Shade and the Skinwalkers

by Marilyn Peake

  I thought of all the work involved. I said, “Well, I’ll need some help. I could work together with other members of the club who know how to do this. I’m good at graphic design. I can lay out the newspaper and come up with content, but I’ll need someone else to set up a website.”

  Ms. Bell’s face tightened. “There’s a website involved?”

  I said, “Yes. That’s where we’d publish it. Or we can use a site like Blogger and use their templates for our website.” I decided to push for the whole enchilada. “And I’d like to get started on creating the public forum—the one our club voted to call The Flying Saucer. I’d like to have it on the same website as our newspaper, if that’s possible.”

  Ms. Bell said, “Well, let me run this by Principal Marquez. Maybe it’s time we modernize this club. Lord knows, I have no idea how this is done, but I’m sure it would be a good way to prepare you all for jobs after high school. How many of you would like to help with this?”

  A bunch of kids raised their hands, among them some serious gamers who knew their way around computers and gaming consoles. There were even two club members who said they participated in online speedruns of their games. Now, that’s some serious stuff! I could never do that. I went from feeling superior and smart to feeling woefully inadequate after hearing about their skills.

  I was excited, though. I knew we’d be able to create an awesome newspaper and an online forum that could do some good.

  Ms. Bell told us to spend the rest of the meeting discussing exactly how we wanted to publish the newspaper. She told us she’d be right back.

  Toward the end of the meeting, she reappeared. She said, “I ran your ideas by Principal Marquez. He said if it saves the school money, he’s all for it. So, I guess show me what you’ve got. If we delay the newspaper by one week, can you have everything ready to go?”

  The gamer kids and I all shrieked and jumped up and down. We enthusiastically agreed to have everything ready before a week had passed. It was like the gamer kids had waited all their lives for just this moment.

  We’d entered the time travel portal. Tighten your seatbelts. We’d soon be leaving the sixties. Next stop: modern civilization. Perhaps we’d find clothing suitable to this time period for Ms. Bell. One could only hope.

  CHAPTER 10

  For the entire next week, we worked like maniacs. Starshine, Violet Skye, Moonjava, Wolf Song, Luke and Jane who always hung out at the newspaper club lunch table, four gamers and I volunteered to get the job done. The gamers were: Mark Bahazhoni, Gail Dickerson, Felix Baker, and Lin Zhao.

  I sent a group email to everyone, asking them where we should meet. Felix replied with an invitation for us to meet at his house every day until the newspaper was published. His family had two computers, and he thought we could get more done that way. The other gamers volunteered to haul their computers over to Felix’s house. The more the merrier when it comes to computing power. I volunteered to bring my laptop.

  Lin said she could drive eight of us in her mom’s “super-sized” van and added:

  I come from a large family—six kids: four girls, two boys. My parents joke that being second generation Chinese in the United States, they felt a strong need to defy China’s one-child policy and have lots of kids. They were both only children.

  I thought how cool to have brothers and sisters. We thanked her for offering us a ride. Moonjava said he’d be driving himself and could take anyone else who wanted to go with him. Luke accepted his invitation.

  The next day after school, Lin picked most of us up and we headed over to Felix’s house.

  Lin was super-friendly and enthusiastic in a way I could never pull off. Her brown eyes sparkled. Her long black ponytail bounced around whenever she moved her head. She came across as full of energy.

  Felix lived on a street with older homes fixed up in really cool ways. Flower gardens overflowed with all kinds of colors and plants. Front doors had been painted a variety of colors: blue, red, hunter green. Wind chimes filled the air with music every time the wind picked up. One place had a birdhouse that was a miniature replica of the main house. A couple of houses had statues out front. Another one had a stained glass window up in the attic. I’d bet that was pretty with sunlight streaming through it.

