Shit. I immediately drop the headphones, a breath catching in my throat.
“The iPod’s on,” I say, shooting up straight. “Whoever he is, he was just here. We need to go. Now.”
Ten moves for the doorway, and I turn away from the bed, but then I stop.
Spinning back around, I dip down and rip the page out of the notebook. I have no idea why I want it, but I do.
If it is a guy living here, he probably won’t miss it, anyway, and if he does, he won’t know where it went.
“Go,” I tell Ten, nudging his back.
And I fold up the page and stuff it in my back pocket.
Holding up our phones, we step out of the room and turn left. But just then someone catches me in their arms, and I yelp as I’m squeezed until I can’t breathe.
“Gotch-ya!” a male voice boasts. “So how about that ride now?”
Trey.
Squirming, I pull out of his hold and twist around. Lyla, J.D., and Bryce stand behind him, laughing.
“Damn!” Ten shouts, breathing hard. He was obviously caught off guard by their sudden appearance, too.
“You might’ve turned off the flashlights,” Lyla scolds with a smirk on her face. “We could see them as soon as we came down.”
I move past them, back toward the stairs, ignoring her. If we hadn’t been investigating that room, the flashlights on our phones would’ve been off.
“What are you guys doing down here anyway?” J.D. asks.
“Just go,” I order, losing patience. “Let’s get out of here.”
Everyone moves ahead, back down the tunnel, and I glance over my shoulder, scanning the nearly pitch blackness and the doorway to the room where we’d just been.
Nothing.
Dark corners, shadows, dank glimmers from the fluorescent light hitting the puddles of water… I see nothing.
But I breathe hard, unable to shake the creepy feeling. Someone is there.
“This was not the kind of fun I was thinking of when you guys suggested the Cove,” Lyla whines, side-stepping the small pools of water.
I turn back around, ignoring my fear as I rush up the steps. “Yeah, well, don’t worry,” I mumble just loud enough for them to hear. “The backseat of J.D.’s car isn’t far away.”
“Hell yeah.” J.D. chuckles.
And I resist the urge for one more glance back down the dark tunnel.
I climb the stairs, still feeling eyes on me.
“Let’s go, ladies!” Coach pounds her fist on the lockers twice as she passes by. The girls giggle and whisper around me, and I comb my fingers through my hair, sweeping it up into a messy ponytail.
“Yeah, I hear they’re installing cameras,” Katelyn Stephens says to a group as she sits on the bench. “They’re hoping to catch him red-handed.”
I roll on some deodorant and toss the container back into my gym bag before checking my lip gloss in the mirror on the locker door.
Cameras, huh? In the school?
Good to know.
I pull the top of my cheerleading uniform down over my head, covering my bra, and smooth my shirt and skirt down. We’re recruiting new team members, since so many of us are graduating soon, so Coach has been asking us to wear our uniforms to school some days to hopefully get more freshman interested.
“I was wondering what their next move was going to be,” another girl chimes in. “He keeps getting past them.”
“And I, for one, hopes he keeps it up.” Lyla adds. “Did you see what he wrote this morning?”
Everyone falls silent, and I know exactly what they’re looking at. I turn my head, glancing to the wall, right over the doorway to the gym teachers’ offices. Flapping ever so gently from the AC blowing out of the vent is a large piece of white butcher paper taped haphazardly to the wall.
I smile to myself, my heartbeat picking up pace, and turn back to finish getting ready.
“Don’t knock masturbation,” Mel Long says, reciting the message we all saw laying behind the butcher paper before morning practice a while ago, “it’s sex with someone I love.”
And everyone starts laughing. I bet they don’t even know it’s a Woody Allen quote.
They discovered the graffiti this morning, here in the girls’ locker room this time, and while the teachers covered it up with paper, everyone saw what was behind it.
The school has been vandalized twenty-two times in the last month, and today makes twenty-three.
At first, it was slow—one occurrence here and there—but now it’s more frequent, nearly every day, and sometimes several times a day. As if “the little punk,” as he or she has come to be known, has developed a taste for breaking into the school at night and leaving random messages on the walls.
“Well,” I say, hooking my bag over my shoulder and slamming my locker door shut. “With the cameras going in all the hallways and covering every entrance soon, I’m sure he or she will either wise up and quit, or get caught. Their days are numbered.”
“I hope he gets caught,” Katelyn says, excitement in her eyes. “I want to know who it is.”
“Boo.” Lyla pouts. “That’s no fun.”
I twist around and head out of the locker room. Yeah, of course it’s no fun if Punk gets caught. No one knows what to expect when they come to school in the morning, and it’s gotten to the point where the first thing on everyone’s agenda is to look for whatever message the vandal has left. They think the intrigue is fun, and while they’re curious, Falcon’s Well would be just a little bit more tedious without the mystery.
Sometimes the messages are serious.
I polish up my sheen, but you can’t shine shit.
-Punk
And then everyone is quiet, visibly brushing off the cryptic message as if it’s nothing, but you know it’s in their heads all day, a thought without a leash.
And then sometimes it’s comical.
FYI, your mom wouldn’t date your dad if she could make that choice again.
-Punk
And everyone laughs.
But the next day, I heard, several parents called the school, because their sons and daughters had given them the third degree to see if it was true.
The messages are never signed, and they’re never directed to anyone in particular, but they’ve become anticipated. Who is he? What will he write next? How is he doing it without being seen?
And they all assume it’s a “he” and not a “she” even though there’s no proof it’s one or the other.
But the mystery buzzes around school, and I’m pretty sure attendance is up just so no one misses what happens next.
Strolling up to my locker, I drop my bag to the ground, pulling in a long breath. The sudden weight on my chest makes it a struggle to inhale as I twist the dial on the lock, keying in the combination.
My head falls forward, but I snap it back up.
Shit.
Opening the door, shielding myself for all the eyes around me, I reach under my skirt, under the tight elastic of my spandex shorts, and grab my inhaler.
“Hey, can I borrow your suede skirt today?”
I jump, releasing my inhaler, and pulling my hand out.
Lyla stands to my left while Katelyn and Mel hover at my right.
Picking up my backpack, I dig out my books from last night and load them into my locker. “You mean the expensive one that I sold half my closet to a consignment shop to pay for?” I ask, shoving my books onto the shelf. “Not a chance.”
“I’ll tell your mom about all the clothes you hide in your locker.”
“And I’ll tell your mom about all the times you weren’t actually sleeping at my house for the night,” I retort, smiling as I place my bag on the hook in my locker and look to Katelyn and Mel.
The other girls laugh, and I turn back to my locker, retrieving my Art notebook and English text for my first two classes.
“Please?” she begs. “My legs look so good in it.”
I pull in a breath with everything I have, the struggle to fill my lungs growing like there’s a thousand pounds sitting on my chest.
Fine. Whatever. Anything to get her out of here. I reach into my locker and pull out the skirt hanging on a plastic hook I’d stuck in the back.
I toss the smooth, tan fabric at her. “Don’t have sex in it.”
She smiles gleefully, fanning out the skirt to have another look at it. “Thank you.”