Escape: The Ashwood Lies (Prequel)

by RJ Infantino

  That probably sounded cliché, but I don’t really care. Taylor was the type of girl that they made the clichés for. The kind of girl I wanted to talk to. Listen to. And, if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t have minded dancing with her either.

  And just then a shadow jumped out of the scrum and shouted “chickens!” right in our faces.

  I tore my gaze away from Taylor and steadied my eyes as the voice shook into focus. It was Rosie. Unshackled from the pressure she put on herself in the classroom, she was barely recognizable as the same girl who sat next to me in English class. There had always been two Rosie’s, and I liked them both, but I always marveled how easily she could leave the serious one behind as soon as the final bell rang.

  “You guys are so predictable,” she said, practically bouncing where she stood. “Do you think we get all made up just to dance around in front of you? This isn’t a peep show."

  Dante snorted, Marcus choked on a comeback, and everyone else just smiled. You didn’t mess with Rosie unless you were ready to tumble, which is exactly why she was my best friend. And to her credit, she was all made up and more. Her hair, her shirt, her jeans, they all looked perfect, and the guys noticed too. There was nothing more intimidating than a beautiful girl making fun of you, so they all just kept smiling like idiots.

  “Where’s Maya?” I asked. Maya was her roommate.

  Rosie threw up her hands in a shrug. “She said dances weren’t really her scene, but I think she just wanted an excuse to sneak away and hook up with Jessica.”

  Lucky her. Avoiding dancing was a lot easier when you had a partner in crime. But Rosie was undaunted. “I know Chase is too lazy, but are any of the rest of you brave enough to dance?”

  I almost sent a swift toe right into Ben’s ribs, but the poor kid was sitting so rigid I was afraid he might shatter. He’d always had a bit of a crush on Rosie, but it did not appear that today was the day he’d do anything about it. I hopped off my perch on the table. Rosie looked shocked.

  “Oh, no,” I said with a wink. “I’ll dance, but not with you. I like my toes to stay more or less unmashed, thank you very much.”

  Rosie tried to elbow me in the ribs, but she was so short, she hit my hip instead. I mock limped into the thick of it as she followed. About three seconds later, I was already regretting my decision. The music did a pretty good job of masking the pounding in my chest, and I stuck my hands in my back pockets to steady them.

  “She’s just a girl,” Rosie mouthed with a wink.

  Maybe.

  I swallowed hard and pushed my way through the flail of limbs. All of that big talk back in the dorm room was gone. Now it was just me, my nerves, my crush, and pretty much every other student in the school there to watch me make a fool out of myself.

  A flash of light from an open door dashed across my eyes, but I ignored it. Taylor was guarded by a pack of friends I barely knew, and I was trying to figure out my way in when she saw me.

  I froze. She smiled. And then I smiled too.

  This was a little game of ours that we’d been playing ever since school started. We’d have these moments. Flashes. Brushes in the hall. Maybe I was just making the whole thing up, but one way or another, things were about to change.

  I started to pick my way over to her when someone slammed into my right side, hard. I staggered. The last thing I needed was to fall over and make a fool out of myself. I looked over to tell off whichever over-excited first year had hit me, only to see Ian sprawled out on the dusty floor. He was getting trampled. I yanked him up to his feet, he looked like a mess, but he started rambling before I could say anything.

  “Chase? Chase! Good. The attic, Chase. It’s a lie. The whole thing’s a lie.” He glanced back at the doors. The kid was terrified.

  I grabbed him round the shoulders. “Ian? Ian, look at me. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got to tell you something. They’re looking for me right now, but I’ve got to tell you something. Find me later. I need to get out of here, but find me later.”

  “Wait—”

  He pressed something cold into my hand, and then he was gone, sneaking through the mosh and ducking through the doors to the kitchen.

  Well, that was weird. I glanced at what he’d given me and froze.

  I was holding a knife. A hunting knife. Heavy duty. Sharp.

