by Lauryn April
25
Sneaking In
The next two days at school, we searched for Eric. Charlie printed off a copy of his schedule and we waited for him after every one of his classes. We never saw him. I grew anxious. We needed to find him, to talk to him. Not that any of us knew exactly what to say when we found him, but we had to at least try to change his mind. Our intentions, however, never developed past the goal stage of our plan as he wasn’t at school on Tuesday or Wednesday. Brant figured he was getting everything prepared for Friday, and I had to admit that it seemed likely. Part of me hoped that Eric had changed his mind on his own. I didn’t care whether or not he had an epiphany or chickened out, but if he just would have decided not to blow us all up, it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
The time between thinking about Eric Thompson and the looming death of all Alta Ladera High students was spent fairly normally. Knowing that the bomber was Eric had put our minds at ease some. We never expected that we wouldn’t see him again until Friday. So on Tuesday and Wednesday, the three of us would meet to hang out before classes as casually as if it were any other day. Brant and I would eat lunch together on the common and visit Charlie in the library before the bell rang. After school, I found myself talking with Charlie on the phone over homework which would usually lead into a conversation about something else-Brant, school, Eric, music, the winter formal. We talked about everything, and I found that she and I had much deeper conversations then I ever had with Christy or any of my previous friends. Being friends with Christy, Ti and Eliza had been a comfortable place to be, but I realized that I’d only felt that way because I’d never really gotten to know anyone else.
Both Tuesday and Wednesday night, I talked on the phone with Brant before I fell asleep. I’d lay in bed with the phone to my ear and my eyes half-closed as we continued to get to know one another. Both nights, I fell asleep with my phone in my hand and woke the next morning needing to dig for it beneath my blankets and pillows.
Things with family also went well those two days. Dad picked Sadie up after school on Tuesday and took her out for ice cream. Both Mom and I knew the things that had been happening couldn’t be solved with frozen yogurt, but the sentiment seemed to help. Dad and I talked for some time that day after he dropped Sadie off at home. He didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. It wasn’t my fault, he still loved me. He even tried to sweeten the pot by reminding me that this meant twice the gifts for Christmas, but it came off like a bad joke. Of course he didn’t know that I knew why they were getting a divorce. I just nodded in agreement and tried to enjoy the time with him. More than anything he said, the fact that he took the time to talk to me was what meant something.
Thursday morning, when Eric was again missing from school, we realized that we needed a backup plan. We couldn’t count on hoping to run into him before the assembly. It was starting to look like things would be working down to the wire and my mind scrambled to figure out what to do next. Brant suggested calling in a bomb threat if all else failed. The only thing I could think to do was to talk to him and try and convince him to change his mind, but I needed to find him first.
Charlie looked up Eric’s address on the school computers and immediately after class we drove to his house. We took the Lumina and I felt my nerves grow as we neared his block, which was in a slightly shadier part of town than I was used to visiting. Not that any part of Alta Ladera was all that shady, some streets were just less maintained then others. We pulled up outside a house with a lawn so overgrown, I wondered if it’d ever been cut. Next door a group of middle school kids sat on the porch eyeing us, and across the street a yellow lab had his head buried in the ground as he dug up a bone.
I took a deep breath, feeling nervous. Charlie and I glanced at one another and then we got out of the car. Brant, who’d been sitting in the backseat, followed. We walked up the steps and stood on the stoop. I knocked on the door. There were no lights on in the house and no car in the driveway. It appeared as if no one was home. I couldn’t give up yet though. I rang the doorbell and held my breath in anticipation. No one came to the door. Beside me Brant had his hands up to block the sun as he peeked into the window.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” he said.
“Now what do we do?” I asked.
“I picked up a few other things from the library today, just in case we didn’t find him,” Charlie said.
I was about to ask her what they were, but it was then that I noticed Brant was no longer peeking in through the window. I looked over just in time to see him vanish around the corner of the house. Charlie and I glanced at one another then we both followed after him. We picked up our pace as we rounded the corner to see Brant already disappearing behind the house.
The backyard was fenced in by rusting chain-link, but the gate didn’t have a lock. Charlie and I walked through the gate and saw Brant holding open a worn screen door and twisting the knob of the back door.
“Wait,” I said.
Brant stopped. “What?”
“We can’t break in.”
Brant twisted the knob and let the door swing open. “It’s not a B and E if the door’s unlocked.” He stepped inside and, cautiously, Charlie and I followed.
“How’d you know it would be unlocked?” Charlie asked.
“I didn’t, just thought it was worth a shot. My dad forgets to lock the back door all the time.”
Brant was peering around corners and quickly eyeing up every room he entered. Charlie and I followed him through Eric’s kitchen, then the living room which smelled like coffee grounds and wilting flowers. His parents seemed to have an accumulation of secondhand furniture and flea market finds as nothing matched. They also weren’t very tidy as everything was covered in a fine layer of dust. Brant peered into the dining room and then we all walked up stairs.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “I mean, it’s obvious Eric isn’t home.”
“Eric might not be, but this bomb he’s been building has to be somewhere.”
