Live and Let Shop

by Michael P. Spradlin

  I headed all the way back through the school to the do jang. There were no windows, and only one door with a sticker on it saying “Fire alarm, do not open except in an emergency.” D’oh! I headed back out and down the yellow corridor leading toward the classrooms.

  It was very quiet and kind of creepy prowling around the school at night with everyone asleep. I tried the door on one of the classrooms and was surprised to find it unlocked. Inside, it wasn’t like any classroom I’d ever been in. Instead of desks it was full of what looked like incredibly comfortable reclining easy chairs. At the front of the room, instead of a blackboard, there was a really big TV or computer monitor of some kind that was built into the wall. What the heck? I thought Pilar said Mr. Kim wasn’t a fan of TV. But I didn’t have time to think about it.

  I hurried across the room to the windows. They had a handle that you pushed aside to open them outward. I looked the window over carefully and didn’t see any wires or anything that indicated it might be alarmed. Cautiously I pushed it open and peered out into the night.

  I was on the other side of the school now, away from the guardhouse, and facing what looked like a bunch of athletic fields with the woods off in the distance. This was my way out!

  Only one problem. Somehow this room was on the second floor. The corridor that led here must have sloped upward into the side of the hill, but I hadn’t noticed it.

  I really hate this place, I thought to myself.

  I was running out of time. I could try to find another way out, but the longer I stayed inside the more I risked getting caught. I looked down and noticed that there was a ledge below the window, leading to a steel downspout that led to the ground. Maybe I would be able to shinny down that somehow. Yeah, me shinny. I’d already had enough gym for a week.

  But I didn’t see another option. I dropped my bag out the window and it landed on the grass with a quiet thud. I stepped up onto the radiator in front of the window and climbed out on the ledge, which was not as wide as it looked—maybe about six inches. My feet barely fit on it. I nearly fell when I took my first step toward the downspout. Once I steadied myself, I kept inching along the ledge carefully until I got to it. But then I had a problem. My back was to the wall, and if I was going to shinny down, I was going to have to turn around somehow and grab the downspout with both hands.

  Come on, Rachel, I thought. They do this kind of stuff in movies all the time. How hard can it be?

  Pretty darn hard, let me tell you. I reached up and grabbed the downspout with my right hand. I held it as tight as I could and then took my left foot and tried to swing it around so that I could straddle the downspout. That’s when it all went bad. All of my weight shifted forward and I started to fall. I grabbed tighter with my right hand and tried to swing myself around quickly, but I missed the ledge with my left foot and couldn’t dig into the wall with my toes. I grabbed the downspout with my left hand, but when I did my weight shifted again and my right foot slipped off the ledge.

  I hung there trying to get my feet back up on the ledge, but I didn’t have the strength or the coordination to do it. My arms and hands started to cramp and quiver from the strain. I tried to hand-over-hand my way down the downspout, but I got only about two feet before I couldn’t hang on anymore and my hands let go.

  I was falling.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Falling With Style

  I must have had the wind knocked out of me. I don’t think I actually lost consciousness. From my position flat on my back, I looked up at the ledge and calculated that I had fallen maybe ten feet. I’d whacked my head pretty hard on the ground, but the grass was soft and even though I didn’t feel like I could move very well yet, I didn’t seem to be seriously injured. What a miracle.

  I started to laugh. Remember that weird nervous laugh I have when I’m scared or excited? I couldn’t help it. It just struck me as funny. What the heck was I doing? Oh yeah, escaping. For a moment I stopped to look at the night sky. It was cloudless and there was a full moon. It was beautiful. If I hadn’t felt like I had just been run over by a truck, I would have enjoyed it.

  Slowly I started to stand up. Whoa. Big mistake. Woozy. I lay back down and waited for the spinning to stop. When it did, I sat up. Better. I was kind of numb all over. My arms and legs seemed to work, but my right wrist was sore, like I’d sprained it. I must have stuck it out to try to stop my fall. I’d have to take it easy.

