The Seventh Level

by Jody Feldman

  I try not to turn red. “Actually,” I say to Matti, “I don’t need you to distract her.” I point to the assistant principal’s parking spot. “See? Her truck’s gone. There’s only…what? Like three cars left. I need you in case she comes back. Just be my lookout.”

  Matti’s ponytail whips around. She nudges Kip. Looks at me.

  I stare back at her. “You’re the only person for the job. We all know she lo-oves you.”

  “I can’t help it if Mrs. Pinchon likes me, so don’t imply I’m a suck-up.”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t call you a suck-up. But if the name fits…”

  Kip takes a step back to dodge the words that could start flying, but now’s the wrong time to mix it up. Even if we do it in fun. “Forget it,” I say.

  Matti looks up, way up. “I don’t think you should do it.”

  “What?” I don’t need her permission, but she seems to know what I can get away with.

  “I don’t think you should do it,” she says. “Randall should clean up his own mess.”

  Sure. Randall would do that, and I would walk through fire. Barefoot. Doused with gasoline. “One problem. Do you see him here to fix this?” I ask. “Just watch out in case Mrs. Pinchon comes back, okay?”

  “No way,” she says. “If you’re doing it, I’m watching.”

  Kip grabs on to Matti’s arm. “He’s not doing it.”

  They lock eyes again like they have for about a year. Like they’re gonna run off and kiss. It makes my neck prickle.

  Kip lets her go and turns to me. “I once heard that there are one million ways to mess up a murder, and if you can think of fifty, you’re a genius.”

  “I’m not murdering anyone.”

  “Maybe your own self,” Kip says.

  I don’t wait for Kip to tell me the rest of the bad things that might happen. “Just stand underneath so I know exactly where to go.”

  I creep into the building even though Mrs. Pinchon is gone. It’s like she knows me better than I know myself, and it wasn’t only the fire alarm last week. It started when she was introduced during the first-day-of-school assembly this year. I had to go to the bathroom and was wriggling in my bleacher seat, and I swear she burned her radar eyes into my bladder and made me sit still till the end. Right then I knew I was in trouble, and I will be for all of middle school unless she retires real soon. Someone said she already retired but came back when our old assistant principal’s wife got a new job in Toledo and they needed to find someone fast.

  So even though I am allowed in the school, I duck under the windows to the main office. Then I flash down the side hall to Mr. McKenzie’s custodian closet and borrow a strong piece of rope. I go upstairs to the teachers’ lounge, where teachers only lounge during school. Not after, I hope, or some school adult’ll haul me by the ear to lifetime detention.

  I knock. No answer. I slip in, around the vending machines, through the roof access.

  Cool. Way up here, it’s like I’m tall. I tower over Kip and Matti and now the whole baseball team. Except Randall. He’s conveniently absent.

  “Travis Raines! Are you nuts?” Marco yells.

  “Maybe. But I’m not stupid.” I hold up the rope so they see it, then I tie it to my waist and hook the other end to a not-too-rusty pipe that juts from the roof.

  “Trav!” Kip yells. “Maybe Mr. McKenzie has a ladder in his closet. Even I’d climb that.”

  “Not tall enough,” I call back. “Where do you think I got the rope?”

  “What about a ladder and a stick? Or a long fishing pole?”

  “Yeah. Like anyone brings a fishing pole to school.”

  “You brought a fish,” says Marco.

  I laugh and tug at the rope tied to the pipe. That should hold. Unless the pipe breaks. But I’ll only need the rope if I slip, and I won’t. I’ll be quick, I’ll go home and have a snack, Kip’ll have his cap, and I’ll have my paper.

  I lie flat on my belly, my head peering over the edge to line my body with the cap that, for sure, is stuck on one of The Legend’s nails. Seven more nails sit in the same row on a big area of brick wall about three feet below me.

  Idea. Kip might’ve been right about the fishing pole. If I tie this rope to a rock or a stapler or something to weigh it down and lean over the roof and knock the cap…

  Nah. Too much trouble. I’d have to untie myself, come down, raid a teacher’s desk to find something heavy, get caught, and be accused of stealing. This’ll be faster.

