“Come in,” he said.
I entered, and he waved me to a chair in front of his desk without saying a word. His face was serious, and I knew I had been right.
“Sarah,” said Principal Jones, “am I correct that one of the students you tutor is Miles Grave?”
The question was so unexpected that it shocked me out of my dread. Miles was a track star and one of the kids I did extra schoolwork with. He didn’t have the best study record in the world, but he really wanted to do well.
“Yes, he is,” I said, still confused. “We’ve actually got a study session tonight.”
Principal Jones furrowed his brow and steepled his fingers. “Well, unfortunately, Mister Grave was caught cheating on a biology test today. We found a piece of paper with the answers on it below his chair.”
“What?” I said, too loudly. “That doesn’t make any sense!” I realized I was still talking to the principal and composed myself.
“Please, go on,” he said, seemingly amused.
“Principal Jones,” I told him, “Miles aces biology every time we study it. It’s the last subject I would suspect him of cheating on. History, maybe, or geography. But,” I said, holding my hands up, “he’s just not the cheating type. He really works hard, and he’s never tried anything shifty when we’ve been studying.”
“Hm,” said Principal Jones, pursing his lips. “Hm, hm, hm. Well, we’re still investigating the matter.” He sighed. “And I’ll admit, I’m relieved to hear you say that. Miles is a fine athlete and is hardly ever in trouble. It would be a nasty shock to find out he was cheating.”
“He wasn’t,” I said with total certainty. “I guarantee it.”
“Well, he’s been assigned detention today,” said Principal Jones. “I’d remove it, but his teacher seems fairly convinced of Miles’ guilt. I’m going to leave the detention, but you may do your tutoring with him there if you wish.”
“Thank you,” I said gratefully. Miles really couldn’t afford to miss a session right now. We were getting into Middle Eastern Geography and he was having a lot of trouble with the city names. “And, if it’s not too much of a favor to ask, could Miles re-take the test? With random answers? Whatever you want. I swear, he knows biology like nobody’s business.”
“I’ll consider it,” said Principal Jones, “but I don’t think it should be a problem. Especially since he has you vouching for him. You know, you’re one of the brightest students I’ve ever seen at Roosevelt.”
I ducked my head. I don’t mean to sound stuck up, but I’d gotten used to adults praising me when I was very young. After a while, I learned to just acknowledge it rather than try to downplay it. I got up to go.
“Oh, and Sarah,” Principal Jones said just as I started to step through the door. I turned to look at him. “We have to finish counting the votes before it’s official, but…congratulations.” His smile was as wide as I’d ever seen it. My own face split in a grin, and I thanked him before leaving the office.
I was walking on clouds the rest of the day. I didn’t even mind that after school I’d have to go to detention to work with Miles. My friends all asked me what I kept grinning about, but I didn’t tell them; I didn’t want to jinx it.
Finally the last bell rang, and as soon as it was done Principal Jones’ voice boomed over the loudspeaker again. “It is my great pleasure to congratulate your new student body president, with a landslide victory, Miss Sarah Preston!”
The class I was in erupted in cheers. Other students swarmed over to my desk to give me congratulations and hugs. I couldn’t stop grinning. Out in the hall, it was the same thing: everyone swarming around me and saying how they knew I was going to win. Even the guy I was running against, a really nice guy named Steve, shook my hand.
“I don’t even know why I ran against you, Sarah,” he said, smiling. “Congratulations.”
Kurt found me in the hall, and before I knew it he swept me into a big bear hug. He actually lifted me off the ground a couple of inches before setting me down. I’m sure I was blushing like an idiot, and grinning like one, too.
“Congratulations!” he said. “What did I tell you?”
I think of that moment every now and then. It might have been the happiest moment of my life up to that point. It was certainly the last simple moment of my life for a long, long time.
When the buzz had died down I went to the detention room. Right outside the door I almost bumped headfirst into Raven.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Me neither,” she said, smirking. “But at least you have an excuse. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” I said, grinning. “I didn’t know you even cared about school elections.”
“I don’t,” she snickered. “But I’m still happy for you.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “Are you in detention?”
“Yeah,” she said ruefully. “I didn’t get out of that tree fast enough. Butch caught me smoking.” Butch was the school janitor.
“Sorry,” I said, though I didn’t know why.
“Not your fault,” she told me. “I appreciate you warning us.”
“No problem.” I hesitated before continuing. “Hey, listen…maybe we should hang out some time. We could go to the mall or something. You could take me to Hot Topic, I could take you to Old Navy.”
She rolled her eyes, but at least she didn’t look offended. “Maybe sometime. That would be nice.”
She smiled again and entered the detention room. I didn’t feel like she was too enthusiastic about the idea. Most likely it would never happen. I sighed and entered after her.
There was Miles. He looked up as I entered, and as soon as he saw me he shook his head, giving me an exasperated look.
“Can you believe this?” he asked. “They won’t listen to me, Sarah. They think I cheated.”
“I know you didn’t, Miles,” I told him reassuringly. “Not on biology, anyway.”
