by Tom Twitchel
When class let out, she hung back from the slow motion exit by the other students; nobody really hurries much during the last week.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her brow furrowed prettily, her hand on my arm.
I shook my head and shrugged. “I slept in.”
“Hey, it’s the last week of school before fall break. No one’s going to call you out. You’re at the top of the midterm honor roll.”
“What?” The honor roll was usually posted on the very last day of school before the break, and my place on it was never higher than second. Justine and I took turns swapping second place for third place. Baffle was always at the top.
Smiling, she bobbed her head, beaming at me. “Numero uno.” She giggled.
“How? Where’s Baffle? Where are you?” I asked, confused.
“I’m right behind you. Sam…he…he’s like fifteenth or sixteenth.” Her voice faltered.
Leapfrogging Justine on the honor roll wasn’t unusual. Baffle landing anywhere other than the top spot wasn’t surprising. It was unbelievable. He was the kind of student, and intellect, that didn’t even have to try to do well. His fall from academic grace was either deliberate or an indication of just how much his “extracurricular activities” were weighing on him.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
Shaking her head, she said, “No. But that doesn’t mean anything because I hardly ever see him in the morning.”
I was rattled and I had so much going on in my head that I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The second bell rang.
“See you at lunch?” I asked her.
“Absolutely!” she said brightly.
Then she caught me by surprise by standing on her toes and kissing me on the cheek. Blushing and giggling nervously, she spun and ran off before I could even begin to think of what to say. Knowing why she was being flirtatious didn’t make figuring out how to handle it any easier. She knew Maddy was moving. She was smart and had to know that Maddy would have shared that with me before anyone else. So, Justine’s behavior was geared to let me know and, of course, I had been pretty thickheaded in the past, that she wanted to be close to me, basically waving me in for a landing in the heavy emotional storm that she knew I was going through. Wow. Girls.
I was late to my second class too, but so many of us were that the teacher just shook his head and waved at the empty seats. A small percentage of kids had either already ditched or blown off coming to school altogether. Third class was more of the same.
When I got into line at lunch, I looked for Baffle without success. Justine, Kayla, Russell and the rest of Justine’s friends had already grabbed a table and waved me over. Justine scooted to one side and made room for me. She smiled, patted my arm and leaned into me.
“There’s a band recital tonight. Would you like to come and watch me play? I can give you a lift home after.”
That was good and bad news. I needed to be there, but I also wanted to hang back so I could snoop around. What I was looking into wasn’t a secret to Justine, but I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to know more than she already did.
“Uh, yeah. But I was hoping to…look around after the recital. I’d love a ride home, but I don’t know how long I’ll need to see if I can find whatever it is Munger’s crew hid in there. Plus, I don’t want to get you involved if you want to stay out of it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“I can wait. I’ll wait for you.” She paused. “Do you want me to help?”
“It’ll probably be easier if I do it alone.” She looked relieved.
“Okay.” She squeezed my arm. I noticed Russell looking at us. He didn’t look jealous, but I had trouble nailing down that emotion for myself let alone someone else.
“You still want to help on Thursday, Benny?” he asked.
“I’m in,” I responded. Maybe that was all it was.
“Good. Already got some people bailing. I’ll need all the help I can get.”
The rest of the day moved slowly (“like molasses in winter” as my mom would say). Classes dragged like nobody’s business. We were all just killing time. The teachers looked as though they were in as much pain as the students. When the last bell rang the energy and urgency that had been missing all day erupted as students ran for the exits. The recital wasn’t going to start for another couple of hours so I had nothing to do but hang around the halls and trade yearbooks for signatures. Baffle was nowhere to be seen and I wondered if he was busy working on the not-so-secret-whatever-it-was.
The only thing I was worried about while I was lurking in the halls was possibly running into one of Munger’s goon squad members. Defending myself wasn’t a concern. I had a pocket full of marbles and my deck of metal cards. I didn’t want them seeing me because it might spook them and cause them to mess up my plan to check out the multi-purpose room after the recital.
Other than making myself nervous, nothing happened that would throw a kink in my mission. At four thirty, parents started showing up with a few students sprinkled in. The recital was a formal audition for band next year so there were kids performing from every class except for the seniors. As people began filing in, I took a seat in the back as far from the door as possible.
The recital seemed to last forever and I couldn’t make out Justine’s clarinet in any of the arrangements they performed.
It took an even longer stretch of time for the room to get cleared. I’d underestimated how long it would take. Turns out that parents want to visit and prattle on about not much when it’s so close to the holidays. When there were just a few chatty adults remaining and students busying themselves with racking chairs, I wandered into a corner and camouflaged myself. I was feeling pretty smug that my smile and I were invisible.
When the chairs were all put away, no one was interested in sticking around and the room emptied fast. The last person out hadn’t turned off the lights, which was fine with me as it made searching easier. Looking through the cupboards was a waste of time since you couldn’t really hide anything in there that wouldn’t be found immediately but I looked anyway. It was a matter of a couple of minutes more to check out the two doors at either end of the stage. One opened onto a hallway that led to the gym and the other was access to the backstage area. There was nothing worth checking out behind either one.
