Steel was next. Penny gave him a boost, and Steel bounded effortlessly into the tree, trying to show Kaileigh that boys were good at some things, even if girls thought them useless.
“Good luck,” Penny said.
“And to you,” Kaileigh returned, for Penny now faced the chore of returning the security camera to where it belonged, inside the library, and all before curfew.
“Is your roommate covering for you?” Steel asked Kaileigh as they ascended through the branches.
“She’d better. I gave her a leather-bound journal that my father bought me as a kind of diary. It wasn’t cheap.”
“I told Verne I’d help him with Chaucer.”
“Seriously? Will you help me too?”
“Sure,” he said, happy at the thought. This surprised him. He’d never really thought much about spending time with friends. Maybe that was why he hadn’t had all that many back home. Maybe starting over at Wynncliff was about more than hiding his incredible powers of memorization from others.
Up they climbed, higher and higher, the lights from the chapel windows fading to the thick of the leaves. There was music playing from Randolph’s house—a solo violin piece that was too good to be anything but a recording.
Halfway up the tree, about thirty feet, Steel paused in the crook of a branch. As in the lower branches, Steel found clusters of initials carved into the bark, some dating back over eighty years. It was as if the tree were a living yearbook, recalling all the students that had climbed it, all the students that had come and gone, many dead by now. The discovery both excited and chilled him, for lately the thought of death had been present in his mind.
“Perfect!” Kaileigh said in a whisper, seeing that from where they were, they had a good view through the branches of both the chapel to their left, Randolph’s house to their right, and the route between the two.
“Now we wait,” Steel said.
“And we hope.”
“They’ll come.”
“You think they will.”
“He called it an operation,” Steel reminded, “and they aren’t surgeons.”
Kaileigh suppressed a giggle, covering her mouth with her hand. For a moment Steel recalled what a strange and indefinable feeling it had been to have Nell Campbell’s hand across his own mouth.
The minutes dragged by and the campus emptied. The darkness settled around them, and for a moment Steel wondered about what they were doing, the risk they were taking compared to any possible gain. Kaileigh had tried to reason with him, had tried to tell him, but he hadn’t listened. Not until now, when it was too late. He checked the glowing hands of his wristwatch: first curfew had come and gone fifteen minutes ago. They hadn’t seen any teachers out searching, so they figured their roommates had covered for them so far. But how much longer could the ruse hold?
At twenty-five minutes past the hour, four people—upperclassmen—appeared from around the chapel. They moved silently and quickly, and just the way they hunched and hurried suggested something secretive, almost sinister. They cut a straight line between the chapel and Randolph’s house, where, to Steel’s utter amazement, they made their way to a side door that accessed the screened-in porch and let themselves in without knocking.
This convinced Steel that he was on to something. He swelled with a sense of purpose and nodded to Kaileigh through the branches. He pantomimed, pointing first to himself and then to the ground. She nodded. Once he dropped out of the tree, without a boost he couldn’t climb back into it. They were separating now. He’d promised he would come back to help her out of the tree, but both of them knew it wasn’t necessarily a promise he could keep.
“I know you’ll try,” she said.
“I will. I promise. No matter what, I don’t want you getting in trouble.”
“That’s sweet.”
“No…” he said, not wanting to be sweet. “It’s the truth.”
“I know. Forget it. Okay? I’ll be fine.”
“No heroics.”
“Shut up,” she said.
Steel smiled in the dark.
Steel dropped from the lowest branch and hit the soft ground silently. He stayed in shadows thrown from lights in the chapel and made his way to Randolph’s. The house, painted white with black trim, was surrounded by handsomely maintained gardens of rhododendron, forsythia, and honeysuckle. Steel ducked through the planting to get his eyes to a window. He hesitated, taking a moment to look up into the tree and see if could spot Kaileigh. He felt desperate to see her, to make contact, to gain encouragement, for his heart was pounding in his chest, his hands were cold, and his mouth was dry. He pushed out all thought of what might happen to him if caught, focusing on the task at hand.
He sneaked a look inside from the corner of the windowsill: an empty parlor lit by light from a hallway. He kept moving, next eyeing a butler’s pantry, also dark.
He was forced to leave the security of the bushes, hurrying around the screened-in porch and reentering the planting on the other side. He lifted to his tiptoes, raising his eyes above the sill, and then dropped like a sack of stones.
Not Mrs. Randolph, since Kaileigh had told him the woman had died. An older lady, she removed doughnuts from a box and arranged them on a large plate. Maybe she was a teacher Steel hadn’t met yet, or a kitchen worker, or school housekeeper. She had four glasses of orange juice and a cup of coffee on a tray.
Steel pushed his back against the house, his heart beating wildly.
“Who-who…who-who…” Kaileigh’s warning call sounded impossibly real. It flushed him with heat. He slumped lower, blood pulsing at his temples, and tried to slow his breathing so as not to be heard. He waited for what seemed like an impossibly long time.
Someone was either approaching him and the house, or Kaileigh had managed to see someone inside the house. Either way, she’d warned him off.
