by Betsy Uhrig
“You wanted to see what happened if you asked it questions when you were alone,” I said. I may be a historian and not a detective, but I’m also (possibly contrary to your opinion of me) not a complete doofus.
“Bing-o,” said Lara in the tone of someone who disagrees strongly with the above non-doofus assessment.
Was it just me or was her whole shyness thing turning into something much snarkier?
Chapter 38
“WHY WERE YOU HIDING UNDER the desk?” I asked Lara, trying to put her on the defensive.
“Because I’m not supposed to be in here,” she said. “And neither are you.”
So now I was on the defensive. That was quick. “You were hiding from me?”
“I thought you were Ms. Grossman.”
Of course she wasn’t hiding from me. What was the club historian going to do to her? Write her up in his history? Which, yes, I just did. See the effect it had? No? Exactly.
“We can’t both be alone with the help screen at the same time,” I observed.
Her silence was way louder than her spoken “Duh” would have been.
“And since you were here first,” I babbled into the “Duh”-laden silence, “I guess I should step outside until you’re done.” I stood up.
“Thanks,” she said, immediately taking the seat in front of the laptop.
I was turning to grab my stuff and leave when there was a rattling, trundling, janitorial noise in the corridor. We each dove under a different desk.
The noise halted outside the door. I’m pretty sure it was one of those big carts the janitors used to move cartons of toilet paper and stuff around the school. The ones that looked like they would be fun to ride on. Then there was a series of clanking noises signifying something heavy being moved. Then the cart rolled away.
Lara and I waited a few minutes under the desks until we were sure the cart and the janitor driving it were gone. Then we crawled out.
“That was close,” I said, without really meaning it. A janitor had about as much power to get us in trouble in this situation as a club historian did.
“We should go,” said Lara.
I nodded, but I was really thinking that she should go so I could move ahead with my plan.
She shut down the laptop and picked up her backpack. Then she stood next to the door, waiting for me.
I thought about saying something like “Catch you later,” but I realized I couldn’t do it. Lara Andersen was expecting me to leave with her, and I wasn’t going to refuse. Why? Because I had a crush on her? Not at all. Because I was afraid of her.
I grabbed my backpack and then grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Nothing happened. Realizing my error, I turned the knob again and pushed. The door opened about one inch before slamming into something heavy that was right outside it. I pushed again, harder, and the heavy thing—which turned out to be the very stepladder that Steve and Vincent and I had used during the Skunk Boy episode—toppled and slammed into the wall opposite. And wedged there.
“What did you do?” Lara asked in that way a parent does when surveying a scene of total destruction.
I looked through the skinny glass panel in the door and saw the ladder and its position spanning the hallway from door to wall.
“Nothing! The janitor left a ladder leaning against the door, and when I opened the door, it fell against the wall. I need to push it out of the way.”
I pulled the door closed and opened it again forcefully, expecting the ladder to give way. It did not. Instead, it seemed to wedge itself more firmly between the door and the wall.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Let me try,” said Lara.
She got the door open maybe two inches, then gave it a vicious kick, which did nothing to the door, though it did heighten my fear of her.
“Help me,” she said.
So we both kicked the door. Over and over. Even if it didn’t budge the ladder, at least the noise would attract someone. That’s what I was hoping, anyway.
Then we gave up on kicking, and I started yelling through the crack in the door, “Help! Somebody help! We’re trapped in the janitors’ closet! Anyone?”
Lara stared at me wide-eyed as I yelled. Like she couldn’t imagine ever yelling like that for any reason, but also like she was glad I was willing to do it.
After a while it seemed clear that the janitor who had left the ladder outside the door was now on his way home to his family and was not going to hear us and come to our rescue. Nor was anyone else.
“You don’t happen to have a phone,” I said to Lara.
She shook her head. “You?”
“Nope. Not until ninth grade.”
“How did the only two kids in the whole school whose parents actually obey that stupid rule end up trapped in a janitors’ closet?” said Lara.
“Vincent doesn’t have one either,” I said.
She just glared at me.
“I guess we could e-mail someone,” I said. We had the laptops, after all.
We thought about the people we knew who might read their e-mail before one of us had to go to the bathroom. (And yes, I was very sorry that idea had entered my head.)
“I could try my aunt,” I said.
“I could try my dad.”
We both sat there picturing our respective adults coming to rescue us from a ladder.
“I have another idea,” I said.
“Okay,” said Lara immediately.
“What if we take that broom and poke it out the door and try to push the ladder sideways?”
This was a terrible idea, and we both liked it way more than e-mailing an adult and then explaining ourselves to that adult.
Since it was my idea, it seemed fair that I be the one to try to move the ladder aside with the broom.
So beneath Lara’s critical gaze, I grabbed the broom as manfully as I could and poked its handle out the narrow opening of the door.
First I tried to push the legs of the ladder, which were wedged against the door. There was some undignified grunting during this attempt. But I couldn’t move the broom handle around the door enough to budge anything.
