* * *
Mr. Sorbet scanned the lineup, looking for the usual offenders while the kids struggled through “Puff the Magic Dragon” as best they could.
His head was pounding, and his patience was short. As he pushed his glasses down past the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes, he noticed the change for the very first time.
Ramone had never been in trouble before, not in his class anyway. Tall and gangly, and painfully aware of it, he almost never spoke during class. He was one of those anonymous kids who passed through the background scenery like an extra on a movie set, blending into the background—though never as literally as that day.
Sorbet’s migraines often played havoc with his eyesight, but he’d never had hallucinations this bad. Ramone’s skin seemed to be changing color and consistency every few seconds, like a television trying to tune in a channel but never quite finding the signal.
Although he didn’t trust his eyes, he did trust his ears, and Ramone’s screeching falsetto was more than he could take today. He rapped his baton against the podium, and the singing stopped.
Ramone waved his arms back and forth wildly, and the other kids gave him a wide berth. His swollen tongue dangled past his chin, and his skin turned the palest shade of blue—or at least appeared to.
Either way, Sorbet’s patience had reached its limits. He tapped his baton on the conductor stand. “Detention!”
Ramone stared back at him for a moment as the tension in the room rose. The kids looked at Ramone, then at Sorbet, then back to Ramone, wondering who would blink first.
Sorbet repeated the order, lowering his voice a full octave. “Detention!”
Ramone gave in, and the showdown ended. He grabbed the slip from Sorbet’s hand and lumbered past his desk and out the door.
* * *
“That didn’t seem odd to you, Roger?” Miss Burnside asked.
“Not at first, but it does now,” Mr. Sorbet said.
She threw up her arms in disbelief.
Coach Hula swallowed the last of her burrito, wiping her hands on her tracksuit before joining the conversation. “That’s nothing,” she boasted. “Remember what I told ya last week?”
* * *
Picture day was the one day of the year when the kids got to wear street shoes in the gymnasium. They waited in a serpentine line that snaked through the double doors and out into the hallway, and each time Coach Hula blew her whistle, everyone shuffled forward one spot. The line moved forward at a steady pace for an hour, scuffing up her gym floor in the process, before eventually grinding to a halt.
Some kind of commotion up front triggered the traffic jam. Coach Hula sprinted to the front of the line expecting to have to break up a fight. Instead, she found the photographer lying unconscious on the gym floor.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“He fainted,” one of the kids said, his finger jammed up his nose.
She slapped the photographer’s face back and forth a few times, trying to rouse him. He was the same one the school had used last year and, though high-strung, seemed otherwise reliable.
“What could have made him faint?” she said.
The kid with his finger in his nose pointed to Donovan at the front of the line.
Donovan was an Army brat who’d grown up overseas, leaving him a step out of sync with his new classmates. A year older than the other kids and plagued by acne, he kept to himself. His teachers politely described him as different, but he wasn’t just different anymore; he’d crossed over into peculiar. Jagged teeth poked out of the corners of his mouth, and his already prominent ears had swollen out of proportion to the rest of his head.
Coach Hula wasn’t sure about the ears—that could have been allergies—but she held out her hand, expecting him to spit the joke teeth out into her open palm. Instead, he recoiled, clicking his teeth together and making an irritating chattering sound she’d never heard him make before.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. She blew her whistle and pointed to the door.
But Donovan wasn’t ready to go, and the clicking got louder and faster.
Not one to be outdone, Coach blew her whistle as loud as she could and drowned him out even as she ran out of breath. “Detention!” she gasped.
The clicking’s frequency slowed, then stopped altogether when Donovan finally gave in. He took the slip from her and shuffled out of the gym.
* * *
Miss Burnside nodded sympathetically as Coach Hula finished her story. A pattern was emerging, connecting the separate episodes, though none of them knew quite what the narrative was yet.
“This Crypto-Punk business makes me…uncomfortable,” she said. “And it’s getting worse. More and more kids seem to be trying it out, dressing like mutants or monsters or whatever, and it’s not even Halloween. Shouldn’t we—I dunno know—tell somebody or call someone?”
The others muttered their agreement. Their jobs were hard enough without the added distractions that this new fad brought. But though they were a majority, they weren’t unanimous. The lone voice of dissent stepped forward, and all eyes turned to him.
“All this fuss over a few students who are a little different than what we’re used to?” Mr. Frost asked. “Didn’t we all go through the same thing when we were young?”
An awkward silence fell over the room as the teachers considered the skeletons in their own closets.
He poured himself another cup of coffee, giving them time to think it over. “I mean, nobody here wants to go through another weekend of diversity training. Am I right?”
Frost’s words quelled the rebellion before things got out of hand. Retreating to their cliques, the matter wasn’t mentioned again.
CHAPTER 4
There were only three chairs in the special studies classroom because there were only three students in the entire program. The chairs were identical to the prototype in the school’s bunker, and like the prototype, each was hardwired to a network of computers that recorded the data generated during each session.
