Weird Girl (16 page)

18

On Wednesdays, Cleo’s last class of the day was English.
Right now, they were reading
Macbeth
, which Cleo actually liked because
it made very little sense and it had witches and murder in it. Mrs. Abernathy,
the instructor, was having students read aloud, and Cleo’s assigned character
was already dead, so nobody was paying attention to her when she slid Cherry
Benson’s monogrammed Cross pen into Hannah Stevens’ pocket. Five minutes after
class ended, Cherry’s nasal Midwestern twang rose above the noise of everyone
packing up and leaving the building. Hannah’s shriek was pure Jersey, and soon
a crowd of girls had reversed direction to gather around what was sure to be a
dirty fight. Cleo picked her way through the crowd and smiled slightly. The
smile grew bigger when she saw Blue headed her way with a grim expression.

“Just sit in the alcove until I get back, Cleo. I’ve got to
deal with this right now,” said the Amazon as she brushed past Cleo on the
steps of Stein Hall. As instructed, Cleo went straight to her little corner of
Main Hall. However, she did not just sit.

She did wait for Ms. Adams to storm out of her office with a
walkie talkie in her hand. As soon as the sound of stilettos on concrete
reached her ears, Cleo slid the desk six inches farther from the wall and began
feeling, pushing, and scratching the paneling with her hands. Blue had to have
come through a secret door that first day, and Cleo figured she had ten minutes
or less to find it.

She was at the halfway point, methodically massaging the
wood from top to bottom, when a voice behind her stopped her heart, nearly
causing her to fall off the chair in surprise. Jackson’s hand was warm and
steady under her elbow when he whispered, “Hurry up! Those girls can’t scream
at each other much longer.”

“Would you rather be doing this?” asked Cleo tartly. “After
all, you are about two feet taller than me.”

“You know I can’t be caught here. Listen, how much longer do
you need?” he hissed.

Cleo desperately wanted to hurt him. She was going as fast
as humanly possible, and even with the chair, it was a struggle to reach the
places that Blue could, considering her towering height. Jackson interpreted
her scowl correctly and took a step back, his palms up in surrender. “I’ll buy
you some time,” was all he said before he darted out the door.

Cleo immediately got back to work, her heart pounding faster
as she heard people on the sidewalk in front of the building. The spectacle
must be over, which meant that Blue would be back any minute—

An alarm sounded. Confusingly, it sounded both nearby and
far away. She jumped off the chair and peered out at the double doors. She
could see girls running past the windows in the direction of the…library. As
understanding dawned, Cleo silently thanked Jackson and climbed back onto her
chair. Blue would be gone for a while yet.

It only took two more minutes to find the trigger, a small
rectangular area of the chair rail that flipped down to activate a lever
system. The door swung silently open, and Cleo repositioned the desk and chair,
grabbed her bag and ducked into the darkness without hesitation. As she pushed
the panel closed, she noticed a shadow glide across the exposed floor of the
foyer, meaning that someone had returned to Main Hall. As soon as the mechanism
clicked, she pressed her ears against the panel to ascertain the identity of
the new arrival, but the person didn’t speak before another sound indicated
that the pocket doors of Ms. Adams’ office were being unlocked. So, either Ms.
Adams, Jackson, or Blue. Cleo let her eyes adjust to the dim light and realized
that she was in a very narrow corridor lined with closed doors. They were
probably all locked, she thought with disgust. She decided to start with the
farthest one and work her way back.

The first two rooms were uninteresting. The first seemed to
be storage for extra office furniture; the second one Cleo recognized as the
room where she had taken her placement tests. She spent no time exploring
either of these. The third door led to an office, presumably Blue’s. With a
glance in either direction, she ducked inside and eased the door shut. It
smelled like cinnamon, and Cleo decided that some poor new girl must have been
in the testing room earlier that day, her stomach contorted with hunger from
the piped in scent. A mirrored panel on one wall, upon closer inspection,
provided a perfect view of the table in that room. How often did Blue watch
girls squirm? Cleo sat down at the desk, where various stacks of papers and
manila folders were neatly arranged under antique doll heads-turned
paperweights. Their eyeless sockets stared at Cleo while she glanced at the
tabs of each stack of files. Picking up the nearest head, she found that
someone had inserted a small bag of sand inside to give it heft.

