Dweeb

by Aaron Starmer

  The Perseverance poster lay splayed out on the floor. A pair of running shoes were poking out from the hole in the wall. Denton was grasping at the laces.

  “Lay off!” came Eddie’s voice.

  “What are you thinking?” Denton said.

  “I’m thinking I’m gonna see what’s back here.” The shoes slipped free from Denton’s hands, and the sound of Eddie’s body collapsing into the space behind the wall roused Wendell and Bijay from their bunks.

  “Sonuva …,” Eddie grumbled.

  “So … what’s—what’s back there, then?” Denton asked as Elijah slipped on his glasses and joined his side.

  “Pipes,” Eddie responded. “Yeah, mostly pipes. I think I can climb ’em, though.” Wendell and Bijay got up and joined the others next to the hole.

  “You can get out, then?” Elijah asked. He placed an ear against the wall and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what Eddie might be seeing.

  Before Eddie could respond, the sound of the lock on the door clicking open stopped them in their tracks. Elijah found himself acting with surprising speed, grabbing the poster and pushing it against the wall to cover the hole.

  “Men!” McKenzie bellowed, stepping inside. “Morning has broken. Breakfast is served.” Placing the breakfast on the floor, he turned toward them.

  “Morning,” Denton said with a guilty smile.

  McKenzie eyed the cockeyed poster with interest. He finally said, “Not a bad little slogan. But not as good as Semper Fi. Know that one?”

  “It’s from your hat,” Bijay said, pointing to McKenzie’s black cap, which was emblazoned with the words in yellow thread.

  “It’s from Latin,” Elijah informed Bijay. “Semper Fidelis. Means ‘always faithful.’”

  “It’s from the marines,” McKenzie clarified. “Means stay true to your brothers. Don’t leave the corps. And don’t you ever leave any man behind. Speaking of which …”

  McKenzie stepped over to the bunks and looked them up and down. “Where in God’s name is Green?”

  Dead silence. For what seemed like … forever.

  Eyebrow cocked, McKenzie continued, “Green? Your good buddy Eddie?”

  Elijah shrugged feebly, but his insides were pulsing and throbbing and he felt as if he were about to scream. Once McKenzie discovered they had broken the rules, what punishment could possibly come next?

  “Where … is …” McKenzie’s voice cracked as he started to shout.

  “Having a bit of an issue, Coach.”

  McKenzie turned toward the bathroom. It lacked a door, but the toilet was hidden behind the wall in an alcove.

  “You’re okay?” McKenzie called.

  Elijah held his breath.

  “Yeah,” came Eddie’s voice again, “just a little stomach thing. I’d steer clear of here for a bit. But I’ll be fine.”

  “Good to hear, good to hear. I’ll give you guys some credit. You’re toughing it out. I’ll be back to check on you later, then.”

  “I’d appreciate that, thank you,” Eddie called back.

  McKenzie gave the rest of them a respectful nod. Still stunned, Elijah nodded back.

  “Carry on, soldiers,” McKenzie said. “Carry on.” And he smiled. It wasn’t McKenzie’s typical smile, either. If Elijah were to describe it, he’d say it was almost kind.

  After McKenzie left, they all scrambled to the bathroom, only to find it empty.

  “Eddie?” Denton said.

  “Yup,” Eddie’s voice came from the toilet.

  “Where are you?” Elijah asked, crouching down and looking behind the porcelain tank.

  “Just hanging with the toilet pipes. You can crawl all over the place back here.”

  “That was far too close,” Denton said. “Now get back in the room.”

  “I thought I might explore a bit. It’s real dark, but I might be able to find my way out.”

  “You should probably come back,” Wendell said.

  “I will, I will, it’s just—”

  Grrrrrrrrrr!

  Because of the hole in the wall, the growl was twice as loud as it had been before. Because Eddie was back there, it was also ten times more frightening.

  “Eddie!” Elijah yelped. Encouraging their escape suddenly seemed like the stupidest thing he could have done. Now Eddie could suffer from Elijah’s selfish decision.

