Sugar & Squall (5 page)

I moved in carefully to look.
Wouldn’t this be the ultimate?
I thought.
Busted in a teacher’s room, prodding around like a common burglar.

There was a pile of papers on the desk. One was angled out. ‘Year 7 Geography – Introductory Quiz’ was written across the top. This belonged to Ben Harris, who, given the ratio of ticks to crosses, looked like he had a brain. I scanned down the page. The last tick had gone wrong. It continued in a big red streak that ran right off the page and onto the desktop. The pen was on the floor.

I stepped backwards into the hall, not willing to explore any further. I’d check the other floors and then try my luck in the classrooms and upper floors of the middle building. Someone had to be around. This was a school for God’s sake.

Each door along the way revealed a different room. While posters were prohibited, a few guys had bucked the rules, throwing them up on the drawers next to their beds, posters of girls, cars, girls on cars.

One of the doors was hanging off its hinge, angling over into the hall. There was an indentation in the middle of it, a foot-print.

Jesus,
I thought.
Someone really hates doors.

I kept moving until I was about to reach the staircase. That’s when I heard it. The sound was rhythmic, yet tempered. Footsteps? Whoever it was, they were doing a good job of keeping quiet.

I put my back up against the wall and made myself as flat as possible. Panic returned, hard. I could hear them clearly, each single depression as feet slowly descended the staircase.

My temples thumped along in tune. What if this was some crazed loon who’d just murdered the whole school, a
whack job mental patient who had been hiding out here for a hundred years? In seconds I was buying into it. Nothing about what was headed my way felt friendly. I just knew it.

I scanned around. Next to me the door to the last room on the floor was completely open. There was a suitcase inside the doorway. On top of it
was a hockey stick. It was no samurai sword, but it’d do. If I was going down, I’d damn well do so fighting.

I stretched my arm out and grasped it, surprised at how light it was, and slid into the room. I gripped the stick tight away from my body in fear it might rattle against my very bones if it were any closer.

What to do. What to do. What to do.

I calculated there could only be a few steps left. They’d round the corner in seconds. I instinctively drew in a breath, told myself not to strike out, but when I heard that breathing, when I felt them pause near the doorway, I couldn’t stop myself.
Horror filled my head. I acted out of pure reflex, stepping into the hall and swinging for their head with all my might.

4. HYPOXIC CONVULSION

The force I mustered up surprised me. Thankfully, he ducked just in time. His hair rippled as the hockey stick moved over it, colliding with the wall in a sickening crack.

I realized who it was. I was on auto-pilot, though, and even while he was reeling back, almost tripping over his own legs to get away, I’d swung again with just as much force, clipping his ear in the process.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Logan said, crouching, his arms outstretched wide in the universal sign of surrender. I must have looked all out of strike, because he brought his hand up to his ear, wincing.

“Ah, Kat?”

He knew my name. Strange. I found my voice.

“How do you know my name?

I lowered the stick and he got to his feet, looking just as surprised as me.

“Pre-calc
, remember? The roll call?”

Right, the roll
call. Good one.

“What are you doing?” I questioned.

“I could ask you the same thing. This is the
boys’
dorm, you know.”

He was dressed in black track-pants and a blue T-shirt that was, to my well-trained eye, maybe a size or two small.

“Where’s everyone else?”

He shook his head. “No idea. I woke up and they were gone. Are they in the hall?”

“Nope,” I replied, still holding the hockey stick. “I’ve looked everywhere. There’s no one else here.”

He was flicking his ear, probably testing it for feeling after I’d practically split it in two.
I backed off. “Shit. Sorry about that. Logan, right?”

“Right, and it’s fine. I would have done the same. You’re saying you can’t find anyone?”

“Yeah, sorry.” It was all I could manage. Truth be told, I was nervous in his presence. He must have thought I was mental.

“There has to be some kind of explanation,” he said, peering down the hall behind me.
He stepped closer. “I didn’t expect it to be you.”

I got defensive.
“Me? What do you mean?”

He paused,
awkward. “Well, you’re new, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.

I shrugged. I didn’t really know how to take him. It’s like he was annoyed we’d stumbled across each other.

“Look, I don’t know what
the hell’s going on, but let’s just look around, okay?” I suggested.

