B005N8ZFUO EBOK

by Lubar, David

  Just after I turned my eyes away, I heard this fluttering whoosh, followed by a bang that made me duck and cover my head. Something had slammed into the wall right behind me, hitting hard enough to knock out a piece of plaster.

  TORCHIE FLICKS AWAY

  I spun and looked down at the math book lying on the floor. Talk about a deadly weapon. I picked it up and stared back into the room. Okay—I’d taken enough crap for one day. More than enough. I walked in. The kid glanced up, watching me with empty eyes.

  “You trying to hit me?” I asked. “If you were, you’d better practice. Your aim sucks.” I held out the book, ready to jump back if he took a swing at me. He was about my size—hard to tell for sure, since he was sitting—maybe a couple inches taller and a few pounds heavier, but close enough so I figured I could take him if I had to.

  “I wasn’t trying to hit you.” He reached up, took the book from me, and tossed it on the bed. I noticed there was just one bed in the room. Torchie had told me that some of the rooms were so small they didn’t try to cram two people inside.

  I relaxed a bit and glanced around the room. Whoa—it looked like the inside of a rock tumbler. The window was boarded over with a sheet of plywood. There were chips of plaster missing from spots on all four walls. Most of the books in the room were piled in one corner. Tangled clothing covered the floor of the closet. The closet door was smashed through in a couple of spots and hanging from one hinge.

  “You must be Trash,” I said.

  “I must be.”

  “I’m Martin,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  We shook hands. His grip was a lot stronger than I expected. I took a step back. “Well, I’ve got homework. Better get to it.”

  “Okay.” He turned back to his sketch pad.

  I looked over his shoulder. It started out as a quick glance, but what I saw locked me in place. He was drawing this incredible scene of a rocket shooting across an alien landscape. I watched him for a few minutes, but he didn’t look back up, so I went out the door and down the hall to my room.

  As I got close to the room, I heard voices from inside. It sounded like Torchie and Lucky. Torchie was saying, “We can trust him.”

  “Maybe,” Lucky said. “But I don’t want to take any chances, so let’s not rush.”

  “Okay,” Torchie said.

  I waited to see if they would say anything else about me, but they didn’t. After a while, I felt funny standing out there listening. So I rattled the knob to make sure they heard me coming, and then went in.

  “Hi,” Torchie said a little too quickly.

  “Hi.” I sat at my desk and got started on my homework while Torchie and Lucky found another topic of conversation. It was okay if they had a secret. I was new, and it would take a while before they trusted me. I was pretty sure the secret had something to do with Friday nights, because they’d almost let something slip about that already.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Principal Davis stuck his head in and said to Torchie, “Come with me, please, Philip.”

  Torchie sighed as he went past me and muttered, “Didn’t do nuthin’.” He followed the principal out into the hallway.

  “What do you think will happen to him?” I asked Lucky.

  He shrugged. “No way to guess.” He stared at me. I was afraid he’d start shouting again. Instead, he quietly said, “I look out for my friends. Understand? Torchie—he’s my friend. Same with Cheater and Flinch. They’re my friends. You treat them okay, we’ll get along.”

  I nodded. “No problem.”

  He stood up. “See you later.”

  “Bye.”

  About an hour later, Torchie came back. He smelled like smoke. Well, he always smelled like smoke, but right now it was stronger than ever. “What happened?” I asked.

  “They made me light fires. Can you believe that? For a whole hour, they just kept making me burn pieces of paper.” He held up his right thumb. “Look. I got a blister from the lighter.”

  “They made you light fires?”

  He nodded. “Guess they figured if they made me do it, I’d get tired of it. But I didn’t do nothin’ in the first place.”

  I didn’t say anything. Obviously, he wanted to keep pretending that he didn’t have a problem. As I finished my homework, Lucky came back. I realized that our room was the place where everyone hung out. Maybe it was because we were at the end of the hall. Maybe it was because Torchie had a lot of magazines.