A quick search of the desk drawers yielded nothing but junk
food and office supplies. Cleo looked up and noticed two file cabinets on the
wall beside the door. The top two drawers of one cabinet were labeled LOST AND
FOUND. Cleo spent a minute or so marveling at the kinds of things that people
left lying around before turning to the bottom two drawers, which were both
designated as CONFISCATED ITEMS. Waldorf was in the top drawer, along with a
few bags of marijuana, a switchblade knife, and a small plastic terrarium with
a desiccated lizard inside. She grabbed Waldorf and the knife and stuffed them
into her bag. Then she returned her attention to the upper drawers, where as
soon as she had rescued her red sneakers, she also liberated a wool Burberry
scarf, a pair of white Chanel sunglasses, and a necklace with an emerald
pendant. Hey, if people didn’t care to look after their stuff, and they hadn’t
come crying about it by now, the finders/keepers rule definitely applied. The
other cabinet just held placement tests.

She turned off the lights and eased the door open, just a
crack, in order to listen for any signs of life. Hearing none, she relocked the
door and tiptoed to the next room. This door was different from the others, and
surprisingly, concealed an elevator. Apparently, there was another floor
beneath this one. Cleo ached to explore, but knew that her time was running
short. She moved down to the next door, vowing to come back for that elevator.

The last two rooms were empty, but Cleo took this as a sign
that the rest of the files must be downstairs (or maybe there was another
secret hallway somewhere, but she’d have to worry about that later). She tried
to convince herself that she had made great progress. She had Waldorf back (and
the bastard wouldn’t shut up), she had gained a few other personal items, and
she knew where Jackson’s files
were not
kept. Still, she knew that he
wouldn’t be happy when she came back empty-handed, and for some reason, she
dreaded disappointing Jackson.

Now, the tricky part was figuring out how to open the secret
door from
this
side. It was too dim to really see detail on the wall. And,
she had no idea if Blue was standing on the other side of it. She ran her
fingertips along the wall where she thought the chair rail might be on the
outside, but she suddenly heard voices.  A split second later, another panel swung
open in the wall at the other end of the hallway: Ms. Adams’ office. Whomever
had opened the door paused to continue speaking, and Cleo jumped across the
hall into one of the empty rooms, easing the door shut just as she heard Blue
and someone else come into the hallway. Another door opened, and she heard a
grinding/humming sound through the wall. They must be taking the elevator.

She waited until the sound stopped before peeking out into
the hallway. It was deserted, so she resumed the pushing, prodding, and
scraping exploration of the wall. Then came the heart-stopping sound of
elevator doors sliding shut on the floor below, followed by the muffled sounds
of its ascent. Cleo frantically scraped her fingernails across a shadowed spot,
hearing a click in front of her at the same instant she heard the thump of the
elevator car arriving. She darted through the panel just as someone opened the
outer door and came into the hallway. Luckily, the person was still talking to
Blue, and didn’t seem to notice as Cleo’s secret panel clicked shut.

***

It was getting dark outside. Cleo hadn’t realized how long
she had been exploring. Holding her bag closer to her body, she walked quickly
back to the dormitory and then took the steps two at a time up to her room,
desperate to tell Jackson about the elevator. The words died in her mouth as
she threw open the door to find that Jackson wasn’t there.

A board creaked somewhere in the pitch black room. The sound
was followed by the swish/click combination of a switchblade knife. “I’ll gut
you like a fish,” said Cleo, somewhat delighted to have an intruder in her
room. It was just like a movie she had watched with Santo.

The overhead light came on, blinding her momentarily. She
blinked a few times, and saw Jackson, hands on hips, looking at her
incredulously. “Cleo, where did you get a switchblade? Wait—that’s
my
switchblade!” he said as he reached for it.

