“This hospital is pretty intense, huh?” Mark says to me as we’re walking down a long, echoey hall.
“It’s confusing,” I say. “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.”
“I don’t know. We’re supposed to think about our ‘role in the community’ or whatever?”
“Would you keep it down?” a booming voice calls out. “Tryin’a watch my movie here.”
I poke my head into the room. This really thin kid with huge eyes made even bigger by these huge, ugly glasses and a long time not being allowed outside is watching a black-and-white movie projected on the cinder-block wall.
“What movie are you watching?” I ask.
“Uh, Psyyyycho,” he says.
“Psycho?” I repeat.
“Film number eighteen in my screening series of Hitchcock’s life’s work.”
I blink at him. “Huh?”
“I’m watching a marathon of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies.”
“Oh. Cool,” I say. “Who’s Alfred Hitchcock?”
The kid looks shocked. “You’ve never heard of Alfred Hitchcock? The Master of Suspense?”
I shrug.
“What kind of morons are they sending me?” he asks the vent in the ceiling. Then he swipes some junk off a chair by his bed. “You staying or not?”
I look out into the hall, but Mark is already gone. “Sure …”
As I circle the bed to make my way to the chair, spooky music plays while this woman goes into a motel room alone.
Seriously? Big mistake, lady! She’s breaking the oldest rule in the book, but before I can open my mouth to say so—
“I know,” he stops me. “Just watch. This is important material.”
Like usual when people tell me something’s important, I immediately black out.
But by the time I open my eyes again the movie’s over and I’m still in this kid’s room.
“So.” My new friend’s voice startles me from my rest. “What’d you think of the film?”
“Um …”
“Yeah no, I’m just messing with you,” he says. “You looked like you could use that nap.”
“I was asleep?”
He just smiles. “Viet,” he says.
“What?”
“It’s my name. What’s yours?”
“Ian Hart.”
“Welcome to film club, Ian Hart. Feel free to bring a blanket tomorrow if you wanna sleep.”
“Sounds great. But I think I have work I’m supposed to do.”
“Okay, big shot,” he says. “Suit yourself.”
But when I catch up with Nurse Norse all ready to make an excuse for disappearing, he tells me something shocking: Apparently my work is hanging out with the kids here.
“This is what having a job is really like?” I ask Ash as we’re leaving.
“I know! Grown-ups are totally playing us.”
“Over here, guppies!” Ms. Fitz sings out. She waves for us to rally around her at the edge of the parking lot. “Your next lesson is off campus,” she tells us, gesturing toward the overgrowth disguising a hiking trail in the hills behind the school.
“A hike, again?” Ash mutters.
“We don’t want a repeat of the first day,” adds Mark.
“Okay, enough complaining,” says Ms. Fitz. “I think you’ll like this lesson.”
Miranda folds her arms. “There are probably forty-seven dead bodies in those woods.”
“Just hope the murderers are already gone,” Alva whispers back.
Miranda rolls her eyes as Ms. Fitz goes on without missing a beat: “Did you know that this place wasn’t always a school for bullies?”
Blank faces stare back at her.
“No? Well, it was in your admission packets. You really should read that sort of stuff.” She turns on her heel and starts to lead us up the path, her voice carving through the air. “But now you’ll have the privilege of hearing me tell you the story. The state’s best students used to come to study and play here together. To make music, and invent, and write and draw and, yes, even dance.”
Our teacher’s voice easily carries over us all, expanding on the history of JANUS—and it’s kind of interesting. At least compared to the voices in my head.
“You actually had to apply to come here,” says Fitz. “And guess what? I was one of those students—so even now that all of that’s only a memory, this place remains very special to me.”
Whoa. When I think about her sleeping in my bunk, and sitting at my desk, and wearing these uniforms, all by choice … ?
It must’ve been a way different place back then. Not scary and weird like it is now. And as we tramp along, I try to imagine that it’s still like it used to be. I try to imagine that we’re all in a special school for talented kids, not a reform school for horrible ones. I pull it off for about thirty-five seconds, before I hear the sound of torture devices.
We stumble out of the woods and into a clearing: right back where the buses dropped us off on that first afternoon.
“Hello, under-fourteens!” says Mr. Dunford. “Welcome to the pride of JANUS! Under-eighteen construction crew, give our friends a proper hello!”
The teenagers are armed with power tools. They mumble at us like zombies as Ms. Fitz brings the class to the top of the hill where we can look down and see what’s up here on the hilltop.
It’s a stage, Tom.
It’s an old, old stage, built out of weathered stone blocks. The stage, the seats, the bullies’ hearts: all made out of stone.
“What happens up here?” Mark asks one of the older guys.
“The showcase,” says the high schooler, heaving big puffs of air as he helps push a piano up the hill. “You know, for parents’ weekend?” he adds, like we’re idiots. As if he’s not the one pushing a piano up a giant hill.
“What’s a parents’ weekend showcase?” Devon asks.
The guy gives up on us and ignores the question, but an older girl wipes her forehead and takes pity.
“You know all those dance lessons you guys do?” she says, her breathing heavy.
