everybody's walking crooked but they feel alright
Hey, look, it's merry_fates prompt time again. In which I answer the timeless question "What do you get when you combine this, the prompt, with this song obnoxiously in your head all day, a half-overheard episode Ugly Betty during Chemistry test studying, and art room loitering, also known as my life?"
"Sans Merci (Seventeen Minutes)"
The art room was the only place worth being in the school, and it was barely even that.
For starters, it was in the basement. It was a dark room stuffed full with exactly one window, and it was my favorite place in the world. Very few people ever went in there willingly. Nobody at Daventry High wanted to associate with the freaks in the basement.
There wasn’t exactly a big art department at Daventry. Ms. Morris was nice but couldn’t care less, and most of the school weren’t the type to take art classes. The kids were always the regulars: Andy who wanted to be a taxidermist when he grew up, Jamie with the million tattoos, his sleeves always growing, Ally who liked photography and Jed who liked pastels, plus Jamie-who-was-a-girl, and me, probably known as Emily, the girl with the black hair and the bad attitude.
Because it was without a doubt the best place in the school, I was in there about four blocks a day. My third block was technically supposed to be a ceramics elective, but I worked on whatever I felt like, and I had AP art after lunch, and then usually spent my study and lunch in there too.
It felt more like home than most other places, the sinks and the paintings and the posters and the prints. There were about two total inches of the walls not covered in posters and cabinets and old projects and paint splatters and leaking tar, and the room was crowded with glue-covered tables and stainless steel sinks across one wall.
My favorite poster was one of the bigger ones, three feet by four, a print of a painting from some museum shop or other. The painting was Renaissance-style, all in browns and reds and greens and tans, and it showed a woman stroking her hair, carefree, glancing down at the dead knight at her feet.
It was called the Belle Dame Sans Merci.
I ate lunch in the art room every day, orange soda and an apple with whatever else I could find. I sat on the desk when I ate, facing the Sans Merci poster.
I toasted the belle dame as I took the first bite of my apple.
“So,” I asked as I swallowed. “What’d he do to you, anyway?”
***
After lunch there was a knock on the door, and I could hear the hesitation in it, the quiet sideways rap on the doorframe.
I looked up, raised an eyebrow. There was a guy in the doorway, and my eyes skipped from his beat-up sneakers to the bundle of envelopes in his fist to the black hair curling down his neck and the red-and-white varsity jacket, colors from a school that wasn’t ours.
“Umm,” he said, coughed, restarted. I stopped what I’d been doing, cutting up cardboard with a razorblade because I hadn’t been able to find a box-cutter. “You know where the office is?”
Transfer student, right. “Go back up the stairs, turn left and it’s at the end of that hall. There’s a giant sign that says ‘main office’ right above it. Can’t miss it.”
I wove the razorblade through my fingers, flipping it over. I had so many band-aids on that it didn’t even touch my skin, from all the cuts I’d got doing my last project, the one with the broken glass.
His face went red at my words, and I should’ve have found that at all endearing, so I didn’t.
“Thanks,” he said, and maybe he had a bit of a lisp? Or he was just speaking quietly, swallowing his words. “Am I late? When does class start?”
“Seven fifty-five,” I said and without looking up I saw him take two wary steps into the room, turning around to check the clock hanging over the door. “Clock’s wrong,” I said.
“What?” he said, and I finally looked up.
“Clock’s seventeen minutes slow,” I said slowly, enunciating clearly.
“Oh,” he said. “Well… Thanks.”
“Anytime,” I said without meaning to but with the right sarcastic bite. “And let me give you some advice. Around here, if you ever catch yourself going down stairs, you’re going the wrong way.”
This kid wasn’t the type who stayed in the art room, and he doubly wasn’t the type who cut in the boiler room, so I was pretty confident our one-story school had other things to offer him.
“Right,” he said, just to say something. He’d taken half a dozen steps when he turned back. “I’m Josh,” he half-called over his shoulder. “Josh Reed.”
I saw Josh Reed five times in the next week, but only one of them was really important.
***
The first time he’d been sent from some math teacher in search of poster supplies, and I was sitting at a table sketching while Jamie-who-was-a-girl looked for the markers box in the back closet.