Miles grinned. Miles has an amazing smile. He’s really tall, black, and has the body of a long distance runner. He’s not as big as the guys on the football team, and not as muscular as the guys who play basketball, but he’s really physically fit. And he’s got this great personality that makes it impossible not to be friends with him. He was one of my favorite students I tutored. In fact, I was thinking about waiting an extra year before going to college, so I could be available to finish his tutoring. He was working really hard to set up his future, and I wanted to help him as much as I could.
“I talked to Principal Jones,” I told him. “I think you’re going to be fine. They’re going to set you up with a new test, and if you pass it, the whole thing should die out.”
“I hope so,” Miles said. “I need it if I’m going to get into USC.”
“They’ll probably let you in on your running alone.” I was a little envious. Unlike Miles, I didn’t have anything but my mind to help me get where I wanted to go. “But right now, you need to learn the difference between Baghdad and Bahrain,” I said, plopping down in the seat next to him. “Come on, let’s crack some books.”
“Are you going to stay here in detention with me?” he asked, shocked.
“Of course,” I told him. “How else are you going to catch up?”
“Man, Sarah,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to thank you. Remind me to buy you a car when I’m big and famous.”
“I will,” I told him. “Now get your books.”
As Miles went digging through his backpack for the textbooks he needed, I looked around the room. Raven was sitting in the back corner of the room, texting on her phone until the teacher showed up. Blade was in the other back corner of the room; no surprise.
What was a surprise was seeing the same shy girl who had wished me good luck earlier that day. She was in the front row, staring down at her desk, but there was no book there for her to read. I wondered what she’d done to end up in detention. She seemed so shy, so far from
a troublemaker.
The door swung open behind me, and I heard a familiar voice.
“Sweet sabers of Slugaduch, Sarah, what are you doing in detention?”
I tried not to groan as I turned around. It’s possible I didn’t totally succeed. There in the doorway, grinning below his mane of curly red hair, was my cousin Calvin.
“Hi Calvin,” I said.
Calvin wasn’t even fourteen yet, but he was a sophomore in high school already. That’s because he was crazy smart. But not crazy smart in a normal way, crazy smart in a mad scientist kind of way. He loved experimenting, and it seemed like he always had different science projects going on. Sometimes those projects got mixed up in alarmingly explosive ways.
On top of that, he was a super geek. If Calvin were a superhero, that would be his name: Super Geek. If it wasn’t Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings, or ninjas, Calvin wasn’t interested. That day he was wearing a shirt with a picture of Darth Vader on it that said, “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?” Sometimes I thought Calvin’s science experiments were just an attempt to give himself super powers.
“What the heck are you doing in here?” he asked, still smiling. “Don’t tell me you were elected student body president and given detention on the same day.”
“No,” I told him testily. “I’m tutoring.” I gestured at Miles and the book he was now poring through.
Calvin’s face fell. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.” I couldn’t help thinking he would have been happier if I was in trouble.
“What about you?” I countered. “What are you doing here?”
Calvin scoffed and waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not even that big of a deal,” he started. “I may or may not have dipped my teacher’s stapler into a vat of liquid nitrogen, shattered it and then glued it back together.”
“What do you mean, you may or may not have?” I asked.
“It’s possible my teacher is unclear as to what actually happened to his stapler,” Calvin said with a grin. “The jury is still out.”
“Charming,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind…”
He waved graciously. “Of course,” he said. “Carry on.” He stumped through the classroom, taking a seat right next to Raven.
“Hey,” he said. “Name’s Calvin.”
“Good to know,” said Raven, not looking up from her phone.
“What’s yours?” Calvin prodded.
“There are so many reasons I don’t want to tell you, I can’t count them.”
Miles had been staring at Calvin through the whole exchange. “Your cousin is…” he began.
“My cousin,” I finished. “Unfortunately. Let’s just get to work.”
For fifteen minutes we pored over the book, getting the cities down one by one. I had him recite them alphabetically, then by population, then by the date they were founded. He started to grin as the names and the facts about them started to sink into his mind.
“I think I’m getting it!” he said.
“Not so fast, boss,” I told him. “Let’s run them again.”
Suddenly something started tickling the edge of my hearing. A low whistling, barely audible in the momentary silence of the room.
“Will whoever is whistling please stop?” I asked, annoyed.
Everyone was silent, except for the whistling, which continued. Miles looked at me, confused.
“What whistling, Sarah?” he asked.
“That whistling,” I said. “Listen.”
“I don’t hear anything,” he said, shaking his head.
The quiet girl in the front row spoke up unexpectedly with her tiny voice. “I hear it, too.”
Calvin leaned forward, cupping hands around both his ears. “What are you guys talking about?”
Behind me, Blade spoke up. “No, I hear it.”
I whirled. I had been sure Blade was the one doing it. But he wasn’t. And Raven certainly wasn’t. Neither was Calvin—I was looking right at him. Unless…
“Calvin,” I said, as the whistling grew louder. “Is this some gadget of yours? Some experiment? An app?”