  I slid it deep into my pocket, careful to hide the hilt under my shirt. What was Ian doing with a knife? Even having something like that on campus was enough to get you no-questions-asked expelled. Which meant I had to get out of there. Now.

  But when I lifted my head, there was Taylor. Standing right in front of me. Smiling.

  Except this time, I couldn’t smile back. “I’m sorry, I have to go.” I started toward the doors and then turned around. “Really, you have no idea how sorry.” And then I was gone.

  Somehow, I’d managed to make the situation worse, which didn’t even really seem possible. I made a beeline for the door as quickly as I could. It wasn’t easy. Running wasn’t an option with a blade in my pocket, so I settled into a hurried limp, keeping my knife leg as straight as I could. I felt Taylor’s eyes burning on my back as I ducked out into the quiet hallway.

  Or at least, I thought it would be quiet. It was actually just a different sort of chaos. The hallway was swarming with angry looking professors. And they all stopped and stared at me as the door whined shut. Great.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Professor Brant asked, pointing at my limping leg.

  “I was dancing with Rosie, and you know, she’s short. I’m tall. She went low, and I tried to follow. Twisting my knee at a dance? I mean Coach is going to kill me.”

  Professor Brant could not have cared less about my basketball season, which is exactly what I was counting on. He waved off my story. “Have you seen Ian Simmons?”

  “It’s kind of hard to tell who’s who in there.” I shrugged for good measure.

  That was the end of his interest in me, and he dove into the dining room without another word. A couple other professors followed, but a few more stayed behind. Of course, Professor Lowe just had to be one of them. He still looked furious about my little stunt in his class that afternoon, so I ducked into the nearest bathroom to wait him out.

  I went straight into a stall, which was the only thing saved me. I’d barely hit the latch when I heard the bathroom door open again. I didn’t need to wait to hear his voice to know it was Lowe.

  “You know you’ve got detention tomorrow, right?” His stern voice couldn’t hide the grin on his face.

  That lunatic had actually followed me into the bathroom. There weren’t a lot of boundaries at boarding school, but this was supposed to be one of them. Now I was really in trouble. I could hide the knife well enough while I was walking, but not in close quarters. I had to come up with a plan. Fast.

  “I’m just sorry that you have to wake up early to supervise,” I said as an idea hit me. “I haven’t even started my Lord of the Flies essay, so detention might actually be good for me.”

  Lowe just grunted.

  If I could hide the knife in the back of the toilet tank, I thought I’d be ok, but I had to do it without Lowe hearing. Time for a little performance.

  “Do you think Lord of the Flies could actually happen?” I slid the lid off slowly as I talked, stopping each time my words paused. “I mean, if we got stranded out here, would things really fall into chaos that quick?”

  “I think people do what they need to do to survive.” He sounded even less interested in Lord of the Flies than I was, but that wasn’t the point. I shimmied the knife out of my pocket and timed the drop for my next sentence.

  “You know, I never really thought about it, but it’s a little weird that you guys assign us a book about school kids killing school kids.” The knife clunked almost silently in the water, and I locked the lid back in place. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s better than Shakespeare, anyway.”

  “I think it’s weird you’re tak
ing so long in that stall.”

  Even weirder that he was out there waiting for me. I mean seriously, this was the most inappropriate violation of privacy. But I didn’t want to prod the bull. “It’s that cafeteria food.” I pulled off one round of toilet paper, then another, and then another. I flushed for good measure.

  Lowe’s smug face was waiting for me when I opened the stall.

  “Sorry,” I said, pointing behind him. “Need to wash my hands.”

  His eyes narrowed as he gave me one final suspicious glare, but there was nothing he could do. I was in the clear.

  “Tomorrow morning, 8:00,” he said, and then he was out the door.

  I washed my hands in the sink until they stopped shaking and then went up to the dorm. The rumors were already churning.

  “I heard Ian stole from the dean’s office.”

  “I heard he attacked somebody at the dance.”

  “I heard he went all mental, just broke down and ran off.”

  Each story sounded more absurd than the last, but they all ended the same. Ian was gone.

