by Susan Vaught
I held my breath so I wouldn’t make a single noise.
Something rustled in the hall.
My heart punched against my chest, and the rush of fear almost made me shout out loud. My hand moved toward my controls, but if I hit the joystick, the click and whirr of the chair’s motor would be so loud.
The light reappeared, slashing through the darkness at the end of the corridor. A flashlight, for sure. I kept holding my breath even though I was getting dizzy, waiting to see if the light moved toward the center of the hall, where maybe whoever was carrying it would turn and look straight at me.
Janitor, my brain tried to say, but the janitor would just turn on the lights, right?
Thornwood’s Revenge. Thornwood’s Revenge!
I squinted through the darkness at the school’s front doors. They’d be locked, just like most of the side doors. Since Toppy had been seriously late picking me up more than once, I knew the school’s door locks electronically engaged at five every afternoon, except for the doors by the library where detention happened. Those locks had to be keyed by hand, when the last teacher left the building.
My heart raced. The only way out was near the library, back in the eighth-grade wing—right past whoever was moving around in the darkness.
That rustling noise came again, very close to the place the hallways joined. I breathed in gasoline. Was the stench stronger?
If the hacker was soaking the hall with gas to light it, if he was planning to make FIRE like Lavender and I thought he might, I’d never get out. If I tried to roll through burning gas, my wheels would melt and pop. Or I could stay put and die from breathing smoke.
No. Way.
I jammed my hand against the controls, opened my mouth, and let go of a wild animal roar as my chair lurched forward, straight toward where I had seen the lights and heard the noises. My wheels skidded briefly on the waxed tile, making me slide side-to-side. I almost hit the wall, and the gas stunk so bad, and I kept yelling.
The light beam I had seen jerked like somebody dropped it, and I hollered even louder. I wished my chair had turbo engines, and I took the corner as fast as it could possibly roll. My wheels spun, lurched, spun some more, slid, then seemed to hit dry tile and dig in. From behind me, I heard a guy start swearing. The words sounded muffled. I couldn’t make out whose voice it was. I wasn’t sure I cared.
Smoke slid across my shoulders.
Roll! I wished I could feed my chair rocket fuel straight from my brain. If I could use my legs to run, I could go faster and faster, just by wanting to, but my chair maxed at three miles per hour. Walking speed. And by the sounds behind me, whoever had been carrying that light and splashing gas, they were running.
“Toppy!” I refused to look back, pelting toward the seventh-grade wing in the dark. I tried to focus on the corner lights, on the triangles of brightness laid out like a trail back to safety.
“Ms. Kendrick! Toppy!” The battery indicator on my chair dropped one slash mark, but the hacker still hadn’t caught me and grabbed me.
“Somebody help me!” My voice splattered through the school’s dark emptiness. I wheeled into the seventh-grade wing. I couldn’t tell where the hacker was, but I imagined him charging along right behind me, closing distance fast. Way, way too fast.
I bit my lip. Tears streamed out of my eyes and I pushed my controller so hard the rubber clown-nose popped off and the real rubber tip started tearing loose. Words left me, and I bellowed a whole bunch of nothing and wondered if I could smell more smoke. Maybe the hacker had gone back to drop matches in the gas. Maybe fire chased me now, and it would sweep into the chair’s lithium battery, and the chair would explode and blow me into a thousand bits of gross all over the school walls.
My yells turned into screams.
12
Was I still in a main hall? Had I taken a wrong turn?
Breathe, my arms and armrests reminded me as I jerked my body left and right, moving like I could force the chair into speeds and angles it wasn’t built to do. I tried anyway. More smoke. I coughed. The fire alarm started with a loud squall, followed by three bells, and stop. Three bells, and stop. Lights turned on. I heard locks clicking open and fire doors automatically pulling shut.
“Max?” Toppy’s voice boomed over the bells. “Max!”
I pelted toward that sound, leaning forward like my body weight could pull the chair faster.