Then I decided that I would reach across the hall with the broom handle and try to knock the top of the ladder aside. To do this I had to hold the very end of the broom—the actual broom part of it. Which made the whole thing very hard to control. Which is my excuse for what happened next.
Chapter 39
I TOOK ALL THE BLAME. With the firefighters, with Ms. Grossman, with Ms. Wu, with our parents. I took all the blame because what happened was completely my fault. Except the ladder. That was not my fault. Who leaves a ladder in front of a door? I’m hoping now, as I write this history in the calm after the storm, that Lara maybe respected me a tiny bit because of my blame-taking.
But she wasn’t respecting me as I flailed away at a wedged ladder with an out-of-control broom handle. And even that very low level of respect must have nose-dived when, instead of pushing the ladder out of the way, I somehow managed with my flailing to poke and break and also set off the fire alarm on the wall opposite, which activated the basement’s sprinkler system.
The noise of the alarm was loud and scary. The water from the sprinklers was cold and everywhere. By the time it occurred to either of us that the Prescient equipment was getting wet, it was way too late to stop screaming and cover it with any of the other dripping-wet things in the room. We grabbed the laptops and dove under the desks, but that was mostly to get ourselves out from under the sprinklers.
Soon we could hear sirens as fire trucks sped toward the school. It was sort of nice to know that in case of an actual fire, we were safe, what with the aggressive sprinklers and the immediate response from the fire department. We were grateful when the alarms were silenced and the sprinklers turned off. And we were super embarrassed when a single firefighter easily lifted the ladder out of the way with one hand and opened the door to the closet.
We crawled out from under the desks, clutching th
e soaked laptops, Lara close to tears and me saying “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry” over and over again.
* * *
I’m thinking that the conversations and investigations and detentions and community service and other “repercussions” (Ms. Grossman word) that followed don’t really belong in a history of H.A.I.R. Club, so I’m going to leave those to your imagination. The whole process was unpleasant and humiliating, not to mention long and tedious. I sincerely hope never to spend a weekend heaving waterlogged cases of toilet paper into a dumpster ever again.
None of that was as bad as having to explain to the other club members that because I’d sneaked into headquarters and then panicked and then flailed, our state-of-the-art security equipment was possibly ruined. Every particle of my hard-earned skunk-petting cred went right down the tubes that afternoon, never to return.
No one seemed to blame Lara for any of this, though she had done her share of the sneaking, at least. In fact, everyone seemed to be feeling sorry for her because of her association with me, the Flounder Bay Flailer.
If you’re interested in reading the minutes of that particular Tuesday’s club meeting, I’m sure Sonia took down every word in permanent purple ink. Every angry, insulting word.
So now I’d managed to alienate almost all my friends in this timeline too. Apparently I was destined to end up alone at a lunch table with Rip van Vincent no matter what I did. Toward the end of the most unpleasant meeting in H.A.I.R. Club history, Ms. Grossman knocked on the door and then came in without waiting for a response.
“Well,” she said when she had our attention, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news and some possibly good news.”
No one knew how to respond to that, so we just waited for whatever was coming next.
“The good news,” said Ms. Grossman, “is that the big screens seem to be working in spite of the water. The bad news,” she continued, “is that the laptops are not working and we have no way of getting in touch with the donor about fixing them.”
My stomach did something weird involving a lump of guilt and a glob of nausea.
“So what’s the possibly good news?” Steve asked.
“The possibly good news is that we live in Flounder Bay, which is home to some of the smartest computer experts in the country,” said Ms. Grossman.
When we looked blank, she said, “Woozle. Woozle employs some of the finest computer minds around. So we asked the tech team there to see if they can get the laptops working again. Clever, huh? We’ve arranged to drop them off on Thursday, after they’ve had a chance to dry out some more. I’ll let you know what the Woozle folks say when they’ve had a look.”
She beamed at us and we didn’t beam back, for obvious reasons. The nerds at Woozle would be all over those laptops like ants on a jelly doughnut. Our futures would literally be in their overcurious hands.
My stomach flopped and I started planning a sprint to the boys’ room.
“In the meantime,” said Ms. Grossman, “since there’s nothing else for the club to do, I’ve volunteered you to help the janitors dust the security cameras. You can get started on that next meeting.”
Chapter 40
HELPING THE JANITORS DUST THE cameras meant carrying their long-handled dusters around and waiting next to their ladders (and yes, the Offending Ladder was involved, and yes, I did resent it bitterly) for dust to shower onto our heads and shoulders and make us look like we had industrial-grade dandruff. The dirty looks I got from everyone except Vincent were brutal. I wished I had sunglasses to protect me from the glare of their annoyance along with the dust.
When we finally got away and met up at club headquarters, we looked ghastly. Except Steve, who’d somehow managed to groom before coming downstairs.
“Ms. Grossman told me they dropped the laptops off at Woozle today,” he said.
