Ouch! I stubbed my toe on the leg of one of the table chairs as I felt my way to the closet. Overcorrecting to make sure I cleared the rest of the table, I crashed into the sofa. Okay. Slow down. The end of the sofa is—I slid my hands across the back of it until it dropped off—here, so the closet is to my left—forward and at an angle. Nothing else there to trip over, if I remember right.
I hadn’t remembered I’d dumped my gym shoes outside the closet, and I stumbled over them. Forget groping around in the dark. Coop had to be wrong. There had to be a way to get light in the middle of the night. What if some kid got sick? I found the wall and slid my hand along it, feeling for a light switch. There weren’t any.
Eventually, I made my way to the big walk-in closet. I found my jeans right off—underneath my sweaty gym clothes—since they were one of the few items of clothing in there and I’d dumped them right in the middle of the floor. The other clothes I owned—the pajamas I’d ordered the night before and the clothes I’d worn to the workhouse—had magically morphed from a dirty pile in my room on the first floor into neatly washed, ironed, and folded bundles I found sitting on the wide shelves of my top floor closet when I first arrived. Even my boxers had been ironed. Talk about freaky. Made me consider throwing out my dirty underwear and ordering a new pair each day.
My cell phone was easy enough to find in the front pocket of my jeans. Still no signal. Sheesh. You’d think this building was in the back of a cave, or buried a hundred feet underground or something. The phone wouldn’t have lasted long, anyway, since I’d left the charger at home. It did put off enough of a glow to help me find my way to the computer sitting on the desk next to the door.
The computer wouldn’t turn on either—shut down for the night like all the lights. Grumbling, I slumped back to bed, where I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours.
First thing in the morning I shot off some e-mails to Brennan, Lester, Mom and Dad, Nana—wondering what ever happened with the broken ankle situation since the limit crisis sort of took over—and, at the last minute, Lauren.
It’s a race, I said to them, even though they couldn’t hear. Let’s see which one of you is the first to write back. My bet was on Brennan. He lived on the computer almost as much as I did.
No one won. Not a single person wrote back the next day.
Or the next.
I received messages from Honey Lady, and I sent out more messages to my family and friends.
By day three I knew there was a problem with the network or the programming or something. The people on the outside might have gone a day or two without answering me, but three? No way. I sent a message to Honey Lady:
I’m not getting any e-mail from outside the workhouse. I can’t connect to any chat sites. What’s the problem?
She answered me later that evening:
That is strange. No one else has complained about having troubles like this. Are you sure the problem is on our end? Some people just don’t like to write. Either way, I’ll have one of our tech people look into it.
I’d wanted to blame the silence on a computer problem, but Honey Lady’s response put an irritating grain of an idea into my brain. What if my family and friends really weren’t writing to me? What if they were beginning to forget all about me and were going on with their lives like I didn’t exist anymore? I could disappear in this workhouse, and no one outside would even care.
EIGHT A.M. TIME FOR SCHOOL.
I headed out my bedroom door, my stomach full and satisfied. Biscuits and gravy. Who’d have guessed a warm breakfast could taste so good? Mom was a fantastic cook, especially when our oven worked, but she wasn’t much of a morning person. The most she ever did to prepare breakfast was point the way to the cereal cupboard.
I’d been experimenting for two weeks now. Every day since I’d arrived at the FDRA workhouse, I’d tried something new and exciting for breakfast. Belgian waffles with strawberries and cream. Breakfast burritos. Stuffed crepes. French toast. Blueberry pancakes. And lots of eggs with bacon or sausage.
I’d probably weigh three hundred pounds by now if Coop didn’t keep me running around the paddle-wall-ball court or swimming every second after work.
“Hey, Coop,” I said as I shut my door behind me.
“Hey, bro.” We didn’t have anything else to say to each other. Nothing new to report since we split up last night ten minutes before lights-out. I’d gotten good at my timing so I wouldn’t have to get ready for bed in the dark anymore.
