Without any of us asking Nicola what the plan was, she marched down to the end of the hall to the doors marked STAFF ONLY, looked once over her shoulder to make sure the chaperones were ignoring us, and pushed through. We followed, silently, into the dark kitchen area of the Gaffin Center, where sometimes caterers prepared big meals for events for parents and prospective students. Nicola flipped the lights on, and it was eerily quiet. The music from the next room was muffled and sounded much further away than on just the other side of the wall.
“We can get out of the building through the service entrance,” Nicola announced.
“Won’t there be an alarm or something?” Sam asked.
“No,” Nicola replied. “The DJ just used it to load in all of his equipment. I saw it from the window of my dorm room.”
We reached the door, above which hung an illuminated EXIT sign. I cringed for a moment, completely expecting an ear-splitting siren to howl the second Nicola pushed on the door’s lever. My eyes darted around, looking for a counter or a table under which I could roll in case chaperones suddenly swarmed in, eager to bust all of us for daring to break out of the Gaffin Center during a Bel Biv Devoe classic. But the door simply opened, and Nicola was daring enough to even kick the doorstop down as we stepped out into the small service parking lot behind the building.
“Wow, this is pretty cool,” Sam said, taking a cigarette from the pack that Nicola had surprisingly produced from her little black handbag. She lit the end of his cigarette with a silver Zippo, which I was pretty sure was prohibited on campus.
The night sky was cloudy, and a full moon flooded us with light whenever there was a part in the rapidly moving clouds. It was almost October, and it was pleasantly cool outside. The Treadwell campus was basically in the middle of nowhere. I’d heard that sometimes there were even deer and wolves on campus. The grass surrounding the parking lot was inhabited by tons of chirping crickets, making it feel a lot later at night than ten-thirty.
“No thanks,” I declined the cigarette when it had passed through Sam, Alex, and Nicola, and had made its way to me.
“Non-smoker, eh?” Alex teased. “Are one of those healthy living types? Do you do pilates? Eat only raw food?”
I snorted. “No! I just don’t like the smell of smoke.”
“She’s not a healthy living type,” Nicola assured both of the boys. “Her dad is in a famous rock band.”
Bashfully, I told them about my dad and Pound. Not surprisingly, they were more excited to hear about my dad’s wife, Phoebe, and her show, The Seven Seas. Kids who like rap are never that interested in my dad’s band.
“Where’d you learn how to break dance like that?” Nicola asked Sam.
“In prison,” Alex interjected.
Sam kicked at Alex’s shin playfully with the pointy toe of his leather oxford dress shoe.
“In the Bronx,” Sam corrected Alex.
“Prison sounds better than the Bronx,” Alex joked.
Sam tilted his head back and sighed, then took a drag off the cigarette. “I grew up in the Bronx. I go to St. John’s on a media scholarship. So I guess you could say I’m not a typical St. John’s student.”
“Button-down shirt with a family crest monogrammed on the breast pocket,” Alex teased.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Does your shirt really have a family crest on it?” I wouldn’t have been surprised. His button-down shirt was mostly hidden by his black pinstripe suit, so I couldn’t see for myself.
“Would you stop loving me if it did?” he flirted.
Alex was far from my type, but his charisma was kind of infectious.
“Take your jacket off, I want to see!” Nicola exclaimed.
“Yeah, Alex. Take it all off, baby” Sam egged him on in a falsetto voice.
Alex began dramatically unbuttoning his jacket in a goofy striptease when unexpectedly we heard rustling noises coming from the kitchen behind us. Chaperones were approaching; we could hear their footsteps, and a woman’s voice was wondering why the door to the parking lot was propped open. Luckily, we were all standing a few feet from the doorway, obscured from the view of anyone in the kitchen. But we also couldn’t see who was about to discover us standing outside with boys, blatantly breaking school rules.
“Run!” Nicola whispered.
Our feet pounded on the blacktop of the parking lot around the corner of the building, toward the larger parking lot where parents parked for big events. In those moments, my heart started pounding as everything that had happened in Croatia came rushing back to me. What was I doing following Nicola outside the dance with boys? I was just a complete magnet for trouble. I walked right into trouble without even realizing what I was doing. It was like there was no hope for me, absolutely none at all.
“Over here!”
Nicola motioned for me to follow her as she rounded the backs of the parked buses. The bus further away from the building had its door open, and we climbed up the four stairs into its dark interior, which smelled like a typical stinky school bus. Once we were all up the stairs, Nicola tugged the lever by the driver’s seat to close the old-fashioned folding door. We hurried toward the back of the bus and crawled into four of the last seats toward the back, breathing heavily.
“Who’s out there?” I whispered to Alex, who dared to peek through one of the windows.
“It’s some lady who looks like a hippie, and some guy who looks like a game show host,” he reported in a loud whisper.
“Ms. DiMico and Mr. Ferris,” Nicola surmised without looking.
“They’re smoking,” Alex added, as if that mattered. As if we could blackmail our grown-up, adult teachers with the knowledge of their smoking habits if we were to get caught violating school rules.
