The Seventh Level

by Jody Feldman

  “You’re still playing soccer next year, right? I mean, not football?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly built for football.”

  “Yeah, but I see the way you kick a soccer ball. Football always needs kickers.”

  “Don’t know if I could live without soccer.” I look up toward the stairwell, about half the school building ahead. “Randall,” I say, “you know I wasn’t the one who had you do the soap or the sign or the marbles. And I know you didn’t make me do the gum or the syrup or the flowers.”

  “And both types of the blue envelopes?”

  Both types of envelopes? I look around. No Matti. No Kip. They said they’d be here. They said they’d have my back. Instructions in non-shiny envelopes? Not from The Legend.

  “Something’s not right,” I say. “C’mon!”

  We start running.

  CHAPTER 31

  We speed the opposite way of the brooms and syrup and stuff, back toward the banners, around the corner and—

  “Ahh!”

  Straight into Mr. McKenzie. He is using me.

  He grabs Randall’s arm with one hand and mine with the other. “You!” he says to Randall. “And especially, you!” he yells at me.

  “Ow!”

  “Here I am, giving you the benefit of every doubt, and what do you do? You overflow my toilets. You steal my soap. You wad up my cafeteria with gum. Now this!” He throws our arms down and points to the banners.

  I want to leave, but he’ll tell Mrs. Pinchon, and I have no proof against him. So forget The Legend. Forget soccer camp. Forget soccer captain. And march me off to that school with Jackie Muggs.

  “It wasn’t us, Mr. McKenzie.” But he can make it look that way.

  “You say that every time. ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me,’” he says in a whiny voice. “Well, here you are. And here that is. And what am I supposed think?” He whips out a cell phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Randall says, his voice almost shaking.

  “The police.”

  “Wait,” I say. “We didn’t get the paint on the school. The person who sprayed that banner did but not us.” I lift the edge of mine, then Randall’s. “See. No paint.” I run toward the grass. “C’mere. I saw what would happen if I painted it up there so we both sprayed ours on the grass.”

  “Is that your story, too, Travis’s friend?”

  “He’s—” I almost say he’s not my friend. “His name is Randall.”

  “Well, is it, Randall?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. McKenzie stares. “How do I know you didn’t paint the other one first? You could still be guilty.”

  “You have to believe us.”

  “If I do believe you about the paint, that still doesn’t explain the other pranks.”

  “But I can explain,” I say. “We thought it was—it was—well, it was the school telling us to do stuff. Not the toilets or the fire alarm. We didn’t do those.” I look around. I don’t see anyone, but I lower my voice. “Today, though, things didn’t add up, and we just realized it, and…”

  This would be the perfect time to accuse him of doing all those pranks to get overtime pay. Except I know it’s not true. Not the way he looks. Not the way he sounds. And especially not because he asked Randall’s name. He’d need to know it to put the D for Denvie on Randall’s bundle.

  He glares at me. “And what?”

  “And I really need to catch those bad guys. They’re the ones getting me in trouble.”

  “So, there are bad guys now? And where are these bad guys? In your imagination?”

  “They exist,” I say, still keeping my voice down. “I swear.”

  Randall slips him the sheet of paper. “We have instructions.”

  “He’s right,” I say. “If we started this, why would we write instructions to ourselves?”

  He reads them. “What’s happening at two o’clock?”

  “I don’t know.” I raise my head toward Mr. McKenzie’s ear and whisper, “But supposedly they’re watching us, probably from over there, behind the back bushes, so if you call the police now, we may never find out.”

  He shakes his head. “I want to believe you, Travis, but you’re here with the evidence.”

  This could be suicide, but…“Do you have Mrs. Pinchon’s number?”

  “I do.”

  “Mrs. Pinchon?” Randall turns several shades of pale. “Why?”

  “I want her to be here. I want her to see I’m not the one.”

  “I’m not the one either,” Randall says.

  I nod. “We’re not the ones.”