  “Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming!” Eddie said frantically.

  Clinking and bumping and scraping sounds telegraphed Eddie’s path as he scrambled along the walls back to the hole. Bijay pulled the poster down.

  Grrrrrrrrrr!

  To Elijah, it sounded as though the growl was getting closer, but he wasn’t going to wait around and see. As soon as Eddie’s hands sprouted from the hole, Elijah grabbed them.

  “Pull, pull!” Eddie called.

  Getting Eddie through the hole was like removing a nail from a board. It required so much twisting and yanking that Elijah wondered how he had gotten in there in the first place.

  “Pull!” Eddie begged, the growling remaining loud and constant.

  Finally, Eddie sucked in his breath and his torso slid slowly along. Once Eddie’s hips were free, Elijah gave a hefty tug and brought him toppling into the room.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said breathlessly.

  Bijay replaced the poster, and Elijah stared at it, almost expecting it to fly off the wall and reveal some terrible monster. Hands up, he backed away and sat on the bunk. The others joined him.

  After a few minutes, the growling faded until it was gone. They waited for nearly an hour and it didn’t return. Things seemed safe, at least for now, but the whole incident scared Elijah more than he cared to admit.

  He held tight to the edge of his bunk, trying to keep his hands from shaking. And in his head, he couldn’t get rid of the memory of a voice: Tyler Kelly’s voice. It kept saying the same thing, over and over again.

  “Maybe I should call you Eliza?”

  Though he wasn’t quick to admit it these days, Tyler Kelly had once been Elijah’s friend. One of his best friends, actually. They had known each other since first grade.

  Throughout elementary school, they weren’t much more than a couple of guys who had lunch together. But by sixth grade, they were inseparable, and spent almost every afternoon hanging out in Tyler’s basement wolfing down junk food. They would make up wild stories, making fun of everyone they knew and imagining a world where they were the school’s dictators of style and substance.

  Tyler wasn’t quite as creative as Elijah, but his humor was nastier, and just listening to him skewer their peers made Elijah feel as if he were doing something wrong. But it also felt good. It was a safe version of wrong.

  In seventh grade, things got a bit more dangerous. When Tyler found out how to program his cell phone to display as a restricted number on caller ID, he brought back an ancient art—the prank call.

  No one was off-limits. Classmates. Parents. Teachers. Tyler would call them all and, adopting a false voice, he’d say all the things the two of them used to say in the privacy of the basement.

  At first, it was exciting for Elijah, because Tyler was the one doing the dirty work. The more he did it, though, the more uncomfortable it made Elijah feel. And the more confidence it seemed to give Tyler.

  Then one day during lunch, Tyler sat down next to Elijah and made an announcement. “Sara Childs and Emma Radson are swinging by my basement after school. They want you to be there.”

  “But we hate them,” Elijah said. It was true that Sara Childs and Emma Radson, two of the school’s most popular girls, were often the victims of Tyler’s prank calls.

  “We don’t hate them if they’re coming over,” Tyler explained, wagging his fist like a champ. “Come on, man, do you realize what this means?”

  “What does it mean?” Elijah asked.

  “These girls think we’re a couple of guys who know a thing or two about a thing or two!” Tyler exclaimed. “And now they want to
show their appreciation.”

  “Their appreciation?”

  “You know what I mean,” Tyler said. “Come on, hot shot. They want to see me do one of the calls. Principal Phipps. The big fish.”

  “I don’t know,” Elijah said. “Not really my scene. Count me out.”

  Count me out—three words that changed everything.

  To be honest, Elijah was too scared to say anything else. What would happen if Sara Childs and Emma Radson came over? Surely nothing more than a little talking? But what if Tyler started being Tyler? Would they be disgusted by Elijah too? What would he say to convince them he was a good guy?

  Elijah decided it was better to just stay home. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the idea of hanging out with Sara and Emma. But it was a situation fraught with frightening decisions. At home, decisions were already made.