  I wave below. Then I pivot on my stomach and stick my feet over the shallow ledge that runs around the edge. With my torso still on the roof, I lower my legs more and more until I’m an upside-down L. I turn my head a little. “How close am I?”

  “You can’t do it,” says Kip. “You can’t get close enough.”

  “Yeah, he can!” yells Matti. “Move about three inches to your left, then you have two or three feet to go.”

  Two or three feet? Great. I’m four foot eight, and two feet something of my spindly legs are already dangling. I was hoping I’d need to hang down only to my armpits. Now it’s gonna take work to hoist myself back up.

  I wish Kip had my arm strength. He’s about eighty-three feet taller than I am and would’ve been able to kick off the cap by now. Maybe Matti would, too, but I don’t like to remember that her legs have suddenly grown higher than my waist.

  I take a deep breath and ease down, brick by brick, my toes catching on mortar indents just enough to control my descent.

  “One more inch,” Matti calls from below.

  Good thing. The concrete ledge is starting to sink into the insides of my elbows and at my first knuckles, where I know my fingertips are turning white.

  My right toe reaches for another brick, but something stops it. Something hard and sturdy. Something I can rest my weight on for a minute.

  “That’s it!” Matti calls. “Kick it off.”

  I will in a sec…. “Ahh!” I will now. My footrest bends down. My fingers grab tighter.

  Someone screams below. Then come the cheers. I did it! I—

  What did I get myself into? The blood is pounding in my temples. I can taste my own sweat. I don’t want to go down with the cap and become tonight’s news.

  Pretend its gym class, Trav. Do one more chin-up, and you’ll break the school record and—and—and I can’t swing my legs forward to pull myself up. There’s a wall in front of me.

  Don’t panic, Trav. You have your emergency rope. It’ll hold. It’ll hold until a firefighter…

  No firefighters. I can’t be caught. Not again. Not by anyone, especially Her.

  I try to jam my baseball cleats between the bricks. Too thick. Why’d I have to wear these? Why couldn’t I have worn, what? Flip-flops? To baseball practice? If only. Yeah.

  “Trav,” calls Kip. “You’re scaring me. Go back up.”

  “I will. Just look out below.”

  I scooch my shoes off my heels and listen for two thuds, relieved no one yells because the cleats have hit them on the head. I also don’t hear anything except running feet. Maybe they’re all racing to congratulate me. Which they can’t do if I splat like that pumpkin we—

  No. Concentrate. Fingers. Knees. Feet. I latch my toes on to the mortar between the bricks, and in two seconds I’m back on the roof, looking at the angry lines in my arms.

  And into the angry face of Mrs. Pinchon, assistant principal in charge of discipline.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I thought…” I don’t bother to finish my sentence.

  “You thought what?” Mrs. Pinchon looms over me, talking with that deep Southern drawl. “I was gone?”

  I try not to nod, but my chin seesaws up and down.

  “Things aren’t always as they appear, Mr. Raines. Remember that.” Mrs. Pinchon kicks the roof pipe I tied my rope to. Either she has high heels of steel or the rusted pipe wouldn’t have saved my underwear from flying off the roof. From its new busted-open, lying-down position, the pipe relea
ses the rope to Mrs. Pinchon’s hands with me at the other end like a guilty dog. Or her prisoner.

  We walk through the roof access door, and I gulp my voice quiet. It wants to tell Mrs. Pinchon to take her own advice. Things aren’t always as they appear. What she thought was me dangling from the roof was really a tree shadow, so if everything’s good, I’m outta here. With me on a leash, though, I’d be stupid if I didn’t keep quiet and follow her to her office. I’d be just as stupid if I untied the rope. But if it accidentally unties itself…

  My fingers act on their own and play with the knot. By the time we’re on the first floor, Mrs. Pinchon is walking a leash attached to nothing. I’m still following.

  She glances back, then shoots me a look.

  I shrug. “Maybe I’m not a good knot tie-er.”

  Did I see a splinter of a smile on her face?