“I like these sculptures,” Josh commented, walking slowly around the room, pausing at a foot-tall twisted wire sculpture with wings made of broken glass. “What class did them?”
I twisted a strand of shiny black hair around my finger, fingertips brushing over the half a dozen silver rings in my ear as I reached for it. “Oh, those weren’t one of the projects,” I said without stopping drawing.
“Then who did them?” he asked, walking over.
I looked up, shrugged. “Me,” I said as Jamie-who-was-a-girl crowed with triumph in her quest for washable markers.
***
The second time I’d been sketching, sitting by myself in the art room. Andy Taxidermy and Jamie Tattoos had gone to Taco Bell to bring back lunch, abusing their senior privileges for once the way they were supposed to instead of just whining about getting their portfolios together.
I heard soft laughter and softer cursing coming from down the hall, and kids who went to the boiler room were usually smoking, making out, cutting class, or some combination of the three, so I don’t know why I went to go see what was going on.
You could always hear me coming, because I had half a dozen keys on my belt and twice as many Sharpies. None of the keys were really mine; I didn’t have a car and my house was always unlocked. Andy Taxidermy and I had swiped Ms Martin’s keys one week and made copies, and since then I’d owned the school.
The noise sounded twice as loud in the deserted basement.
The boiler room door was ajar, which would’ve been dumb if anyone ever came downstairs. The walls were brick, and I had sketches of a mural I wanted to do, a doorway into hell in the corner, but I wasn’t sure what medium to use on the brick walls.
Josh Reed was sitting up against the wall, reading a comic book. He was facing away from the door, in the chair someone’d swiped and brought down ages ago, leaning back, and he kept saying things to the drawings on the page.
I shifted, keeping quiet, trying to see what he was reading. X-Men, a pretty old one, it would seem.
I laughed a little, involuntarily, and I couldn’t tell you why. “Uncanny,” I muttered softly.
***
The third time he was looking for a stapler, and I could just see the classes forcing the new kid to run errands. Nobody ever wanted to go down the basement, and it wasn’t like he’d volunteered or anything.
He tapped his fingers on the drawer as he shifted through for staples, while I tried to salvage some dried-out and Andy Taxidermy wasted time on the internet.
“Can you stop that?” I asked, because the noise was drilling a hole in my brain.
Josh stopped, glancing over at me and the old Saves the Day t-shirt I’d gotten from my cousin and smiled. “I love those guys.”
I gave him a look. “You don’t know who they are.”
He gave me a nastier look, something like pain or annoyance crossing his face. “Yeah, I do.”
“Yeah, who do you listen to, anyway?” I ask, and maybe I sound more than a little bit patronizing. Jocks like him came in two flavors of musical tastes: either it was whatever they played on Z100 this week, or it was blind worship of Led Zeppelin.
“Well,” he said, and listed half my mp3 player.
And I challenged him, and he argued back, and we talked emo and then we talked punk and then we got into The Beatles and then the period was half over, suddenly.
The lights went black when we were getting to which pop singers we hated most and least, and Josh turned around, surprised, while Andy Taxidermy cursed at the computer screen and I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t mind it,” Andy Taxidermy said as Josh got up, looking through the door into the hallway. “It’ll be back on soon. Just chill out in here.”
I checked my watch. “You’ve got sixteen minutes.”
“What?” Josh said.
“Happens all the time,” Andy Taxidermy said with a shrug. The power outages weren’t always at the same time, or on the same time, or with any even lengths of time between them, but there was always one constant: every one lasted for seventeen minutes. “Always seventeen minutes long.”
“That’s…kind of weird,” Josh said.
Andy Taxidermy shrugged. “School’s haunted.”
I’d always thought the school was haunted. It was a feeling on the back of your neck, and, of course, the near-weekly power outages.
Josh looked pretty surprised by that, so apparently nobody gotten around to telling him yet.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said, looking at my watch with a shrug.
The fourth time I saw him I was wandering the halls during math class, supposedly on a trip to the bathroom, and he seemed to be doing just about the same.
“So Daventry High School is haunted,” he said conversationally, falling into step beside me, tone as casual as if he was discussing the weather and not spirits.