  So he stayed home. He stayed up all night writing his story “The Stairway to Despair.” When he finished, he felt as if an immense weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

  The plot was simple enough. It was the tale of a wealthy telescope maker who lived alone in a house on the edge of a small village. He chose to watch the world from a distance. The only thing he truly cared about was discovering what was hidden behind the clouds that always hung over the village. Since his telescopes couldn’t see through the clouds, he paid to have a giant stairway built into the sky. And since he didn’t trust what he couldn’t see, he asked his neighbors to climb the stairs and place the eye of his biggest telescope on the other side of the clouds. One by one, all the people from the village lugged the giant telescope up the stairs, but once they reached the clouds, one by one they all disappeared.

  The telescope maker considered climbing up after them, but thought better of it. He walked into the village instead, and explored the houses of his former neighbors. He went through their drawers, read their diaries, looked closely at their lives. As he learned more about them, he suddenly became interested in them. He couldn’t believe it, but he missed them. He rushed back to the stairway, ready to take the risk and join his former neighbors in the sky. It was windy out and, as he approached the first step, the clouds parted for a quick moment, revealing a group of people gathered on a platform at the top of the stairs. Together they pushed, yanked, and pulled the wooden stairs, which heaved and swayed and then started cracking. As they tumbled from the sky, the stairs landed squarely on the telescope maker’s house, crushing and shattering all the telescopes inside. Everything was reduced to a pile of wood and glass.

  In the last moments of the story, the telescope maker managed to walk away from the rubble. He went back to the village and into a house. He closed all the blinds. He descended to the basement. He vowed never to look up in the sky again.

  “It’s an interesting allegory,” Mrs. Reed told Elijah when he presented the story to her the next day.

  “It’s meaningful,” Elijah insisted, not completely understanding her. “That’s what it is.”

  “What do you say to entering it in a contest?”

  A few weeks later, Elijah was more than just a writer. He was an award-winning writer. At the same time, Tyler had become more than a seventh-grade boy. He was a seventh-grade boy with a girlfriend, and Elijah started to look at his best friend differently. What he’d once seen as a wild sense of humor, he now realized was cruelty. What he’d once seen as rebellion, he now saw as immaturity.

  To Elijah, Tyler was a bully, and artists weren’t friends with bullies. Tyler’s opinion on the matter could be summed up in the one phrase he kept saying when they passed each other in the halls:

  “Maybe I should call you Eliza?”

  Down in the room, Elijah released his hands from the edge of the bunk. They had stopped shaking.

  “If this were a story I was going to write,” he said to the others, “someone would have to go back through that hole. He would have to take the risk. Otherwise, he’d always wonder what might have been.”

  Chapter 11

  EDDIE

  It was 11:30 on Monday night. The lights were out, but Eddie was hunched over his desk. The only glow came from Wendell’s watch, a hulking device that was equipped with a calculator, a GPS, and a variety of simple video games.

  Elijah sketched lightly with the nub of a pencil on a blank page torn from the back of one of the test books. He was drawing rooms and hallways. He was making Eddie a map.

  “Go through it again,” Eddie said.

  “There are blind spots, under the cameras. Here, here, and here,” Bijay said, pointing to spots on the map.

  “And I can hide there?” Eddie said.

  “Yes,” Bijay said. “But to move, you must watch how they pan back and forth. It’s outdated technology. Old and slow. And they’re only on one side of the wall. If you time it right, you should be able to make it through the halls without ever being detected.”

  “Ooooh, like Castle Wolfenstein,” Wendell said, rocking back and forth with excitement.

  “What?” Eddie said.

  “It’s just a, you know, a classic … video ga—Never mind,” Wendell said.

  “Are they hooked into alarms?” Eddie turned back to Bijay.

  “I don’t think they are,” Bijay said. “I hope they aren’t.”

  “What about the cameras in the rooms?” Eddie asked.

  “They’re fakes,” Bijay said. “Don’t let the blinking lights fool you. The school couldn’t afford real cameras for every room, so they put in decoys. They think it discourages … stuff.”

  “And they teach you this in AV club?” Elijah said.

  “Not the teachers,” Bijay said. “Jacob Wade told me.”