“
Sounds like a plan.”

I nodded
, and if my heart had of been running in my chest before, now it was sprinting, half with caution and half with the thought of spending time with him – regardless of whether he wanted to or not.

Caution won out
.
After all,
it said,
what do you really know about this guy, and why are you so fixated on him anyhow?
My skin crawled at the thought of Xavier and the night before.

Together, we scouted the rest of the school.
Logan tried to make conversation. Occasionally I nodded or answered back with as few words as possible.

He did have
some interesting observations. For example, the electricity was still on. The school’s power came from a series of generators behind the main building. The ferry brought fuel each weekend for them, so the power would be on for at least another week. How he knew all this, I didn’t know, and dared not ask.

The weekend was four days away, and thus the ferry. At least that was a certainty. He’d asked me on the way where I’d been this morning. I’d lied and said I was in bed as well. The truth was too embarrassing. I was hardly in the mood for relaying how I decided to run out in the middle of the night only to ge
t drugged and wake up with a mouth full of sand.

It took us almost into the late afternoon to check the classrooms – door by door, one by one. We were now up to the top floor of the middle building.

“There’s an office or two up here, a bunch of storage rooms, the library and the admin office,” Logan said, pointing off to the left and right. I’d let him take the lead. There was something driving him on, like he couldn’t wait to find everyone and be free of me. My legs were lead beneath me, but he just powered upwards, desperate.

“I think there’s a phone in the principal’s office and one on the secretary’s desk that’s for student use. We’ll try them both. If that doesn’t work, we can jump on the net in the library.”

“You
really
know your way around for a newcomer,” I said, growing bolder.

“I like to be prepared,” he replied, turning and walking into the principal’s office.

I spoke to his back. “Like a scout?”

He didn’t turn, or reply.

I followed him in. Sadly, I’d been in this position more than a few times. The principal at my last school had been a hard old hag. There was no corporal punishment. I wasn’t bent over any desk and belted. No, she just looked at you in a certain way, a slant of the eye, and that would be enough.

“You’re a deeply troubled girl,” she’d said to me, knowing full well the childish connotation of ‘girl’. That was good, but she was saving her trump card. “It’s sad, really, that your mother isn’t around.
She’d be
deeply
disappointed.”

I
’d thought of my mother on the street, cut down by some junkie for fifty dollars, bleeding out onto the pavement, the bloody knife by her side. I’d thought of the ice-cream falling from my hand as I ran to her, the coward running away with her purse, people pointing but doing nothing. I’d thought of her and I’d wanted to hurt this bitch in front of me. I’d wanted to hurt her so bad.

Instead
I’d sat there simmering until the cops came, trying to burn right through her with my eyes. All the while she just looked at me – a piteous look that I’ll never forget.

“Nothing,” Logan said.

The phones in the office were both dead. We moved onto the library, books our only accomplice. Logan kept tapping the enter key on the computer keyboard so that the same thing cycled on the screen over and over.

“There’s no network.
Power, yes. Internet, no. It probably goes down in bad weather, but I don’t remember a storm last night.”

“What about
cell phones?” As I said it I remembered there was no reception.
Stupid.

“No, it’s not a bad
thought. Somebody said they keep a bunch of prohibited items in a box in the principal’s office, but I already checked. They’d be no use anyhow.”

“How far is it to shore?” I was rolling now.

“It’s too far to swim if that’s what you’re thinking. Plus it’s winter, and there’s supposed to be a really bad undercurrent that runs right around the island. Apparently, no one swims in the ocean. It’s too dangerous. That’s why there’s the pool.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I didn’t.

He held my gaze and then
suddenly averted his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear me.

I suggested we do a final check of the perimeter of the school. We walked around until it was clear to all parties involved we were doing nothing but chasing our own tails.
The sun fell all the while. It would be dark soon.

“Hungry?” Logan
said casually, his shirt flapping in the breeze.

On cue, my stomach gave out something between a chirp and a groan. I pressed on it through my sweater, mortified.

Logan laughed a little, for the first time. “I think it’s settled. Come on.”

“W
hat about the others?” I protested.

“We have to eat,” he said, harsher than I expected, and then h
e was already off back to the school.