  Almost everyone we saw was black. It seemed like such a time warp, people segregated by race. My trailer park had a whole mix of people. But, then, the trailer park was filled with poor people. We were probably all labeled trash. I felt proud of us as we hopped out of the van. We were a mix of white, Navajo, Chinese and black. We’d bring diversity to Felix’s neighborhood. Although truth be told, I knew that probably would have been a much bigger deal if Lin had driven us into an upper-crust white neighborhood.

  Felix’s mom came to the front door. Her face had a glow that basically radiated happiness. She was wearing a pink cotton dress with sneakers. Her hair was swept back in cornrows that fell to her shoulders.

  As we walked up the front steps, she said Hi to each and every one of us. Man, I wished my mom would do that for me just once.

  Inside, there were two little kids racing around the first floor. As I peeked into the living room off the front hallway, the boy went leaping up onto a couch and scrambling over the back to get away from his little sister who was giggling and chasing him. Running through a door into the kitchen, he slipped, fell and knocked over a potted plant.

  Felix’s mom yelled, “Hey, stop that!” Picking him up around the stomach, she carried him flopping like a fish to the kitchen table. She plopped him down into a chair, then yelled to us that she had baked cookies.

  Oh, man, they were fresh from the oven. Ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookies with the chips still warm and melted and delicious. We downed them with glasses of ice-cold milk.

  I felt like I’d crossed the threshold into Heaven. The same feeling I’d had in Annie’s house, except here there was less of an emotional chill.

  While we were eating our snack, Felix’s sister climbed up onto a chair. In between bites of cookie, she asked a whole lot of questions. Swinging her feet back and forth and looking up at the ceiling, she asked, “Why are you all here?” like it was the most important question in the world.

  Felix’s mom answered for us. “They’re working on a newspaper project on Felix’s computer.”

  Her next question: “Why would you work on a newspaper on a computer? Newspapers don’t come out of computers. That’s silly.” Then she started laughing so hard, she knocked over Felix’s glass of milk.

  Felix jumped up and yelled at her. “Mia, what is wrong with you!”

  Mia started crying. She shouted back, “Nothin’s wrong with me! I got detracted! That’s all!”

  Their mom grabbed a dish towel hanging from the oven door handle and mopped up the milk in no time flat. In an incredibly calm voice, she said, “Now, now, Felix, she’s fine.”

  Felix’s mom asked about our project. She thought an online newspaper and forum sounded like a great idea. She said, “It’s about time that school entered the modern age.”

  We finished our snack, washed the buttery grease off our hands and headed up to Felix’s room.

  He had a really nice room. Science-themed mobiles hung from the ceiling. A shelf went all the way around the room, showing off some impressive Lego sets—mostly Star Wars, but also famous buildings like the Eiffel Tower. A double-sized bed had a bookshelf built into it. There was an L-shaped desk with a large computer screen and stacks of books on top and a separate table with a microscope and slides. On the desk, there were also a bunch of figurines—superheroes and villains and computer game characters.

  Felix reminded me of someone at a preppy school. He had on tan shorts and a red T-shirt with a collar and buttons and an alligator emblem. His hair was cut short, he wore metal-rimmed glasses and he sounded smart when he talked. His room clinched it for me. I could totally picture him becoming a scientist someday.

  Lin asked where the second computer was. Felix said, “I
n the kitchen. It’s our family computer. I can remote into it from my laptop.”

  Very cool. I couldn’t imagine how much we’d get done with this kind of setup.

  We immediately got to work. Felix let me use his computer to arrange the text and pictures in my article, to pick the font and add borders. I was really happy with the results.

  Before giving up my place at the computer, I zoomed in on the pictures of a few of the animals in the cages. My heart pounded. They had human hands; one had human eyes. I pointed at the screen, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  Felix bent down and looked over my shoulder. He said, “I wouldn’t photoshop those if I were you. Your article will lose impact if you add false details.”

  I found my voice. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  Felix laughed. “It just happened, huh?”

  I felt confused. I said, “I didn’t photoshop anything.”