“We have to get them back,” said Hoppy. “If those nerds figure out what they do, it’ll be over for us.”
“It’ll be like a movie where the government scientists capture the friendly alien and try to dissect it,” said Steve.
“Or take over the portal to another universe and try to drive tanks through it,” said Vincent.
“Those things are both way cooler than our cafeteria footage of senior year,” said Nikhil. “But still. It’s meant for us, not geeks who ride around on scooters at work. Plus, we still need to find out what happens to us.”
“I don’t think there’s any hardware in those laptops labeled ‘From the Future,’ ” said Andrew. “But I’m guessing that whoever built this stuff used tech that isn’t available even to Woozle. Which will be obvious when they open them up. Anyone who saw it would want to study it for a while. Which means it’s unlikely we’d get them back anytime soon.”
“Exactly,” I threw in. From what Luke had said, whatever was inside those computers would not look normal to a random techie inspecting for water damage.
No one so much as glanced my way. It was going to be an uphill battle getting back into their good graces. Except Lara’s. There was no chance I was ever getting back into her good—or even mildly disgusted—graces. That was a lost cause.
I needed to fix this—or at least go down trying. Which meant thinking big. “We need to get in there,” I said. “Into Woozle.”
“And what, steal the laptops?” said Nikhil. “Not happening.”
“It’s not stealing if they’re ours to begin with,” said Steve.
I threw him a grateful smile for his support, but he was looking at Hoppy, his vice president, for her opinion.
“Speaking of security equipment,” she said, “do you know how impossible it would be to get into Woozle and take something? It’s not exactly on the same level as sneaking in here.”
Which hadn’t gone well either time we tried it, everyone seemed to be remembering during the moment of quiet that followed.
“What if we got someone to let us in?” said Lara, ending a moment of quiet for possibly the first time in her life.
“Like who?” said Nikhil.
Hoppy snorted. “Who here doesn’t have a relative who works at Woozle—besides me?” she said. “Let’s have a show of hands.”
Only Vincent raised his hand. His parents are lawyers.
“My mom works there,” said Andrew.
“Both my parents do,” said Nikhil.
“Mine too,” said Steve.
“My mom works there and my dad works at Hopkins,” said Sonia.
“Seriously?” said Hoppy. “An inter-company marriage?”
Sonia shrugged. “They manage.”
“My mom works there too,” said Lara, “but there’s no way she’s letting us take the laptops without permission. I was thinking that maybe someone knows someone who would do that.”
Now everyone was sort of looking around at one another and wondering who had a parent laid-back enough to either let us into their workplace knowing we were going to take the laptops or let us in and not notice that we were taking them.
Vincent, who had met my aunt Shannon, finally spoke. “Dude,” he said to me, “you owe us.”
I did. I knew that. I also knew something no one else there did. Which was the identity of the only person on the planet who might be able to fix the laptops for us, no questions asked. If Shannon could get us into Woozle, maybe Luke could get our futures back.
Chapter 41
THE FACT THAT SHANNON ALREADY knew about Prescient and Luke and the equipment was a huge plus. I figured I would e-mail her as soon as I got home, explaining the problem and asking for her help.
But as I was walking home, I had—and this will shock most readers who have been tracking my progress or lack thereof—a Mature Thought. It occurred to me that Shannon might not want me e-mailing her at work about the possibility of letting me and others into her workplace so we could take something without permission. Nor could I call her, since she likely wouldn’t want to speak aloud about this type of plan in front of her coworkers either.
But I also didn’t have any time to spare. The nerds were probably clustered around their technological jelly doughnuts with their tiny screwdrivers ready even as I raced up the front steps.
“You’re an arsenic,” said Alice as I entered the front hall.
“What?”
“You,” Alice enunciated, “are an argonaut.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“You got in trouble with the fire department. That’s what they call you. An artisan.”
“An arsonist? Is that the word you’re trying for?”
“That’s what I said.”
“An arsonist is a person who lights fires. If anything, I’m the opposite of an arsonist. I set off a fire alarm—by accident!—when there was no fire. I’m not an arsonist. You, on the other hand, are a nuisance.”
“You’re a nuisance,” Alice said. “And a dork.”
* * *
If I couldn’t call Shannon at work, I could call Luke, I decided when this Alice interlude was over.
“Um, how’s your ear?” I asked when he answered his phone.
“I think we’re past the real danger,” he said. “It’s not pulsating anymore.”
“Not pulsating is good.”
“I think so.”
There was some awkward silence. I didn’t exactly call my uncle often. Or ever.
“So what’s up?” he finally said.
“You heard about the whole fire alarm incident, I’m guessing.”
“I did,” he said carefully. He may have been trying not to laugh—it was hard to tell on the phone.
“Well, the Prescient laptops got wet because of the sprinklers going off and they stopped working.”
“Crap,” he said. “They’re not built to be waterproof.”
I could picture him running his hand through his hair until it stood up, something he did when he was agitated.