  I stood up and tried to get my bearings. That’s when I noticed that there was a door in front of me that led back into the school. I hadn’t been able to see it from the window above. It was probably locked anyway. I peered in the window at the frame of the door, and I didn’t see any alarm boxes or wires, so it didn’t look like a fire door. But I decided not to chance opening it anyway. All I needed was to set off the alarms at this point.

  I was now on the side of Blackthorn Academy facing out from the mountain. No one should be able to see me from the front. All of the athletic fields lay beyond me for several hundred yards. There was a track, a football field, and a couple of baseball or softball diamonds. They were all deserted with not a soul in sight. Beyond them lay probably the thickest woods I’d ever seen in my life.

  I figured I’d go over the chain-link fence and into the woods. Then I’d head back toward the road, keeping the school in sight so I didn’t get lost, until I hit the freeway. Then I could hitch a ride. Of course, I’d never hitched a ride before, but I’d read about it. You stick out your thumb, somebody stops (hopefully not a crazed psycho traveling serial killer), and you’ve got your ride. What could go wrong?

  I walked all the way across the fields until I came to the fence, which was about eight feet high. I had no idea how I was going to get over it. I kept thinking about Pilar’s crack about me not being in good enough shape to get out. But I’d show her. In police shows on TV you see people climb these fences all the time when they are being chased. They just run at it and scamper over like monkeys. So it couldn’t be too hard. I shifted my duffel bag around so it was on my back, then backed up a few feet, ran at the fence, and jumped. I bounced off the fence and landed on my butt, digging my sore wrist into the ground. Yow!

  Not to be deterred, I tried it again. I didn’t fall down immediately this time, but I couldn’t get a grip on the fence with my sore wrist and I couldn’t get my feet to dig in and push me up. Eventually I slipped and fell again, this time landing against the fence. This wasn’t going to work.

  The fence wound all the way around the complex until it hooked back up with the school on both ends. I didn’t see any gates nearby, but they would all be locked anyway.

  What to do? Giving up was not an option. I tried to run through some other escape scenarios in my head:(1) Hide in a laundry cart and get loaded on a truck and sneak out the back door when the truck stops. Okay, could work. Except I had the feeling that Mr. Kim probably made everybody at Blackthorn wash their own clothes on the rocks in a nearby stream, so there probably wouldn’t be a laundry truck. (2) I could steal a spoon from the cafeteria and tunnel my way to freedom. (3) I could pretend to be sick and get taken to a hospital and escape from there, but what if they had some kind of medical ward in the school where they stuck me? Besides, those plans would keep me here for at least another day, and I wanted out now. There had to be a way.

  Just then I noticed that the baseball field had some wooden benches along the baselines where the players sat. Hmmm. If I could drag one of them over here, maybe I could prop it up on top of the fence and shinny my way over.

  I left my duffel bag by the fence and trotted over to the bench. It was probably fifteen feet long and made of aluminum with wooden legs. Still, it was heavy, and I had to turn it upside down and drag it the hundred yards or so back to the fence. Not so easy when you’ve got a probably sprained wrist and are extremely sore from having to do gym for the first time in years. Finally I managed to wrestle it up on its end and tip it toward the fence. The legs on that end of the bench hooked over t
he top of the fence, and bingo, I had a ramp.

  Now I just needed to climb it. It was steep and the aluminum was slippery. I shifted my duffel around so it was on my back again, then started up the bench and immediately slipped back down. I tried again, with the same result. This was hard! Sometimes you just can’t escape from a boarding school.

  This called for desperate action. I could see only one way to make it over. I backed up and took a running start straight up the bench. I almost stumbled near the top, but I pushed harder with my legs and gave myself a boost. I flew off the end of the bench, and the next thing I knew I was soaring through the air.