“Yeah,” replies Devon.
The high schooler gives a pointed look.
“No way,” says Devon.
“Why don’t you show off those sweet moves for us right now?” she teases.
“Come on, kids!” says Ms. Fitz. “Over here!”
I see her waving toward a pile of wood and supplies, and some huge diagrams pinned up on a big easel, fluttering in the breeze.
“We’ve got everything you need right here. Blueprints, and wood, and screws—and our under-eighteens have kindly precut and predrilled them for you, all right?”
She looks around at us expectantly. “Well? Any questions?”
Ash raises his hand. “What are we doing?”
“Check out the blueprints.”
“But what is it?”
She gestures toward the blueprints. “That is up to you to figure out, as a team.”
“It’s like a puzzle?” says Ash.
He looks at me and I can see he’s a little excited.
Ms. Fitz grins right back at him. “Well? Go!”
Miranda’s minions are off and running before she’s done talking. Like any well-trained army, they’re good at following orders, and they’re halfway done with putting together a sky-high structure by the time the rest of us have even found screwdrivers.
“These things are broken,” says Devon. He kicks a pile of boards at his feet. “We need stronger screws.”
“Maybe we’re missing something,” Mark says, staring at the blueprints like they’re written in Martian. Our creation is about as much like the thing on the blueprints as potato salad is like ice cream.
“Try a little teamwork, guppies!” says Ms. Fitz. “Why don’t you go over there and ask the girls how you can help?”
Grudgingly, Mark brings Miranda to our site to take a look at where we’re going wrong.
“No, no, no,” she says, taking a man
gled mess of half-screwed boards away from Devon. “Do it like this.”
She pops two of the boards free and flips them, and they fit together like a fork into an electrical socket.
Mark can’t hide how impressed he is as Miranda shows us how to fasten the big sheets of plywood onto the sturdy frame, like in the blueprints. When we see it coming together, suddenly I feel excited: We’re building a real thing!
It is a good thing!
I secretly hope that our thing is a catapult.
“It’s not a catapult, Ian,” says Alva.
“How did you know my secret hope?” I ask her.
Ash taps my shoulder. “You said it out loud, man.”
Crap.
“This is all scenery for the Parents’ Weekend Showcase,” Miranda informs us. She shows us how it’s going to be a huge, flat thing and how there are all these bright paints waiting to be splattered across the plywood front of it.
My disappointment must be obvious.
“Come on.” Alva elbows me. “Let’s finish fast and maybe we can do the catapult next.”
“Hooray!” says Ash. “I will assemble a list of flingable objects!”
“A long list?”
“Quality over quantity,” he says. Then he thinks for a second. “No, you’re right: quantity over quality.”
“All of the above,” I agree.
“Yeah, shoot for the moon!” says Ash.
I laugh. “Shoot for the moon! I see what you did there.”
“You guys are extremely weird, you know that?” says Alva.
“We do, in fact!” says Ash.
And just when I’m happily wondering if someone might have pushed the lever on my time machine and flushed us back in time to Old JANUS—the school for the talented kids—that’s when I see Devon watching Alva with a heavy scowl.
He spends the rest of the day chucking screws at the tree line.
“Let’s just quit,” says Devon as we hike back down from the amphitheater.
“We can’t quit,” says Mark. “We gotta do what they say or bad things will happen.”
“What bad things, again?” Devon says.
“Well for one thing,” says Mark, “if we don’t complete the program, they will send us to the Village.”
“And for another thing?” Devon asks.
“We will be bullies forever,” I say, “and no one will like us.”
Devon turns to me like I’m some sort of talking vegetable. Sometimes when he looks at me like that, I think that I might actually be a talking vegetable. This is my cue to catch up with Ash.
But just before I get to him, I hear his voice: “Why do people keep calling us guppies?”
“No clue,” says Alva.
“Maybe ’cause we’re the new kids here?” Ash guesses. “Baby salmon?”
“Good guess. But baby salmon aren’t guppies,” Alva says.
“They’re not?”
“Nope. Guppies are different,” she says. “I know because my friend Lacey had a tank full of them in her bedroom.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Until her mom flushed them down the toilet.”
I shouldn’t be eavesdropping on my best friend, Tom … but the Freak is way too curious to hear what they talk about when I’m not around, and after wearing myself out in this scorching sun, the Freak’s taken over my left arm, three of the fingers on that hand, and both of my legs.
“Her mom flushed them?” says Ash.
Alva nods.
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s what I told her! And now I’m not allowed to go over to their house anymore. Because I called Lacey’s mom a murderer.”
“Whoa, you really called her a murderer?”
“She said they deserved it. Can you believe that?”
“Gross,” says Ash.
“Yeah! Apart from eating their babies, they’re totally innocent.”
“Wait. Apart from what?”
“It was just one time …”
“You’re joking, right?” says Ash. “This is one of your funny jokes, Alva?”
“Nope. Guppies are totally cannibal fish.”
“You’re lying,” I hear a squeaky voice chime in.
