Being Henry David

6

Past the chill, beyond the smell of decaying leaves and pine and the fresh mist of morning on Walden Pond, a man’s deep voice reaches into my sleep. I’m outside under the sky and I hear his voice. It’s not the ghost of Thoreau this time. The voice is more familiar.

Wake up, the voice says. It’s time to gather wood for the fire and make breakfast. We’ve got a long hike ahead of us today.

I smile. So happy to be here with him. He calls me by the name I can’t remember, and I can almost hear it, the shape and lilt of my forgotten name.

“Dad?”

A man clears his throat awkwardly. “Uh. Excuse me. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”

My head jerks toward the man’s voice, and I pull a stiff muscle in my neck with a twang. Some big guy with a black goatee stands looking down at me, clutching a crooked walking stick.

“The park isn’t open yet,” he tells me.

“What? Oh, sorry.” My voice is thick with sleep, and my mouth feels full of marshmallows. Just the sight of his leather jacket and black wool hat makes me shiver, jealous of the warmth. I sit up, fighting grogginess, and rub the stiff place in my neck.

As he stares at me, I imagine my wild hair with leaves poking out of it, my wrinkled clothes and sleep-creased face. Surely he can see I’m merely pathetic and not a threat.

Leaning on his stick with one hand hitched up on his hip, he asks, “Did you sleep here all night?”

I scratch my head and pull an oak leaf out of my hair. “I wouldn’t call it sleeping, exactly.”

He smiles, which makes friendly creases around his eyes. “Well, just so you know, Walden Pond doesn’t officially open until seven a.m.” He pulls back a coat sleeve to consult his watch. “And it’s about six forty-five at the moment.”

My forehead crunches into a frown. What? Can they actually close the pond? Close the woods? I wonder if he’s going to arrest me. With his bulky build and shrewd, guarded expression, he could be a cop. Or maybe an ex-con. I want to ask what he’s doing here if the pond is closed, but I don’t want to sound like a smartass.

“I work for the park commission, and I come here for my morning walks,” he explains, as if reading my thoughts. “I’m a Thoreau interpreter,” he adds, like he’s expecting me to be impressed.

I stand up and brush pine needles off the sleeve of my sweater. “You…translate his writing into other languages?”

He stares at me, then a chuckle erupts from somewhere deep in his wide chest. “No, not that kind of interpreter. I’m a historic interpreter. I pose as Thoreau, wear the kind of clothes he would have worn, make appearances and give talks. That kind of thing. People ask questions and I answer as Thoreau. It’s fun.”

I narrow my eyes at his tall, muscular body, trying to imagine him in an outfit like Thoreau’s. He doesn’t look anything like the short, thin version of Thoreau I saw—dreamed, hallucinated, whatever—but he seems like a nice guy so I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

He takes a deep breath of morning air, and looks out at the misty lake reflecting the sun. “A morning walk is a blessing for the whole day,” he says. I recognize the quote. Thoreau, of course.

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” I quote back automatically, stifling a yawn.

The man laughs. “Clever,” he says. “Very clever. By the way, my name’s Thomas.” He extends a hand. I try to muster a decent grip inside his paw of a hand.

“I’m Hank.”

As soon as he takes my hand, Thomas yanks his back in surprise. “Christ, Hank. Your hands are like ice.” For the first time, he notices that I’m shivering my ass off.

He stares at me, trying to figure me out.

“You need a ride home, Hank?” he asks.

Home. “Uh, no thanks.” I stuff my hands into my pockets and stare at the ground. When I glance up again at Thomas’s face, I see kindness.

“Well at least let me help you get warmed up. I have hot coffee in a thermos and a couple bagels back at my vehicle. I’d be happy to share them with you.”

I squint into the morning sun behind his head and say, “Sure,” trying to sound casual. But I’m suddenly feeling so grateful that I have to swallow the lump in my throat.

After crossing the street with Thomas, I spot Thoreau’s cabin. The cabin isn’t on the hill by Walden Pond where it belongs, but all the way over here, practically in the parking lot.

“Why is the cabin here? It doesn’t belong here,” I say, pissed. If I’d only known last night that it was here all along, so close.

