There was a long, gradual incline that wore me out a bit. I stopped at the top to catch my breath. Dad was probably wondering when I’d be back with the Fritos. How long would I be gone before he got really worried? How long before I got into trouble?
Well, I was going to be in trouble. There was no way around that, at least if Mom woke up before I got back. I would think of something. Excuses weren’t hard to come by. I could get a flat tire or something. The chain could break on my bike. I could find a loose dog and take him home.
I looked back down the hill and saw two tiny bicyclers in the distance, making their way up the hill, standing on the pedals with every pump to put their weight into it. One wobbled and fell. It was Brian.
I spun my own bike around and rode back down the hill, already dreading the fact that I’d just have to ride up again. I braked hard when I reached the bottom. Brian was up but walking a slow circle to shake off the sting of the fall. Allan was straddling his bike, trying to catch his breath.
“What are you two doing?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” said Brian. “Riding our bikes.”
“You’re following me.”
“No, we’re not!”
“Well, turn around and go home. I don’t want company.”
I rode back up the hill, stopping again to catch my breath. The second time was even harder than the first. I looked down the hill and saw Brian and Allan still standing at the bottom. I waved my arm toward Tanglewood and yelled.
“Go home!”
My words were carried away by the wind, but Brian and Allan started pedaling slowly toward home.
I moved on, going right past the sign for Alden Academy. A little bit farther I found a trail into the woods and stopped, made sure the coast was clear, and plunged in. It was a rocky trail, but I have a mountain bike with a tough frame, thick wheels, and a fixed gear so the chain wouldn’t get knocked loose. I tried to keep my bearings as I twisted and turned on the path. I caught sight of a stately building, went off the trail, and locked my bike to a tree.
Mom had been working at Alden for years, but I’d never actually seen it. It looked more like a big house than a school and was surrounded by an eleven-foot-high fence. I hadn’t thought about a fence.
I didn’t think I’d find a garden gnome with a key in it, but I looked anyway. I walked around the school, keeping hidden in the trees. There was a back gate locked tight with a chain and padlocks. The front had an automatic gate and a gatehouse that looked empty. During the week there was probably a guard, but I guessed that on weekends the staff swiped a card at the box by the gate.
I was trying to figure out a way to get in when Brian came pedaling slowly up the driveway and stowed his bike in the trees on the other side. He didn’t see me and I didn’t want to shout. I picked up a pinecone and lobbed it at him, missing by a good ten feet. I’m not a quarterback. It was enough to get his attention. I sprinted across the driveway.
“I told you to go home,” I whispered.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” he whispered back.
“Yes I can. I’m your big brother.”
“No you can’t!”
I knew from experience we could go back and forth like that for an hour. I didn’t have the heart to fight with him, anyway. He’d skinned his palms and ripped his jeans when he fell off his bike, and he looked pathetic.
“Where’s Allan?”
“He went home. I told him he could. His asthma was bothering him.”
“You didn’t go with him?” I remembered Allan’s wheezing. “What if he needs help?”
“He told me it was okay. He said it happens all the time.”
“You shouldn’t leave a buddy all alone like that. Let’s go catch up with him.”
As soon as I said it, Allan appeared around a bend of trees on the driveway. Brian ran up and waved him off to the side.
“I. Decided. To. Come. Help,” he said. He took an inhaler from his pocket and inhaled deeply with it. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Come help with what?” I asked them.
“Same as you,” said Brian. “We’re going to rescue Mandy.”
“Mandy?” Why would Brian care about her? Because of Dad, I thought.
“Look, I’m not going to rescue her,” I said. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I was just going to see what the situation was—how bad the school was, really, and how Mandy was doing. “I’m just going to talk to her. She can’t stay a runaway forever, Brian. And sooner or later Dad’s going to go back too. You can’t make him stay here if he doesn’t want to be here.”
“I don’t care,” said Brian. “That’s not why I’m doing it. I like Mandy.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“Says you!” His eyes got fierce.
Maybe he did know her. Brian had taken care of Cassie on Friday. He must have met Mandy then. She might have been feeding Cassie when he got there. How else would he know that she was called Mandy? Mom always called her Amanda. Now that I thought about it, how else would he know I knew her?
Still, he’d only met her once, and based on that he was ready to set out to rescue her from the dungeon like a knight in a fairy tale?
“How are you going to help her, Bri?” I asked.
He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a keychain. I recognized the little hippo that Mom had for a fob. They were her work keys.
“At least I planned ahead,” he said.
“Dude,” I said, stepping forward to pick him up, then stopping because I remembered he didn’t like that. “I was just looking for a garden gnome, but you’re a freaking Gninja.”
We still didn’t have a way past the gate, but Allan threw himself on his Gninja sword. Nobody at the school would recognize him, so he found a pebble and used it to depress the valve on his bike tire and deflate it, rubbed some dirt on his face to look more pathetic, and went to the box on the gatehouse while Brian and I hid in the trees.
There was a big red button on it. Allan pushed it. There was no answer at first, but he held it down until a voice squawked at him.
“Can I help you?”
“I need help!” he said. “Can I use your phone and a bathroom?”