  “Ugh, Jacob,” Denton said. “You mean the movie quoter?”

  “I can’t stand that kid.” Eddie groaned. “Everything he says is a stupid movie or TV quote. You know how he greets me in the hall? ‘It’s not easy being Green.’ What a dope.”

  “A dope who knows a lot about security cameras,” Bijay put forth.

  Eddie rolled his eyes, then shifted the conversation back to the task at hand. “So I’m safe as long as I’m in a room?” He looked closely at the map, zeroing in on the auditorium, the gym, and other large rooms he could navigate instead of hallways.

  “Except for Snodgrass’s office,” Bijay said. “It’s rigged wall to wall with real cameras. No blind spots.”

  “But that’s where I’m going!” Eddie said. “And they’re sure to check those DVDs!”

  “There’s one way,” Bijay said. “But you have to move fast.”

  Eddie smiled. “Fast I can do.”

  “Between twelve-thirty-seven and twelve-forty-one every night, the DVDs switch over,” Bijay explained. “Or they did, last I knew. They’ll be off for those four minutes. As long as anything you move gets put back in the exact same place, they probably won’t notice.”

  “Four minutes. If I can run a mile in that time, I can search an office,” Eddie said, snatching up the map. “Now or never, right?”

  “Leave no stone unturned,” Elijah said firmly. “You’re a brave kid, Eddie.”

  “Just find what you can,” Denton said. “Good luck and Godspeed.”

  “Really? Godspeed? They make ’em different there in England, don’t they.” Eddie laughed as he removed the poster from the wall.

  Eddie had to do this alone. No one else could fit through the hole. And even if they could, they probably weren’t athletic enough to climb the pipes.

  Climbing pipes wasn’t too difficult for Eddie, once he got the hang of it. Shinny them like ropes, or take to them like ladders, pushing off from the joints with his feet. Come to a dead end, turn around. Monkey business, really.

  He only had to grab one hot pipe before he knew to tap every following pipe and make sure they were cool. The main problem (and this was a big one): he had no idea where he would end up.

  To his forehead, Eddie had strapped Wendell’s watch, which was held tight with a headband made from the handle of t
he plastic bag Snodgrass had left behind. The GPS did him little good, but the watch’s eerie glow was enough to let him see a few feet in front of him. He was essentially in a cave, pawing at walls and pulling himself through passageways, striving to find some pockets of light.

  As terrifying as it all was, there was one thing Eddie knew he had to do: keep moving. The sooner he found his way out, the more time he had to explore the school.

  “Please, no growling,” Eddie whispered to himself as he scurried through the dark. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  After about fifteen minutes of climbing, squeezing through tight spots, and retracing his path, he saw a faint glow above him. Drawing closer, he realized it was a small grating letting in shafts of light. He propped himself on a ledge beside it.

  He was tempted to kick the grating out, but he had no idea where it might land. Luckily, there were nuts and bolts to remove. He twisted the nuts free, then wove his fingers through the grating, eased it forward, turned it, and pulled it back through the opening. He stuck his head out to see where he was.

  Tiny lights from above provided a faint illumination. It was about a ten-foot drop to the floor below. Turning his head around, he nearly hit his nose on the ceiling. He could see a hallway extending on either side of him, and could just make out the cameras staggered and mounted on the opposite wall. They were panning back and forth.

  He paused a moment, pondering his next move. He noticed the cameras were mounted slightly below the level of the grating. They were tilted on a gentle downward angle.

  They can’t see me, he told himself as he eased his feet out from the opening and rocked back and forth, gathering momentum. Before his mind could process the consequences, he was launching himself through the air and landing in a crumpled heap in the dead center of the hall, like a bird on a pane of glass.

  It was a stupid move.

  And as he hopped to his feet, he locked eyes with one of the cameras.

  He had no choice but to sprint right for it until he was safely beneath it. He pressed his aching body against the wall and took a deep breath.

  It’s all over, he thought. Spotted! As fast as that. An alarm has been triggered. McKenzie is on his way. Their only escape route will be found.