane just listening to her. I've even gotten into shouting at her for hours, just to drown out her never-ending babbling."
Poor Susan. I had sort of gone out with her best friend once, in the way that middle schoolers ever "go out" - a question was asked and answered in the affirmative and then we were going out, until we both got busy with school and kind of forgot about each other. Susan was the class president type, high up on the hierarchy. Not the sort you'd pick for Class Whacko. "Wow. I never would have thought."
"Hey Sam," Remi giggled. "How long do you think it'll take for Conyers to get removed from the riser?"
I curled my lip. "I think we'll find out soon, and by soon, I mean the minute he gets free."
Two hours later the door to the Bell unlatched again. Two guards, not Conyers’s flunkies, marched in lock-step, making a beeline straight for my cell. The wheel rasped against the door as it unscrewed, the horrible grating noise of metal on metal. The two dour guards beckoned me to come out and I obeyed, the open spaces of even just the Bell feeling wide after the cramped cell. With a start, I noticed that one of the guards was Biff, his friendly face clouded over with duty and contempt. "Hi Biff," I said, and he started, as if suddenly surprised to recognize me.
The other guard snorted and pushed me out the door.
"Give 'em Hell Sam!" Remi yelled.
"We're in Hell, Sam!" followed quickly after from Susan.
It was late, well past lights out. The dance would have wound down by now and most students would be back in their dorm cells. Remembering Conyers's and Largo's conversation, I doubted that even the Blind Hall was left alone for the normal illicit after-dance activities. There would be a lot of horny teenagers alone in their rooms tonight, with only their frustration and their roomates for company. I knew the route to Conyers's office well and under the momentum of the guards we made quick time.
The outer lobby was empty and Biff opened the inner door.
"What am I going to do with you, Mr. Crafty?" Conyers sat at his desk, looking at his right hand. The skin there had been killed and peeled away with some sort of acid, the raw meat below glistening and bright.
I shook my head. "You could have just poured gasoline on it."
Conyers frowned. "And where do you think we keep the gasoline here, Sam? This is Quarantine. We don't have any gasoline."
Made sense. I shrugged and plopped heavily into the chair in front of his desk.
He stared at me. "You didn't answer me, Mr. Crafty. What am I going to do with you?"
"Gonna keep me locked up in the Bell for a while, I assume."
He nodded. "Maybe. Maybe. I just have to say, Sam, this makes me sad. I thought we were friends."
"You thought wrong." I looked down at my shoes, nice brown loafers for the dance.
Conyers's lip curled. "It's no mystery any more. I smell the Beast on you."
"Screw yourself with that," I snapped. "You can't smell crap."
His tone grew somber. "Oh yes I can, Sam. And you're only making it worse."
I glowered, then nodded to his hand. "That hurt?"
"Yes. It hurts like hell."
I shrugged. "Sorry."
"No you're not." Conyers opened the lower drawer of his desk, looking for something. "You wanted some attention. Didn't want the kids calling you rat. And it's clear to me that this is only the beginning. It's been a little more than a month. I'm not sure I could survive another five years of Sam Crafty."
His silver revolver was clutched in his hand, pointed at my heart.
"I could shoot you right now, son. All I got to say is that I saw your eyes go red and I can plug you so full of holes the dentist won't even be able to recognize you. I could even shoot your eyes out, so they can't check the color. And if you continue to screw with me, I will call you into this office and unload this weapon into you. But maybe...maybe I should just do it now." The hammer clicked back, one, two, three times.
I shot him a bird. "Screw you, Conyers. You're not going to do it."
His face was turning red. "I've killed lots of kids like you. I have no qualms about doing it."
"Oh yeah? What qualms you have about losing control of the student body?" I leaned forward, bringing my forehead closer to the barrel. "Didn't you know what game we were playing? What you prize more than anything is your control over the students, keeping discipline by fear and sheer force of will. That's why you made such a big deal out of getting me locked out of class the first day, so that I knew my entire life rested in your hands. Very effective. But the entire student body just saw you look like a fool, and they saw who you blamed for it. If I suddenly get killed going Beast, people are going to find that awfully convinient. It'll make them doubt you, make them think that they're in just as much danger from you as the Beasts. The tighter you try to control it, the more fringe groups will splinter out to challenge you. Kill me and you upset the very nice little applecart you've taken such great pains to build."
Conyers's composure slipped for a moment, but then it was back, full force. All smiles. "This isn't Beirut, boy. This is Quarantine. The brats here do what I say, when I say. They don't got the balls to do anything."
I raised an eyebrow. "Then you've got no reason not to pull the trigger."
He hesitated, and I knew I had him. His neck bulged with veins as he realized his blunder; he had let me see him unsure, worried that I might be right. "You're going back to Solitary, son. For a very long time. Let's see how much these kids remember your shining example once you're in a metal box. Biff!"
The door opened and Biff stuck his head in.
"Take Mr. Crafty to his dorm room and retrieve his books and study supplies. Then lock him in the Bell and throw away the key."
Biff led me alone through the halls, through the barricades at the end of the hall and out towards my dorm cell. He tried his best not to look at me, but I wasn't having any of that.
"Funny, isn't it?
Biff only stiffened and continued marching, eyes forward.
"I pull a prank on you and I get no punishment at all. Pull one on Conyers and I get God knows how long in the Bell. Kind of a double standard, huh?"
Biff rolled his eyes. "I'm not stupid, Sam. One offense can be forgiven. It's understandable; new kids act out all the time. But when you knowingly disrupt the routine...I got no pity for you, and I've seen all the same movies you have. Sorry, in real life the prisoner doesn't turn the guard against the warden."
I gaped. "The routine? You think this is about routine?"
He nodded. "You don't understand. The routine keeps everyone alive here. You wake up at a certain time. You brush your teeth at a certain time. You eat breakfast, you go to class. At a certain ti
me. When kids start deviating from the routine...that's when we have trouble. It could be a kid going Beast. Or it could just be some jerkoff we have to peel resources away to go protect, endangering everyone else. When you disrupt the routine, you put all of us in danger."
"Crap," I spat. "Why does talking to you always make me feel like a jerk?"
Biff shrugged. "You are a jerk, man."
"You should be the Principal of this place, Biff. I mean that with all sincerity."
He sighed. "I'm no teacher, Sam."
I unlatched the door to my cell. "That's okay. This is no school."
Dave and Ben were ecstatic to see me, once they woke up properly, but they sobered quickly on seeing Biff. "Why didn't you tell me what you were doing?" Dave asked, in awe. "I made all those sawblades for nothing."
I shook my head. "Not at all. I was pretty sure that all these cells are bugged. And this proves it; he knew what we were planning before it happened. That's how he tried to turn the joke back on us. I really only needed one sawblade for the punchline, but the number of them covered up their purpose well. You did good, man."
"Awesome. Come back soon, buddy," Dave said. Then he grinned. "Hey, I don't want to get spoiled. Having two delinquent roomies leaves a man a lot of space."
Ben only muttered a quiet "Goodbye," but his eyes were bright. Clearly he had enjoyed the spectacle of the evening.
I gathered up my books and tried to slip my music player into my bag. "No way," Biff said, taking the player from me. "No entertainment devices in the Bell."
"Oh come on, Biff! I'm gonna go crazy in there. Remi's in there for two months and he barely did anything. How long do you think he'll leave me in Solitary for what I did?"
Biff licked his lips considering. All I had to hope for was that Biff was as decent a guy as he seemed to be. Then he stiffened. "Sorry. Principal's orders."
I stuffed everything else into my bag (which had been re-searched in my time in Solitary) and waved goodbye to my friends. "Don't forget me, locked up in there."