  I didn’t land perfectly, but it was better than I did coming down off the ledge. My wrist hit the ground again and I yelped in pain. But I was over!

  I stood up and looked around the woods. There were creepy-looking Wizard of Oz trees all over this forest, and it was very dark. Dark like the kind of woods that Jamie Lee Curtis runs through in the Halloween movies when she’s being chased by the evil Michael Myers. I glanced back at the school and the bench lying on the fence. In the morning, they would know for sure this was how I had escaped, but I planned to be long gone by then. I took a deep breath and looked at the woods again.

  What I was really doing was stalling. I don’t like woods. I’m not a woods person. Bad things happen in woods. Any episode of Scooby-Doo will tell you that. And this, as I’ve said, was a particularly scary-looking wood. I don’t know what kind of trees they were, but they were thick and overgrown and the branches hung low to the ground. Branches that would undoubtedly reach out and grab you as you walked by.

  I decided to follow the fence for as long as I could and keep the school in sight. Since eventually I’d be back around to the front of the school and in sight of the guardhouse, I was going to have to cut into the woods at some point. But I’d worry about that later.

  I started along the fencerow and was about fifty yards from where I’d jumped it when I found a gate. An unlocked gate. A totally and completely unlocked, open-me-up-and-walk-right-through-me gate. I hadn’t noticed it in the darkness. So I’d nearly broken my neck and killed myself twice for no good reason. I bet that stupid door I saw back at the building was wide open too. Stupid school! It almost made me want to go back and wake Mr. Kim up and give him a stern lecture about security. This school was supposed to be full of “bad seeds” like me! How could he go around leaving things open all the time?

  I kept walking along the fence, but before I got back to the front of the school I ran into a problem: an enormous ravine. From the fence it led away into the woods. The side where I stood had a more gentle slope down, but the opposite side went almost straight up. It looked much too steep to climb.

  I could go back through the gate, try the front entrance, and hope the guard was asleep. Or I could try to follow this ravine into the woods and cut back around to the road. I didn’t like option B, but I’d already been at this for an hour and I was going to lose a lot of time if I went back.

  So I scrambled down the side of the ravine and headed into the woods. This was a strange and twisty ravine. It twisted around and cut back and forth and led down deeper into the woods. It must have been some kind of weird geological thing from the mountain. The trees kept getting thicker, and pretty soon the moon was blocked out so it was really dark. I reached into the pocket of my duffel and pulled out the little mini-Maglite that I had packed before I left. The flashlight cut the darkness a little, but not much, and it was still spooky. I could hear things rustling in the woods and scampering around in the underbrush.

  Once I heard a horrible screech that nearly made me jump out of my skin. After my heart rate returned to normal, I did a very fast and convincing job of telling myself that it was just an owl. Of course, being from Beverly Hills, I know nothing about owls and for all I know it could have been the Blair Witch after me. But saying “it’s only an owl” sixty-seven times made me feel better.

  Soon I came out of the ravine and the woods flattened out before me. Now I had another problem. The ravine, with its winding course, had left me totally lost with no sense of which way I needed to go to reach the road. I couldn’t see the moon through the thick trees, and I had gone far enough into the woods that I couldn’t see the school either. I thought I needed to head to my right to reach the road, but I couldn’t be sure…maybe it was my left. Maybe I could have figured it out if I had a compass. Of course, I didn’t know how to read a compass, but if I had one, at least I’d look professional as I got more and more lost. Then, when they found my body in the woods, dead fingers clutched around the compass, they’d say, “Ooh, that’s what happened. She headed south/southeast instead of due west.”

  Even when I’m about to die, I crack myself up.

  There was only one decision as far as I was concerned. Pick a direction and go. I was in eastern Pennsylvania, not Siberia, so eventually I’d run into a road somewhere. Or so I thought. Except the trees made it hard to go straight, and there were a lot of thick bushes and big rocks that I had to go around. So I went as straight as I could, which was not very straight at all, and I walked for what must have been another hour, and I was still no closer to anywhere civilized as far as I could see.