I shrugged, and opened the door to the girl’s bathroom, because while I was wandering I might as well get in some graffiting time. He followed behind me, and I gave him a look as I locked the door.
“You realize this is the girl’s room, right?” I said, though considering the mildly uncomfortable expression on his face, I probably didn’t need to.
“You’re the one who just locked me in,” he noted.
“Nope,” I said, “you can leave at any time. I’m locking everyone else out.”
I took a Sharpie off my belt, testing it on my forefinger’s Band-Aid, and it luckily wasn’t one of the dead ones.
I had a mural going in the girl’s bathroom, on the blank wall above the mirrors. I had to climb up on the sinks to reach it, taking advantage of the weird shelf left by some remodeling, and I was maybe three-quarters of the way done.
It was an Escher-inspired design, sort of, a simplified variation of the Relativity steps with some small additions, mostly in the form of captions on the doors. Calculus, Chemistry, College Applications, and at the bottom, a cursive caption, ‘welcome to the maze’.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Ghosts?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What, you think the power company is just really selectively unreliable?”
“No,” I said, struggling for the words to explain. “Yes. It’s, like, I think this place is haunted, but I don’t think it’s the way we always think of it. Like the ghost of a person who died here or something. I don’t think it’s a person at all. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, I get it,” he said. “Like, it’s not a dead person, it’s something else. The spirit of a place or something.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, because that was it, sort of. “I just don’t think it’s somebody. I think it’s something.”
“Like what?” he asked, because it was the obvious question.
I shrugged. “I dunno. They’d probably been stupid enough here to build a high school over an Indian burial ground if it was cheap enough.”
“That is pretty much the premise of Buffy,” he agreed and I held back a grin.
“If by ‘Indian burial ground’ you mean ‘Hellmouth’,” I allowed.
The doorknob rattled while I was speaking, and as I looked over there was the distinct sound of a key in the lock. I stopped drawing.
“I thought you locked it,” Josh said as the door opened and cut off my chance to say ‘and they unlocked it, you idiot.’
The vice principal stood in the doorway, a lost-looking freshman half a step behind her. She looked between me, Josh, the ‘GIRLS’ sign on the open door, the drawing on the wall and the Sharpie in my hand.
The keys and markers on my belt made a soft jingling noise in the silence.
“Sorry,” I muttered at Josh as we got out of the office, though it wasn’t so much a ‘sorry I got you suspended’ as it was ‘sorry I’ve got to sit in the ISS room with you for the next week’.
Josh shrugged, varsity jacket rustling on his shoulders. “S’alright.”
I’d half expected him to bitch about missing football practice or something. I didn’t even know if he played football, I’d just assumed as much from the jacket. I reached out, tugging at the elbow of the sleeve.
“What’s this from, anyway?” I asked as he held open the office door.
He grinned at me, fleetingly. He looked completely different when he smiled. “Badminton,” he said with the swallowed remnants of the smile.
I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
He shrugged, still ghosting a smile. “They weren’t stingy with the varsity letters at Westhaven.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but answer me this. Was there seriously a JV badminton team?”
That was the first time I heard Josh Reed laugh.
***
Even if the art rooms give the impression of Daventry High School as a lawless no man’s land, discipline was actually pretty strict when they bothered to enforce it.
As far as they knew, it was the same way in the basement, but they weren’t aware of Ms. Martin’s habit of cutting out every day at twelve and leaving everyone to their own devices. The only classes after that were independent study APs, so technically it was even allowed.
Occasionally they even bothered sending someone down to check out the boiler room, or change the locks, but they seemed pretty aware that was a losing battle.
ISS was boring.
The walls of the room were painted a thick meringue yellow and the clock ticked obnoxiously loud. The window was to our backs and there were six desks. Josh and I sat in the desks farthest from each other, closest to the walls. In the front was a desk where a bored-looking math teacher played Solitaire. At eight in the morning, he’d given us each a giant pile of work to do.
At ten the power went off.
The thing that always got me about power outages was the fact that they were silent. One minute it was there and one minute it was not, lights gasping out without a sound.
The math teacher did a double take and got up, giving us a warning glance. “Stay here,” he directed, slipping out the door. They always told us to stay in the room during a power outage, probably because they were afraid everyone would just leave.