  Mr. McKenzie leads us into the building so no one can overhear. He pushes some numbers into his phone and hands it to me.

  The phone stops ringing. “Yes, Ralph?” comes the drawl at the other end.

  “It’s not Mr. McKenzie, Mrs. Pinchon. It’s me. Travis Raines.” I tell her the story of me and Randall being there. “I wanted you to know,” I finish. “It was my idea to call because I want to help catch whoever’s been making me look bad.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can, Mr. Raines.”

  I press End, hand Mr. McKenzie his phone, and grow a way-too-big smile on my face.

  “You want to let me in on whatever’s so amusing, Travis?”

  Why not? “I thought you were setting me up to get overtime pay.”

  His smile turns into a laugh. “No, buddy. That’s not—”

  Randall comes looming over us. “Um, Travis? I hate to break up this party,” he says, “but we were supposed to get out of here after ten minutes.”

  He’s right. “We need to leave, Mr. McKenzie,” I say. “I promise we’ll come right back, but if the bad guys are watching, we’ve gotta make this look good, like we got away with something.”

  He steps aside.

  Randall and I burst out of school and keep moving. “He forgot to check my backpack for cans!” I say loud enough for the back bushes to hear. We high-five. We laugh. We walk around to the front. He sits on the steps and calls his parents. I jump onto my bike, pedal down the main road, then stop on a side street, where I call mine. “Be home in about an hour.”

  It’s 7:42. In just over six hours, I find out exactly who’s been making my life miserable. First, though, I need to sneak back into school.

  I weave around the neighborhood for a couple minutes and end at a street opposite Lauer. I chain my bike to the signpost. Look at the school. Coast is clear. Go! I race across the street. Aim for the parking lot. Jump behind the bushes near the door.

  Finally Mrs. Pinchon’s pickup pulls in. She walks toward the entrance where I’m sitting. I don’t want to cause her a heart attack, so I rustle around. “It’s me in here, Mrs. Pinchon,” I half whisper. “Me, Travis. Behind the bushes.”

  She nods, unlocks the door, and goes in. The door shuts then stays open an inch from the doorstop she kicks into place.

  I crawl into the school, close the door all the way, and hope none of the bad guys saw me.

  When we get to her office, Mr. McKenzie and Randall are already there. We give her every detail, and Randall‘s almost in tears when he admits he swiped the soap.

  “And whoever you’re looking for was here this morning,” Mr. McKenzie says. “I checked the stairwell. The syrup and soap were moved to the space inside the door with the mops, brooms, and buckets.”

  “How’s that possible, Ralph? It should have triggered the alarm.”

  He shakes his head. “The interior door trips the alarm. No one breached that. But they’ll be back by two o’clock. And we know what they’re planning to do with the syrup and soap.”

  “I figure they’re not planning to make pancakes then clean up after themselves,” I say.

  Mr. McKenzie smiles. “When you get home, mix the two together and smear some on a plate. Let it dry for a couple days, then try to wash it off, but not under running water. We can’t put the hall floors under running water. Try to wash it off with a
rag.”

  I picture it. Sticky, soapy bubbles slopped all over. It’d take forever to wipe it up.

  “Now,” Mrs. Pinchon says, “back to the perpetrators. Do you know who they are?”

  “I think it’s Marco,” Randall says.

  “Marco Knox?” she says.

  Randall nods. “He’s been griping over The Legend getting all the attention and how someone should change that.” Randall tells us things Marco’s said recently, and it makes sense.

  He started being nice right after I climbed on the roof. And he was there when I talked about the toilet paper. I want to punch him for using me.

  “If that’s everything, boys,” Mrs. Pinchon says, “then go home. Do what you normally do on the weekend.”

  I shake my head.

  “Now what, Mr. Raines?”

  “We have to come back at two o’clock.”

  “Oh no,” says Mrs. Pinchon. “We’ll let the police handle it from here.”