  Lucky had brought his portable stereo. “It’s mine,” he said when he caught me looking at it. “I didn’t steal it. I got it last Christmas.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything,” I told him.

  Cheater came next. Flinch dropped by soon after that. It wasn’t like a party or anything—it was just a bunch of us sitting around, talking or reading or just listening to music. Maybe it was a safety thing. Together, we were less likely to be harmed by Bloodbath. Maybe it was a social thing—we had the common bond of being sent to Edgeview. I really didn’t feel like trying to examine it right then.

  “Does Trash ever drop in?” I asked Torchie after the other kids had left.

  “Him? No way. We tried hanging out with him. All of us did. Especially me. I really tried hard to make friends with him. But he’s not a lot of fun to have around. He’s always throwing stuff. That kind of makes the rest of us nervous.”

  “I can see how it might.”

  Torchie shook his head. “He even threw a sneaker at Bloodbath once, in the locker room. Can you believe it? He got the crap kicked out of him for that.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more about Bloodbath. “Hey, got anything to read besides magazines?”

  Torchie pointed to the closet. “I have a ton of books in there. Help yourself.”

  “Thanks.” I opened the closet and dug through his collection. There was a lot of good stuff. He had some Jack London and Jules Verne, but I’d already read most of that. My sister had gotten me started on them, along with H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and Roald Dahl. I’d discovered Dean Koontz and Stephen King on my own. I searched around and finally picked up a battered and slightly charred paperback called Fifty Great Science Fiction Stories.

  Maybe it was the book that gave me my first real hint. The stories I read described all kinds of strange and wonderful things. I guess they gave my mind a shove in a direction I hadn’t planned. At one point, I glanced up from the book and looked at the clock on Torchie’s desk. “A whole day,” I said.

  “What?” Torchie asked.

  “I’ve been here a whole day.”

  “Happy anniversary,” Torchie said.

  “Thanks.” I thought about my first day. It couldn’t be called a success—I’d gotten nearly every teacher angry with me. I was used to that sort of reaction, but even I was surprised at how quickly I’d gotten into trouble.

  Still, I didn’t think it was fair to compare me with kids who set fires or stole or threw stuff or cheated all the time. Fair. Now, there was a fun word. Dad liked to remind me that life wasn’t fair. I’d heard that from him more than once. And then he’d tell me all the things I should be thankful for, and then he’d tell me how easy my life was compared to when he was a kid. And I’d tell myself I couldn’t wait to get away.

  Well, here I was. Away. For real. I’d never been away from my parents like this before—not in a place I couldn’t leave. I was on my own. There were teachers all over the school—Edgeview had no shortage of adults—but that didn’t change the fact that I was on my own. None of the adults here had any reason to care about what happened to me. None of the teachers was going to worry about the fate of one more face in the crowd, no matter what they might say about wanting to help. They especially wouldn’t care after the way things had gone today.

  As I heard the dinner bell ring, I put down the book of science fiction stories and got to my feet. “Pretty strange,” I said to Torchie.

  “Yeah, it’s got so
me cool stories,” he said.

  I didn’t bother to tell him I hadn’t been talking about the book.

  PART TWO

  SEEING THE TRUTH

  SETTLING IN

  If my arrival at Edgeview reminded me of a prison movie, the start of my stay reminded me of endless television reruns. My second day was distressingly like my first. I went to classes, got in trouble, and went to more classes. My second week was also pretty much like my first. In other words, I’d settled into a routine, which wasn’t all that easy, since things in the classroom had a way of changing. We actually played a board game in math for a couple of days, until someone stole the dice. Mr. Langhorn tried different stuff in geography, too, but no matter what we did he always yelled. Even in history, we didn’t wear costumes every day. Thank goodness. I was getting sick of the smell of talcum powder. Sometimes, we had a lecture or a test.