“What the heck are you talking about?” he said. His eyes grew wide, but he looked like he was serious. “I still don’t hear the…oh, wait, there it is. Wow, it’s loud.” He moved to cover his ears with his hands.
He was right. It was getting very loud. I tried not to cover my ears as I looked around to discover where it was coming from.
“What the heck is that?” Miles nearly shouted, hands pressed tight to the sides of his head.
“You guys are weird,” I barely heard Raven mumble, still in her phone. Suddenly she clapped her hands to her head, too. “Oh, wow! What the—”
Suddenly I heard a thump. I looked to the front of the room to see the shy girl had fallen out of her chair to the ground. She was passed out cold.
“Oh my gosh!” I cried, trying to run to her. But suddenly my limbs felt stiff, sluggish. My eyelids started fluttering.
Thunk. Miles’ head hit his desk hard as he, too, passed out. I tried to shout, but I couldn’t. And the whistling was growing louder.
“Aliens, man,” Calvin said, his voice breaking into a yawn. “This is how aliens…”
Thunk. His head hit the desk.
I turned to look behind me. Blade was already out. Raven’s head was nodding. I had to fight this. Someone had to warn one of the teachers. I had to make it to the door. I tried moving my legs, but it was like I was mired in molasses.
Fight it, I thought. You have to—
I fell to the ground, and darkness took me.
IT SEEMED LIKE FOREVER BEFORE I woke up. Ever so slowly, I became aware that I was conscious again. My head felt like it was on fire. The whistling noise was still in my ears, but it was growing quieter and quieter. Finally it faded away completely. I could feel the cool linoleum of the classroom floor through the back of my shirt. I pressed my palms gently into it, enjoying its chilly touch against my skin.
When I opened my eyes I realized I wasn’t on the classroom floor at all—because I wasn’t in the classroom. I was looking up at a clear blue sky. It was a deeper, darker shade of blue than I’d ever seen. It looked like something in a painting, or maybe a photograph that somebody had Photoshopped on a computer.
I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Every part of my body was sore. But for a brief moment, it was kind of nice to just lie there and stare up. I would have felt like I was falling into an endless blue sea, if it wasn’t for my back pressing against the cold, hard…
What was I lying on?
That’s when Calvin’s face popped into view, appearing to hover above my own. He stared at me with wide eyes.
“Sarah, are you okay?”
I groaned, then pushed up off the ground to look around.
It wasn’t just me and Calvin. Miles, Blade, Raven and the shy girl were all there. Miles was up already, but the others were still out. Seeing me start to get up, Miles came over and helped me to my feet. His strong hand wrapped around my forearm, propelling me up so quickly that I felt my stomach lurch.
“You okay, Sarah?” Calvin asked again. Miles looked at me, worried.
I shook my head to clear it and smiled reassuringly at both of them. “I’m fine, guys. Thanks. But…where the heck are we?”
We were in some sort of large square courtyard. It was rimmed by a stone wall that had to be twenty feet high. There were two doors leading out on opposite sides of the courtyard, but they were closed. I couldn’t see anything above the top edge of the wall; either nothing was out there, or it wasn’t tall enough to be seen. We could have been in the middle of a city, the middle of a forest, or the middle of nowhere for all I knew.
But what was way more interesting than the courtyard wall were the stone pillars. There were six of them, and they were arranged in a circle. We were sitting right in the middle of the circle, which was probably a good thirty feet wide. The pillars were round, made of stone, and had intricate designs carved all over th
em. They were about four feet tall. Each of them had a stone sitting on top of them. They were carved with hundreds of facets, like gemstones, only they were opaque and didn’t look like any gems I’d ever seen. In fact, I’d never seen anything quite like any of it before, but the pillars and the walls reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Ireland or ancient Rome.
Of course, that was impossible. We were in Rhode Island; Europe was halfway around the world.
There was a rustle, and I looked over to see the shy girl slowly pushing herself to her feet. She looked unsteady, and I’m sure she felt the same as I had, but she didn’t make a sound as she got up and slowly looked around. She flipped her head to cast her dark brown hair back over one of her eyes, but she still didn’t say a word.
I stepped past Miles to go to her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She stared at me with a wide eye and nodded, but still didn’t say anything. I hoped she wasn’t going into shock. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what to do about it if she was.
“I’m sorry, but I never got your name,” I told her, hoping to make her focus on something, even if it was as simple as talking. “I’m Sarah.”
Finally I saw a change of expression: a tiny little smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I know your name,” she said softly. “I voted for you, remember? You won.”
I smiled back. “That’s right. But what’s your name?”
“Tess,” she finally told me.
“Okay, Tess,” I told her. “Until we figure out where we are, I need you to stick real close to me or Miles, okay?”
“Hey!” piped up Calvin from behind me. “Why not me!”
“Because she’s older than you, Calvin,” I shot back over my shoulder before returning my attention to Tess. “Can you stick close to us, Tess?”
Realm Keepers: Episode One (A Young Adult Fantasy) (Realm Keepers Episodes) Page 2