A second later, I realize that the voice came out of my mouth. Crap. Alva spins around, eyes right on me. Double crap.
“Were you eavesdropping on us?” she says.
“Uh, no.”
“Sounds like I’m not the one who’s lying, Ian,” says Alva. “And yes, they’re totally cannibals. It’s their nature. Also? It’s totally uncool that you guys are judging them right now.”
“Why’s that?” Ash demands.
“How would you feel if you got flushed down a toilet because aliens took over the planet and suddenly held you responsible for all sorts of rules you didn’t know?”
She has a point. “Nobody deserves to be flushed down a toilet,” the Freak proclaims and shoots Ash a grin. But Ash doesn’t return it.
“You guys have fun with this,” he says. “Ian, can I have my book back for a minute?”
As I hand over The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I can’t help feeling like Ash might be mad at me.
“Sorry for listening …” I say.
“Not like we were hiding anything from you.” He shrugs. “No secrets between you and me, ya know?”
I swallow hard. “Yeah.”
“This place is just messing with us, I think.”
“We have to make it home safe,” I say.
He manages a smile and then skips ahead to be alone for a little, I guess. But Alva keeps babbling about her friend Lacey’s cannibal fish.
“I remember the way they were going around and around the bowl, before—you know …”
The way she says it is all dreamlike, like she’s weirdly caught in her own head. And the Freak latches on to it and nudges me:
“Hold up,” I say. “You are lying.”
“I told you—”
“You’re the one who flushed Lacey’s fish!”
She looks at me in surprise—and I’m pretty sure she can see the Freak inside my wide-open pupils. “How’d you figure that?”
But I don’t want to tell her I’ve been secretly wondering what she did to get sent here. And I’m not sure how to explain the Freak to her. “So … what’s going on with you and your friend Lacey?” I ask instead. “Were you bullying her? Is that why you’re here?”
For a second she pulls herself up as tall as she can, and I know she’s making up a new lie in her head. But then her shoulders droop.
“I don’t think Lacey’s my friend anymore … It’s complicated. And scary, and …” She opens her mouth and nothing comes out for a second. Like she’s reaching for words she can’t get her hands on. “You know how sometimes it’s hard to make sense of all the crazy pieces in your life?”
I nod.
“Sometimes I just try putting the facts together in a whole different way, you know? Then I kinda start to understand a little better.”
“By ‘putting the facts together in a different way,’ you mean ‘lying’?” I ask.
She smirks. A sad version of the thing her face usually does. “Please don’t blab about this stuff, Ian.”
“I honestly don’t understand it enough to blab it. And anyway, I trust you.”
“Why would you do a dumb thing like that?”
“I don’t think you’re that person anymore,” I tell her. “We’re all bullies here. We all deserve another chance. It’s like you always say: We’ll start over.”
“Those are just words,” she confesses. “Lies. All right? I’m a liar.”
“Well of course you’re a liar.”
Alva pauses.
“Everybody knows you’re a liar. You’re probably the most honest liar I’ve ever met though.”
Her face stops doing that sad thing, and it makes her look like a whole different person.
“In my experience?” she says. “There are two kinds of bulli
es in this world: the ones who get caught, and the ones who don’t. And you aren’t either of ’em.”
“What am I?” I ask her.
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Let’s drill a little deeper into your brains today,” Dr. Ginschlaugh begins our next torture session.
I can almost hear the whirring of a power tool.
“Let’s really plunge in,” he goes on with a grim sort of joy. “But first? I shall choose today’s victim … unless there’s a volunteer?”
A hand shoots up before we’ve gotten a chance to be terrified.
“Devon Crawford!” says Dr. Ginschlaugh. “You picked a peculiar time to stretch your arm …”
“I wasn’t stretching, Dr. Ginschlaugh,” he says.
“You want to volunteer?” asks the teacher.
Devon nods.
“Well. This is a momentous occurrence! Go ahead, Mr. Crawford. Why are you here with us?”
“I’m here with you because my friend Max had an accident in the cafeteria one day,” says Devon. “As you already know, since Ian can’t ever shut up about it for five minutes.”
A few bullies smirk and shoot looks my way. I try to ignore the burning feeling in my cheeks and smile back at Devon.
“Let’s be clear, Crawford,” the teacher says. “Saying it’s an accident implies that no one’s to blame, but—”
“I know, I know,” says Devon. “I fully accept responsibility for the whole peanut butter jam, Dr. Ginschlaugh.”
“Good.”
“I accept responsibility for everything that happened,” says Devon. “I’m used to taking responsibility. To not being able to depend on anyone else. Anyway, I know you all heard a version of the story that made me look like the worst bully of all time, but that’s not how it really went down. In real life, all I did was what I had to do to protect my friends.”
“Devon,” says Ginschlaugh. “That’s not an excuse.”
“Sure. Obviously there’s no excuse for bullying an innocent kid,” says Devon. “But here’s the thing …”
His eyes scan the room and the next word out of his mouth is full of controlled rage. I can almost hear each synapse firing inside his head, like a rifleman on a Civil War battlefield, as he goes on:
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