  I felt like I wanted to cry again. I hadn’t cried since I was eleven and Fluffy died. But ever since my trial it seemed like all I wanted to do was cry. I’m not a crier. I am a witty and intelligent young woman with a bright future, I told myself. But I felt like crying anyway. I was exhausted, lost, and out of ideas.

  My flashlight battery was starting to go dim, and I had not brought a spare. Great planning, Rachel. I decided I needed to rest for a few minutes, so I sat on the ground by a giant boulder and leaned my head back. I reached into my duffel and pulled out my white UCLA sweatshirt and shucked it on. It was still early autumn, but it was getting colder. The boulder felt cool against my neck and head, and that was soothing. I tried to clear my mind. I’d have a good idea any second, I was sure.

  Instead, of course, I fell asleep.

  And I had the strangest dream. I almost never dream when I sleep, or if I do, I never remember them. But I remembered this one. I was running down a hallway or a corridor, or it might have been the ravine in the woods. Someone was chasing me. He wore some kind of large golden medallion around his neck, and for a second I could swear that his head turned into the head of a bull, with giant horns sticking out the side. He was getting closer and closer. I kept running and turning corners and trying to get away from him.

  I turned a corner and ran into a large storeroom that was filled with big boxes or crates. Except that the crates weren’t really crates. They might have been boulders like the ones in the woods. I ran back and forth among the crates, trying to find a place to hide. Finally I huddled on the ground next to this big crate, only it wasn’t a crate, it was the boulder I was sitting next to in the woods. And I looked up, and then I saw the weird face of the man/bull above me and I thought, How did he get above me? And then he said, “Good morning Rachel!” And I awoke with a shout and jumped to my feet and looked up into the smiling face of Mr. Kim, sitting cross-legged on the boulder.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’m Sure You’re a Nice Person, but This Just Isn’t Going to Work

  “You just scared the bejabbers out of me!” I yelled.

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t want to frighten you, so I let you sleep for a while. You did an amazing job getting out of the school, I must say. No one has ever thought to use a bench as a ramp over the back fence. Most new students try to sneak past the guardhouse, but Mr. Henderson usually catches them. It’s been a long time since somebody has tried to leave here through the woods.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was tired and sore. I’d had a strange dream, and this Kim guy really had a way of keeping me off guard. Every time I expected him to yell at me for something, he would tell me how smart I was and what a good job I’d done. If Judge Kerrigan or Charles or
Cynthia had been sitting on that rock, I’d be in Juvie now or worse. But this guy, even when it seemed like you should be punished, gave you a compliment. What was up with that? It was really starting to tick me off. And that dream was still disturbing me a little. I looked around and saw that it was lighter out. The moon was down, so it must have been early morning. I felt completely out of sorts.

  “Were you planning on heading back to California?” he asked.

  “No,” I lied. “Just away, you know, anywhere but here.”

  Mr. Kim nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not going back to that school,” I said. “You can’t make me.”

  “No. You are correct. I can’t force you. Even if I could, I can sense from your determined spirit that you would keep trying until you succeeded in getting away from the school. However, I would prefer you not hitchhike anywhere. If you wish, I will drive you to the airport and get you safely on a flight back to Los Angeles.”

  “I told you, I’m not going back to Los Angeles,” I lied again. I figured deception would throw him off the track. “That stupid judge would just send me to Juvie.”

  “Yes, she would. But perhaps you have someone you could stay with for a while. Maybe your friend Boozer? He might be willing to take you in, wouldn’t he?”

  Now I was freaked. This guy was like Yoda or something. He had my plan figured out practically before I did. Plus offering to drive me to the airport, and then basically telling me to run away and hang with Boozer? This guy obviously didn’t understand that his job was to crack down on delinquents like me. He should have been dragging me back to Blackthorn and putting me in solitary confinement or something.