Ms. DiMico and Mr. Ferris, totally onto us, walked toward the buses. I could hear the click clack of Ms. DiMico’s mary jane pumps on the blacktop, and could imagine her circling the bus and peering into windows.
“I don’t think there’s anyone out here, Gus,” Ms. DiMico said.
We all gasped and jumped when suddenly the door to the bus on which we were hiding jiggled. It was Mr. Ferris, trying to open it from the outside.
“I would have sworn I heard kids running,” he said.
“It could just as easily have been caterers taking a smoke break who left that door open,” Ms. DiMico countered. “And if it was kids, the St. John’s people will have to do a roll call before they drive off. Not our problem.”
There was silence, followed by the sound of very quiet footsteps. And then we heard Mr. Ferris joke, “I’m positive our girls are more trouble than their boys.”
We all remained frozen on our respective bus seats for at least a minute after it sounded like Mr. Ferris and Ms. DiMico returned to the building.
“Man, that was a close call!” Sam exclaimed finally, bursting into laughter.
“It’s really not funny,” I complained, truly angry. “I can’t get in trouble at this school. If I get kicked out, it’ll be like, the end of my life.”
“No one’s getting kicked out of school,” Alex assured me. “I’ve got this under control. Sam and I, here, will secure the perimeter and we’ll signal to you when it’s safe to exit the vehicle.”
As much as I was annoyed with Sam, Alex, and especially Nicola, I did find Alex to be pretty cute and funny. He and Sam bounded in big steps toward the front of the bus, and cranked the door back open. We watched them cross the parking lot through our windows and they carefully approached the corner of the building. But then, they disappeared around the corner of the building and didn’t immediately come back.
“We should go,” Nicola said a moment later.
“What if there’s someone else out there and they got in trouble?” I asked.
Nicola hesitated, weighing the potential risks of disembarking the bus. The problem with just getting off the bus was that there was really only one way to go, to follow Sam and Alex back toward the entrance to the Gaffin Center kitchen. T
he other side of the parking lot tapered off into the woods. We could have made our way around the Gaffin Center toward its front entrance that way, but we would have had to walk through soggy grass in our high heels, in the dark. It shook me a little to see Nicola indecisive, because up until that point all week, she had seemed like the kind of person who wasn’t afraid of anything. “It’s eleven,” she reasoned. “It’s pretty much now or never.”
But as we began walking toward the front of the bus to step down, we both froze in the aisle. We heard boys’ voices, lots of them, and they were approaching the bus.
“Crap!” Nicola hissed. Through the bus’s windows we saw a huge group of rowdy boys round the corner behind which Sam and Alex had disappeared minutes earlier. The disassembled group was led by several chaperones in suits, carrying clipboards. When the boys reached the buses, one of the chaperones began calling names off of his clipboard, and the boys began lining up in two single-file lines, still joking, yawning, and punching each other playfully on the shoulders.
“We are so… dead,” I mumbled.
There was no way we could climb off the bus at that point; we would have been seen by both of the lines of boys and all of the chaperones. Through the bus window, I was able to make eye contact with Alex, who was motioning for us to stay on the bus and stay down so that no one else would see us.
I really just felt like crying, like a big baby. “We should just get off the bus,” I told Nicola. “We’re going to get in trouble at this point, no matter what.”
“No!” Nicola refused vehemently.
Heavy footsteps climbed up the stairs into the bus and the uniformed driver sat down behind the wheel. We both cringed as the driver began the engine, and the engine of the bus parked next to ours also hummed to life. The sticky, dark green vinyl seats beneath our bare knees vibrated along with the engine. Nicola and I had basically been pushed off the cliff, at that point. There was no way for us to reverse the direction of that night until we hit rock bottom.
The next few minutes played out like a nightmare. Boys boarded the buses, and thankfully Alex and Sam had made it into the line intended for our bus, and were among the first few to push their way down the aisle. They raced toward the back where we were crouched together into one of the last seats in the back, ducking so as to avoid being seen by the chaperones entering the bus. Thankfully, the other boys who sat in the back who took notice of us joked quietly and seemed humored enough by the idea of Alex and Sam smuggling two girls back to campus that they didn’t draw the attention of the chaperones in our direction. We became a delightful secret; surely none of these boys had ever seen Treadwell girls secreted back to campus in a more creative manner.
I braced myself, certain once all of the boys had boarded the bus that a chaperone would walk the aisle with that clipboard again, doing a final headcount before getting back on the highway, bound for August. But maybe the red punch had made the chaperones of St. John’s a little lazy that night. The bus began to back out of its parking space and I felt like a hand was pushing me further and further below water.
Someone’s definitely going to tell the chaperones before we get off school property, I promised myself.
But no one did.
CHAPTER 11
One small comfort was I could tell by the time the bus had picked up speed along the rural highway between Treadwell and the St. John’s campus that Nicola was as scared as I was, even if it was for different reasons. I was terrified of getting caught and getting kicked out of Treadwell, plain and simple. But I knew Nicola well enough even early into our friendship to know that she was afraid of not having control over any situation she was in. Any kind of a change in her daily routine was jarring for her. Being caught in an uncomfortable crouching position on a bus bound for who-knew-where was definitely, totally out of control.