Jumping down off the stage, I turned and faced it, trying to get a sense of where there might be a good hiding spot. On the left side of the stage, there was something odd about the commercial carpeting that wrapped the stairs and covered the lower portion of the stage foundation. I walked toward it and the reason for the off-kilter appearance was easy to see: a piece of the carpet had come loose and was off center. Pulling at the piece of carpet, I could see that it was attached to the wooden face of the stage with Velcro strips. When I pulled it back, I could see hasps that were recessed into the stage face that were obviously holding an access hatch closed.
I’d found their hiding place.
I laid the carpet piece aside and opened the hatch. The hole it exposed was about three feet high and four feet long, easily large enough for me to lean in and look around. Looking over my shoulder to assure myself that no one had snuck in behind me, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight. I crawled about halfway in on my hands and knees. There were a ton of wires and junction boxes, most likely for AV hookups and lighting. Support joists and posts created a skeletal structure that stretched all the way to a far wall under the stage that I could just make out at the edge of the beam from my phone. I swung the light slowly from left to right and couldn’t see anything that looked out of the ordinary. I was about to back out of the hole to see if there was another hatch at the other end of the stage when the light caught something right by the hatch opening.
It was a small box, about three times the size of a pack of cigarettes, that had been torn open and smashed flat. I flipped it over and read the large print: 10 MM JACKETED HOLLOW POINT.
My hand shook so bad that I dropped the r
uined box. Bullets? Had they hidden bullets in here? Panning the light around the area surrounding where I’d found the box I saw something else. It looked like there was sand spilled around where the box had been crushed. Directing the light vertically, I couldn’t see anything that might have leaked sand onto the rough cement floor. I ran my hand through the little pile and rubbed it between my fingers. It didn’t feel like sand. It was gritty but slippery like metal. I scooped some of it into the misshapen box and put both in my pocket.
I slid back out of the hole, half-expecting to hear a voice behind me, bringing an end to my brief career as a spy.
Hastily resetting the hatch in place and reattaching the carpet (more carefully than it had been before, I might add) I stood up and brushed off my jeans. There may or may not have been fireworks hidden away under the stage, but something certainly had and it wasn’t there anymore.
They’d moved it.
Checking my watch, I stifled a groan. It was fifteen minutes to eight. The school was regularly locked down at eight o’clock under normal circumstances. I might have as much as another half hour because of faculty members associated with the recital tying up loose ends, but not much more. I decided that I was going to have to tell someone about what I’d found. The bullets had sealed the deal. I’d march my ass into Mr. Conroy’s office in the morning and just lay it out. Protecting Baffle wasn’t the priority anymore. But now I needed to get out without being caught and possibly getting implicated in their screwed up plan.
I was at a loss as to what to do next. If I snuck into the gym and got caught when the security system went live, I’d be trapped overnight. Then there was the sequence that I had guessed that Baffle and Coby were following. They wouldn’t have set anything up yet; they would wait until after the AV was put in place in the gym on Thursday night. The gym was huge and I didn’t have enough time to go through it thoroughly because the parents gabbing after the recital had burned so much time.
Sighing, I shrugged and decided to call it a night. There was no point in trying to find something that had been moved and hidden somewhere else.
I pulled my phone to text Justine that I was ready and asked her to pick me up behind the gym. Her text response vibrated my phone almost instantly.
I walked out into the hallway keeping my camouflage in place as best I could. It didn’t work as well when I was moving; I sort of flickered in and out of view as I headed for an exit. My hand hit the crash bar on the door a good five minutes before eight and there was no jangling alarm when I pushed out of the building. Hugging close to a wall, I got to the parking lot in front of the gym just as Justine’s car pulled up. My phone rumbled in my pocket again and I got it out to check it. Mr. Goodturn had called but hung up after one ring. I hit redial and held the phone to my ear as I opened the door to get in Justine’s Prius.
She smiled at me and mouthed a hello.
“Hi,” I said as I got in the car. “I’m just making a quick call.”
“Oh. Do you want to go right home or are you hungry?” she asked.
There was a thought. I was hungry and nodded as I closed the door and buckled myself in. “Yeah. I am hungry actually.” I got Mr. G’s voicemail. “Hey Mr. Goodturn, it’s Benny. I missed your call; I’ve been really busy. I’m grabbing some dinner with a friend. I’ll call you back later.” I hit “end” and tucked the phone into my hoodie’s pocket.
Justine hadn’t put the car in gear. “Where do you want to go?”
Grinning, I shook my head. “How about Dick’s?” A Dick’s burger is almost a sin; they are so good and greasy. They had been around like forever and when I felt like splurging nothing was better than a Dick’s Deluxe and fries washed down with a hand-dipped vanilla shake.
Laughing, she put the car in gear. “There goes my diet!”
“Uh huh. Like you really need to worry about that.” Justine’s figure was…distracting. She did not need to lose weight.