I counted to fifteen before I got up, looking out into the hallway.
There were emergency lights on the walls, little spotlights on boxes that probably had batteries or something, backup power.
They were off. I’d never noticed that before.
“Another power outage?” Josh asked and well, duh, but his voice wasn’t much of a question.
“Yep,” I said with a sigh.
“Wonderful.”
“Seventeen minutes,” I said, walking across the room to pick my backpack up off the middle desk and text Andy Taxidermy.
third one this week.
Josh shifted, getting up to pace around the room.
yep, Andy Taxidermy replied, and hows ice?
buckets of fun, I sent back.
“What’s that?” Josh asked.
“What?” I asked, looking up from my phone.
“The noise,” he said at the same time I heard a clattering noise from the hallway. We reached the door at the same time, and I had a hand on the doorknob before I could see what was happening.
There was a knight in the hallway. His armor was battered and grey against the dark blue of the lockers and his hair was blonde to match his stereotypically handsome face, and he was walking slowly. Almost limping, actually, and probably not just because of his metal shoes.
Josh and I exchanged a look as he collapsed to his feet at the end of the hallway, where the hall turned into the front lobby. Josh moved to push the door open and I stopped him, holding the door back.
“What-” he started, as the woman came down the hallway.
Her dress was printed with poppies and dragged on the floor, and her hair was red and long enough to step on. The expression on her face was utterly serene, and I think there was blood smeared on her hands.
From beside me, Josh cursed. “The…” he eventually trailed off.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”
The directive to stay inside during a power outage seemed a lot more sensible now.
The woman didn’t notice as she went by, gliding across the gritty tile of the floors towards her knight. Neither of us spoke until they were out of sight.
“That was…” I started, and then I hear the telltale twinkle of broken glass. After the weeks I’d spent on my last project, I knew it well. I knew the sculpture well too, knew every inch of it after all the work I’d put into it, so when I saw it heading down the hallway towards us, broken glass wings glittering in the sickly fluorescents, I panicked a little.
I sat back in my desk. Very, very quickly.
Josh stayed at the window until the glass sound faded, and then turned away, sitting next to me.
“Fourteen minutes left,” I said without looking up from the bright screen of my phone.
"Sans Merci (Seventeen Minutes)"
The art room was the only place worth being in the school, and it was barely even that.
For starters, it was in the basement. It was a dark room stuffed full with exactly one window, and it was my favorite place in the world. Very few people ever went in there willingly. Nobody at Daventry High wanted to associate with the freaks in the basement.
There wasn’t exactly a big art department at Daventry. Ms. Morris was nice but couldn’t care less, and most of the school weren’t the type to take art classes. The kids were always the regulars: Andy who wanted to be a taxidermist when he grew up, Jamie with the million tattoos, his sleeves always growing, Ally who liked photography and Jed who liked pastels, plus Jamie-who-was-a-girl, and me, probably known as Emily, the girl with the black hair and the bad attitude.
Because it was without a doubt the best place in the school, I was in there about four blocks a day. My third block was technically supposed to be a ceramics elective, but I worked on whatever I felt like, and I had AP art after lunch, and then usually spent my study and lunch in there too.
It felt more like home than most other places, the sinks and the paintings and the posters and the prints. There were about two total inches of the walls not covered in posters and cabinets and old projects and paint splatters and leaking tar, and the room was crowded with glue-covered tables and stainless steel sinks across one wall.
My favorite poster was one of the bigger ones, three feet by four, a print of a painting from some museum shop or other. The painting was Renaissance-style, all in browns and reds and greens and tans, and it showed a woman stroking her hair, carefree, glancing down at the dead knight at her feet.
It was called the Belle Dame Sans Merci.
I ate lunch in the art room every day, orange soda and an apple with whatever else I could find. I sat on the desk when I ate, facing the Sans Merci poster.
I toasted the belle dame as I took the first bite of my apple.
“So,” I asked as I swallowed. “What’d he do to you, anyway?”
***
After lunch there was a knock on the door, and I could hear the hesitation in it, the quiet sideways rap on the doorframe.