  Starshine leaned over my other shoulder. She covered her mouth with her hand and gasped.

  Violet took a look. She said, “Oh my God, that’s really creepy. That whole tent was creepy. Made the hair stand up on my arms the whole time we were there.”

  Felix said, “Those animals actually looked that way?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  Felix said, “May I suggest publishing a couple zoomed-in pictures then? It will add to your circus theme. This is totally the kind of stuff on display in the Freak Show section of circuses.”

  I nodded my head yes and turned back to the computer as though in a trance. I knew he was right, but my shaking hands warned me that publishing those pictures could be dangerous. Bobby Huffman was dead, after all, and I didn’t for one minute believe it was suicide.

  I reformatted my article to accommodate the new pictures. Then I pushed away from the computer and went over to the microscope to lose myself in the universe of feathers and fly wings. They both made rainbows at certain magnifications.

  By the end of the day, we had the entire newspaper ready to publish. Felix’s dad had found a site where we could publish it, so we uploaded it there, ready to be made public as soon as we had the OK from Ms. Bell. We decided to meet the next day to create a forum.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next day was pretty much the same as the day before, except that Lin drove her van to school, so we could leave right from there, and what happened on the Internet.

  Felix’s mom didn’t greet us at the door this time. She was busy chasing Felix’s little sister Mia around, trying to wipe icing off her mouth and cheeks with a wet washcloth. She gave us a big smile when they ran through the front hallway. She said, “Hi, everyone! There’s a snack in the kitchen for you. Help yourself to mi-i-i-i-i-lk!” The last word trailed behind her as she went running into the living room.

  Mia laughed and screeched and yelled, “Cupcakes! Cupcakes! Cupcakes!”

  Oh, man, confetti cupcakes with creamy vanilla icing and sprinkles. I felt like I’d died and went to Heaven all over again. Just like yesterday.

  After we ate and washed up, we climbed the stairs to Felix’s room. He discovered an email from Ms. Bell, letting us know officially that the Principal had approved our first electronic newspaper and the site where we hoped to publish it. We all high-fived each other, jumped around and hooped and hollered. It felt like such an incredible feat, modernizing the newspaper at that school!

  As we discussed the forum, we felt energized and hopeful.

  I realized we could look at The Tiger’s Den as an example. I still had access. I made the suggestion and everyone agreed that would be helpful.

  I opened up my laptop, the most awesome gift from my old school, and signed into it with my AtticAmulet password. I then zipped right over to The Tiger’s Den. Before signing in, I realized I should show everyone how it looked to the general public.

  Someone was keeping the site up. The artwork had a fall theme. It wasn’t the same as the look I’d designed last September, but remnants of my work were still there: the black-and-gold school colors and the tiger mascot. Apple trees now grew along both sides of the home page; baskets overflowing with apples sat in the grass at their base. Along the bottom of the page, kids rode bicycles on a road strewn with autumn leaves.

  I said, “The artwork on a forum site should change for special events and different times of year, to keep people interested. I had a really great time designing the October theme for this one. I titled it Welcome to Our Haunted House. Along the top...” I pointed to the top of the home page. “...I drew a haunted house with spiderwebs and a jack-o’-lantern on the front porch. The face carved into the pumpkin was our Principal’s. Kids got a kick out of that. It attracted a lot of attention and brought a lot of kids into the forum.”

  I thought back to the ghosts I’d added: one that looked like Brandon and a smaller one that looked like his brother. PTSD snuck up behind me and tried once again to strangle me. I remembered how Annie had disappeared on Halloween night.

  I tried to think of happy things. Kai had healed her. Kai had healed her. Everything would be OK.

  Struggling to regain control over my breathing, telling myself not to hyperventilate, I ran my eyes down the list of Discussion topics on the forum. One jumped out at me as though written in bright red blood: Girl in Romania.

  What the hell? Was this about Misty?