Thomas stands with his keys in one hand. “It’s a replica,” he tells me. “The actual cabin was moved and collapsed years ago. So they built this one from old photos and descriptions in Henry’s book.”

A replica. I walk closer, peer in the window.

“Do you want to go in?” Thomas smiles at me. “I have the key. It’s time to open for the tourists anyway. ”

“Yeah, I would.”

“First let me grab breakfast.” He jabs a thumb toward a motorcycle parked about twenty feet in front of us, black and chrome, reflecting the morning sun. A historian with a Harley. If that historian was anybody else, it might seem strange. But somehow, it fits Thomas. I watch as he saunters over to the bike in his black boots, opens a compartment in the back, and takes out a backpack.

Inside the cabin, it’s just the way I imagined it when I read the book, almost exactly the way it looked in my dream. A bed. A desk and table, painted green.

“Three chairs,” I say, unconsciously quoting Henry again. “One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Thomas lifts his eyebrows. “That’s exactly right.” He sets his walking stick in a corner and sits in the chair closest to the fireplace. He takes a thermos out of the backpack and pours steaming coffee into a plastic mug, which he offers to me. I cup my hands around its warmth.

“So, they lock this place up at night?” I ask casually and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress crackles under me, like it’s filled with straw. The coffee is black and tastes bitter but warms me from the inside out, so I don’t mind.

“Of course. Concord’s a nice town, but they can’t leave it open.” Thomas takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair. “Some vagrant might show up and try to sleep here.”

I nod sympathetically. “Yeah.” Some vagrant. Like me. I examine the windows, wondering how hard it might be to jimmy one open.

Thomas hands me a buttered bagel in a plastic bag.

I rip the bag open and eat too fast, realizing I haven’t had food since yesterday afternoon on the train from New York.

“Hungry?” Thomas takes a civilized bite into his own bagel and smiles.

“Growing boy,” I say with my mouth full, but try to take smaller bites so I won’t look like a total pig.

Thomas pours me more coffee. “Well, you look better now than you did when I first saw you this morning.” He reaches over and picks up my copy of Walden from where I’d set it next to me on the bed and flips it to the back, to the photograph of Thoreau with his pale-eyed, serious expression. “You looked like you fell out of the sky or something.”

Wiping my buttery fingers off on my jeans, I hope I don’t look like too much of a slob. When I glance up at Thomas, he’s not looking at the book anymore, but intently at me.

“So where did you come from, Hank?”

I shrug, feeling slightly buzzed from too much caffeine and too little sleep. “I guess I fell out of the sky or something.”

Why not? It’s as good an explanation as any. And even though Thomas has been kind to me, I decide not to tell him the truth. There are still so many questions I need to answer for myself first.

“I see you value your privacy, and I respect that,” Thomas says, looking down at his hands. “But come on, I have to ask. Why were you sleeping outside at the cabin site? Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I’m just curious.”

“Well,” I say reasonably. “I wouldn’t have been sleeping outside if the cabin had been there like it was supposed to be.”

Thomas smirks. “Fair enough.”

I stand and nonchalantly try to open one of the windows, like I just want some air, and all I manage to do is disturb a spider, who scuttles to a corner of his web. The window is nailed shut. Figures. Outside, instead of a view of trees and bushes that should be there, there’s a view of the parking lot and the road, where rush hour cars are whizzing by. Not the best location for a hideout.

“It’s not right,” I say, half to myself. “It doesn’t belong here.”

“I’m sure Henry would agree with you,” says Thomas. He reaches up to scratch the back of his head. That’s when I notice a design in black ink on his upper arm, showing under the left sleeve of his navy blue T-shirt.

“What’s the tat?” I ask.

He pulls up his sleeve to show me the tattoo of a man’s face in profile, a man with an old fashioned black beard. Under it is written in fancy script lettering like a signature: “Henry D. Thoreau.”

“You know.” I pause, uncertain how to say what I’m thinking. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but—”

“But I don’t act like a stodgy Thoreau-loving historian-slash-scholar who works for the park commission?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, I know. I get that all the time.” He gets up, screws the top on his thermos and gathers the remains of our breakfast. “I’m heading into town. Want a ride?”