  Wishful thinking, with all the things she could do to me. At least she can’t string me on a flagpole through my earlobe. I don’t think my parents want my ear pierced.

  She can’t expel me either. They didn’t expel the eighth grader who brought drugs to school the first time. He got suspended.

  Can’t Mrs. Pinchon understand? Today I was trying to fix things, but she probably can’t understand more than rules in a rule book.

  After she closes her office door behind me, she doesn’t haul out the book. She swivels and rocks in her body-swallowing chair.

  I know it swallows bodies because last spring I barely scrambled out before the old assistant principal caught me. I try to stop grinning.

  “What’re you so happy about, Travis?”

  “Your chair?”

  “Is that a question or a statement?” Her eyes burn so hard into mine, I’m afraid she’ll turn my green ones brown like hers. I’m also afraid to tell her I don’t know how to answer her question.

  “My chair makes you happy?” she asks, saving me from admitting it.

  “It looks comfortable.”

  “Then try it.” She stands and sweeps her arm toward it like a model showing prizes on the old game shows my mom watches. But Mrs. Pinchon’s not close to model pretty.

  I can’t stop staring at her eyebrows. They’re like a pair of sideways question marks: reddish, sort of drawn on, and half-hidden by the red bangs that look permanently plastered to her forehead. I never noticed her eyebrows before, probably because I don’t usually make eye contact with assistant principals in charge of discipline. I have no choice today, now that I’m sinking into this chair. It was more fun last time when I was sneaking a seat.

  “Do you still like my chair?” she says, moving to the other side of her desk.

  This is no time to disagree with anything. I nod.

  “Good.” A dangerous smile creeps onto her face. “I want you to sit there and walk in my shoes, so to speak.”

  I bite my lip to keep from laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Does this lady know everything? “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pinchon. I was picturing me walking in your shoes. Your high heels.”

  She turns away from me, I’m hoping, to hide a smile. “Do you think this is the proper time for such thoughts? Shouldn’t you be thinking about your little stunt?”

  “It’s hard,” I say. “My brain keeps flooding with what you’re gonna do to me.”

  “Which is why I have you sitting in my chair,” she says. “I want you to be me. What punishment would you give yourself?”

  Me? All I can think about is grabbing my passport from my dad’s top dresser drawer and fleeing to Micronesia. “Can’t we look in the rule book to see what’s appropriate?”

  “That’s the problem,” she says. “The rule book doesn’t cover suicide missions.”

  “I wasn’t gonna kill myself.”

  “You could have, and schools don’t like when that happens.” Is that a joke? Should I laugh? Nah. Better listen. “So, Mr. Raines. Appropriate punishment?”

  I should get the worst over with. Maybe not the worst, which would be banning me from The Legend, tied with banning me from soccer next fall. Okay, the next worst. “I wouldn’t suspend me,” I say. “I wasn’t mean, I didn’t hurt anyone, and it’s not good for a kid to stay home from school. You don’t learn anything, you get bored, then you get into more trouble. Especially a twelve-year-old kid like me with both parents working and only my dog at home.”

  “I agree,” she says. “I don’t think suspension befits your actions. Other ideas?”

  I watch myself in the mirror-ball necklace she always wears. It sways back and forth, back and forth, trying to hypnotize me. “Detention,” I say in my new hypnotic state. I can handle smelly detention after school and still catch the end of baseball practice.

  Mrs. Pinchon nods. “Detention. Settled. For how long?”

  Am I deciding my own punishment? Cool. How long? She looks too serious for one day. This is Tuesday. “The rest of the week?”

  “Fine,” she says with another sweep of the arm that sends me to the wooden chair on the other side of her desk.

  “Are you gonna call my mom now?”

  She sits, rocks back, her chin resting on her fingertips. “No. You get the pleasure of telling your parents all the gory details.” She starts typing at her computer.

  Why can’t she call and get this over with? How do I tell my mom what happened without freaking her out? How do I get that paper from Kip’s cap without telling him about it? I wait forever with nothing to do but stare at my own face staring back at me through the ADA PINCHON letters on her gold nameplate.