Then he spotted it: a shadow out across the grass. And he understood that the woman with the tray was standing in the window directly over his head. Had he made noise to attract her attention? Was she looking for him, for someone creeping around in the bushes? Steel didn’t know what to do. If he moved, if he made any attempt to run, she’d see him. If he didn’t, and she somehow knew there was someone out there, then he was a sitting duck.
The shadow moved.
“Coo-coo,” came the call from the tree. All clear.
He understood then that he wasn’t going to find Randolph and the boys on this side of the house. He was going to have to continue around the house, away from the protective eyes of Kaileigh.
He made his move. Low and quiet, he dodged a set of back steps, continuing past a storm cellar entrance, and hugged the next corner of the house, arriving to a long line of equally sized windows.
The flower beds along this side of the house had not been raked recently, so the fallen leaves crackled underfoot as Steel crept toward the first window. He saw inside to a music room and study, also dark. He hated to take even a single step, the crunching of the leaves seeming so loud to sensitive ears.
He slipped ahead to the next window and discovered the dining room. DesConte sat in a chair at the dining table, his back to the window. The three other boys flanked him. Randolph sat facing the far wall, where a portable screen had been erected. A projector, connected to a laptop computer, showed slides of what looked like a foreign country. A building in the pictures was large and surrounded by a tall wall. There was a guard booth. It looked to Steel like an embassy or some kind of official building.
The next slide revealed a neighborhood, but not like any Steel had ever seen. Each boy had a pad of paper and a pen and was taking notes on every new slide.
A class? Was Randolph…tutoring the boys? History? Something for extra credit?
Steel felt like a moron. All this for…
But if just tutoring, then why had the boys snuck around, arriving here through the tunnels? That made no sense. Why tutor after hours when the boys belonged in their dorm rooms? Why try to hid
e that the boys were here in the first place? It couldn’t be tutoring—not exactly—and yet…
“Who-who. Who-who.” The warning cry carried faintly around the house. Kaileigh’s second warning.
The old woman?
Something jumped at him. It sprang from the sill of the very window he’d been peering through. A cat! It had been right there, right next to him, sitting so quietly, so dead still, that he hadn’t seen it. It pounced and landed on him, sticking its claws into his arm.
“Oww!” Steel shouted.
Everyone in the dining room spun toward the window. Steel ducked.
He heard Randolph shout, “GO!” Chairs banged to the floor. Footfalls pounded against and squeaked the plank flooring.
DesConte and the three others were coming after him.
“Who-who! Who-who!” The pigeon sounded far more agitated.
Steel took off toward the chapel. If he could only make it into the tunnels…
Kaileigh would see him running and could join him in the choir room. There was still a chance of getting away.
As he cleared the front corner of the house, he caught a blur through a window: two of the boys racing toward the front door.
The other two were no doubt headed to the back.
The screen door flew open just as Steel skidded to a stop.
He was facing Verne and a friend of Verne’s, an African American student named Earl Coleman.
What the heck was Verne doing here?
“Go!” Verne whispered. “We got you covered. Go!”
Steel scrambled away just as the boys came off the porch. He dove and hid in some bushes.
“What-a-we-got-here?” It was DesConte.
“Just out for a stroll,” Verne said. His eyes flashed in the dark.
The other two boys from the dining room reached them. Verne and Earl stepped forward, blocking the way to Steel’s hiding place.
Steel saw Kaileigh drop from the lowest branch and run around to the far side of the chapel. DesConte glanced in that direction, but missed getting a good look at her.
Steel sneaked away toward a stone wall.
“You want a piece of me?” Steel heard DesConte ask Verne and Earl.
Three minutes later, Steel and Kaileigh met at the chapel’s main doors. They ran inside, and Steel led her through the hidden door into the pipe room. They were in the tunnel now, keeping their heads low and moving as fast as their feet would carry them.
He led the way, turning right at the common room, heading past the metal rungs that led to the auditorium, and into new territory. The tunnel angled slightly left. Steel switched on and off sets of lights. Suddenly the tunnel extended a hundred yards or more in front of them: the dorms.
He found a ladder that roughly matched the distance to Kaileigh’s dorm. He led her up the ladder and found himself facing a panel of lumber construction. He worked with the panel and then noticed a peephole. He put his eye to it.
“It’s the boys’ bathroom,” he said. “Lower Two. A shower stall.”
Now he understood where, in his own dorm’s washroom, he’d lost track of the boys he’d gone after weeks before.
“The boys’ room?”
“I don’t think you have any choice.”
He found that by pulling the panel toward him, it clicked and released. And he swung it open.
The washroom was empty.
“You know where you are?” he asked.
“Yes. My dorm’s directly overhead.” She looked terrified.
“Can you do this?”
She nodded.
“Okay. Better hurry.”
She stepped through the hidden panel and pushed it shut.
“What the heck?” he asked Verne when his roommate returned to their room fifteen minutes later.
“Is that ‘Thank you’?”
“Yes. It’s that and: What the heck? Where did you come from?”
“I followed you. Not me, actually. It was Earl who did that.”
“Followed me?”
“Went looking for you. You asked me to cover for you, you got me all curious.”
“And White Socks?”
“No sweat. He bought it.”