The squawking voice muttered something and went away. Several minutes later a woman came out and walked slowly across the lot.
“I got a flat tire and I’m really far from home and I was supposed to be home an hour ago but I can’t walk that far and I don’t have a bike pump.…” He rambled on a bit. The woman gave Allan the once-over and decided he wasn’t a threat.
“We don’t normally allow boys on the property,” she said. She keyed the box and opened the gate enough to let him in. He dropped his bike as soon as he was inside.
“There is a commode around back that the grounds staff uses,” the woman said. “You can use that one. And you can use this for a phone.” She held up a cell. “Which one do you want to use first?”
“The bathroom!” Allan said, now hopping from foot to foot.
“Well, good for you for not using the woods like some kind of animal,” the woman said. She slid the gate closed and walked with him around the school.
“She didn’t close it all the way,” said Brian.
He was right. We slipped in and closed it behind us, jumped over Allan’s bike, and sprinted across the parking lot to the other side of the school. If she’d locked the gate behind her, Allan would have faked an asthma attack just after she opened it to let him out. I was glad it hadn’t come to that.
We found a side door and tried all the keys until one worked. The second we went in, we saw a flashing box.
“It’s an alarm,” I said.
“We have to hide,” said Brian.
The alarm started screeching a moment later. We went up two flights of stairs, through some rooms and hallways, down another flight of stairs, around a corner, and down another hallway. We stopped when we heard footsteps and voices on the floor below, but they faded and we continued
exploring.
The school looked more like Hogwarts than Tanglewood Middle School. There was fancy trim along the ceilings and floors, paintings hanging in the hallways carpeted stairs, and wooden railings. But Hogwarts would be fun, and this felt like the kind of place where you’d never be allowed to raise your voice and weren’t supposed to touch anything.
“There’s the offices,” whispered Brian, waving at a sign. “Let’s find Mom’s.”
We scanned the names on the doors until we found hers. Brian got the right key on the first try. We let ourselves in and shut the door behind us seconds before two women ran into the hallway.
“The offices are all locked,” we heard one of them say. “Nobody’s in there.”
“Go do a head count in the dormitory,” the other one said. “Brenda can search the school.”
One woman left, and the other made a call. It sounded like she was pacing around in the hall right outside while she talked.
“See if you can find a map,” I whispered to Brian, gesturing at the shelves. I started rummaging through the desk, and Brian sifted through the papers stacked up on a shelf. In one of the drawers I found a phone with a familiar nonsparkling vampire on the cover. I slipped it into my pocket. Mandy would be glad to get it back, even though I suspected it was her phone that had betrayed her.
“Here,” said Brian. He’d found a brochure with a map in it.
There were residences and the cafeteria on one side of the school. The classrooms, offices, and library were on the other side. Next to the library was the faculty lounge, and on the other side of the lounge was a room called the Reflection Center. Mandy had said if she got caught, they’d put her in the “RC.” Was that the Reflection Center? Maybe that was a fancy way of saying solitary confinement.
“I think I know where Mandy is,” I whispered. But the woman outside was still chattering and walking around. There were more footsteps and voices, sounding more like teenagers. Maybe they’d put together a search party to comb the school.
I fiddled with Mandy’s phone to kill time. I figured out how to open the little Web browser and found a play-byplay of the Pats game.
Every time I thought the coast might be clear, there’d be footsteps, or voices, or a door opening. This place sure was busy for a school on a Sunday. Shouldn’t everybody be studying quietly in their rooms, or something?
The windows faced east, and the room filled up with shadows, but we didn’t dare turn on the lights. I watched the game updates until the screen started to dim, then I shut off the phone to save whatever was left of the battery.
It finally fell quiet outside of the office. I counted to one hundred, just to be sure.
“Let’s go,” I said. I opened the door and peered out. All the lights were off. That was a good sign.
If I was right about the RC, it was more or less overhead. It was also far from the dorms and cafeteria, which made things easier for us. We crept out of the office, tiptoeing down the hall and up the stairs. The school looked even more like Hogwarts in the dark, with long shadows looming around every corridor.
I saw the sign for the library and stopped, gesturing at Brian to get the door open. He tried a bunch of keys until he found the right one, and we went in. There were shelves on all the walls, full of books, and a table in the middle. The books had titles like Sarah Stevens: Young Nurse and The Virtues of a Virtuoso. They sounded as dreadful as the school. No wonder Mandy hated it here.
“This is the library,” I said.
“Duh,” said Brian.
“Don’t ‘duh’ me,” I said. “Be right back.” I continued down the hall.
If the map was right, Mandy was two rooms over, but you could only get there through the faculty lounge. The doors to the lounge were open, and bright light spilled out into the hallway. It was easy to peek in. There were chairs with high backs and no arms, little round tables with whorls for feet. It looked like a room where old ladies would drink tea. To the right was the door to the Reflection Center. There was a woman about forty years old in front of the door, reading a book with the silhouette of a cat on the cover. The door didn’t have bars or anything, but it looked sturdy, and the lock was probably a dead bolt. I knew Mandy would be in trouble, but I didn’t expect her to be locked up and under guard like a prisoner.