In the kitchen,
he opened the one of the five or six industrial-sized fridges one-handed, peering inside with deep concentration. Even under the Freon glow inside, a light that would be most unflattering to most, he looked angelic.

“See anything you like?” he said,
nodding his head at the fridge’s innards.

But I wasn’t looking inside the fridge
.
Sure do.

I peered in, noting a large container of what looked to be lasagna labeled ‘Monday’ up the back.

Logan went to grab it, but I stopped him. “No, I’ll do it. Find some plates and cutlery.”

It’s the least I can do,
I thought, as Logan skated around the kitchen with purpose.

Five minutes later,
we sat at one of the tables in the dining hall. Even though I’d nuked it well beyond levels that were safe for human consumption, I had to admit the lasagna tasted pretty good. Better than Italy even.

At least the light
s stayed on.

We both ate rapidly, taking small bites, keeping our mouths closed as we chewed, an artificial hum flatlining in the background. We sat spaced a few feet apart. It seemed neither of us
was prepared to move closer.

“Not bad.” Logan shoved in another spoonful of lasagna. “If this doesn’t pan out, you could always be a chef.”

“Ah, no,” I said. “I struggle with macaroni cheese.”

I almost spilled it then, that we had a team of cooks at our bidding. “Dad and I eat out a lot. That’s all.”

I was hacking through another pasta sheet with the side of my spoon, the knife Logan had laid out for me neglected on the tabletop.

“What’s your dad like?” he asked.

“He’s not so bad. He tries, but he’s usually flat-out with work.”

I knew what the next question would be, so I answered first.

“Mom’s dead.”

It was dramatic, but I’d learned plain truth without any frills or fancy was best.

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I mean, I don’t, but I’m sorry.”

Logan looked down into what was left of his lasagna.

I pulled my hair back over my ears. “It’s fine, really. It was a long time ago. What about you? What are your parents like?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them in a while.”

“Oh? Where was your last school?”

It was a while before he answered. “It was a lot bigger, public, inner-city. Yours?”

I shrugged my shoulder, resting a spoonful of sauce back on the plate. “Same. In the city, lots of kids, nothing special.”

Logan stopped eating altogether. “What did you do to end up here?”

“It’s a long story.” I hovered here.
Give him the truth,
something told me.
Don’t sugarcoat it.

“I punched someone and they fell through a window.”

Most people freaked out when I told them. I sort of enjoyed the shock value of it. Logan’s spoon didn’t falter, nor his expression. It was completely neutral, like he’d expected it. “Must have been some punch.”

“Hardly.”

“Should I be worried? Do I need protection? I’m pretty lethal with a spoon, you know,” he said, brandishing his in the air like a sword. He was joking. That was good.

I rolled my eyes. “It was an
accident
.”

He sat back in his chair. “I see. So they sent you here.”

“Yep, that’s about it. I’ll probably get blamed for all this.”

“You’ve got me,” he said. “I’ll be your PIC.”

“PIC?”

“Partner in crime.”

“Oh, right. And you, what was your ‘crime’?”

He paused again before answering. “Let’s just say I got a bit too involved with a girl.
”

I gave him a look of concern.

“Oh, nothing like that. You’re
way
off.”

I didn’t press further, so we sat in silence.

Logan looked ahead. I couldn’t work out what he was thinking about, if anything. The proximity of it all, the sheer fact we sat, alone, a few feet apart, both excited and infuriated me all at once given I’d never make the first move.

Yet I felt guilty. I felt guilty for sitting here thinking about him when everyone else was who knows where, maybe taken, dead, locked away, or worse.

The hall was warm, but goose-bumps lined my arms.

I didn’t want to think about it any more, the others.

Screw them.

I finished
and pushed my plate away as was habit, but no one swooped in to take it. I tried to fold my legs, my arms, but couldn’t get comfortable. I decided to break the silence, trying to make the sentence as short and succinct as possible to avoid stuffing it up. Although I’d just run it through five times in my head, when it came out it was ghostly quiet.

“So, what are you into?”
Add something else, quick.
“Sports or anything?”

Sports? What the hell.

He looked into my eyes. Eyes, plural. Most people tended to go for either the left or right when they looked straight at me as if it wasn’t right to look at both together, that there was something wrong with one or the other.