by Dan Gutman
Most people tend to drift away from their childhood pals as they de- velop new interests and new friends. But Coke and Jimmy never did. There was a comfort level there. It’s easy to trust somebody you’ve known all your life.
“Later,” Coke replied, and headed down the hall to the health room.
The health teacher, Mrs. Audrey Higgins, had that look on her face. It was the look that said she hated her job, she hated her life, and she hated the kids she had to teach. And they hated her right back.
“Today we’re going to learn how to brush our teeth, correctly,” Mrs. Higgins informed the class.
Coke groaned, and Mrs. Higgins probably heard it. He found it inconceivable that sixth graders had to be taught how to brush their teeth or that precious class time would be wasted on something so commonsensical. He looked around to see if anybody else in the class saw the ridiculousness of it all. They just stared back at him blankly. Zombies.
Mrs. Higgins was a tall woman with short hair. She squirted a dollop of hand sanitizer, which she always kept on her desk, and rubbed the stuff into her palms. Then she picked up a toothbrush.
“Grasp the handle firmly,” Mrs. Higgins told the class, “and always brush up and down. Never side to side.”
Coke had no real problem with Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique. But he did have an interest in busting chops, especially when it came to grown-ups.
“What’s wrong with brushing from side to side, Mrs. Higgins?” he asked politely.
Mrs. Higgins stopped for a moment to look at Coke. She was used to kids like him: bored, supersmart know-it-alls who amused themselves by asking dumb questions.
“If you brush from side to side,” she explained slowly, as if he was developmentally challenged, “your teeth will grow in crooked. That should be self-evident, Mr. McDonald.”
It also should have been the end of the discussion, but Coke couldn’t let it drop.
“Why would they grow in crooked?” Coke asked. “If you put an equal amount of pressure on the teeth as you brush to the left and an equal amount of pressure as you brush to the right, the pressure on both sides would be equal; and the teeth would have no reason to grow in anything but straight. Unless, of course, you’re claiming that Newton’s third law of motion is incorrect. That is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
A few of the boys in the back snickered. They had no idea what Coke was talking about, but they could tell he was giving Mrs. Higgins a hard time. She looked at Coke wearily. She’d had enough of him and his attention-getting devices.
“That’s detention for you, McDonald.”
“What?” Coke shouted. “What did I do? You’re gonna give me detention because I questioned you about how to brush teeth? Are you kidding me? It’s the last day of school! I was just exercising my freedom of speech.”
“Your freedom of speech ends at my ears,” Mrs. Higgins said.
“This is child abuse; that’s what it is!”
She ignored him. The bell rang, and everybody pushed through the front door chanting the chorus of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” Coke trudged to the detention room.
It was a depressing, windowless room in the basement of the school. On the whiteboard, somebody had scrawled: PAY ATTENTION AND AVOID DETENTION. Coke was surprised to see one other student in the room, sitting in the second row: his sister.
“What are you in for?” she asked Coke. “Armed robbery?”
“I questioned the philosophy behind Mrs. Higgins’s tooth-brushing technique,” he replied. “And you?”
“Chewing gum,” Pep said.
“Nice move,” Coke said. “Got a piece for me?”
Pep opened her mouth to show him the only piece of gum she had.
It just might be a long afternoon. Coke took a seat and opened his dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He hadn’t read a children’s book since first grade when he decided they were too easy.
“This is totally unfair,” Pep complained. “What kind of teacher gives detention on the last day of school? We’re probably the only ones left in the whole building. Everybody else is gone for the summer.”
A minute later, Mrs. Higgins came into the room. She was wearing white gloves. All the West Marin Middle School kids knew that Mrs. Higgins was germ phobic and obsessive-compulsive about personal hygiene. That was probably why she became a health teacher in the first place. When she was feeling particularly paranoid, Mrs. Higgins would put on her gloves. Kids would make fun of her behind her back.
When she saw Pep and Coke sitting there, she smirked. Coke refused to give her the satisfaction of eye contact.
“How long will this be?” Pep asked Mrs. Higgins.
“As long as it takes,” the teacher replied.
Pep slumped in her seat and looked at the door. It was wooden, with a thin sliver of window in it just a few inches wide. The school janitor, Mr. Rochford, walked by pushing a broom. He glanced inside as he passed.
Mr. Rochford was a creepy-looking, extremely obese man with a big, bushy beard and mustache. As far as the students knew, he had never said a word to anybody, which led to all sorts of speculations and rumors about him. Some said he was ashamed because he couldn’t speak English. Others insisted he was a deaf mute. The conspiracy crowd claimed he had his tongue ripped while serving time in a Bolivian prison. Everybody called him Bones because he was so fat.
Her cell phone rang, and Mrs. Higgins rushed to open her pocketbook. She said hello on the third ring, but the call was dropped.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Mrs. Higgins went out into the hallway. The door closed behind her.
Coke thought briefly about just picking up and walking out of there. What could Mrs. Higgins do, suspend him? It was the last day of school.
But then the lock on the door clicked. There was no escape.