  “You can’t,” I say. “If the police are waiting and we don’t show up, the bad guys’ll know we called them. And if it’s Marco and his oafs, then either move me to east Micronesia or make a reservation in the nearest emergency room.”

  “Even if the police arrest them,” says Randall, “it’s not forever. They’ll be back for us.”

  Mrs. Pinchon twirls her hypnotic necklace. “Let me get this straight. You both want to be here when the police show up so they can haul you to the station, too?”

  “No.” I tell her my plan.

  “I can live with that,” she says. “But if it’s not working, we’re stepping in.”

  I don’t love that, but we agree.

  “Now go,” she says. “I’ll see you both back here around noon.”

  “Two hours early?” I ask.

  “Go home,” she says. “You’ll understand.”

  CHAPTER 32

  My parents are relaxing with their coffee and the newspaper when I get back.

  “How was your adventure?” my dad says.

  “Not over.”

  “I had a feeling.” He hands me a shiny blue envelope.

  “Who gave you this?” I say.

  “Some guy delivered it,” says my dad. “And no, I didn’t recognize him.”

  I race the envelope up to my room, unwind the string, dump out a seventh coin. Also a metal bar. It has a small knob on one side and seven round indentations on the other. I pull out the paper.

  Seven puzzles solved.

  Seven objects delivered.

  Seven coins collected.

  Now you’ll find out why.

  Be inside Room 117 at exactly 12:07 this afternoon.

  Bring the bar and the coins. You’ll know what to do if you follow the rules.

  Follow the rules? Hasn’t that put me in a mess of trouble? It won’t today. I know more.

  And now I need my parents to know more, too. I go back downstairs. “You know this thing I’ve been doing?”

  “Yes?” my parents say together like they’ve been rehearsing.

  “There’s this group of oafs—”

  “Oafs?” says my mom.

  “Bad guys who tricked a few of us—me and Randall and probably some third person—into believing that if we did what they said, we’d be part of The Legend.”

  “What we got wasn’t real?”

  “That part was real.” And I explain the two sets of instructions and about the bubble gum, flowers, syrup, and spray paint. I dig into my pocket and pull out a business card. “Mrs. Pinchon’s waiting for you to call so you know everything I do the rest of the day is legal.”

  My mom makes the call.

  I pace around the kitchen and listen to a lot of “uhhuh”s and “I understand”s but nothing worth knowing.

  My pacing expands to the whole house, and time drags more slowly than a sled with five hundred pounds of kids going uphill on unmown grass. If I would stop looking at the clock every two minutes, it might go faster, but what else am I supposed to do?

  TV! I haven’t really watched it since I’ve been off house arrest. I turn it on, but after ten minutes of barely watching, I turn it off. I go into the kitchen and manage to swallow a lemon-free, taste-free moon cookie my mom made last night. I head upstairs and zip the seven Legend coins and the metal bar into my knee side pocket. I take the pictures of Randall and the soap out of my desk and shred them. I’m done in here.

  I go out and kick my soccer ball against the garage until my dad comes to kick it around with me. After a while he convinces me to get something to eat, so I have half a milk shake. Then he makes me wash up a little.

  “It’s just school,” I say.

  “But it’s with people,” he says. “And they have noses.”

  I change my shirt but not my pants. The coins and bar are already safe in this pocket.

  Somehow the clock moves around to noon, and my mom drops me off at school. Mrs. Pinchon suggested I not take my bike.

  There’s a security guard stationed at a table inside the front door. Is he normally here on Saturday or special for today? I don’t ask. He checks my name off a long list.

  I doubt every person on the list is getting into The Legend. There are probably kids practicing for the play and the debate team and Science Olympiad, but I don’t have the energy to worry about who else is here. I’m already worried enough about two o’clock. Also what to do with the coins and the bar.

  I turn right and reach Room 117, Mrs. Bloom’s science room. The window on the door is covered with a shade. Do I knock? Just go in? I crack open the door about an inch. It’s mostly dark inside. “Hello?” Silent, too. I let the door close behind me.