  Miss Nomad couldn’t seem to stick with one approach for more than a couple of English classes. We did worksheets for two days in a row. Then we memorized stuff for three days. That was awful. I know a preposition when I see one—I sure don’t have to memorize a list of them. Then we sat and read. That was better. Then we sat and wrote, which was okay, too. Despite what I’d said to Miss Nomad, I did kinda like to write. Except when we had to do stuff about ourselves. One day she made us write an essay called, “Why I Like Being Me.” Give me a break.

  But, whatever we did in class, I could usually expect to be doing something else a couple days later. So, the main thing that never changed about classes was that things always changed.

  Most of the time, my teachers just ignored me. That was fine. If they didn’t talk to me, I didn’t talk back. I figured that if I stayed as invisible as possible, they just might forget about the first day and vote to send me back to regular school when the time came for my review. I even did all my homework, though once in a while Torchie burned it before I could hand it in. There was just one problem: The teachers didn’t always cooperate with my plan. Sometimes they’d slip up and ask me a stupid question. And I’d say something that would piss them off. But mostly they were learning to leave me alone.

  As for my social life, it took almost three weeks—and one foolish moment on my part—before Torchie and the others shared their secret. I knew something was going on—a person would have to be as dumb as dirt not to notice all the winks, whispers, and meaningful glances they exchanged every Friday. They sure weren’t playing checkers. The first Friday night after I arrived, Torchie slipped out of the room around eight. He mumbled something about going to the bathroom. He was gone for hours. If he’d spent all that time in the bathroom, there’d be nothing left of him. Torchie snuck back in around midnight, moving with all the silent grace of a moose on a floor full of marbles. I was half asleep, but I glanced at the glowing hands of his desk clock when I heard him tiptoe in from the hallway.

  He repeated the scene a week later. The clumps of snow clinging to the sides of his shoes made it obvious he’d been outside. I didn’t worry about it. I figured they’d tell me sooner or later. And if they didn’t, it was no big deal.

  I spent more time thinking about the larger puzzle that was tickling against the back of my mind. I saw a painting once that showed a couple of guys climbing a hill. At first, there was nothing special about it. But if you stepped back and let your eyes relax, the whole scene turned into a picture of a grinning skull. I felt Edgeview was like that. Whatever I saw right now, it wasn’t the whole picture. I needed to step back and let my eyes drift, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. At the moment, all I could do was keep my eyes open and wait for things to fall into place.

  But at least I got along with my roommate and his friends, and they treated me okay. The guys even tried to give me a nickname. Flinch said they should call me Squirt because I really had a knack for pissing off the teachers. Fortunately, the name didn’t stick. As smart as Cheater was, Flinch was brilliant in his own way. He didn’t have a million facts in his head, but he could think up stuff really fast. Flinch saw connections. Smart or not, he got in as much trouble as the rest of us. Not only was he pretty distracted most of the time, and as jumpy as a cat in a roomful of pit bulls, but he also interrupted the teachers a lot. They tended not to appreciate that.

  As for Friday nights and the big secret, I don’t know how long—if ever—it would have taken before they told me. But on Wednesday of the third week I was walking down the hall when I heard the unmistakable sound of Cheater yelping in pain. I spun back and saw Bloodbath had just tossed Cheater against the wall.

  “Watch where you’re going next time,” Bloodbath said. He grabbed Cheater with one hand and raised the other fist.

  Oh boy. I knew this routine. No matter what Cheater did or said, Bloodbath would pound him for a while. I scanned the halls for the one thing that might save Cheater. No luck. There wasn’t a teacher in sight. But Bloodbath didn’t know that.

  Trying not to think about how stupid it was to approach Bloodbath, I ran over and pointed back to the door of the nearest classroom. “Langhorn and Davis are coming out,” I said, trying to fill my voice with panic. It wasn’t hard.

  Bloodbath flashed a smile at me. Then he punched me on the shoulder—I guess that was his way of saying thanks—and slunk away in the opposite direction.

  “Thanks,” Cheater said.

  “Anytime.”