Harley had seen both Donovan and Ramone around school, but he didn’t really know them. Even though it was just the three of them in class, they didn’t have much time to hang out because they spent most of their time in the chairs watching movies, which sounded a lot better than it really was.
The movies were long and boring, just a bunch of colors dancing around the screen with a lot of weird sounds. They were so boring that Harley found himself drifting off to sleep most of the time. But he didn’t get into any trouble because there weren’t any teachers around. Dr. Camaro, however, was always there, wandering around the room, scribbling in his journal, watching them watch the movies. Security cameras recorded everything inside the room, which meant Camaro could watch himself watch them watch the movie later if he wanted to. And that’s what he did—at least that was the running joke among the three of them.
The boys were tested three times a week, which worried Harley at first. He’d always had trouble in school and was really anxious after the first test. “How’d I do?” he asked. But he must have aced it because the Doctor just smiled and gave him the thumbs-up.
Even recess was different. Each day after lunch, they’d run through the sewers beneath the school, which were way better than the school’s playground. Dr. Camaro added barriers, ladders, and ramps to the tunnels for them to jump, climb, and slide over. Harley liked it because running through the course was a lot like running through a video game level. He’d never been good at sports before, but now he could run—run really fast—and he never seemed to get tired, no matter how hard he ran.
They’d just finished recess and were on their way back to class when the Vice-Principal waved them over. Standing next to him was a tall man with a bushy mustache that Harley had seen hanging around before.
“Boys, I want you to meet Mr. Runyon,” Mr. Frost said. “He’s going to be working with you from now on.”
The boys shoo
k hands with Runyon whose tanned face and rough hands seemed unusual for a teacher and seemed more like someone who worked outside. He breathed through his mouth instead of his nose, which had been broken more than once, and he looked like a hawk when he turned in profile.
Frost dismissed the others but took Harley aside. “Harley’s our best student,” Frost gushed. “He’s really responding to the program protocols. He’s getting stronger and smarter every day.”
Harley was getting stronger—there was no doubt about that—but something else was happening, too. Dr. Camaro must have noticed the same thing, because after Frost and Runyon left, he took Harley aside.
“How long have you been having the headaches?”
“Just started,” Harley said. He was having trouble remembering things, too, but he didn’t tell the Doctor because he didn’t want to sound like a whiner.
Dr. Camaro flashed a penlight in his eyes. “Any hallucinations?”
Sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he’d get double vision, like there was two of him, but the other him only appeared when he looked into the mirror.
“How often do you see the other?” Dr. Camaro asked.
“Not much,” Harley said, but that was a lie.
“Any other problems?”
“No,” Harley said, but that was a lie, too.
Dr. Camaro listened to everything he said and wrote it all down in his journal.
Harley watched Camaro for a reaction, looking for some kind of clue as to how serious these symptoms were, but his face was blank.
“Anything wrong with me?” Harley finally asked.
Dr. Camaro waited a long time before saying anything. Instead, he finished his thought and closed his journal before answering. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it,” he said. So, Harley put it out of his mind and forgot about it.
* * *
“You finished yet?” Clementine asked, panic creeping into her voice.
The Vice-Principal was still a few tables away, but he was getting closer, and they were running out of time. Mr. Frost had worked his way through most of the other projects and didn’t seem impressed by the mazes he’d seen—which only added to the pressure they were already working under.
“Almost,” Newton said. “Hand me that thing over there.”
“Thing? What thing, bro?” Grady said. “‘Thing’ could mean almost…”
“Never mind,” Newton said, pushing him aside to grab the part himself.
They made their final adjustments and finished just as Frost arrived.
Newton cleared his throat and threw his arms wide to start the show, but Frost shushed him with a wave of his hand.
They weren’t sure how to read his reaction at first. For a moment, they thought they’d blown it, but then Frost walked around the table and leaned in for a closer look, and they knew they had him. “Tell me more,” he demanded.
Building the maze had brought out a gleeful malice buried deep inside them, a cruel energy they didn’t know they even possessed. Tunnels and ramps twisted up, down, and around the sinister layout, leading the mice from one sadistic challenge to another.
“We used the plastic kit blocks, action figure sets, even parts of a busted-up pinball machine we scrounged,” Newton said.
“What are these here?” Frost asked. “Tracks?”
“We got ’em from an old model railroad,” Clementine said. “The track runs from one end to the other—like the L-train that runs along side our block. We put an old cell phone in one of the cars so we can keep track of the mice. It even snaps a picture every few seconds.”
“We put the maze in the middle of the wash basin just in case Romeo gets past the traps,” Grady said. “The water’s a foot deep and rigged with floating hair-nets—no way he’s bustin’ outta this.”
Spider pulled a switch, and a translucent umbrella unfolded, covering the maze. “The dome’s the last line of defense to keep ’em in. Keeps ’em dry in case it rains, too.”
They’d gone all out, even including a tiny moon attached to a length of stiff wire that orbited the habitat when cranked by hand. Frost turned the spray-painted tennis ball so it faced him, the silver paint coming off on his fingertips.
“Sorry about that,” Newton said. “We put a face on the moon so he thinks he’s being watched all the time. Worked for me, anyway.”
