The Fourth Stall Part III (10 page)

T
he recess supervisor never let go of my arm as she led me through the side doors. In fact, her grip seemed to get tighter as we went deeper into the school. The inside was kind of like my school in some ways, but then in many other ways not like it at all.

It stunk, for one. Literally. I didn't know what my school smelled like, probably not good either, but this one smelled really funny. And not funny ha-ha. It smelled like a mixture of beef gravy and Urinal Cocktail (you know, it's that thing that sometimes happens in boys' bathrooms where no one flushes a particular urinal for a while and then everyone keeps using that same one like we're all involved in some sort of unwritten contract together to see if we can make it overflow).

I felt numb as we went down halls, around corners, and past classrooms, likely on our way to the administration offices. I could barely keep up with my captor as she charged ahead. Luckily she pulled me along hard every time I started lagging. I couldn't believe I was going to be expelled over this. Just like that. I mean, I was
retired
. This was exactly why I had quit, too. This sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen to kids who had retired.

A few kids were in the halls. They stopped and stared as we passed. Teachers we came across looked at me sullenly and shook their heads slowly. Was it just me or did this school's lights seem to be a lot dimmer than at my school? It seemed like the lighting was only getting darker as we moved deeper into the school, too.

I was looking up at the lights, trying to figure out why it seemed so dark, when suddenly water splashed on my face and the recess supervisor let go of my arm. Her right shoulder and face were drenched, and a broken and deflated rubber balloon stuck to the curls of her dark hair. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, another balloon soared in and nailed her in the right leg. She jumped back, rage engulfing her face. We were being assaulted.

“Run!” I heard a voice yell.

I didn't need another prompt. I took off sprinting down the hall in the direction we'd just come from.

“Hey!” I heard the recess supervisor shout at me.

I glanced back just as another water balloon pelted her in the back of the head. She turned around to see who her assailants were, but the hall looked empty. They were good, whoever they were. I darted left down another hallway. The recess supervisor, frozen with indecision between going after me or her assailants, had a ton of ground to make up now if she ended up choosing to chase me.

I wasn't going to waste my lead. I weaved in and out of the halls, looking for an exit or place to hide. A teacher popped out of a classroom as I passed. He started walking after me.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey!”

I bolted left around another corner. This place was like a maze. I just needed to find an empty hallway where I wouldn't be seen entering a room of some kind. From there, well, I'd figure out what to do, but I just needed to find a good hiding spot to collect my thoughts.

If everything else so far that morning had gone about as bad as could be expected, then you couldn't blame me for being shocked at my fortune when I rounded the next corner to find a completely deserted intersection in the hallway. I knew the one teacher was probably still walking after me and maybe the recess supervisor, too, so I had to act fast.

The left branch was a long hallway that stretched for what seemed like infinity with a billion doors. The right branch was much shorter with about five doors, including a glowing green exit sign posted above the last one on the left. I needed to decide now whether to cut my losses and make a break for it or stick around and try to carry out the mission. I heard footsteps approaching behind me.

I moved quickly down the shorter hallway to my right, glancing at the doors as I passed them. The first few were definitely classrooms. I wasn't about to try to hide in a regular classroom. I was likely only seconds away from giving up and bolting for the exit when I caught my second break.

The second-to-last door on the right looked to be an old storage room of some kind. It still had a long, narrow glass window like the other classrooms, but instead of regular rows of desks and chairs the dark room just held a bunch of boxes, piles of chairs, and really old wooden desks.

I tried the handle and was somewhat shocked to find it unlocked. It seemed as though my luck was turning in an epic reversal of fortune that could probably be matched only by three straight Chicago Cubs World Series titles.

I slipped inside and shut the door behind me as quietly and quickly as I could.

The room was dark, but the light coming in through the small window in the door was just enough for me to avoid tripping over any boxes or clutter as I moved toward the back. I heard the bell ring, signaling the end of recess. I found a large pile of boxes near the back and wedged myself in behind them. And . . .

Well . . .

Now what?

I wasn't really sure at all what I was supposed to do next. I still intended to try to meet with Ken-Co if I could and fulfill what I came here to do. But how? I mean, here I was hiding behind stacks of boxes. How was this going to help me?