There were windows along the wall, looking out at rooftops. There was one in the library, too, and maybe even one in the Reflection Center. Maybe I could climb out on the window ledge and creep all the way over to Mandy?
I went back to the library and checked out the window. It didn’t open all the way, but it did have a hinged wing that opened a few inches.
“Give me your shoelaces,” I told Brian.
“What?”
“I’ll give ’em back.”
We both kicked off our shoes and unlaced them. I tied the ends together to make a rope.
“That’s not long enough to climb down,” said Brian.
“Duh.”
“Don’t ‘duh’ me either,” he said.
I slipped one end of a lace through a notch on the phone, made another knot, and went to the window. I opened it as far as I could and tried to look to the right. I couldn’t see the next window over, but that was fine. It meant nobody could see our window from that one.
I turned the phone on, clicked the YouTube app, and searched for kittens. There was a perfect one called “Angry Kitten” that was six minutes long. I put the volume all the way up on the phone.
“Click play, then drop this out and swing it over that way,” I told Brian. I handed him the phone and the other end of the makeshift rope.
He took one look at the screen and knew what I was up to. “Got it.”
“I need the keys,” I said.
He handed them to me. I slipped out of the library into the hall, peeking into the lounge. The woman sat up straight when she heard the sound outside the window, then set her book down and went over. She cranked open the window wing to peer out. “Hi, honey baby. How did you get up there? Come over so I can see you, sweetheart.”
I stepped over to the door of the Reflection Center, flipping quietly through the keys. How did Mom keep them straight? There were twenty keys, easy, and no labels. I sorted through and found five or six that looked the right size, then crept over and tried them each in turn. None of them worked. The woman was still squatting by the window.
Her own keys were on the table by her chair, marking her place in her book. I’d have to come within a few inches of her. Now I was glad I’d taken off my shoes.
I tiptoed over and slid out the keys.
“Come on, baby,” the woman pleaded. “Let me see you.”
I got the door open a second later. Mandy was lying on a bed, her cheeks flushed. She looked at me in shock, wiping at her face with her shirtsleeve. I gestured with my thumb that we were leaving. She nodded and we left, tiptoeing past the guard, who was still kneeling and begging the kitten to come closer. She patted her pockets, like she might have tuna-flavored snacks she’d forgotten about.
We sprinted across the lounge to the hall, passing the library, and I realized I hadn’t shut the door to the Reflection Center. As soon as that woman turned around, we were sunk.
“Come on,” I told Brian.
It took him a second to reel in the phone.
“The battery is dead,” he said. “That was me meowing the last five minutes.”
“Let’s go!” I ran to the end of the hall, tore down the stairs, and threw myself at the first door I saw. It opened, and I felt a brief flash of victory before I remembered that there was a big, unclimbable fence between us and freedom.
Mandy was a few steps behind and nearly crashed into me. I heard a loud squeal from inside as Brian came out a second later—the alarm had gone off.
“I lost my shoes on the stairs,” he said. “No laces.”
Great. We were three runaways without one pair of shoes between us.
“Mandy, how did you get past the fence befor
e?” I asked.
“The old sewer.” She took off running and I tried to keep up. Old sewer? I was hoping I’d misheard her.
She ran around the school to a gray, windowless door.
“Locked,” she said, yanking on it. I pulled out the keys and started trying them.
“Hurry,” said Mandy. “It might say ‘Yale’ on it because the lock does.”
“Oh, yeah, thanks.” I tried a few more keys. One went in and didn’t turn, but it was close. I scanned the other keys, looking for one that was similar. I found it and got the door open. The alarm was still shrieking. The three of us nearly fell over each other getting in, and Brian pulled the door shut behind us.
Mandy flew down a flight of concrete steps and through a door. She flipped on a light switch. I saw a row of washers and dryers and a couple of metal tables. There was a cart-style laundry basket full of socks and stuff.
“Grab some extra socks,” Mandy said. “Two or three pairs.”
“I don’t want to wear those,” said Brian. “They’re girl socks.”
“Man up,” I told him, tossing a handful his way and stooping to put a couple on each of my own feet.
“I’m not wearing the ones with pink pom-poms,” said Brian, tossing a couple back.
“So where’s this sewer?” I asked Mandy. I didn’t know how much time we had, but it couldn’t be long before people came through that door.
“It’s this way,” said Mandy. She went past the machines through a doorway and into a cramped area with a bunch of pipes and a humming water heater. “Here,” she said, crouching at an access panel in the wall. “This lock is broken.” She slipped her fingertips into the space around the panel and pulled it off, exposing a cobwebby crawl space. A moment later she was crawling off into the darkness.
“Gross,” said Brian, but he clambered in and followed Mandy.
I was left with the task of getting the panel back into place, which wasn’t easy. I used my stubby fingernails to bring the edge of the panel flush with the wall, but I was afraid it would fall if I let go. I waited, breathing in the cobwebs, feeling itchy and tickled all over, trying to hear if anyone was out there. I finally risked pulling my hands back, away from the plate—it stayed put. I crawled off after Mandy and Brian.
The Tanglewood Terror Page 11