“What do you think janitors do over the summer?” Pep asked her brother. She had a way of caring about people in whom most other kids couldn’t be less interested. “How do they support themselves?”
“Bones is probably a part-time brain surgeon,” Coke said. “Sweeping the floor and cleaning up kids’ puke is his hobby.”
“Funny,” his sister commented.
“Actually, I think he might be retarded,” said Coke.
“You’re not supposed to say retarded,” Pep told her brother. “You’re supposed to say mentally challenged.”
“Whatever.”
Coke went back to The Catcher in the Rye. He didn’t feel like debating the point.
“Do you think Bones could have been one of those guys who tried to kill us yesterday?” Pep asked.
Coke looked up from his book and thought for a moment. His brain was stuffed with so much data, he had nearly forgotten that twenty-four hours earlier he and his sister had jumped off a cliff after being chased by lunatics in golf carts wearing bowler hats and armed with blowguns. A photographic memory only goes so far.
“That’s ridiculous,” Coke said, looking back down at his book. “Janitors don’t kill people.”
“Do you smell smoke?” Pep suddenly asked.
“No,” Coke replied, clearly annoyed with his sister. “Don’t you have a book or something to read?”
“I smell something,” Pep insisted.
“You’re having an olfactory hallucination.”
“Women have a stronger sense of smell than men do, y’know,” Pep told him.
Coke knew it was true. In third grade, he’d done a science project in which he had males and females sniff various substances to determine which gender was more sensitive to smell. The girls won easily. The project was written up in the local paper and even mentioned in a national science magazine.
“So maybe the school will burn down, and we can get out of here,” Coke remarked.
“You shouldn’t even joke about things like that.”
A few minutes passed, and Coke suddenly looked up from his book.
“Something’s burning!” he said, alarmed.
“I told you I smelled smoke!” Pep replied.
They jumped up and saw puffs of smoke coming out of the vent in the back of the room.
“We gotta get outta here!” Coke said.
“Where’s Mrs. Higgins?” Pep asked.
“Who cares about her?” Coke said with a snort. “Let’s worry about us.”
“She’s the only one who can open the door for us!” said Pep. She ran to the door and turned the knob. The door was locked. Coke tried to yank it open. Nothing. The door was made of thick wood. It felt warm to the touch. Smoke could be seen through the narrow slit of a window.
“The dead bolt is locked from the other side!” Coke said.
Smoke was pouring out of the vent now. It was starting to fill the room. The roaring sound of a fire could be heard, too.
“Help!” Pep hollered. “Mrs. Higgins! We’re locked up in here!”
“She probably ran out of the building to save herself,” Coke said. “She doesn’t care about us. She hates kids.”
Pep was getting frantic. She let out a scream in a frequency that only girls can produce—another advantage females have over males.
“Stop that!” Coke yelled, putting his hands over his ears.
“We’re gonna suffocate in here!” Pep yelled at him. “I’m gonna call Mom and Dad on the cell!”
“You can’t get a good signal in this room,” Coke told her. “I’ve tried plenty of times. I’m gonna break down the door. It’s the only way out.”
Pep rolled her eyes as Coke paced off ten steps and prepared to take a running leap at the door.
“If you do your famous Inflictor move, you’re gonna break your leg again,” she said as she stepped aside to give him some running room.
“I’m not gonna kick it down,” Coke told her. “I’m gonna use my shoulder.”
He backed up as far as he could go and sprinted for the door. At the last instant, he turned and leaped against the door. Then he crumpled to the floor.
“Did you dislocate your shoulder?” Pep asked, running to him.
“Shut up.”
Smoke was snaking under the door. The fire was in the hall. In the detention room, it was becoming hard to see. Worse, it was getting hard to breathe.
Coke was becoming enraged. Despite his sore shoulder, he got up and picked up a desk with both hands. Then he heaved it against the door. It clattered to the ground harmlessly after doing no more damage than nicking off a little paint.
Pep looked around frantically for something she could use to open the door.
“The fire extinguisher!” she yelled as she ran across the room and lifted it off a hook on the wall.
“We’ll die from smoke inhalation before the flames get to us!” Coke yelled at her. “The whole school could be burning down! You think you’re gonna put out the fire with a little fire extinguisher?”
“No!” she replied. “We can use it as a battering ram!”
Coke immediately understood what his sister had in mind as she held the fire extinguisher against the wooden door.
Newton’s first law of motion states that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. If they could put enough force against a single point on that door, they might be able to crash right through it. Coke picked up the desk again.
Despite everything that was happening, he couldn’t help but think how much fun it was to bust up stuff. Busting up stuff was one of the most fun things you could do. Building things is a long, slow, and difficult process. But busting up stuff was nothing but fun, as long as you didn’t have to clean up the mess afterward. He had often thought that the ideal career choice would be to work in the demolition business, blowing up old buildings and stadiums. The money probably wasn’t very good, but nothing beat the thrill of demolishing things.
Pep held the fire extinguisher against the door. Coke gave himself some running room and gripped the legs of the desk tightly.
“You ready?” he asked. “On three.”