Hopefully, anybody who had been chasing me would just assume after enough time looking that I'd exited the building and was gone. I heard the faint noises of kids moving through the halls, heading back to class. Well, I was guessing there wasn't much more I'd be able to do until lunch, since likely Ken-Co and all of his employees would have to be in class until then.

I sighed.

At least I'd found a relatively safe place to hide until then. I could use this free time to try and figure out exactly what my next move should be. I took out my phone and played a game to kill some time and help clear my thoughts. Sometimes my best brainstorming was done while mindlessly fidgeting with my phone or playing a game. Besides, I likely couldn't make another move until lunch so I had tons of time to kill. Two hours may not actually be all that long, but when you're cramped in the corner of a dark storage room alone, two hours is basically a lifetime.

I was just starting to settle in when the door to the storage room opened. I pocketed my phone as quickly as I could, careful not to make any noise. I only hoped whoever it was hadn't seen the glow of the screen first.

“Well, he definitely came down this way,” a man's voice said.

The lights flicked on, and I had to shut my eyes tightly and cover my face from the sudden blinding glare. I had been getting used to the dark.

“Who is he?” another male voice asked.

“I don't know, but he was outside bullying our students,” said a voice that I recognized as that of the recess supervisor.

So they clearly hadn't given up their search, after all. And look what I'd done. I'd had my chance to escape, but instead I'd chosen to corner myself in this room like a penned animal at one of those horrible hunting farms where basically rich, dumb people who want to pretend they're hunters pay to go inside a large fenced area and shoot defenseless animals.

And here I was, stupider than those animals who probably didn't even end up in those pens by choice like I had. Idiot. I smacked my forehead with my open palm without realizing what I was doing.

“What was that?” one of the men said.

“Probably a cockroach, knowing this place,” the other guy said, and then all three of them laughed.

I heard them start to shuffle through the boxes and clutter at the front of the room. I probably only had a matter of minutes before I'd be discovered. I went through my options.

I could make a break for it. If I moved quickly, I might catch them off guard and be able to slip right by them and out into the hallway.

I could grab a plastic chair and fight them to the death.

I could try to use the Force and conjure up some sort of crazy tornado of boxes, desks, and junk and use it to tear a hole in the roof that I would then fly out of.

I could just keep sitting here thinking about ridiculous scenarios until I was caught, turned in to Dickerson, and expelled.

As much as I hated to admit it, option four seemed to be the most likely to occur. One of the searchers was just around the pile of junk now. It was the recess supervisor; I could hear her heavy breathing, like a siren warning an impending storm.

Then I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt. The wall I'd been sitting against was suddenly gone, and I was falling backward into the dark.

I
t all happened so fast, it took me a while to figure out that I hadn't actually just plummeted into some spontaneous black hole and would never be heard from again. The first thing that clued me in was the voice of a kid speaking right next to me.

“That were a close one, eh, mate?” he whispered with a thick Australian accent.

It was pitch-black. I mean the kind of dark where the only thing I could actually see was the inside of my eyelids when I closed them. It was also sort of cramped; I could feel that much. There was enough room for me to sit upright, as I currently was, but I could feel my hair brushing against a hard surface above us.

“Where are we?” I whispered. “What happened?”

He snickered quietly. “Come on. It'll all come good,” he said.

With his accent and everything I didn't really know what exactly he meant. But I heard him shuffling down the cramped tunnel to my right. Or at least I hoped that was him and not some sort of giant Thief Valley School rat.

“You coming or what, mate?” he whispered again, except this time his voice was several feet farther away.

“I can't see,” I said back.

He laughed again. “Aw, well, lucky for you there's only two ways to go.”

Then he started moving again. He had a point. And I definitely didn't want to get stuck in here alone and end up some cryptic skeleton that would be found someday in the year, like, 2079 and make everybody wonder just how this strange small boy got stuck inside the walls of a school.

I quickly crawled after the Australian kid, wondering how and why I'd been saved twice by the students here. Especially after it had been their fault I'd been caught in the first place. The ground under my palms was cold and hard, with very little dirt or dust considering we were inside of a wall. Why would a crawl space behind a wall be paved?

“Are we going to see Ken-Co?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. I could tell he was having fun with me.

“So he runs a pretty good business, then, huh?”

At this the Aussie simply laughed. He laughed so loud it echoed through the tunnel and sounded like ten kids were laughing instead of just one.