We reached the top of the stairs. Brant started pushing open doors. The first was a bathroom we passed by, the next the master bedroom. Finally we found Eric’s room and Charlie and I followed Brant inside. From the second Brant pushed the door open and the smell of sweaty gym socks and stale potato chips assaulted my senses, it was obvious that this room belonged to a teenage boy. The floor was a mess with discarded clothes; the desk was cluttered with papers. The bed was unmade with its navy comforter lumped half on the floor. The curtains were pulled shut, and the walls were lined with band posters that appeared to have more Satanic references then musical ones.
“No bomb,” I said, eyeing up one of the posters. It hung crooked on the wall, held up by thumb tacks. A zombie stood center stage, complete with green skin and dripping gore, but said zombie was also a woman and overtly sexualized with heaving breasts and ripped clothes. It was a disgusting mix of horror and soft-core porn.
“Good band,” Brant said as he walked up behind me.
My eyebrows lifted. “Ew.”
“Guys, come check this out,” Charlie said.
Brant and I spun around to see her standing before Eric’s desk, sifting through the papers that were scattered there.
“He’s definitely our guy, look at this.”
Looking over the papers, I saw that Eric had researched how to build bombs. One sheet held the pros and cons of pipe bombs; another had doodles of mushroom clouds and scribbled skeletons. It had my stomach flipping, just seeing all of that written in his handwriting. For a moment, it was hard to believe that the boy who had drawn them was the same one we used to call ‘Teddy Bear Thompson’.
“So where’s the bomb then?” Brant asked.
“Basement?” I suggested and he nodded.
We left Eric’s room and made our way to the kitchen then down the basement steps. The light in the stairwell was burnt out and I gripped the metal railing tight as I moved down the stairs into the musty, cold dark.
“Guys?” Charlie asked, “What are we gonna do when we find it?”
Brant thought for a moment. “Take it apart if we can. Call the police, we could say Eric showed it to us.”
“You don’t think they’ll think we helped him build it, do you?” I asked.
“I think if we turned him in, they’d let us off the hook.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the dark while Brant fished for a string to pull and turn on a light. It was absolutely pitch black, so dark that I couldn’t distinguish between closing my eyes and opening them. Then I heard the sound of a beaded chain clink against a glass bulb and the click of that cord being pulled. Suddenly there was light, not much, but enough to see the space around me. Nothing was down there, no bomb, just a washing machine and a dryer with a rusting lid. A pile of dirty clothes sat on the cement floor and a spider pulled himself along a dangling line of his web.
Charlie sighed. “Where is it if it’s not here?”
“I don’t know,” Brant said, his voice sounding edgy and rough, “but we should go before someone comes home.”
“Couldn’t we just call the police and show them Eric’s notes?”
“I don’t think that’d be enough, and we’d get in trouble for being here.”
We went back to school after that to get our cars. On the drive, we discussed that we were going to have to stop him tomorrow. We’d have to get to him before he set off the bomb. I hated that we were waiting until the day of to deal with him, but not knowing where he was or where he was keeping his explosives made me feel like we didn’t really have any other option. I hoped that when I saw him next, I could reason with him and persuade him from blowing up the school. I think Brant was just planning to find him and tackle him before he ignited it. Whether or not we had the opportunity to talk to him or tackle him, however, was dependent on us knowing where he was planning to set the bomb off. If we could get there before him, we could stop him before he even set anything up.
We again met up later that night at my house, this time Charlie bringing with her blueprints of the entire school. All students had a map of the basic floor level, or at least had access to one to help them find their classrooms. Usually they were given out to freshmen during orientation, but what Charlie brought us was a much more detailed map that showed all storage closets and a basement layout. We sat around my dining room table, hunched over the schematic-like map, and tried to think like a murderer.
“Alright, so here’s the gym,” Charlie said as she drew around the rectangle of the space with a bulky yellow highlighter. The gym is where we would all be on Friday during the assembly.
“Well it’s not like he’s going to be setting this up beneath the bleachers,” Brant said.
“Might be a little too obvious,” I agreed.
“So what’s the most likely place around here?”
Charlie started to highlight all the exit routes from the gym, a total of four-one at the front of the gym, another to the side and one going to each of the two locker rooms, one for girls and one for boys. “I think he’s got a few options here. He could set up in one of the locker rooms, or possibly this storage closet here.” She pointed to a small room on the map that wasn’t in the gym but shared a wall with it. “But in both cases he’d risk having someone discover him. There shouldn’t be anyone in either of the locker rooms on Friday, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. And he’d have to carry his explosives down the halls past everyone.”
“So if not the locker rooms or closet then where?”
Charlie grabbed another blueprint, this one of the basement. It was printed on a thin sheet of paper and as she laid it over the map of the main level we could see exactly which part of the basement lied beneath the gym. “Here, in the basement. Below the gym, there’s a big storage unit where they keep most the sports equipment-soccer goals for the fields, those roll-y basketball hoops, that kind of stuff.”
“Okay,” I said, “makes sense since it’s right below the gym, but won’t he still have to walk past everyone with explosives to get down there?”
