“Keep this little attitude up,” he told her, “and we’ll change that.” He turned to the guards. “Get that thing out of here.”
Dre looked stricken. “Where are you taking it?”
“My office,” said Dean Bronson, “where it will remain under lock and key.”
There was nothing left to do except watch and feel helpless as Sissy was rolled out of the room. A defeated silence hung in the air.
“That’s it,” Tree said. “I’m screwed.”
Carter spread his hands and made an appeal. “Okay. It’s a setback. I get it. But you can reset the day. Try again, right?”
Tree shook her head. “No. You don’t understand. I keep getting weaker every time I come back. I don’t know how many chances I have left. For all I know, this could be it. If I die again, I might stay dead.”
“Ooh,” Samar said. “That’s a problem.”
“No shit,” echoed Dre.
They all sat in silence for a bit, the futility and frustration washing over them.
Suddenly, Tree flashed a wily grin. “Unless we steal it back.”
“Steal it?” Ryan asked.
Tree shrugged. “I mean, it’s not even really stealing if it’s your property.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Samar said. “I don’t know about this. If we get caught and I get expelled, my parents will hang me by my nut sack.”
“I’m with him,” said Dre. “Except for the nut sack part. Obvi.”
Carter stood up and shook his head. “I don’t mean to throw a bag of dog shit on your porch, but as far as I’m concerned, you guys owe this to her. You created this whole situation, so it’s your obligation to help her. If she dies, that’s blood on your hands.”
“Okay,” said Samar. “That’s a little dramatic.”
“He’s right.” Everybody turned to look at Ryan. “This is our fault, so we fix it. That’s what scientists do. We solve the problem.”
Samar suddenly leaped to his feet and shouted, “Hell yeah!” at the top of his lungs.
Everyone froze and looked at him like he was crazy.
“What?” he asked. “Too much?”
“A tad,” said Dre.
* * *
—
A half hour later, the whole crew gathered around their usual cafeteria table as Dre unfolded a brochure with a map of the campus and started circling locations and tracing routes from Dean Bronson’s office to the lab.
“So check it out.” Samar pointed at a path running through the quad toward the science and engineering building. “Dean Bronson spends every evening knitting in the faculty lounge here.”
“He knits?” Carter was incredulous.
“It’s his thing.” Samar tapped the building with the faculty lounge. “Anyway, all we need to do is get the keys to his office, sneak over to admissions, break into the dean’s office, grab Sissy, wheel her back to the lab without anyone from security seeing us, get Dean Bronson’s keys back to him without him knowing they were ever gone, power up Sissy, run diagnostics, flip the switch, and bam! Tree’s back in whatever whack-ass dimension she came from, and we just saved the damn day.” Samar dropped his pen like a mic.
“Okay,” Tree said. “Sounds awesome. How do we do it?”
Samar shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Everybody sighed or groaned. Faced with Dean Bronson’s confiscation of Sissy, the general consensus was clear: We’re toast.
Carter wasn’t giving up. “We need a diversion,” he said. “Some way to distract the dean.”
On cue, a Facetuned photo of Danielle popped up on Carter’s phone, serenaded by a ringtone of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful.”
“She picked the ringtone,” he mumbled with a blush, grabbing his phone and avoiding any and all eye contact. He swiped and answered. “Hey, babe!”
Tree could hear Danielle yapping at Carter a mile a minute. She couldn’t quite make out what Danielle was saying, but she sounded like a very pissed-off version of Charlie Brown’s parents.
“I’m just hanging out with Ryan—”
Tree was disgusted watching Carter dealing with Danielle’s type A jealousy. She was such a…
That’s when it hit her: Drama queen.
Tree reached over and grabbed the phone out of Carter’s hand.
“Hey!”
There was no time to explain.
“Danielle! Hiiiii. So, we have a little favor to ask you…”
22
Roger Bronson sat alone in the faculty lounge, knitting a scarf in the colors of the Bayfield Baby, crimson and white. His ex-wife used to laugh at him for knitting, and so he’d taken to keeping his hobby on campus. Now that she’d left him, knitting by himself in his own living room was an option, but it was depressing to be at home alone. The house felt strange and empty. Instead, he came here and put Sean Hannity on TV to keep him company while he practiced both knit and purl stitches for a ribbed scarf to wear to the football games. The rhythmic monotony of his clacking needles freed his mind from the endless litany of issues to be addressed: student retention, discipline, and the unremitting havoc wreaked by those snotty-nosed little bastards with the experiment he’d confiscated. As of tonight, there’d be no more rolling blackouts.
The door of the faculty lounge swung open, and Dean Bronson looked up expecting to see Hank, the night janitor, making his rounds. Instead, a young woman in dark glasses appeared, tapping and swinging a red-and-white cane in front of her. The dean performed a swift inventory of the sight-impaired students currently on the rolls. This young woman was certainly not on it. He’d have remembered. Blind or not, she was stunning. Whoever was helping her get dressed in the morning was doing an excellent job.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
The young woman whirled toward the sound of his voice. “Oh! Pardon. I appear to be very lost.”
