“Ronda, it’s so nice to see you,” I said. “Is the principal around?”
“In a meeting,” she said, and I breathed easier. Without batting a mascara-coated eyelash, she asked, “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“On shore leave.” I waved the yellow hall pass my geometry teacher had given me after he finished lecturing and told us to do practice problems for the rest of the time. “I want to make a change in my schedule. I’d like to switch bio for computer science—I already checked and there’s a class that will fit second period.”
She waited—for what, I wasn’t sure. Then she said, “I guess it’s okay. Since you’re not asking to transfer to chemistry.” She paused. “Did you really create a noxious cloud that caused the evacuation of your school in Ohio?”
“Of course not.” I waved my hand dismissively.
“Good,” she said, typing something into her computer. I hoped that meant she was getting me where I needed to be next hour, if I was lucky. Which I wasn’t usually, but today might be the day.
“It was a few harmless chemicals mixed into an equally harmless cloud. Not noxious so much as big,” I said. “It was a distraction to help this girl, Sophie, who really needed an A. Her partner messed up their lab on purpose, because she broke up with him.”
“Huh,” she said, and gifted me a skeptical side-eye as she hit enter. She reached over and plucked a fresh document from the printer beside her desk. “Just don’t . . . hack the mainframe or whatever in your new class.”
“I solemnly swear,” I said. After all, there probably wasn’t even a mainframe to hack.
I crossed my fingers it would go just as easily when I came back and asked to transfer out of comp sci. I didn’t want to stay in the class any longer than I had to, not if the Warheads were also in it. Computers were more SmallvilleGuy’s thing.
When I reached the classroom, Devin had saved me a seat next to him, along one of several rows of tables with tricked-out computer workstations that could have come straight from a Coast City high-tech start-up that also helped design futuristic movie sets. This school appeared to be way more flush with cash than most of my previous ones.
No doubt due to Principal Butler’s semi-convincing layer of charm.
“Morning,” I said, slipping into the seat beside Devin. I wasn’t used to having someone to sit next to. Not that I was convinced the other Scoop staffers wouldn’t go hungry zombie and turn on me yet, but maybe. Maybe the plan and the job would work out.
And it was impossible not to notice that Devin was cute.
“Do you even know anything about coding?” Devin asked.
“I know how to use computers,” I said, frowning down at a keyboard that included a few rows of symbols that might as well have been hieroglyphics.
“This is an advanced class,” he countered, “grasshopper.”
“So I gathered. I’m here to learn.”
I gave up on the keyboard and surveyed the classroom. A few other students were playing around on their computers, screens scrolling with lines of code. Anavi came in, slouching into a chair directly across from us, without even looking up. She must sit there all the time.
Well done, Devin.
Once at her workstation, Anavi glanced around, like she knew she was being hunted but couldn’t tell where the predators were hiding.
None of the Warheads were there, though. Not yet.
Before I could say anything to Anavi to lay the groundwork for interviewing her later, the teacher—Ms. Johnson, according to my revised schedule—showed up. She wore a boxy, skirted suit, and her black hair was swept back in a bun so tight that it must give her a headache by the end of the day. She primly carried a stack of papers.
As she went to shut the door, a hand pressed it back open. The Warheads had arrived—in pack formation.
“Pop quiz,” Ms. Johnson said to the owner of the hand, “and you almost missed it.” But her voice was timid, and she’d come close to dropping the papers.
Annoyance would have been the response I would have gone with, not being obviously unnerved. But, hey, I wasn’t the teacher.
The Warheads were dressed in black again. They also wore the same slightly mocking expressions. Half-smirks, like full ones required too much effort.
They glided in one after the other, moving like they were cogs in a well-oiled machine or individual bones in the skeleton of some large animal. Fanning out, they took seats down both sides of the table directly behind Anavi, who seemed already to be freaking out—even more—as a result.
And the choice to sit there had to be on purpose, because Anavi really did look like she might lose her breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the keyboard in front of her. They must have known that she wouldn’t be able to forget that they were behind her. But she also didn’t give them the satisfaction of looking.
Or, I thought, it might have been an attempt not to provoke them.