The turn came up on me fast, but I swung around the corner and almost ran flat over my grandfather and Ms. Kendrick. Toppy had his hand on his service weapon and his eyes on the corner and the hall beyond. Ms. Kendrick clutched her phone and her zombie book. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes seemed huge behind her square glasses.
Three bells. Stop. Three bells. Stop. Three bells. Stop.
Toppy seemed to flicker as lights blinked all around him.
“Get Max outside!” he barked at the teacher, even as he punched the button on the radio attached to his shoulder. “Fire at Blue Creek Middle School. Send cars, too.”
Ms. Kendrick turned midstep, running for an unchained door. Strobing lights made her look like an old movie.
“This way,” she called, yanking the door open and gesturing for me to roll outside.
I didn’t take my hand off my control until I was halfway down the sidewalk to the street. That’s when I realized Toppy was in a burning building alone, probably facing off with a horrible person who might want him dead.
“No way.” I jerked my control to the side, spun the chair toward the school, and rolled full-out back toward the detention entrance.
“Max,” Ms. Kendrick said as I motored past her. “Hey!”
Before I got to the door, the chair started to drag, probably because it had a teacher and a zombie book and a phone dragging along behind it.
“Look to your right,” Ms. Kendrick said. “Max! Eyes right. Please!”
I was grabbing hold of the door handle. Sirens blared in the distance, and I turned my head to see Toppy marching out of a set of automatically opened doors in the seventh-grade wing. He had his police jacket wrapped around a smoking trash can, carrying it as far from his face as he could get it.
As I watched, he dropped the smoldering can onto playground dirt, watched it for a second, then kicked it another ten feet away from the school for good measure. After that, he stomped on stuff that was still burning and talked into his shoulder radio again. Probably not proper police procedure—but one hundred percent Toppy.
“He’s fine, see?” Ms. Kendrick said.
I barely heard her over the blood hammering in my ears, but I let go of the door.
Then I put my face in my hands and cried without even feeling like a giant baby.
• • •
“Really, I’m good,” I said as Mayor Chandler washed my face for the third time.
She put down the washcloth and offered me her fries from the fast food she brought to the police station. Lavender and Ms. Springfield were finishing up their foot-longs with chili, but I still wasn’t hungry, so I declined with a quiet, “No, thank you.”
While Toppy, several officers and firemen from Blue Creek, Ms. Kendrick, and two big guys from the State Police talked in the main area, the four of us were holed up in Toppy’s office, which was just a little bigger than my bedroom. A big oak desk stacked with books and papers took up a lot of the space, but he had an old couch with metal legs and orange plastic cushions, a rickety metal chair, and a bunch of signed pictures of University of Tennessee football players decorating the walls between the crime boards. Lavender reached up and took some pictures of the boards, but her mom and Mayor Chandler got up and dutifully turned them around so we couldn’t see them.
I should have been thrilled that Lavender got a few pictures, but mostly, I was still freaked out.
“Just a trash can,” I said, reminding myself that the world hadn’t ended.
“But a trash can with a fire in it,” Lavender reminded me around a mouthful of tater tots. “Could
a blown the whole place up. Plus, somebody painted an owl on the hall wall.”
I swallowed hard. “Thanks so much.”
“It was a small fire,” Mayor Chandler said. She was sitting closest to the office door, which was cracked. Every now and then she leaned her head toward the opening, obviously eavesdropping. “Looks like somebody set it on purpose, then tried to stamp it out. Chief Brennan said they found a sooty footprint on the ground outside an open window into the seventh-grade wing.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “It’ll be size ten or eleven when they measure it. Probably some normal sneaker.”
“Probably,” the mayor agreed.
Ms. Springfield put down her humungous-size cup of Sprite. “Starting a fire on purpose, then putting it out—that makes no sense.”
“It could have been a prank,” Lavender said. “You know, to get people out early for the holidays. Lots of people have seen that owl on the Internet fake accounts.”