She moved her arm just beyond his grasp and scowled
mightily. “No, it’s not. It’s mine, fair and square!”

Jackson let out an exasperated sigh and rolled his eyes.
“No, it’s my knife. Virginia confiscated it three years ago. Look, it’s got a
“J” engraved on the side.”

Curious, Cleo held it up to the light, making out a faint
script letter just before Jackson snatched the weapon from her hand. He closed
it one-handed, which impressed Cleo. It had taken her an hour to figure out how
to do that, and even with practice, she was still awkward.

“But I found it, so it’s mine,” she said, sounding for once
like a whiny ten-year old (which she was). Jackson shook his head and pulled a
chair closer to her bed, flipping and straddling it in one smooth motion.

“So, where did you find it?” he asked.

“I got through the secret panel, and there are all these
doors, and some of the rooms are boring, but I found Blue’s office, and I got
Waldorf!” she said excitedly, bouncing a little on the bed.

He leaned forward. “So, did you find the files?”

She stopped bouncing. “No.” He looked so crushed that she
scrambled to put a positive spin on it. “But I did learn some important things,
like how to get into that hallway, and that Blue definitely doesn’t have the
files in her office. Oh, and there’s an elevator that goes down one floor.”

That did it. Jackson got up and paced circles around the
room, babbling about what could possibly be downstairs. Cleo thought it was
strange that he seemed to be so…close to Virginia, and he had free access to
Main Hall, but he had never been in that hallway. “Oh, Virginia guards her
secrets closely,” he said. “I’m here to serve…other purposes, and unless she
sees a reason to allow me through that door, I can’t even ask her about it.
I’ve seen Blue come through that door a thousand times, but the one time I
asked about it…umm, it didn’t go well. And I can’t explore on my own, because
if I get caught, my life will be over.” He looked at Cleo intently. “That’s why
I need you. Because you’re smart, and if you’re caught, you’ll figure out how
to get out of it. I wouldn’t be able to do that, just based on certain
circumstances.” He took off his hat and ran a hand over his head in
frustration. “Look, it kills me to know that I’m helpless in this, but I am, so
we have to deal with it. And I promise you, if you get me that file, I will be
in your debt for the rest of my life.” She could tell that he was serious.

“What did you do in the library today?” she asked. “You
know, as a distraction?”

He smiled. “I hope no class ever needs
Wuthering Heights
,
because three copies of it are now ashes in the bottom of a trash can.”

“Well, thanks,” said Cleo. She grinned. “Now we just need to
figure out how to buy me enough time to see where that elevator goes.”

They stayed up all night plotting, and Cleo was dragging the
next morning. She fell asleep in German II, and her teacher angrily pounded on
a metal trash can right beside her ear to wake her up. She used all the wrong
formulas in physics, designing an egg-dropping machine that, based on her
calculations, would actually catapult an object backwards. In English, she kept
nodding off, and ended up writing the same paragraph three times in the middle
of her timed essay.

To make matters worse, when she arrived at Main Hall for her
shift, Blue was waiting with a thick stack of manila envelopes. “I need you to
deliver these,” said the woman before shoving them into Cleo’s arms.

“But—don’t you have something for me to staple today?” said
Cleo, adding a smile made of pure sunshine. She may have even batted her
eyelashes.

Blue just looked at her. Then she turned and walked into Ms.
Adams’ office, closing the pocket doors with a little more force than usual. As
the doors swiftly shut, she caught a glimpse of Jackson wearing a very worried
expression. Cleo sighed and looked down at the pile of envelopes she was
carrying. Each one had a name scrawled on the outside in loopy, feminine
handwriting.

She delivered half a dozen before finding a quiet closet and
carefully opening a few. She didn’t understand what the numbers meant, but it
looked like a bank statement or something. There was an envelope for each
teacher and staff member at the school, so she figured it had something to do
with taxes. “Damn IRS!” she muttered. (She had heard Darwin utter this phrase
often.)