“More boxes.” I nodded my head at the one large and two small boxes sitting outside Jeffery’s door.
“Things never change much on the top floor,” said Coop.
Jeffery’s door flew open. The moment he saw us, his entire face soured.
“What’s the delivery today?” I asked, pretending the two of us had ever had a civil conversation together.
“Like you even care,” he said, scooping up the small boxes. “You can’t blame a guy for trying to fill up the long, boring hours he has to spend by himself each night because someone came along and stole his only friend.”
Coop reached out and clamped a playful hand on his shoulder. “Hey, little dude, call a time-out.”
“Jeff, you know you’re always welcome to join us for paddle-wall-ball. Anytime.”
He glared at me, squinting his eyes until they were almost completely closed. “It’s Jeffery.” Ugh. I knew that. He’d told me at least a dozen times over the past two weeks. I just couldn’t get used to using such a formal name on a twelve-year-old kid.
“Sorry.”
He dumped the small boxes inside his room and moved on to pushing the larger one through his doorway, since it was too heavy to pick up.
“And just what would the two of you do with me if I showed up in the middle of your precious paddle-wall-ball game? Use me as a target? Gee, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
“Fine. Be like that. See if we ever try to be nice to you again.” I nudged Coop, and the two of us headed down the hall.
“Sorry, little Jeffery man, I really do like hanging with you when you’re not teed off at me.” Pausing in front of the last door before the hallway ended, Coop put one finger to his mouth.
“Is he in there?” I whispered.
“Don’t think so, but we can try. Just to be sure.” With his goofy grin plastered on his face, Coop started pounding on Reginald’s door and ringing the bell over and over again.
“Forget it.” I headed into the cubicle area. “We’re never going to get out here before he does. See?” I threw an arm toward the glass cube, the sliding door securely closed. I even risked a visit from a security guard by tugging on the handle. Locked. “He must wake up at like, four in the morning to make sure he beats everyone else.”
“We’ll get him someday,” said Coop.
“You bet we will—it just won’t be in the morning.”
We reached Coop’s cubicle. As he was about to begin his daily ritual of shooting free throws with his Nerf ball and hoop before sitting down to his computer, I snatched the ball and swooshed it through myself.
“Bro!” He swiped the ball off the floor, and I slipped around the wall into my cubicle.
Time for my own morning ritual.
Shoot! They still hadn’t fixed the problem with my e-mail. The only item in my in-box was Honey Lady’s daily motivational, rah-rah message. I didn’t even read them anymore. They were always sappy sayings, like, Learn to LOVE to work HARD, and you will discover that it is not HARD to WORK. The person who remains down once he falls ends up with nothing but a mouthful of mud. The slothful and lazy not only lose the game—they lose at life. Whatever.
I sent Honey Lady what was turning out to be my daily message to her: PLEASE FIX MY E-MAIL!!!
Two weeks and nothing. After two days I started wondering if she was ignoring my requests on purpose. Since I also couldn’t make calls on my phone, I began to think she was trying to cut us workhouse kids off from the outside—why sh
e would do this, I had no idea. Then I asked some of the other Top Floors, and every one of them said they had no problem getting their outside e-mail. Good-bye, conspiracy theory. I was stuck with plain old boring technical difficulties. I knew Honey Lady was busy, but how long would it take for her to send a message to a tech support person? Just fix it already, Honey Lady!
“Ta-da!” The gloating, high-pitched voice floated over all the cubicles.
“Not again,” I moaned.
“Hey, man, get used to it,” Coop called from his side of our shared cubicle wall.
It’d happened every day since I arrived. Each morning Madeline made a grand entrance and strutted around like she was the coolest, best-looking thing alive. She actually thought we cared.