  I guess Cheater told Lucky what happened because at the end of the third week, on Friday evening, as soon as we’d gone upstairs after dinner, Torchie let me in on their secret. “Friday nights,” he said, looking nervously around our room as if the walls and ceiling were filled with hidden microphones, “we do something special.”

  “Oh really?” I asked, trying to sound surprised.

  He nodded. “Yeah. There’s no way anyone would know. That’s because we’re real careful. We never tell anybody. But we talked about it and everyone thinks you’re okay. What we do is we sneak off into town. Want to come?”

  “Absolutely.” My pulse sped at the possibility of getting outside of Edgeview. Even a few hours would be wonderful. We were allowed into the schoolyard, but that was as far as we could go. It almost seemed as if they were afraid to let us be seen in town. They never let us leave the school unless our folks came for us on the weekend. Mine hadn’t. I was getting ready to climb the walls. “Where do you go?”

  Torchie shrugged. “Usually the arcade, sometimes we just hang out.”

  “Sounds fine to me.” Maybe I could even get a slice of pizza or some other real food. The very thought was enough to make me drool.

  So that evening I learned the story of Lucky’s great escape route.

  WHY I LIKE BEING ME

  PHILIP GRIEG

  WAY OUT

  Torchie whispered the whole story to me in our room. “Lucky was fooling around behind the school last October. You know, bouncing a tennis ball against the back wall. So anyhow, one time the ball got past him. When he was looking for it, he noticed this round place in the ground. He’s always finding stuff. Anyhow, he decided to check it out. He got a stick and started poking around. Guess what he found?”

  I shrugged. “Not a clue.”

  “There was this manhole cover. He called me over and we got it up. Guess what we found?”

  I just shrugged again.

  “A pipe,” Torchie said. “This big old tunnel. I guess it was a drain or something. We followed it. I didn’t really want to go, but I wasn’t going to be a chicken if Lucky went. It doesn’t go far, but—get this—it comes out on the other side of the fence, down at the bottom of the hill.”

  He paused, I guess to let me fully appreciate the meaning of that. It was the perfect way out. Since the fence was ten feet high in back, nobody ever checked to see if kids were there. They locked the front gate in the evening when the guard left.

  “Which door do we use?” I asked.

  Torchie shook his head. “Too dangerous. We could get caught. Lucky’s room is in the back. So we
go out his window.”

  “I thought Lucky had a room on this floor,” I said.

  Torchie nodded. “He does.”

  “But—”

  “We made a ladder,” Torchie said. “Lucky found some broomsticks in a closet. And we borrowed a bunch of rope from Mr. Briggs’s supplies. I tied the knots myself. I was a Cub Scout. I would have been a Boy Scout, too, but I got kicked out because of this fire in my tent. Man, canvas really burns a lot faster than you’d think. But that’s not important.” He stood up and said, “Come on, let’s get ready.”

  Torchie showed me how to stuff clothes under my blanket to make it look like I was asleep in bed. That was just in case anyone checked the rooms. It probably wasn’t necessary. Once classes were over, nobody seemed to care all that much what we did, as long as it didn’t involve too much violence or vandalism. The teachers went home in the evening, except whoever had gotten stuck with night duty, which just meant sleeping in that room on the second floor in case there was an emergency.

  “One more thing,” Torchie whispered as we cracked open our door. “Remember, don’t ever mention stealing to Lucky. Okay?”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  I followed Torchie down the hall to meet Lucky. True to his name, he had the room to himself. The rope ladder was already dangling out the window. A long stick tied to the top kept it from falling through. From the sharp chill in the room, it felt like the window had been open for a while. I watched as the others climbed down one at a time. When my turn came, I wasn’t sure I could do it. I got my left leg out the window fine, but it took three tries before I managed to swing the other leg past the ledge.

  The ladder swayed like a funhouse floor and I had to dig with my toes to get each rung away from the wall. Halfway down, my hands started to grow numb from the cold. I hurried to reach the ground before I lost my grip. Despite visions of splattering myself into a huge pile of roadkill, I made it without any real slips.