When he was finished laughing, he stopped ahead of me.

“Mate?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It's the best business this side of Brisbane, Australia. It runs like a machine. Every piece oiled, every employee loyal. Nothing ever breaks down, ever. You see, money does all our talking for us, and we answer to no one. We own this school, the teachers, the janitor; I even heard we got the superintendent under our thumb.”

If this was true, then I was dealing with a businessman the likes of which I'd never come close to knowing. Even Staples's empire in its greatest moments was like a dude selling fake designer purses on the sidewalk compared to what this kid was describing.

“All right. Let's go, then, yes?” he said, and kept moving.

After what must have been a hundred yards of crawling through narrow spaces and around corners, he stopped.

Then a small flashlight clicked on, which blinded me for a few seconds. After my eyes adjusted, I saw that we were at a fork. One branch of the small cement tunnel went left and seemed to gradually get bigger farther down the path. The right branch stayed pretty small and actually seemed to slope down, as if it led to an underground level.

“Kinda creepy-looking, isn't it, mate?” he said, tilting his head toward the right branch.

“That's where we're headed, isn't it?” I said.

He responded only by laughing again, and then he started down the narrow tunnel. I sighed and then followed.

The slope was pretty gradual at first, but after a little bit it got a lot steeper, and I felt my hands slipping on the cement. It was getting tough to keep from slamming face-first into the Australian kid's heels. Then, just when I was sure I was at my breaking point, that I was about to get my teeth knocked out by his shoes or the cement floor, he was suddenly gone.

We finally exited the tunnel as it'd turned in to a larger room. I heard about all the bones in my body cracking and popping like fireworks as I climbed to my feet.

The room was cement and probably the size of a normal school classroom. There were no windows of any kind, and I assumed that we were likely at least partway underground now. Light came from six or seven flashlights and battery-powered camping lanterns hanging on the walls throughout the room.

Beside the passage we'd just come from, I could see at least two other small openings, as well as an open door leading into another chamber. The Australian kid stood next to me, watching my face and wearing that stupid grin of his. Two pretty big kids stood on either side of the open door. They were also studying me.

One of them was a girl and one a guy, but other than that they looked almost identical. They were clearly twins.

“We've been expecting you,” the girl said.

“What took so long?” her brother said.

The Australian kid shrugged. “I couldn't find the bugger! He ran off and then hid in the three twenty-two storage room. It took me a few minutes to figure out where he'd gone.”

The twins seemed to accept this as an okay excuse because the girl handed him something that I was guessing was money. Then the Australian kid turned to me and said, “Well, good luck, mate. You'll need it.”

Before I could ask what he meant by that, he was gone, scurrying off through one of the small tunnel openings in the wall.

I looked at the twins. The guy smiled at me in a smug way, as if he wanted me to know that he knew what was in store for me and that he also knew that I didn't know what he knew. This kid was good at giving looks that said a lot.

The girl didn't smile. She just stared at me.

“You've been expecting me?” I asked. “How is that possible?”

They didn't answer. Instead the guy motioned toward the door between them.

“This way,” he said.

What was it with TV kids and being so reluctant to answer questions directly?

I followed the kids into the next chamber, which was roughly the same size and had a similar setup, including several small tunnel openings and two more metal doors. There was also a small printed sign a few feet from one of the doors that said, “The Line Starts Here →”

One of those red-velvet, movie-theater ropes used to partition lines at giant cinemas ran along the wall behind the sign. Nobody was in line at the moment, which made sense since it was regular class time. Speaking of, just how was it possible that all these kids were out of class without getting in trouble? There was a reason my business operated only during recess and lunch: it just wouldn't be possible to get out of class regularly during other times of the day. I was annoyed that Ken-Co had achieved this, and I was probably a little jealous, too.

The guy pounded on the metal door opposite the sign. In the enclosed cement chamber the clanging almost sounded like thunder. His twin sister folded her sizable arms and continued to stare at me like she thought I might have insulted her but wasn't quite sure.

“Pretty nice setup you guys have,” I said, trying to sound as nice as possible.

“Hmm” was her reply.

I heard a muffled voice from inside the metal door but couldn't make out what it said. Then the guy turned to me and opened the door. He smiled and motioned for me to head inside the room.

“She's been expecting you,” he said.