“One . . . two . . . three!” they both hollered.
Coke took a deep breath and made a run for the door holding the desk in front him like a battering ram. Pep closed her eyes and tensed her muscles to absorb the impact. When the top surface of the desk crashed against the fire extinguisher, it hit a seam in the wood and broke through, cracking the door in half and sending two preteenagers, a school desk, a fire extinguisher, and pieces of splintered wood into the hallway.
But the hallway was engulfed in flames.
Chapter 7
The Science of Fire
Fire is an interesting thing. If you’ve ever passed your finger through a candle flame quickly, you know it doesn’t hurt. But leave that finger in the flame for one short second, and it’s a different story.
Did you ever look deeply into a flame? The white part is hotter than the yellow part, and the yellow part is hotter than the red part. But the hottest part of a flame is the blue part. That’s odd, because we think of blue as the color of cold and red as the color of heat.
You need three things to create fire: oxygen, heat, and fuel. Combine them, and you get ignition. Take any one of them away, and the fire goes out. The science of fire is pretty simple, really.
When the average kid comes crashing through a locked door and lands face-first in a hallway filled with smoke and flames, he probably isn’t going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the science of fire. But Coke McDonald was not an average kid.
“Avoid the blue flames!” Coke shouted as he landed on top of his sister, who, in turn, had landed on top of the shattered door.
“Get off of me!” Pep shouted right back.
The twins jumped off the hot floor and were faced with a nightmare scenario. There were flames and thick smoke in all directions. The sprinkler system in the hallway ceiling had turned on, but the spray of water was no match for the inferno raging around them. Coke and Pep grabbed hold of each other instinctively. There was nothing else to hold on to that wasn’t on fire.
A lot of paper—toilet paper, paper towels, art supplies, napkins—was stored in the basement of the old school on the shelves next to the detention room. It had ignited fast. Tiny pieces of charred paper were swirling in the air around the frantic twins. But that wasn’t all that was burning. There was a noxious, flammable substance that had been poured all over the floor.
This fire had been set deliberately.
Who would want to burn down a school?
Don’t answer that question.
The sound of fire engines could be heard in the distance, but that didn’t provide Coke or Pep with any comfort now. The heat was intense. Their eyes were tearing from the smoke, their throats choking to breathe. There was a nasty chemical smell filling the hall. That stuff alone could probably kill you if you inhaled enough of it.
Pep tried to remember the lessons she’d learned when a firefighter came and spoke at the school a few years earlier. She recalled that he said something about “stop, drop, and roll,” but that wouldn’t help now. The floor was on fire. She wasn’t about to roll around on it.
Coke’s photographic memory had on file just about everything he’d ever experienced, but he had never bothered to notice where the basement fire exits were located. Even if he knew where they were, those doors could very possibly be locked, or intentionally blocked.
Coke pulled his T-shirt off over his head.
“What, are you trying to be macho?” Pep yelled.
“No, I’m trying to live!” he replied.
He ripped the shirt in half, wrapping one piece around his mouth and nose and handing the other piece to his sister. She made a mask of her own. As Coke looked up to see if the ceiling was about to collapse on him, he realized that the bottom of his left pants leg was on fire. He used his other foot to snuff it out, kicking himself and hurting his ankle in the process.
; “Oww!” he yelled.
“I think I smell carbon monoxide,” Pep shouted in his ear.
“Carbon monoxide is odorless, Einstein!” was his reply. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Which way?” she hollered. “I can’t see!”
“Doesn’t matter!” he shouted back. “You pick. You’re the one who has feelings. Use ’em!”
“It’s too hot!” she shouted.
Some burning debris fell off a shelf and almost hit her.
“We can’t stay here!” Coke told Pep. “We’ll be burned alive! One way or another, we’ve gotta make a run for it!”
“Right through the flames?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, “like you’re running your finger over a candle. If we move fast enough, we won’t feel a thing.”
“That’s crazy!” she said, and he knew she was right. But staying where they were would be crazy too.
“Where’s the fire extinguisher?” Coke yelled. “Maybe we can clear a path with it.”
They fumbled around on the floor until Pep got her hands on the fire extinguisher.
“Oww!” she screamed. “It’s too hot to touch!”
Coke picked up a piece of the door they had broken and slapped at the flames with it. This worked to an extent, but the wood was heavy and quickly sapped his strength.
“We’re gonna die in here!” Pep screamed.
That’s when everything went dark.
A large cloth had landed on top of them, and they couldn’t see a thing. Then they felt hands pulling the edges of the cloth around them. It was damp.
They felt themselves being lifted and carried somewhere by somebody. They couldn’t get their arms free to struggle. They didn’t want to struggle. They wanted to get out of the hallway, and that was what was happening. Somebody had hoisted them up and was carrying them away.
The twins felt themselves being pushed through a set of double doors and then outside onto the grass in the playground behind the school. The blanket was pulled off so they could see their rescuer.
It was Mr. Rochford, the school janitor. Bones!
“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket,” he told them, “but I thought you kids could use one.”