“Today’s outfit is a VonClossen creation,” she announced. “Notice the beadwork on this cord belt.” What she called a belt looked like ten red cords with various beads stuck here and there. The end of it hung practically to her knees. I don’t know why she was wearing that belt, but it definitely wasn’t to hold up her pants. On top she wore a white shirt covered by a red shirt covered by a white jacket. I’d sweat under that many clothes. “I found the VonClossen website when I noticed the company’s stock had doubled in the last nine months. I’m happy, and my clients are happy!” She threw her arms in the air and froze in a one-hip-forward pose right at the opening of my cubicle.
I gave her a weak smile and a nod as she continued on her course around the cubicles, pausing to turn and pose a few more times.
“It never ends?” I called to Coop. “Just how big is her closet?”
“Same size as yours.” She’d retreated to stick her sneering face back in my cubicle. “Some of us know how to organize our wardrobes better than others.”
“Some of us don’t care!”
With a huff and a nose-in-the-air, hair-flipping turn, she strutted away.
Two seconds later screams of delight shot over the top of the cubicles. Neela and Paige were getting their first glimpses of today’s fashion statement. Their high-pitched squeals grated on my ears like a painful whistle to a dog.
“Shut up, already!” Kia’s response was as predictable as Madeline’s daily show.
With or without Kia’s warning I knew everyone would settle down within the next few seconds and get going on their four hours of computerized schoolwork. We would’ve done it even without the threat of a guard watching on the monitor and coming up to crack down on us. I don’t care who you are—whether you’re a model wannabe, a paddle-wall-ball fanatic, or an Indian princess—if you’re smart enough to be a Top Floor, you’ve got enough nerd in you to love the challenge of ripping through the assignments that pop up on your screen and seeing how close to a perfect score you can get. I was actually learning something when I didn’t have to wait for days on end until everyone else in the class caught on. The computer science projects I got on the top floor stretched me beyond anything available at my middle school. What I loved most were the math lessons. They taught me new theories and strategies. And an added bonus to computerized learning—I never had to eat school lunch.
I rubbed my hands together. Come on, Mr. Computer Teacher, let’s see if you’ve got anything worthy of my brain today.
Five p.m. Free time.
Already? The paying work I did in the afternoon was hard, but that made it all the more satisfying when I clawed my way through it. They had me doing math modeling. Two days ago I’d finished a mathematical model for a marketing company, to predict how consumers would react under a specific situation. My current project was for a chemical company, to optimize one part of the process for manufacturing a certain type of plastic.
I’d get so into my work—fascinated by the way I could manipulate numbers and equations—I’d lose all track of time. Usually Coop peeked around the edge of the cubicle to call me to paddle-wall-ball before I had any idea it was close to quitting time.
It happened again.
“Let’s hit the court, cuz,” he said.
“Hold up. I’ve almost figured out this part.”
“Five o’clock, man. You gotta shut it down or the feds’ll come here and quote codes and laws at us till our ears bleed.”
“Reginald always works longer. He works all the time.”
“What makes you think that? You’ve got X-ray eyes now and can see through those closed blinds of his?”
I didn’t have to answer, but I did anyway. “No.”
“Free time, fool. It means you’re free to do what you want. If your pants aren’t itching after sitting eight hours a day pounding on a computer and you want to goof around on the Internet or play some games or invent a new programming language just for the fun of it, then free time says you’re free to do it.”
“He’s not working overtime?”
“Not allowed. Go in and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“No, I believe you,” I said fast. Go in there? Disturb Reginald? Unthinkable. Besides, Gorilla Man or one of the other guards—who all looked so much alike from the neck down they could’ve been clones—would come and grab me if I even knocked on that glass door of his.
I typed in a few more keystrokes.
“I hate this! I’m never going to get it right!” The voice blasted from several cubicles down and carried throughout the entire room. It sounded like Neela, but I couldn’t be totally positive, since none of the girls ever spent much time talking to me. A pounding noise followed from the same direction that sounded like the girl slamming her fists into her keyboard.