Charlie smiled, “That’s what makes it perfect, there’s a service entrance here,” she pointed again to the map, “that leads outside, and there’s big metal double doors for when they have to move something big. All he would have to do is break the lock and he’d be in with easy access. This also gives him a lot more space to…well, build a bigger bomb.”
As I was looking at the maps before me, things were suddenly more real than they’d ever been. It was eerie how easy this all seemed to be. It was even more unnerving, though, to think that this wasn’t just a possibility, some Hollywood plot we saw in a movie. This was happening. Tomorrow morning, Eric Thompson would be filling the school basement with explosives and would try to kill us all.
“We’ll have to get to school early,” Brant said.
I nodded.
“If he wants to build something big enough to take out the whole gym, it’ll take him some time to get it all set up.”
“I vote we get there before he gets any of it put together,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll second that,” Charlie agreed.
Our night ended early with plans to meet on the common at six a.m. From there we would head down to the basement and intercept Eric before he could get anything put together. If I couldn’t talk him out of it, Brant was prepared to take him down physically and Charlie would have her cellphone in hand to call for help. Either way, we decided, we would need to tell someone about what he had tried to do, and we couldn’t risk him trying it again, but we needed to have proof first.
The rest of my night went by quietly. Both Mom and Sadie seemed to be taking Dad’s absence better than they had before. We sat down together for dinner, talked, laughed, smiled. It was a happy evening. I had momentarily forgotten about the possible doom that awaited me and the rest of my classmates the following day, and for that I was glad. I needed a break, needed to spend some time with them.
Before I went to bed that night, however, the sense of worry returned. For the first time, I considered the possibility that I would confront Eric and that I would fail, that we would all fail. It was possible that Eric wouldn’t listen to my words of reason, that Brant wouldn’t take him out in time, that Charlie’s phone call would be made in vain. It was possible that tomorrow we would all die. Thinking about it was surreal. It isn’t often that one has the ability to contemplate the real possibility of their death. All I knew was that this was something I needed to do. That thought was the only thing that kept the fear from capturing my mind. Before I went up to bed that night, I hugged my mom tight and told her that I loved her, I told her that she was a good mom and that she meant the world to me. She was a little taken aback by my sudden declaration, but she laughed it off and kissed me on the forehead before heading off to bed.
Before I opened the door to my room, I was surrendered to the idea that I had a sleepless night ahead of me at best, and at worst one that was plagued with nightmares. Then I stepped into my room. With the doorknob still held in my palm, I gasped in shock and quickly shut the door behind me. Brant was in my room. He was sitting at the edge of my bed and was currently fidgeting with the small stuffed bear that I kept there. I wasn’t much of a fan of stuffed animals, but the bear had been a gift from my grandfather who passed away some years back. It was one symbol of my childhood that wouldn’t be easily replaced.
When he saw me, he set the teddy bear aside as if he were a small child who’d been caught playing in his father’s study. For a moment, I stood in silence, still reeling from the surprise of his presence. Then the feeling of a chilly breeze brought me back to reality.
“Brant, what are you doing here?” I asked in a whispered voice. “And how did you get in here?”
“Window,” he said with a shrug.
That was when I noticed that the light draft I had felt came from my bedroom window which still stood slightly ajar. The thin curtains surround
ing its pane fluttered softly in the wind.
“You have a rather nice tool shed below it that was easy to climb up.”
“Mom likes to garden. Why are you here?”
“I thought I’d be romantic and surprise you.”
“No offense, but sneaking into my room comes off a little more creepy and stalker-ish then romantic and sweet.”
Brant stood up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out. I can go.” He took a step toward the window but I moved forward and grabbed his arm to stop him.
“No, don’t go… I’m not creeped out, you surprised me is all. Next time you plan to play creature of the night, just give me a heads up okay?”
He smiled. “Okay,” he said then leaned in to kiss me. “So, there’s going to be a next time then?” he asked when we pulled away.
I slapped his chest playfully then made my way over to my dresser to grab a pair of pajamas. “If we survive tomorrow that is.” I didn’t meet his eyes as I turned back around. Instead I stared intently down at my hands which held a pair of green and pink plaid pajama shorts and a grey tank top. When I finally looked up, Brant had walked over to stand before me. His hands rose to rest on my arms and he looked down at me with a comforting gaze. His hands moved up and down rubbing my arms and he smiled at me.
“Nothing bad is going to happen tomorrow, I promise.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know enough, we’re the good guys, yeah? And, the good guys always win.”
It was silly, but it made me smile and that alone was enough to raise my spirits for the time being.
Seeing my mood pick up, Brant let go of my arms and took a step away from me. “I’ll, um, be over here while you change,” he said, gesturing to the clothes I held in my hand.
I watched as he wandered over to the other side of the room and turned away from me to stare attentively at the photos and posters that lined my wall. It was strange, he’d seen me naked and yet it still felt comforting to have him look away for me to change. I quickly disrobed and dressed in my pajamas. The whole time, Brant hadn’t so much as peeked in my direction. It wasn’t until I padded toward the bed and cleared my throat that he turned back to me.