  Finally Mrs. Pinchon triggers the printer. “This will be for your parents to sign,” she says. “And detention for the rest of the week? That’s appropriate. But…”

  I hate “but.” “But” can make you scrape dried-up gum from under the desks or clean the gym lockers with—

  “But I don’t know if that’s creative enough for your offense.”

  Huh? Will “but” have me tap dancing in detention? Or wearing a fairy costume to gym class? “I don’t know exactly what you mean.”

  “I mean,” she says, “your actions don’t fit any guidelines, so your punishment shouldn’t either.” She glances out the window. “Ah. Here comes Mr. McKenzie with my pickup and those cases of toilet paper the supply company forgot to deliver today.”

  My punishment involves the janitor and toilet paper?

  Idea. “Can my punishment be to help in a safer way? Like helping Mr. McKenzie?”

  She lets out a short laugh. “Why not, Travis? Go help Mr. McKenzie.”

  My lungs breathe easier.

  “But also, according to this letter, you’re to be standing in front of your house tomorrow morning at seven sharp looking for my pickup. I’m your bus, your bicycle, and your legs the rest of this week. You’ll spend your detention here in my office, seven o’clock until school starts, then after school until I take you home. Around five-thirty. Something, thankfully, you weren’t aware of before you climbed onto the roof.”

  CHAPTER 5

  My mom makes me stand outside at ten to seven. In the morning. Before the sun’s all the way up, before my stomach’s ready for breakfast, and probably before Randall’s out of bed. He should be standing here, the oaf. Not here but outside his house. It’s his fault I got in trouble and couldn’t get my For Your Eyes Only paper from Kip last night.

  At exactly seven o’clock, I’d guess, Mrs. Pinchon’s truck rounds the corner to our street.

  I try to smile and bounce to the driveway, hoping a good attitude will let me out of jail to find Kip this morning, but my smile and bounce are still tucked under my covers.

  “Good morning, Mr. Raines,” she says.

  “Morning.” I swing open the navy blue door and hand her the Travis-has-been-bad letter my mom signed. It gives Mrs. Pinchon permission to rule my entire life through Friday.

  “Don’t look so glum. Not everyone has his own personal chauffeur.”

  I give her a piece of a smile because she�
��s right about that. If only I could choose the time and I could choose the chauffeur. It sure as shirt dirt wouldn’t be her and it wouldn’t be now and it wouldn’t be in a pickup.

  She chatters about moving here from Texas and loving St. Louis and doesn’t once bring up my little stunt, as my mom also called it. At least I don’t think she does. It’s hard to listen when your toes feel like eighty-three pickles crammed into a ten-pickle jar.

  I had to wear my old shoes because I never found my baseball cleats yesterday and Mrs. Pinchon didn’t let me get my stuff from my gym locker. I rode my bike home in sock shreds after I helped Mr. McKenzie lug ten more-than-half-my-height cases of toilet paper into the school. So I’m also trying not to flex my arms, which will be sore. Until the Fourth of July.

  We pull up to the building and there, hanging on the bricks where Kip’s cap hung yesterday, are two huge banners. The first is a new one, Legend blue, painted with floating money. The second one has been around for years: a blue triangle and square, interwoven. The symbol of The Legend.

  Normally I’d get run-in-circles excited, but I can see myself stuck in Mrs. Pinchon’s office while every other kid is winning prizes or playing soccer all day or doing whatever The Legend dreamed up. Whoever they are. No one knows how The Legend members get picked or where they meet or how and when they hang the banners. No one knows how they’ve been able to keep everything secret for so many years. But everyone hopes for one thing: to be a member.

  I point to the banner.

  “Yes?” drawls Mrs. Pinchon.

  “What’s the Event?” I say, chickening out from asking the real question.

  “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Will I get to see?” That’s the question.

  She doesn’t answer for what seems like hours. Instead she pulls into her parking space. “I can’t punish myself or any teacher by making one of us stay behind with you.”

  I follow Mrs. Pinchon down the noiseless hall into her lightless office. This dark, her chair looks like a grizzly, and her coat rack with her spare jacket and hat looks like a burglar.