  I told myself to calm down. I thought back to the time Walter Jenkins had posted a Discussion topic and labeled it The Location of Anne Marie Green (Annie). It turned out he’d just heard Annie was missing and wondered what had happened and if anyone knew her location. No clues. No information. Just his curiosity and a need to post on the forum. I had to change the title to Anne Marie Green (Annie) Is Missing, so that people wouldn’t think she’d been found and stop looking for her.

  Starshine asked, “Are you OK, Shade?”

  I must have looked strange. God knows what my fears did to my face or how long I extracted myself from the world when my PTSD demons struck. I shook my head. “Yeah, I’m OK. Let me show you how powerful these forums can be.”

  I did not want to discuss my past, but I knew I had to do it for Misty. I explained as briefly as possible. “At my old school, a few girls went missing. It’s a really long story...”

  Violet saved me once again, as she’d done the day Wolf Song looked me up on his cell phone and found out I was a “hero”—his word, not mine. She came over and put her hands on my shoulders. It gave me support.

  I continued. “Basically, they were kidnapped as part of a sex slave ring. My best friend Annie was one of them. She’s just beginning to recover. One girl died. Another one is still missing. The cops investigating the case said it looked like she’d been taken to Romania.”

  The room went silent. We could hear Felix’s brother and sister playing downstairs and the happy sounds of their TV show. The silliness clashed with the shocked silence upstairs.

  My fingers trembling, I scrolled the pad on my laptop and clicked to enter the Girl in Romania discussion. My hand covered the pad with sweat, which made it difficult to move through the discussion. I said, “Wait a sec,” and pulled a mouse out of my backpack. Squeezing it for dear life, I read the discussion.

  Here’s the gist of it.

  Someone going by the username Starry-eyed Girl had started the discussion two days ago. Her post recounted how several girls had gone missing from the school; then mentioned how the police thought one of the girls, Misty Perkins, had been taken to Romania against her will. Starry-Eyed Girl was asking for help from anyone who had seen or heard anything whatsoever about Misty.

  As had happened with the posting about Annie, a whole bunch of people commented with statements of sadness, shock, a lot of Oh my God!s and tear-filled emojis.

  About twenty replies down, there was a weird cryptic statement from someone with the username pipedream that just said: I may have heard something. PMing you.

  Damn! I needed to see that PM.

  Then I remembered. I bet I still had
administrative privileges. I wasn’t going to share that information, though. It might seem creepy to my new friends to see me breaking into someone else’s private messages. And no way, no how did I want to take a chance on having this reported to my old school. If I still had privileges, I didn’t want them taken away once whoever was in charge realized their oversight in not canceling them when I moved to a different school.

  I pointed to the line I’d just read and said, “This could be promising. Wish I knew what the PM was.”

  Starshine, our social butterfly, said, “Why don’t you just contact the person it was sent to, tell them you’ve been looking for the girl who the cops think went missing in Romania? They’re going to your old school, after all. You have a bond.”

  Clearly, she did not understand my limited personal resources in regard to bonding. I did not bond well or play well with most of my peers.

  I scanned the remaining comments. Nothing else seemed relevant.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I drew artwork for our new forum. Felix and the other gamers created the forum layout, while everyone else passed the time doing homework.

  It was agony waiting until I got home to look at the private message.

  By the time Felix’s brother came upstairs to tell him dinner was ready, we felt we’d gotten enough done to call it a day.

  I showed everyone the artwork I’d created. A line of school buses that would go along the bottom of the home page, with each bus having different anime designs rather than plain-old school bus yellow. Silver flying saucers that would hover above the school buses. And green kites that looked like outer space alien faces designed to float up the sides of the page. Everyone liked it—loved it, actually—so that was a relief. Another major job completed.

  On our way home, we talked about ideas for articles for next month’s newspaper. My mind was barely present. A couple of times, I had to ask to have something repeated.

  As soon as we reached my trailer park, I jumped out, said, “Bye,” and hurried up inside.