“On a Friday?” I shook my head. “What would be the point? Especially if nothing got damaged. Whoever it was, they came to set that fire while I was in the building. Maybe because I was in the building.”
Mayor Chandler let the door close a bit, keeping her fingers in the opening. “The officers and the firemen aren’t sure about that. They think it might have been a coincidence.”
I groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Detention was supposed to be over, right?” Lavender pushed her last few tater tots around on the napkin in her lap. “Toppy was late. You and Ms. Kendrick should have been out of the building when it started.”
“Besides,” Ms. Springfield said, “who even knew you two had detention?”
“Did you tell Junior?” Lavender asked, suspicion lacing each of her words.
“Nooo,” her mom said, but the way her eyes darted back and forth, I wondered if she was trying to remember what she had or hadn’t said to her new best friend.
“Ms. Zevon and Ms. Kendrick knew,” I said. “The principals, I guess, or whoever keeps the detention list. Toppy knew, and all of you guys. Lavender and I didn’t tell anybody else.”
The mayor’s eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”
“We were sort of embarrassed,” Lavender admitted. “We didn’t want anybody to know.”
Mayor Chandler looked even more surprised. “Well. That tickles me. I stayed in trouble half the time I was in middle school and high school. You two must be a lot better than me.”
“I doubt any of your teachers or principals are caught up in all this,” Ms. Springfield said. “But I guess we could ask Toppy to check out their backgrounds.”
“The hacker set the fire,” I persisted. “And drew the owl. He was probably trying to scare Toppy. You know, make a point, like, See what I can do.”
The mayor leaned back against the office wall. “Maybe. But it’s just as likely it isn’t related.” She hesitated, then continued with, “And I really think you should step back and let your grandfather handle this. Toppy’s a good officer and a good investigator.”
“Good officer and investigator?” My watch beeped, and I quickly shifted my weight in my chair. “Did you record that, Lavender? We need to put it on Facebook. Everybody thinks Mayor Chandler hates my grandfather.”
Mayor Chandler’s entire face turned a rosy pink. “I’ve never hated him. It’s just . . . a long time ago, he broke my heart, and I guess I broke his.”
“How did that happen, exactly?” I asked.
Mayor Chandler got even pinker. “He told me that we should see other people while he was away in the military. I thought he was through with me, so I moved on and got married.” She rubbed both hands against her cheeks. “When he came home, he was furious I hadn’t waited for him even though he told me not to. It was—we—we were both so young, Max. But he’s still just as stubborn, and half the time he won’t listen to anything I say, and when I see that same old obstinate look on his face—oooh. I just want to shake him.”
“He makes me mad, too, sometimes,” I said, and for no reason at all, a big lump filled my throat and tried to cut off my air. Tears climbed into my eyes, and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say, but what came out of my mouth next was, “He thinks Cream of Wheat looks like vomit.”
The tears escaped my eyes and ran down my face. I wiped them away quick, but not before everybody saw, and the next thing I knew, three people were hugging me and my nose was crammed into the mayor’s neck. I had time to think she was strong, and that she smelled like clean clothes just out of the dryer, all fresh and comforting, and then I realized she was crying, too, just a little bit.
“I thought he was going to get hurt at the school,” I blubbered.
“I know.” The mayor sniffed. “And I’m so sorry.”
“Today really sucked,” Lavender said under my left ear. She smelled like tater tots, not clean clothes.
“It did,” her mother agreed from behind me, her hands squeezing my shoulders. “I think a lot of this week has sucked.”
“Maybe it’ll start getting better tomorrow,” Mayor Chandler said.
“Can you decree that?” I asked. “You’re the mayor. Mayors are allowed to decree stuff.”
The office door opened, and the mass of huggers moved back to reveal my grandfather. He seemed to fill the doorway, and when he saw that I was crying, he strode straight to me, nudged everyone out of his way, unfastened my safety belt, and lifted me out of the chair to hug me.