Her accent was…French? But a dialect with which the dean was as of yet unfamiliar. It made sense, though, that she was foreign. Her bone structure alone was evidence enough of her European heritage.
He jumped to his feet and tossed his needles down. He was quite eager to help this damsel in distress.
“I’m Dean Roger Bronson,” he informed her.
She smiled. “Bonjour. My name is Amélie…Le Pew.”
“Oh!” It all made sense now. “You must be with the exchange program.”
“Oui, oui.”
Out in the hallway, Tree and Carter watched the whole debacle go down through a small window in the door to the faculty lounge. When she had asked Danielle to distract Dean Bronson and swipe his keys, this was not what Tree had anticipated.
“She’s really into her drama class,” Carter explained.
They watched as Danielle reached out into the air as Dean Bronson approached her.
“Monsieur, may I know your face?”
“I’m sorry?” he asked, but there was no more explanation to come. Danielle started aggressively rubbing her hand all over his face. The dean felt bolts of lightning coursing through him. His knees began to tremble.
“Such strong features,” Danielle said.
“Thank you.” Dean Bronson was beyond smitten, and he breathed in deeply to capture the aroma of the moment.
“You must be French,” he said, nearly panting. “Your hand smells like cheese.”
Watching from the hall, Tree had to clamp both hands over her mouth to smother a laugh as Danielle, without any hint of an accent, shouted, “I don’t eat cheese!”
Flustered, she quickly tried to recover with a flurry of mumbled high school French and a strong accent on the words lactose intolerant.
She set off thwacking her stick around the room and was clearly pleased to see Bronson following her like a puppy looking for a treat.
“Where are you trying to
get to?” he asked her, practically panting by now.
“Le café.”
Tree could tell that Danielle was searching the room frantically for Bronson’s keys, knocking that cane against furniture as if her life depended on it.
“You must mean the cafeteria,” Bronson said. “I’m happy to show you.”
Danielle froze when she spotted the keys sitting on a nearby table. Her only problem was getting the dean off her back for long enough to grab them.
“Here,” he said. “Allow me.”
Tree and Carter watched as Dean Bronson tried to take Danielle by the arm. As he did, Danielle stumbled forward and slammed her entire body into another little end table, toppling a fake flower arrangement. As it fell to the ground, the vase exploded in a torrent of glass marbles that immediately rolled and bounced all across the room.
“Oh no!” Danielle shrieked.
Smelling a lawsuit and an international incident brewing, Dean Bronson flew into action. “Don’t move!” he shouted. “You’ll trip!”
With the dean on all fours chasing marbles, Danielle ran like a gazelle to the table, snatched the keys, and leaped to the door where Tree and Carter were standing watch. She slapped the keys in Tree’s waiting hand, who immediately spun around with Carter and made a run for it.
The dean groaned to his feet to find Danielle standing near the door, looking almost like she was, well, looking out into the hall. But before his doubts could take solid shape, she snapped back into the part of fumbling blind girl.
The dean shot forward to intercept her before she could demolish anything else.
“Pretty quick there, aren’t you?” he said. “Hold on now. I just need to grab my keys.”
Danielle knew he couldn’t go looking for his keys this soon or they were all busted. She gave it everything she had and tripped, launching herself toward a large hanging tapestry. She closed both hands around the fabric and yanked as hard as she could. The fabric ripped away from the hanger and landed on top of her as she fell to the floor.
As Danielle struggled under the fabric, crying out for help, a flustered Dean Bronson raced to her aid.
“Eeet is so dark!” Daniel cried out.
The dean tried to help. “Look for the light!” Even as the words left his mouth, he regretted them. “Oh. Jeez. That was inconsiderate. I’m sorry.”
Danielle continued to flail, pulling the curtain over her head.
“You’re making it worse,” Dean Bronson said.
Perhaps this poor young woman was newly blind and still getting the hang of it.
“I cannot breathe!” Danielle shouted, continuing to tear at the curtain, tangling it further.
The dean continued to pull at the fabric wondering how someone so beautiful could be so helpless.
* * *
—
Ryan, Dre, and Samar were already waiting outside Dean Bronson’s office as Tree and Carter came racing up.
Carter immediately started trying keys in the lock.
Ryan was dancing back and forth from foot to foot like a little kid needing to pee. “Hurry up, dude!”
“Got it!” Carter said.
Finally, the handle turned.
He swung open the door and flipped on the lights. There, on a dolly in the corner, was Sissy. Samar and Dre rushed over and immediately began wheeling the device out of the room.
Back in the hallway, Carter quickly closed and locked the door of Dean Bronson’s office. Ryan, Dre, and Samar took off with Sissy. Then Carter flashed Tree a smile, and the two of them sprinted off in the other direction.
* * *
—
When Roger Bronson finally untangled the flailing young exchange student from the tapestry, her hair was a disaster. The beret she wore was barely hanging on now, and as she attempted to right herself, she smiled beneath her dark glasses and, in the French accent he still couldn’t place, said, “Gracias.”
As the dean bent down to retrieve her cane, Danielle saw Tree and Carter arrive back at the door. Oblivious, Dean Bronson handed her cane back to her.