“Hmm…What do you mean, Nougat?” Frost asked.
“Newton. My grandma used to tell me a bedtime story about the man in the moon when I was small…used to scare me, keep me from getting up at night for water. But she only talked German, so everything she said was kinda scary anyway.”
“How’d you come up with all this?” Frost asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, we didn’t know what scared mice, so we just thought about what scared us and put it in,” Spider said.
They tried reading Frost’s expression for some hidden meaning, but he just stood there, nodding his head. Finally, the corners of his mouth moved up, forming something like a smile. “You win the get-out-of-jail card.”
* * *
Kids entered Bixby’s cafeteria at one end, separating into either of two lines, depending on what they wanted for lunch. When the building was a mansion near the turn of the twentieth century, the cafeteria was a ballroom, so there was a satisfying symmetry to the daily choreography.
Drew carried his tray along the rows of tables pushed end to end to where he usually sat. There weren’t any assigned seats, but everybody sat in the same place every day because that’s where they sat at the beginning of the year and nobody changed. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t a rule, it just happened that way, naturally.
The others were already locked in a heated debate, which wasn’t unusual for them during lunch. Drew put his tray down and casually looked across the cafeteria to Harley’s table, now conspicuously empty.
“So whatcha think, Nougat?” Spider asked.
Newton nodded his head. “Let’s do this.”
Spider reached into the brown paper sack and pulled out a pepper, holding it up for them to see. “This is the Ghostface pepper,” he said. “It’s the fifth hottest pepper in the world.”
“Why only the fifth?” Newton asked.
“Because any hotter and your head would explode,” Spider said. “And you got a big head, so it would be a big mess.”
The tiny bulb glistened under the light, a deep shade of crimson that faded to black near its stem.
“Where’d you get that, anyway?” Clementine asked.
“Evolution happens slowly,” Spider said, “over millions of years. But sometimes the unexpected happens. Evolution gets pushed forward, skipping a generation ahead. Like what happened to this pepper.”
His impression of Frost was so dead-on they had to laugh. “My grandma grows ’em in her garden,” he said. “She eats ’em like they’re popcorn, but they’re too hot for me.”
He waved the pepper back and forth by the stem. “So?”
Newton reached for the pepper with a trembling hand. He held it by the stem, like Spider did, and brought it to his mouth, though taking an awfully long time to do it.
The pepper bushed against his lips, and his reaction was instantaneous: His pupil’s dilated and his face went flush. Sweat poured down his forehead and dripped into his eyes
“That’s not a pepper—that’s a hate crime!” Newton gasped. He grabbed his milk and slammed it in less than a second, but the burning wouldn’t go away.
The others lost it, rolling on the floor with laughter as Newton leapt up from the table and ran for the water fountain in the hall.
After things settled down, they got back to their food.
“Yo, anybody seen Harley?” Drew asked.
“Not for a while,” Clementine said. “Why?”
Drew took a bite of pizza. “Just wonderin’.”
“Who cares?” Spider said.
“I think he’s in that program—special studies. That’s why we don’t see �
��im,” Clementine said. “They got their own classroom, Room One-Thirteen.”
“That’s weird,” Drew said. “Know what else is weird?”
“Redheads?” Spider smirked.
Clementine put down her sandwich and balled her hand into a tiny fist. “Are you full? Or do you have room for some smack-a-roni and cheese?”
Drew shook his head. “No. That Harley’s in advanced anything. Remember that lemonade snow cone he ate last winter?”
Spider’s brow furrowed. “So?”
“So, it was yellow, but it wasn’t lemonade,” Drew said. “Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Jealous?” Clementine teased. “Maybe Harley’s got somethin’ you ain’t…”
Grady arrived, tray in hand, slamming the brakes on their conversation.
“What’s up, guys?” he said.
“What happened to you?” Drew asked.
Swatches of Grady’s hair were hacked away at irregular lengths, showing his bare scalp in some places. Orange spray-tan markings ran up and down his pale arms, forming an asymmetrical pattern, like stripes on an anemic tiger.
“Whatcha mean?” Grady asked.
“He means, ya look like a piece of grilled chicken,” Clementine said.
Grady’s affinity for skate-punk gear insured he didn’t always blend in with the crowd, but this was beyond anything they’d seen before.
“Oh, this. It’s called Crypto-Punk,” Grady said. “All the cool kids are into it.”
* * *
Spider didn’t live too far from school, and cutting across access roads and winding through back alleys meant that most days he could be home by foot quicker than by taking the school bus—most days.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
The sun was setting, making it tough to see anything but silhouettes. There were three of them; big kids or small adults, rummaging through the garbage cans at the far end of the alley.
“Those guys weren’t there just a minute ago,” Spider muttered.
He didn’t want any trouble, so he turned the other direction. He rounded the corner in the L-shaped alley, but an eight-foot-high construction fence blocked his way.
“That wasn’t here last time I came this way,” he said.
The silhouettes crept into the alley, blocking the only way out.
Spider took a nervous step back, letting his backpack slide down his arm. “Newton? Drew? That you?”
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