The boys undressed quickly, changing into pajamas. Steel tossed the laundry bags into the closet and moved the dummy head there as well. Second curfew was in three minutes. They could hear White Socks making his way from room to room.
“But—”
“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Verne said. “DesConte was ready to split your head open, I think.”
“You’re going to get into trouble,” Steel said. “You think he saw me?”
“He saw you, but I don’t think he knew who it was.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I got your back.”
“But why?”
“We’re roomies. ’Sides which, you’re now going to tell me everything that’s going on.”
“You think?”
“I know. I saved your butt. Me and Earl.”
“It’s complicated, and I don’t know it all.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t tell you,” Steel said, “what I don’t know.”
“We’re roomies,” Verne repeated. “So you’ll tell me what you do know.”
White Socks opened the door. “Keep it down in here. Shut your…trapp.” He’d amused himself. He pulled the door closed, and they heard him move to the next room.
“That’s original,” Steel said.
Verne chuckled.
Roomies, Steel thought.
The bleachers that surrounded the ga-ga pit on three sides were overflowing with students and faculty. Even more people were standing or sitting crossed-legged on the grass. The ever-present Connecticut wind was lessened by the pit’s position in the lee of the gymnasium, and the early afternoon sun remained high enough in the sky to cast strong but barely slanting shadows so that the pit seemed lit by spotlights.
As a reserve Spartan, Steel sat in the front row of one of the aluminum bleachers, with a few empty spaces between him and Hinchman. To his right sat Cloris Twiler, a horse-faced girl with wide shoulders and amazingly quick reaction times, the other Spartan reserve. Cloris expressed anxiety by worming her hands like a ball of snakes in her lap.
“Can you stop that, please?” Steel said to her.
“No,” she answered, without taking her eyes off the ga-ga pit.
The first of seven games had been no match at all. The Argos players—the Argives—led by DesConte, had proved themselves far more agile and fleet-footed. Their use of the boards—the octagonal walls of the pit—was precise and devastating for the Spartans. When in the hands of the Argives, the spud traveled as if it had a mind of its own, seeking out all Spartans and striking them below the knee with authority. The game was over nearly before it began, with the Spartans’ five members quickly whittled down to just one, Brenda Simple, who didn’t last long, being outnumbered as she was.
Hinchman psyched up the team for the second game, placing the Spartans into a defensive formation known as gammon—a play on the word backgammon, for the teammates lined up in an I-formation, but back to back. The gammon defense worked; the Spartans stayed in the game longer and got the upper hand, five players to three. Some adroit passing and the Argives’ striker, DesConte, was eliminated. A few strategic passes and the Spartans had won.
In a surprising move, the Argos coach retired a player and called upon a reserve, the results devastating: the Argives handily won the next two games, quickly getting up four players to two and then “running the pit”—eliminating the remaining players. In the process, Ronald Martinez, the Spartans’ foremost striker, was hit with a wild ball to the stomach and went over the pit wall backward, twisting his knee. The crowd hushed as Martinez went down, and groaned as he came up limping.
Hinchman turned to his bench: Cloris and Steel. There were no rules preventing him from loading his team with three girls, all of whom were formida
ble players, but his tightly set eyes lingered on Steel.
“Trapp,” he said.
Steel swallowed with difficulty, his eyes lighting upon two faces in the crowd: Nell Campbell and Kaileigh. He’d been so focused on the ga-ga pit in the early going, he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the crowd. But now he felt both the joy and terror of being picked to play. They were behind three games to one, meaning a single defeat would cost Sparta the match.
Hinchman pulled him by the shoulders, leaned down, and spoke into his ear. “You’ve been watching the game,” he said. “I’m counting on that. Anticipate their every move. Exploit their weaknesses. You can do this.”
Steel nodded. Hinchman turned him toward the pit. He was greeted by his teammates with fist-pounds as he climbed over the wall.
There was DesConte grinning at him the way a wolf grins at a wounded lamb. The two teams, five players each, lined up on opposite sides of the pit. Hinchman elected a “2-3”—two players in front, three behind. The Argives stayed with the “1-3-1” they’d been using—a player out front, in this case a girl, three players behind her, with DesConte in the middle, and a remaining player behind the row of three, the other girl. DesConte, the team’s strongest player and best striker, was protected within a diamond of teammates. If the team structure could be maintained, it meant that there was a high percentage of probability that he would remain in play the longest, be the last Argive standing. This gave their team the best chance of winning.
The 2-3 chosen by Hinchman was a more aggressive lineup, as it put two strikers, Steel and Toby Taggart, up front against the Argives’ one. Their best overall player, their team captain, a boy named Reddie Long, was in the middle of their two girls, in the back row.
The referee tossed the ball into the middle of the pit and the play began.
Steel, while never taking his eyes off the spud, focused less on the play and more on what Hinchman had told him: Anticipate, exploit. Without giving it direct thought, he shook off his nerves and immediately knew exactly what each player was going to do before he or she did it. This included his own teammates. His ability to anticipate—to know—slowed the game down for him. He blocked out the crowd noise, even the voice of his coach, and watched as the ball began to move as if heavy and tired. He could calculate its direction and destination long before the spud arrived at a given point.
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