“When we get to campus,” Alex told us in a low voice, “you have to get off the bus when we do. The bus is a rental. It’ll go back to the rental facility tonight.”
“How are we going to get off the bus with everyone else without being noticed?” I asked.
“No one is going to be paying attention at that point,” Sam assured us. “The teachers are tired and besides, we’ll be on school property. Everyone just rushes toward the dorms.”
Alex and Sam took off their jackets and gave them to us to wear when we passed through the iron gates of the St. John’s Academy for boys. I was growing so sleepy that I anticipated our arrival on campus with a mixture of sickening dread and longing for relief. There was no point in Nicola and me even trying to figure out how we’d travel the hour-long drive back to Treadwell if we even got off the bus without being apprehended. It also occurred to me during the drive to St. John’s that our own RA’s were probably doing bed check at that very moment, observing that neither of us was in our respective dorm rooms.
“Don’t worry about that. They get very sloppy on Friday nights. Sundays are another story. But on Fridays, the RA’s all go out with their boyfriends. Mine sometimes does bed check on Saturday mornings and it’s easy to lie and get out of that; you can always say you got up early and went to the gym.” Nicola seemed quite confident that our absence would go unnoticed.
I dug my cell phone out of my bag and texted my sister, feeling a need to acknowledge my impending punishment with someone who would understand. You’ll never believe where I am right now, I text messaged her. But even after I waited a few minutes, Bijoux never replied.
As we neared the campus, the boys broke into a rousing and off-key round of “Thank you, Mister Bus Driver,” stomping their feet on the floor of the bus and cheering at the end. The bus slowed its speed as it pulled off of the wooded highway and through the iron gates onto the boys’ campus. It drove slowly through the woods lining the private drive to the main welcome area, past a little stream with a quaint stone footbridge.
The bus navigated through a series of turns and then rolled to a stop in a parking lot with bright street lights illuminating the area. Nicola and I didn’t dare raise our heads to get a glimpse of what our surroundings would be when we stepped off the bus. We would literally be descending the steps directly into the unknown.
Alex and Sam lingered in the seat they shared behind ours until all four chaperones riding on our bus had descended the steps. The bus driver was still in his seat, with the engine of the bus gently idling.
“Good luck,” one of the boys in the seat in front of us teased as he stepped into the aisle to leave his seat.
“Go, go, go,” Sam urged us. Nicola wiggled into Sam’s blazer and I wiggled into Alex’s. It was lucky that a number of the boys had taken off their blazers, so that Sam and Alex wouldn’t attract too much attention in their dress shirts as they crossed the parking lot. I was nervous enough to not even find humor in the fact that there was, indeed, a family crest embroidered on the pocket of Alex’s dress shirt. Feeling like my heart was going to pop into my mouth at any second, it was beating so violently, I followed Nicola into the aisle and we slowly progressed behind other boys toward the stairs. By some amazing stroke of luck, the bus driver was staring out his window at the school buildings when we passed him and reached the stairs.
And by another amazing stroke of luck, the tall Chinese boy who had been sitting in the seat in front of us had taken the initiative to distract the one, sole chaperone standing at the bottom of the stairs of the bus keeping tabs on boys as they flooded the parking lot and segmented off in groups headed for the dormitories.
“I think I left my cell phone back at that school,” the boy was telling the older, bearded chaperone as Nicola and I hurried down the stairs.
Once our feet were on the pavement, we moved quickly to avoid being pushed in the direction of the grassy lawn which led to the dorms. We trotted as quickly as we could around the front of the bus, hidden from the view of the bus driver as we crouched. We hurried around the other side of the bus beneath the driver’s window, and toward the back.
“Wher
e should we go?” I whispered to Nicola. There were a few parked cars, presumably belonging to teachers, in the lot. We could hide behind them, but that wasn’t necessarily a great idea if any of the chaperones were going to walk directly to their cars to drive home as soon as the buses were empty and boys had all entered their respective dorms. We could make a break for the nearest brick building, which appeared to be a larger structure where classes were held. It had gas lamps hanging from the arched portico that wrapped around its front. Or, we could double back down the private road we had just traveled aboard the bus, which was lined by thick trees, and make our way back toward that little stream and footbridge.
“Over there,” she impulsively decided, pointing toward the building.
We both took off our heels and made a mad, barefoot dash for the big brick school building, and hid behind pillars in the portico, breathing heavily. From there, we could hear the last of the boys’ rowdiness become swallowed by the buildings across the grassy lawn and down paths that passed in between them. The buses idled for a few more minutes, and then roared back into motion, the sound of their engines eventually growing distant as they disappeared into the trees. Then the car engines started, and one by one, each drove off down the private road.
“Whew,” Nicola said with an uncharacteristic smile on her face. “We made it!”
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