I clung to his neck and smelled pine and Earl Grey and everything safe and happy in my entire life, and I relaxed. Over his shoulder I saw Captain Coker in her trooper’s uniform. She had her arms folded, and her sharp eyes looked misty and distant, like she might be thinking about something sad or scary.
“We’re going to get a little help for a while, okay, Max?” Toppy said. “The State Police and TBI, they’ll be giving us support.”
“That sounds good to me,” I said.
I didn’t want Toppy to put me down, and he didn’t, not for a long time after that.
13
DECEMBER 9
Early Saturday morning, just about every website associated with Blue Creek businesses crashed. Thornwood Owls popped up in their place, each with a message nastier than the one before it.
Chief Brennan fails to protect local schools. Discipline lax in Blue Creek. #kidsatrisk
Deliberate fire-setting at Blue Creek Middle School, no action from police chief. Mayor Chandler weak against ineffective police chief. #favoritism
Watch your wallets. #moreiscoming
I swear the hacker got no sleep at all—just stayed awake and tried to screw up everything he could for the town. The Chamber of Commerce site was still up, and it seemed like everybody had something to say.
You can do it, Chief Brennan . . .
Whoever this is needs to get a life . . .
Chief, you really need to find this person . . .
Mayor Chandler, you’re failing the town by not putting a stop to this nonsense . . .
Maybe it really is Chief Brennan. Maybe he needs medical help . . .
The ones that weren’t supportive made me mad, and the people who implied Mayor Chandler or my grandfather might not be doing enough to stop everything—seriously? How could they buy into that mess? Saying a lie over and over again didn’t make it true, but apparently it created doubt and confused people way more than it should have.
When Mayor Chandler called at nine in the morning on Saturday, I answered the kitchen phone by the microwave, the one Toppy hung halfway down the wall so I could reach it.
“You’re not calling to tell me you’ve decreed that things will be better, are you?” I asked after she said hello.
The mayor didn’t laugh like I’d hoped she would. “I wish I were, honey. Let me speak to Chief—uh, let me talk to Toppy, please.”
I frowned, but then I stretched the old-fashioned curly phone cord across the kitchen to the table, where my grandfather sat in the Grinch p
j’s I bought him for Christmas last year, reading his Saturday newspaper with its “Fire Set at Blue Creek Middle School” headline. His cup of Earl Grey and a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and apples steamed in front of him, barely touched.
He gave me a long-suffering look, but he took the receiver, tucked it between his ear and his shoulder, and said, “Yel-low?”
I went back to my iPad and read a couple of short messages from Lavender.
Not grounded yet, are you? And, I’ll come over after dance class this morning if you aren’t.
Come over, I typed back.
“Well, why do they want to do that?” Toppy asked the mayor. He sounded annoyed, and maybe a little surprised. His head and face slowly flushed red, and he stopped looking at the newspaper.
That wasn’t good.
“Well, I know it’s bad for business,” Toppy grumped. “But it’s not like we’re swimming in tourists in the middle of winter, what with Thornwood shut down and country music thriving in Nashville.”
I fidgeted in my chair, looked back at my iPad, and realized I had an e-mail. When I clicked on it, it was from [email protected].
Ellis.
Hey, Max.
JThornwood has money issues. Motorcycle lot in Connecticut not up for sale. It’s being auctioned by his creditors to pay bank loans he owes. Lavender may be right about him being a creeper, may want $$. Tell her mom to watch her wallet and passwords. Heard you were around the school when the fire happened last night. You okay?
“How is that going to solve anything?” Toppy got louder with each word. “It’s giving that punk exactly what he wants.”
I’m okay, I typed back to Ellis. The fire scared me but I didn’t get hurt. Thanks for finding out info on Junior. Tell Riley Lavender thinks he’s cute. I put a smile at the end of my sentence, but I didn’t feel smiley.
As I hit send, Toppy said, “Fine, I’ll be there.”
He got up, walked over to the wall, and hung up the telephone. Then he just stood in place for a few seconds, and his shoulders curved forward. It made him seem shorter and older, maybe even a little sad.