  Chapter Four

  I couldn’t sleep. The night kept replaying across the back of my eyelids over and over. The dance. Taylor. Ian. Taylor. The knife.

  What in the world was he doing with a knife? I mean, Ian was an odd dude, sure, but a knife? He wasn’t dangerous. I kept trying to figure out what he wanted to tell me. And what did he mean? What’s all a lie?

  It just didn’t make any sense. No matter how many times I unraveled and re-wrapped it, I kept coming back to one thing. Whatever happened, it happened in the attic. That’s where Ian was going, that’s the last thing he said, and that’s where the answers would be.

  Sleep just wasn’t coming. I climbed quietly down the ladder out of my sky bed and landed softly on the cool floor. The room still felt fairly new, but even after only a few weeks, I could do it in the pitch-dark. I felt around my desk for my backpack, and then slowly opened the closet.

  “You know he’s not your responsibility.”

  Tre’s voice jumped so suddenly out of the darkness that I almost dropped my bag. He’d always been a pretty light sleeper, which probably made me a pretty inconvenient roommate, considering how often I was sneaking out.

  “Go back to sleep, Tre.”

  “I’m serious. For some reason you always get it in your head that all this stuff is your fault, but it’s not. He’s the one that went up there.”

  Yeah, but he did it, at least in part because of me. Because he was trying to impress me. Honestly, I was the last person anyone should try to emulate. I mean, seriously.

  I stood up. “If they catch me—”

  “I know, I know. I was asleep. Which, coincidentally, is exactly where I’m going right now. Good luck, my friend.”

  “Thanks, bud.”

  I finished stuffing my bag and slipped out the door.

  For once, the school was completely silent except for the odd gust of wind pushing against the two-hundred-year-old walls. As much as I complained about Ashwood, it was moments like these that I really started to appreciate it. Which was ironic, considering what I was about to do could easily get me expelled.

  Ashwood had a lot of rules, but most of them revolved around a central principle: be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. I was currently breaking that rule into a thousand pieces.

  Attending boarding school somehow felt like being extremely mature and being five years old all at the same time. I mean, we actually had bedtimes. Seriously. On dorm was 10:00 each night. Lights out was at 11:00. I was seventeen years old, and every night I was sent to my room to go to sleep before midnight. And if you got caught out after hours, well, it wasn’t good.

  As absurd as the rules were most of the time, they did have one pleasant, unintended side-effect. It forced each and every one of us to be creative. Every hard and fast rule had a little gray area, and that’s where I had my most fun. You see, there was an exact hour when we had to go to our rooms, but there was no such specificity about when we could leave the next morning. We just had to stay in our rooms all night.

  Well, what did night mean? Breakfast was always at 7:00. But what if I woke up at 6:00? 5:00? 4:00? That was my gray area, and gray areas were where I lived.

  Of course, at that exact moment, it was still 2:30 in the morning, and that wasn’t anywhere near gray enough for me. But I couldn’t wait. Ian was out there, and the entire faculty was on the hunt. I had to find him before they did. I had to find him before they found me.

  I made my way toward the end of the hall, careful to steer clear of the spots on the floor that always creaked. Most nights, even the professors would all be asleep at that hour, but I knew they were out on the prowl. I had to be careful. This first part was the most dangerous. There were a hundred different doors and windows and other ways out of the school, but it was more than just Russian Roulette choosing the right one.

  The front door was so stupidly obvious that it would almost actually work. But those were the same doors that the professors would be using, and I didn’t want to open the door right onto one of their faces. On the other hand, I could have just climbed out the window in my own room, but that was too exposed. Too much risk. Once I committed, there was no easy way to pull myself back in. If a professor just happened to be walking by outside, I was doomed. No, I had a better idea. I went back to my English classroom, the one I had tried so hard to lie my way out of that afternoon. The door was locked.