I looked up, raised an eyebrow. There was a guy in the doorway, and my eyes skipped from his beat-up sneakers to the bundle of envelopes in his fist to the black hair curling down his neck and the red-and-white varsity jacket, colors from a school that wasn’t ours.
“Umm,” he said, coughed, restarted. I stopped what I’d been doing, cutting up cardboard with a razorblade because I hadn’t been able to find a box-cutter. “You know where the office is?”
Transfer student, right. “Go back up the stairs, turn left and it’s at the end of that hall. There’s a giant sign that says ‘main office’ right above it. Can’t miss it.”
I wove the razorblade through my fingers, flipping it over. I had so many band-aids on that it didn’t even touch my skin, from all the cuts I’d got doing my last project, the one with the broken glass.
His face went red at my words, and I should’ve have found that at all endearing, so I didn’t.
“Thanks,” he said, and maybe he had a bit of a lisp? Or he was just speaking quietly, swallowing his words. “Am I late? When does class start?”
“Seven fifty-five,” I said and without looking up I saw him take two wary steps into the room, turning around to check the clock hanging over the door. “Clock’s wrong,” I said.
“What?” he said, and I finally looked up.
“Clock’s seventeen minutes slow,” I said slowly, enunciating clearly.
“Oh,” he said. “Well… Thanks.”
“Anytime,” I said without meaning to but with the right sarcastic bite. “And let me give you some advice. Around here, if you ever catch yourself going down stairs, you’re going the wrong way.”
This kid wasn’t the type who stayed in the art room, and he doubly wasn’t the type who cut in the boiler room, so I was pretty confident our one-story school had other things to offer him.
“Right,” he said, just to say something. He’d taken half a dozen steps when he turned back. “I’m Josh,” he half-called over his shoulder. “Josh Reed.”
I saw Josh Reed five times in the next week, but only one of them was really important.
***
The first time he’d been sent from some math teacher in search of poster supplies, and I was sitting at a table sketching while Jamie-who-was-a-girl looked for the markers box in the back closet.
“I like these sculptures,” Josh commented, walking slowly around the room, pausing at a foot-tall twisted wire sculpture with wings made of broken glass. “What class did them?”
I twisted a strand of shiny black hair around my finger, fingertips brushing over the half a dozen silver rings in my ear as I reached for it. “Oh, those weren’t one of the projects,” I said without stopping drawing.
“Then who did them?” he asked, walking over.
I looked up, shrugged. “Me,” I said as Jamie-who-was-a-girl crowed with triumph in her quest for washable markers.
***
The second time I’d been sketching, sitting by myself in the art room. Andy Taxidermy and Jamie Tattoos had gone to Taco Bell to bring back lunch, abusing their senior privileges for once the way they were supposed to instead of just whining about getting their portfolios together.
I heard soft laughter and softer cursing coming from down the hall, and kids who went to the boiler room were usually smoking, making out, cutting class, or some combination of the three, so I don’t know why I went to go see what was going on.
You could always hear me coming, because I had half a dozen keys on my belt and twice as many Sharpies. None of the keys were really mine; I didn’t have a car and my house was always unlocked. Andy Taxidermy and I had swiped Ms Martin’s keys one week and made copies, and since then I’d owned the school.
The noise sounded twice as loud in the deserted basement.
The boiler room door was ajar, which would’ve been dumb if anyone ever came downstairs. The walls were brick, and I had sketches of a mural I wanted to do, a doorway into hell in the corner, but I wasn’t sure what medium to use on the brick walls.
Josh Reed was sitting up against the wall, reading a comic book. He was facing away from the door, in the chair someone’d swiped and brought down ages ago, leaning back, and he kept saying things to the drawings on the page.
I shifted, keeping quiet, trying to see what he was reading. X-Men, a pretty old one, it would seem.
I laughed a little, involuntarily, and I couldn’t tell you why. “Uncanny,” I muttered softly.
***
The third time he was looking for a stapler, and I could just see the classes forcing the new kid to run errands. Nobody ever wanted to go down the basement, and it wasn’t like he’d volunteered or anything.
He tapped his fingers on the drawer as he shifted through for staples, while I tried to salvage some dried-out and Andy Taxidermy wasted time on the internet.