  I’ve been in this room every school day this year, and I cannot think of an obvious place for a bar and seven coins. I take inventory. Desks, lab tables, stools, sinks, closets, bookshelves, Bunsen burners, microscopes, ecosystem displays, static electricity maker, whiteboard, Whiskers, and worm farms. What am I missing?

  Follow the rules and I’ll know what to do, today’s letter said. The rules! Why didn’t I look at them when I was home? I can remember them. Keeping secrets. Solving everything alone and fast. Parents knowing. And the weird one. #6. Opportunity closing a window and opening a door. The window to the room was blocked off….

  So, what door’s open? Lab table door? Closet door? Closet door! The Toxic Closet! That weird bar lock’s hanging loose on the handle. The door is cracked open.

  This has to be it. Either that or I’ll be toxic in a minute. I wedge my fingers into the opening. Deeper and deeper. No alarms. No flashing lights. I pull.

  No chemicals, either. Another door. This one has a weird bar lock, too, with its seven round indentations.

  I unzip my pocket and pull out a coin. The nickel side fits perfectly into an indent. I grab another. Pop that in. Grab the bar. The bar! With seven circles, too. Dime-sized?

  I put the dime side of one coin into the bar, and it clicks into place like there’s a magnet. A strong magnet. I’m making a key!

  I pop the other six coins into the bar. Fit the new key into the bar lock. Grab the little knob on the other side. Pull back and…

  Nothing. It doesn’t move.

  Shove it right. Nothing. Left. Nothing. Down. Nothing. Up. Something. Up and around? The bar lock rotates. The door opens. I put my new key into my pocket.

  And I start down the blue-lit stairs.

  CHAPTER 33

  It would be a normal school staircase, going down one flight into the basement, but normal school staircases aren’t behind Toxic Closet doors. And don’t require keys. They do lead to halls like this one does. I follow the string of blue twinkle lights, which ends at another bar-locked door. I put my key in and rotate it up.

  Standing on the other side of the door, with his or her back toward me, is someone in The Legend’s blue robe. The person motions for me to walk ahead toward an open entry.

  I take three steps and glance back and the person’s walking the way I just came in, clo
sing the door between us. I hear it lock.

  I continue to a barely-lit room that is probably the half-sized, extra gym the school doesn’t use anymore. I saw it on an old fire escape map. The room looks smaller than on the map, but it has a wood-slat gym floor and probably cinder block walls behind the blue curtains on the sides. A screen suspended from the ceiling shows clips of different Legend events, some from during my time at Lauer but most from before.

  Mai Lin from my grade is in the first of seven chairs back here near the entry. In the second is Randall, an oafish grin on his face probably like mine. I take the third. No one tells us to be quiet, but it’s like talking would break a magic spell. So we keep grinning and watching and waiting. Soon Sari Wolfe, the one who doesn’t eew at worms, comes in. After her, one by one, three sixth graders fill the other chairs.

  The video stops. Seven spotlights shine on the floor like an invitation to move forward. We do. Then, appearing from the two front corners, as if they’ve walked through the walls, blue-robed people parade in and stand before us.

  Strrrick! A match lights a candle in the first person’s hand, which lights another and another and…

  I look around. Find the exits. See the fire alarm and extinguisher. Pay attention again.

  By now all the candles are lit and illuminating the faces of The Legend members. First seven eighth graders. Then Natalie Levin. Then Matti and Kip.

  The first eighth grader whispers, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.”

  They all nod and their voices whisper in unison, “It started with seven. Seven students. Seven pranks. Seven problems. Seven minds, looking for solutions. They found them, and in turn, they founded The Legend.

  “The Legend.” The voices echo and roll, the words repeating like a wave, one on top of the other.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” comes the first hushed voice.

  They file to the right, circle away from us, place their candles into holders, then return to the straight line, with seven of them holding up blue robes.

  No one says anything, but it’s like we’re sucked into their ceremony and know to step forward, turn around, and let them help us into our robes. I zip mine up.