  I took my student ID card and slid it through the doorframe just below the lock. Lift, push, twist, and I was in. It was a lot quieter than when I ran out of there with Lowe screaming at my back. Peaceful even. I hurried over to the window and waited. Eyes were pretty useless at that hour, but ears? Those saved lives. Ashwood Prep had its own sounds, full of the rhythms, aches, and groans of an old building. I knew them as well as Tre’s breathing. I cracked the window and listened.

  The quiet outside was different. It was more restless. Expectant. But it was also exactly what I was looking for. Wherever the professors were searching, the grid had long grown past the immediate area, and I was safe to climb outside. Technically, it wasn’t much more than a hop. Not only was the climb itself much easier, but the classroom sat squarely in front of a row of weeping pine trees. The branches provided the perfect amount of cover.

  Once outside, I had a decision to make. Where was I going to search? There had to be at least ten professors out there, but only one of me. They had the advantage. And if I couldn’t work harder than them, I’d have to be smarter.

  Ashwood sat smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, nestled in between the Appalachian Mountains on one side and a river on the other. There was a small town maybe thirty miles out, but after that, there was a whole lot of nothing. Technically, it was a whole lot of farms and nothing, but that was kind of the same thing. One single road stretched from the front of the school across the river to the town and beyond.

  Ian was dumb, but he wasn’t an idiot. He’d stay off the road. I also decided to cross the mountains off my list. Ian was in a rush, and that climb was anything but easy. No, he’d be in the woods somewhere, but that didn’t narrow it down much.

  The forests surrounding the school were a maze of trees and brush and logs and brooks stretching for miles in every direction. I needed to take a risk. Ian didn’t seem like someone with much of a plan the last time I saw him. Instead of struggling with the river and heading toward town, he was probably just trying to buy himself some time until he figured out what to do. If I was right, then the best bet to find him was on this side of the water. Even still, that meant searching over one hundred square miles. I cinched my backpack tight on my shoulders and took off.

  This first part of the journey was going to be the most dangerous. I dashed from bush to bush, cutting across the dark between the street lamps. There weren’t any unexpected sounds that night, but that didn’t mean the teachers weren’t out there. They were tracking
Ian just as I was, and they had a lot of practice. I barely allowed myself to breathe until I dove through the tree line that marked the beginning of the woods. Now I was truly at home.

  Some people thought Ashwood Prep was a school. Other people looked at it like a prison. But for me? It was an escape. Don’t get me wrong, I came from a good home, but that home never stayed my home for very long. My dad was an Army-lifer. My mom died when I was young. I’d never stayed any place more than a year or two, not until I came to Ashwood.

  Ashwood had always been more than just a building to me. It was my roots. My base. My origin story. I think that’s why I was so intent on finding Ian. I knew how it would feel if Ashwood started slipping away from me. So if there was any chance to keep Ian from losing that, well then I had try. But first, I had to find him.

  The forest on this side of the river was carved up with trails. Everyone knew the main ones, but there were a dozen more hidden tracks for those who took the time to explore. I jumped off the main path down a hidden little switch back and took a purposeful pace between the moonlit trees. Even out there in the middle of the dark, I kept my footfalls soft and silent. I wanted to make sure I could hear Ian if I found him, and I needed to make sure no one else heard me.

  I was out there almost an hour before I found one of the professors. I slipped behind a tree and waited. It was no wonder they hadn’t caught Ian yet. Professor Torres was waving her floodlight around like a beacon. If Ian was nearby, he had all the warning he needed to stay away. But after I slipped by Torres, my luck started to change. Five minutes later, I was avoiding Professor Brant. Barely another ten before I had to sneak away from Barnwell. Either the professors all came to the same conclusion about where Ian would run, or they were working with better information than I was.

  I kept my guard up tight, and it was a good thing I did. A few minutes later, I noticed a twig snap behind me. Someone was following me. I almost froze out of instinct, but I forced my legs to keep moving. Faster. Faster. Whoever it was, they didn’t have a flashlight, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a teacher. My eyes scanned the darkness until it found a thick tree. I slipped behind the trunk and waited silently.