“Forget about it for today.” This snooty voice I recognized. Madeline. “Come on. Let’s go order dinner. Paige, log off now! What’s with you two today?”
“Just a minute,” Paige called back from her own cubicle.
“I can’t quit. I can’t!” Neela’s wailing voice cried.
“You guys know they don’t pay you extra for working overtime,” said Madeline. Her voice moved from over by Neela’s cubicle, the first girls’ cubicle across from Reginald’s, to Paige’s cubicle, across from Coop’s, and back again. “You’re going to make the guards come up here, and you know how smelly they can be. How can you even stand that programming stuff, Paige?”
“I’ve almost got this,” said Paige.
“Well I don’t, and my deadline was three days ago! Miss Smoot is going to kill me. I just. Can’t. Get. It!”
I logged off my computer and smirked at Coop. “Always a drama, huh.”
He nodded. “With girls around. Come on, man.” He practically dragged me out of my cubicle. “As much as I love designing databases—and I do, don’t get me wrong—I gotta move. Now. Let’s hit the court.”
“Check that.”
The voice startled us and made us look around. We’d passed Jeffery’s cubicle—which he’d already vacated—and made it as far as Isaac’s, but the voice belonged to Kia.
“Isaac, tell the little boys you and I have dibs on the court today,” she said. It took us a few seconds to find her—well, her head anyway. She was standing on something, her desk or a chair maybe, so her black curly hair and dark face stuck over the top of the middle cubicle wall. I wondered if she often talked to Isaac that way. I also wondered if Reginald ever opened his ceiling blinds and if Kia had gotten a peek at him. Not likely.
“We have dibs on the court today, little boys,” said Isaac, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped on his desk. He held a model spaceship and kept his eyes on it as he twisted it slowly in his hands. “Like it?” he asked, holding it up for Coop and me to admire—although we didn’t. I really couldn’t see much difference between the model he was holding and the dozens of others that crowded his desk and shelves. It was a miracle the guy could still fit his computer in that sci-fi collector’s shop—although the computer was covered with aliens too. “I just got this one today. You know what it is?”
“No, and we don’t care,” said Coop. “You can’t dibs the court. It’s first come, first served. Always
has been. And since Isaac is busy playing with his little toys, Matt and I are going to get there first.”
“Sorry to crash your hard drive,” said Kia. “I already talked to Miss Smoot about how you hog the court all the time with your stupid paddle-wall-ball game.”
“And what would you choose to play in there? Something lame like basketball or volleyball?” Coop made his voice go up about two octaves. “Oh, Isaac, will you make that shot for me? I think I need to file my nails.”
She didn’t flinch. “You are so lame. Miss Smoot said I could write a sign-up schedule, which I did last night. I e-mailed a copy to everyone first thing this morning. Didn’t you read it?”
Oops. I guess I’d deleted it, thinking it was an extra rah-rah message from Honey Lady. It must have been the message that had “Top Floor Cooperation” in the subject line.
“I have better ways to waste my time than reading e-mail from lowly animators like you two,” Coop said, nudging me with his elbow.
Kia rolled her eyes and stuck her chin in the air. “It doesn’t matter if you read it or not. Isaac and I are signed up for the gym from five fifteen until eight.”
“It’s the only room we can totally black out.” Isaac sat up straight, getting excited. “We’re making a movie with all these laser special effects. There will be tons of spaceships flying everywhere, and battles. It’s going to be awesome. It’s got everything.”
“Yeah? How about a plot? Has it got one of those?” asked Coop with a sneer.
“Of course it does,” said Kia from above.
“Hey, you know what? You don’t need the gym.” Coop was getting excited himself. “The girls’ dance room doesn’t have windows. You can use it!”
A high-pitched shriek came from the other side of the cubicles. Ten seconds later Madeline raced around.
“No way,” she said, twirling the long red cords of her belt like a cowboy’s lasso. “They are not allowed to use our dance room.”
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