“Yes. Time to go think about what you’ve done,” Butler said, hurrying after me to make sure I heard. A quick glance told me that he and the others were behind me.
I slowed so they could catch up.
“You could have created unnecessary difficulties for Anavi. And for me,” Principal Butler finished, drawing even with me.
“Wouldn’t that be a shame?” I asked in a tone he could interpret however he wanted.
As we walked away, a chorus of voices raised to follow us:
“Yes, think.”
“About how you lost.”
“And about how we won.”
“We told you we would.”
The last voice, unmistakable, belonged to Anavi.
*
An hour into detention, I realized I should have asked Butler what it was we had supposedly done wrong. I didn’t even know how he’d justified this detention. You couldn’t sentence students to punishment because they worked somewhere you didn’t like or for publishing negative things about you.
Unless you run your school like Butler does. Then you probably can.
Detention was living up to the grim reputation the word conjured. We’d had to hike through the patriotic blaze of a gym that looked recently renovated to a decidedly less spruced up area in the hallway beyond. The large open space had been outfitted for detention with rows of desks, but I suspected it was a former locker room from the few cubbies remaining around the edges of the walls and what I imagined was the lingering odor of stale sweat and gym socks, the hollow echo of a thousand dirty jokes.
We were shown to desks, and told there was no talking or studying, just quiet reflection on whatever had landed us here. It was going to be hard to stay awake.
And we had to stay awake. That was another rule of detention.
One that became even harder to follow when the instructor, a small man with a widow’s peak, announced he had “something to aid your reflection,” and switched on a small stereo on the corner of his desk. The low music that came out was sleepy classical.
I was convinced Maddy would start to weep. Her T-shirt today was for a band called Fatal Retraction. Coincidence?
Maddy looked miserable. So did James, but I was trying not to care about that. He scowled at me whenever he caught me looking, and I shrugged that off with only a moderate amount of guilt. He hadn’t taken me up on being listed as a contributor to the story. Technically, he didn’t deserve to be punished with the rest of us.
Not that any of us deserved this.
Devin alone seemed not to be harboring any hard feelings toward me, but he wasn’t into this scene either. There were a handful of hipsters in the back row who had waved and called to him in greeting when the four of us entered. These must be the cool kids Maddy had mentioned in the cafeteria. Being seen with the likes of preppy James, misfit-by-choice Maddy, and unknown quantity me wouldn’t help Devin’s reputation. I couldn’t help wondering again if the hipster crowd knew about his kingdom in the game or his love of big fat fantasy novels.
Basically, what it boiled down to was that I was ruining the lives of the people I wanted to be my new friends.
And then there was Anavi. Anavi, who was—it seemed—one of them.
SmallvilleGuy could and would help me, but there was only so much he could do from far away. If I was going to get to the bottom of this and have that retraction request retracted and find some way to rescue Anavi, then I needed more allies.
Needed allies, and wanted friends. I wanted to earn their trust back. But if I told them everything, about my growing suspicions of hive mind control experiments, they’d think I was crazy.
Evidence of what was going on at the lab might be enough to seal the deal. Prove it. But first, I needed them willing to listen to me again.
We’d been stripped of our phones outside the door, taken by Butler himself with another slick grin, and would only be returned at the end of the day.
But then there was a positive development. The teacher stopped following the rules (or maybe he didn’t have to), and succumbed to a nap. His widow’s peak fell forward as his weak chin dipped down to his chest.
Someone spoke in the back of the room, and I said, “Shhh.”
To my surprise, whoever it was did. Who knew how long this opportunity would last? I didn’t want to risk waking the teacher up by talking.
I needed this time to get a message across. So I took a piece of paper from the reporter’s notebook in my backpack and wrote fast. I copied the same message—more or less—three times. Then I tore the paper into pieces as quietly as I could and tossed them to Maddy, Devin, and James.
I’d apologized and asked them to please meet me at the Scoop after school to discuss our next move, that I had something important to tell them.
I would have to figure out something not insane-sounding to say—if they agreed.
James’s note was the only one that landed on the floor instead of his desk. He considered it, next to his expensive sneakers, making no move to pick it up.