“Merci,” she said.
He smiled. “Okay. Shall we?”
He turned and walked toward the door, Danielle tap-tap-tapping behind him, when he suddenly paused.
“Forgot my keys again.”
As the dean turned to go back to the table where his keys should’ve been, Danielle realized that this was her big moment. She wasn’t going to be another actor with perfect cheekbones and killer lips; she would be a star. Without hesitating another moment, she did the only thing she could. Her cane swung up and down so fast it made a pffffwht through the air before she whacked Dean Bronson as hard as she could in the face.
The dean yelped in shock, holding his nose with both hands. Blood was already gushing out between his fingers.
“Christ almighty!” he roared in pain and anger. “Be careful with that thing!”
“Oh no! Mon dieu!”
“Oh god!” he shouted. “I’m bleeding!”
As Bronson attempted to stem the bleeding with his Angora cat tie, he stumbled over to the table under the flat screen and began opening the cabinets for a tissue.
Watching from the hallway, Carter pushed open the door and tossed the dean’s keys to Danielle. She caught them and dashed across the room, setting them back on the end table, and then pirouetted and landed on the sofa in an impossibly casual pose.
Bronson turned just a split second after Danielle hit the couch. Was she smiling at him?
Bronson had reached a boiling point. “Do you want to go to the cafeteria or not?”
Danielle gave him a sexy, “Oui, oui,” but Bronson was done.
He stormed over, grabbed Danielle by the wrist, and marched her toward the door.
“Don’t you have a dog or something?” he asked.
Danielle set her mouth in a sexy pout. “My dog died.”
Bronson shook his head and kept walking. First thing in the morning, he’ll be setting new academic standards for exchange students.
23
Ryan, Samar, and Dre were busy reconnecting all of Sissy’s electrical cables when Carter and Tree burst into the room.
“How’s it going?” Carter asked.
Ryan ran back to his computer, firing up the diagnostic software. “We’re on it!”
Tree glanced up at the clock. It was already 9:13 p.m. “Guys, we’ve got less than three hours to make this happen.”
“Not gonna lie,” Ryan said. “It’ll be close.”
“Shit.” Tree shook her head and turned to Carter. “Stay here.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Just promise me you’ll stay here?” Tree grabbed her jacket and pulled it on.
“Where are you going?” Carter wanted to know.
Tree spotted a toolbox near Ryan’s desk. She grabbed a long flat-head screwdriver.
“I need to borrow this.” She tucked the screwdriver behind her back and ran out of the lab.
She heard Carter call her name, but she didn’t look back.
* * *
—
At the hospital, Tree slipped directly into Tombs’s room while the cop was still using the bathroom. She still had time. She sneaked behind him and slid the gun out of his holster while he was still peeing. His stream slowed to a sad, messy trickle as he twisted around to find her aiming the barrel at him. He awkwardly raised his hands.
“Sorry,” she said. “Bad timing.”
“Just take it easy,” he said.
“You can put it away,” Tree told him.
The cop tucked and zipped his pants. Slowly, he turned around.
“Lady, you’re making a big mistake.”
“There’s a killer on the loose.” Tree kept the gun trained on him. “Go get help.”
/> “What?” he asked.
“Go!”
The cop backed away before bolting from the room. Tree heard him yelling in the hallway.
“She’s got a gun!”
Tree took the elevators down to surgery. She ran down the hall and blew past the emergency exit door before slowing down as she approached the OR. She raised the gun, then walked into the room. Lori was standing over Tombs’s gurney.
“Lori, move!” Tree shouted.
Lori jumped out of the way, revealing Tombs, already sitting up, wielding a knife.
Bam-bam! Tree blew Tombs off the gurney.
Lori was frozen in shock. Tree grabbed her.
“Come on!” she said. “We have to move!”
“What the hell is happening?”
“I’ll explain later!” Tree pushed her toward the door. “Move!”
* * *
—
Over in the lab, Ryan typed commands into the computer until he thought his fingers might fall off. Finally, Sissy started to power up. Carter, Dre, and Samar moved around the perimeter of the room, double-checking the device.
At that same moment, Dean Bronson, his bloody nose stuffed with Kleenex, was guiding the crazy, beautiful, blind exchange student down the hallway to the cafeteria when the lights began to flicker overhead. The whole building was experiencing an all-too-familiar power surge, the kind of power surge he’d definitively stopped with authority when he’d confiscated that ridiculous science gadget…and Roger Bronson knew that he’d been had.
“What is this?” he growled, spinning Danielle around and ripping off her sunglasses. “You’re not blind!”
He yanked the cane from Danielle’s hand and tossed it to the ground as if it, too, were not really a cane. As Dean Bronson took off running toward the science building, Danielle fished her phone out of her purse and dialed. It only rang once before Carter picked up.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said.
It only took Bronson a few minutes to get there, but Carter had helped Dre and Samar be ready. As Sissy glowed and the lights flickered, Dean Bronson and his guards came flying around the corner only to find the lab door locked from the inside.
Happy Death Day & Happy Death Day 2U Page 21