“Can you stop that?” I asked, because the noise was drilling a hole in my brain.
Josh stopped, glancing over at me and the old Saves the Day t-shirt I’d gotten from my cousin and smiled. “I love those guys.”
I gave him a look. “You don’t know who they are.”
He gave me a nastier look, something like pain or annoyance crossing his face. “Yeah, I do.”
“Yeah, who do you listen to, anyway?” I ask, and maybe I sound more than a little bit patronizing. Jocks like him came in two flavors of musical tastes: either it was whatever they played on Z100 this week, or it was blind worship of Led Zeppelin.
“Well,” he said, and listed half my mp3 player.
And I challenged him, and he argued back, and we talked emo and then we talked punk and then we got into The Beatles and then the period was half over, suddenly.
The lights went black when we were getting to which pop singers we hated most and least, and Josh turned around, surprised, while Andy Taxidermy cursed at the computer screen and I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t mind it,” Andy Taxidermy said as Josh got up, looking through the door into the hallway. “It’ll be back on soon. Just chill out in here.”
I checked my watch. “You’ve got sixteen minutes.”
“What?” Josh said.
“Happens all the time,” Andy Taxidermy said with a shrug. The power outages weren’t always at the same time, or on the same time, or with any even lengths of time between them, but there was always one constant: every one lasted for seventeen minutes. “Always seventeen minutes long.”
“That’s…kind of weird,” Josh said.
Andy Taxidermy shrugged. “School’s haunted.”
I’d always thought the school was haunted. It was a feeling on the back of your neck, and, of course, the near-weekly power outages.
Josh looked pretty surprised by that, so apparently nobody gotten around to telling him yet.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said, looking at my watch with a shrug.
The fourth time I saw him I was wandering the halls during math class, supposedly on a trip to the bathroom, and he seemed to be doing just about the same.
“So Daventry High School is haunted,” he said conversationally, falling into step beside me, tone as casual as if he was discussing the weather and not spirits.
I shrugged, and opened the door to the girl’s bathroom, because while I was wandering I might as well get in some graffiting time. He followed behind me, and I gave him a look as I locked the door.
“You realize this is the girl’s room, right?” I said, though considering the mildly uncomfortable expression on his face, I probably didn’t need to.
“You’re the one who just locked me in,” he noted.
“Nope,” I said, “you can leave at any time. I’m locking everyone else out.”
I took a Sharpie off my belt, testing it on my forefinger’s Band-Aid, and it luckily wasn’t one of the dead ones.
I had a mural going in the girl’s bathroom, on the blank wall above the mirrors. I had to climb up on the sinks to reach it, taking advantage of the weird shelf left by some remodeling, and I was maybe three-quarters of the way done.
It was an Escher-inspired design, sort of, a simplified variation of the Relativity steps with some small additions, mostly in the form of captions on the doors. Calculus, Chemistry, College Applications, and at the bottom, a cursive caption, ‘welcome to the maze’.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Ghosts?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What, you think the power company is just really selectively unreliable?”
“No,” I said, struggling for the words to explain. “Yes. It’s, like, I think this place is haunted, but I don’t think it’s the way we always think of it. Like the ghost of a person who died here or something. I don’t think it’s a person at all. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, I get it,” he said. “Like, it’s not a dead person, it’s something else. The spirit of a place or something.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, because that was it, sort of. “I just don’t think it’s somebody. I think it’s something.”
“Like what?” he asked, because it was the obvious question.
I shrugged. “I dunno. They’d probably been stupid enough here to build a high school over an Indian burial ground if it was cheap enough.”
“That is pretty much the premise of Buffy,” he agreed and I held back a grin.
“If by ‘Indian burial ground’ you mean ‘Hellmouth’,” I allowed.
The doorknob rattled while I was speaking, and as I looked over there was the distinct sound of a key in the lock. I stopped drawing.
“I thought you locked it,” Josh said as the door opened and cut off my chance to say ‘and they unlocked it, you idiot.’
The vice principal stood in the doorway, a lost-looking freshman half a step behind her. She looked between me, Josh, the ‘GIRLS’ sign on the open door, the drawing on the wall and the Sharpie in my hand.
The keys and markers on my belt made a soft jingling noise in the silence.