“Did you find anything while you were looking around?” she asked, changing the subject.
I decided not to mention the empty box or the grit I’d found. “No. If there was anything hidden in there they either moved it or I couldn’t find it.”
“Well, hopefully, it’s just a prank after all.”
“Yeah, I hope so. Baffle doesn’t need any more drama in his life,” I said.
The streetlights outside were starting to come on as the sun dipped low. The Queen Anne location for Dick’s was close but still a bit of a drive so we had plenty of time to talk.
Staring straight ahead, Justine asked, “So, what did you think? How did we sound?”
“Good. Great. I had trouble picking out individual instruments though.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t know why she picks the arrangements she does. She’s pushing us hard with a lot of new material.”
“You all sounded good though.”
Giggling, she bobbed her head. “I think so too. We need to jell because there are a lot of seniors leaving. I’m probably getting moved up to first chair.”
“That’s cool.”
We spent the ride talking about the holidays, family plans for vacation (mine were a complete fabrication) and movies coming out over the next few weeks. A few minutes before we got into the Queen Anne neighborhood my phone trembled against my side and I saw a text from Maddy:
Where are you?
Perfect. I decided to answer it later. Just too weird responding to a text from Maddy while I was riding in a car with Justine.
By the time we pulled into the parking lot at Dick’s, I was starving. Justine looked in the backseat and got a panicky look in her eyes. She leaned forward, looked at the floor on my side of the car and slumped back in her seat.
“Benny, I’m so embarrassed! I forgot my purse at school. It’s in my locker!” She groaned. “I don’t have any money on me.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it. Besides, you drove.” I laughed.
She smiled at me, shook her head and made a frustrated sound.
We hopped out, placed our orders and snagged a picnic table in the covered area. The dressing they put on a Dick’s Deluxe is a mustardy kind of sauce with chopped pickles in it. Sounds weird, but man is it good. Even though the weather was chilly and damp, my shake tasted great too.
Justine grinned at me as she daintily ate her fries. “This is nice.”
Her blond hair had a few wisps that kept blowing in her face, but she didn’t bother to brush them away. The light made her eyes look like they were glowing. “Yeah, it is. Thanks for giving me a lift home.”
Reaching out across the table, she touched my hand. “This is almost like a date.”
Suddenly, I felt guilty. The whole Justine/Maddy dynamic troubled me, and Maddy’s impending departure made me feel depressed whenever it crossed my mind. The text I still needed to respond to suddenly seemed more important.
“Yeah, kinda.” Clever, right?
“Can I ask you a question, Benny?” she took a long sip of her strawberry shake.
When someone asks that question it usually indicates that they’re going to ask something they consider potentially off base, and who ever responds to it by saying “No. I’d rather you didn’t”? I mean, who does that?
“Sure. What?” Seriously, what are you supposed to say?
“Do you like me?”
So, think about that for a minute. First of all, it isn’t actually “Do you like me?” It’s more than that. It’s really “Do you love me?” or “Do you want to go out?” or “Are you attracted to me?” Second, if you answer incorrectly, and yes folks, there is a wrong answer, you are on immediately shaky ground. Third, whatever relationship you had up to that point with the girl asking that question, you can darn well bet on the fact that said relationship will be different after you answer. Finally, how gutsy is that? She seriously put it out there. No hiding behind “no, that’s not what I meant.” Add to that the fact that Justine was my ride home and I didn’t want to hoof it ho
me from Queen Anne again, I was caught flat-footed.
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she said, her voice catching.
It was the first time I could think of that she had lied to me. Of course, it wouldn’t be okay, for either of us.
“Of course I like you,” I said, trying not to look too directly into those big brown eyes.
“That’s… I didn’t mean just that. I meant…” she took another desperate sip of shake.
Whether it had been instilled in me by my mom or it was something I was born with, I couldn’t handle seeing a girl in distress. It was like the moment when I had walked into class and seen the Homecoming invitation draped all over my chair, Justine blushing hard.
“I know what you meant,” I said.
Her eyes brightened, but her smile was fragile. Eyebrows raised, she waited.
“I want to be careful how I say this Justine. No ,don’t frown. I do really like you—no buts. You know my friend Maddy. I know that Homecoming and after was kind of…messed up. She’s not my girlfriend,” Justine’s shaky smile found some stability. “She is my best friend and that complicates things. She’s pretty…she’s a little…” Where were the words?
“Possessive?” interjected Justine.
Ah, there’s the word. “Yeah, maybe, a little. Anyway, I don’t want to screw up my friendship with her so I don’t know how to handle…this.”
Pursing her lips, she said, “She’s moving, though. Right?”
“Yeah, at the end of school.”
“And she’s not your girlfriend? You guys aren’t dating?”
“No, we’re not dating. We’re just good friends.” My conscience twinged a bit. Was that totally accurate? Maybe at one time it had been, but not necessarily now. The Dick’s burger started rumbling around in my stomach. Nothing like an emotionally stressful conversation right after a greasy meal.
“And you like me?” Her lips were parted as though she was ready to pounce on my next response.