“Sorry,” I muttered at Josh as we got out of the office, though it wasn’t so much a ‘sorry I got you suspended’ as it was ‘sorry I’ve got to sit in the ISS room with you for the next week’.
Josh shrugged, varsity jacket rustling on his shoulders. “S’alright.”
I’d half expected him to bitch about missing football practice or something. I didn’t even know if he played football, I’d just assumed as much from the jacket. I reached out, tugging at the elbow of the sleeve.
“What’s this from, anyway?” I asked as he held open the office door.
He grinned at me, fleetingly. He looked completely different when he smiled. “Badminton,” he said with the swallowed remnants of the smile.
I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
He shrugged, still ghosting a smile. “They weren’t stingy with the varsity letters at Westhaven.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but answer me this. Was there seriously a JV badminton team?”
That was the first time I heard Josh Reed laugh.
***
Even if the art rooms give the impression of Daventry High School as a lawless no man’s land, discipline was actually pretty strict when they bothered to enforce it.
As far as they knew, it was the same way in the basement, but they weren’t aware of Ms. Martin’s habit of cutting out every day at twelve and leaving everyone to their own devices. The only classes after that were independent study APs, so technically it was even allowed.
Occasionally they even bothered sending someone down to check out the boiler room, or change the locks, but they seemed pretty aware that was a losing battle.
ISS was boring.
The walls of the room were painted a thick meringue yellow and the clock ticked obnoxiously loud. The window was to our backs and there were six desks. Josh and I sat in the desks farthest from each other, closest to the walls. In the front was a desk where a bored-looking math teacher played Solitaire. At eight in the morning, he’d given us each a giant pile of work to do.
At ten the power went off.
The thing that always got me about power outages was the fact that they were silent. One minute it was there and one minute it was not, lights gasping out without a sound.
The math teacher did a double take and got up, giving us a warning glance. “Stay here,” he directed, slipping out the door. They always told us to stay in the room during a power outage, probably because they were afraid everyone would just leave.
I counted to fifteen before I got up, looking out into the hallway.
There were emergency lights on the walls, little spotlights on boxes that probably had batteries or something, backup power.
They were off. I’d never noticed that before.
“Another power outage?” Josh asked and well, duh, but his voice wasn’t much of a question.
“Yep,” I said with a sigh.
“Wonderful.”
“Seventeen minutes,” I said, walking across the room to pick my backpack up off the middle desk and text Andy Taxidermy.
third one this week.
Josh shifted, getting up to pace around the room.
yep, Andy Taxidermy replied, and hows ice?
buckets of fun, I sent back.
“What’s that?” Josh asked.
“What?” I asked, looking up from my phone.
“The noise,” he said at the same time I heard a clattering noise from the hallway. We reached the door at the same time, and I had a hand on the doorknob before I could see what was happening.
There was a knight in the hallway. His armor was battered and grey against the dark blue of the lockers and his hair was blonde to match his stereotypically handsome face, and he was walking slowly. Almost limping, actually, and probably not just because of his metal shoes.
Josh and I exchanged a look as he collapsed to his feet at the end of the hallway, where the hall turned into the front lobby. Josh moved to push the door open and I stopped him, holding the door back.
“What-” he started, as the woman came down the hallway.
Her dress was printed with poppies and dragged on the floor, and her hair was red and long enough to step on. The expression on her face was utterly serene, and I think there was blood smeared on her hands.
From beside me, Josh cursed. “The…” he eventually trailed off.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”
The directive to stay inside during a power outage seemed a lot more sensible now.
The woman didn’t notice as she went by, gliding across the gritty tile of the floors towards her knight. Neither of us spoke until they were out of sight.
“That was…” I started, and then I hear the telltale twinkle of broken glass. After the weeks I’d spent on my last project, I knew it well. I knew the sculpture well too, knew every inch of it after all the work I’d put into it, so when I saw it heading down the hallway towards us, broken glass wings glittering in the sickly fluorescents, I panicked a little.
I sat back in my desk. Very, very quickly.
Josh stayed at the window until the glass sound faded, and then turned away, sitting next to me.
“Fourteen minutes left,” I said without looking up from the bright screen of my phone.