A ride on the Harley? Hell, yeah. We head out to the parking lot and walk to the motorcycle. “For a kid who worships Thoreau enough to stay all night at his cabin site, you have a lot to learn,” Thomas says, handing me a spare helmet from the back of his bike. “Thoreau was a rabble-rouser in his time. A free spirit. A rebel.” He pulls on his own helmet, straddles his bike, and flashes straight white teeth. “Why do you think I like him so much?”

After Thomas drops me off in town, I aimlessly walk the streets of Concord with my hands stuffed deep into my pockets. I can’t stop thinking about seeing Thoreau last night. Sure, it was probably just some freaky dream. But what if it wasn’t a dream? What if Thoreau’s ghost knows stuff about me and is watching over me like a guardian angel or something? Maybe that’s why I woke up with the book next to me at the train station. Maybe it was a sign, a gift from Thoreau himself.

Now that I’ve had some food to start my day (Essential Fact of Life Number One), I decide to address Number Two—clothing—at a sporting goods store on Main Street. I buy a warm coat (on sale, half off), plus black sweatpants and a thick gray sweatshirt. I put the sweatpants and sweatshirt on in the dressing room, and stuff the clothes Magpie gave me into the plastic bag. Now I’ve got two sets of clothes. Nothing fancy, Thoreau wouldn’t approve of fancy, but enough to keep me warm.

Next up: shelter.

There is one hotel in town, the Colonial Inn, with a sign outside that says it was built in 1716, but I ask the price at the front desk, and it’s way too expensive. My money, Simon’s money—don’t think about that—is dwindling. My shelter has to be safe and it has to be free, someplace where I can stay long enough to get my thoughts together. Just until I remember more about my life and figure out what to do next.

Somehow, I wind up back at the Concord train station, and being there reminds me of meeting Hailey. I think of her smiling green eyes and I get this feeling like, hey, I’d really like to see her again. So I retrace the steps we walked yesterday to the high school. But as soon as I start up the long driveway to the school, I realize something is different. To start with, there are only a few cars in the parking lot. Plus, I don’t see any kids outside, playing sports in the fields or sitting on the stone wall. It’s a weekend or holiday or something. No school today.

At first I’m disappointed. But then it occurs to me that I need shelter, and here is an entire building comprised of shelter and nobody around. If I can just get inside, there has to be someplace in that big building where a guy could curl up and get some sleep.

I try the front door, but it’s locked, so I circle around to the back. Along the side of the building, a red minivan pulls up, and two girls, both with brown hair and pretty faces, pile out of the back seat. Do all the girls in Concord look like perfect little cheerleaders? One of them cuts a glance in my direction with interest but no recognition. They head to a side door, open it, and go inside. I wait a beat or two, and follow them.

Inside, it smells like floor cleaner, sneakers, and pencils. I pass rows of lockers and follow the sounds of the girls talking and giggling, their voices echoing in the empty hallways. When they pass through some double doors, I peek through a small window in one of the doors into the high school auditorium. Rows of red seats face a stage where a group of people are working. Some are standing on ladders with electric drills and hammers, a couple of guys carry in boxes and set them on the side of the stage, and a few girls are painting sets off to one side with black paint. A tall guy with gray dreadlocks, probably the school janitor, pushes a humming vacuum cleaner up the side aisle. He’s wearing jeans and a faded tie-dyed T-shirt.

Then I see her. Hailey, sitting on the edge of the stage, swinging her legs back and forth and talking to some guy. She’s here. Now, instead of wearing her loose lacrosse uniform, she’s wearing a tight red sweater and jeans. Her hair is down instead of up in a ponytail, and it’s long, curling around her shoulders. Yeah, she looks hot.

The guy she’s talking to is really into her, gesturing his hands around a lot and talking. I can’t tell if she’s interested back. He’s shorter than me and kind of scrawny, with shaggy brown hair and black jeans. His cap is on sideways and there’s a chain attached to his belt, like he thinks he’s some suburban punk gangster. Trying to decide whether I should go up and talk to Hailey or just sit in the back of the auditorium, I open the door slowly and slip inside. The heavy door swings shut behind me.

BOOM!

There is a loud cracking sound, and before I can even register what happened, a flash of scrambled images bursts inside my head, metal reflecting twilight. Colors, blue and red, fireworks bursting, a cry like an ice pick in my brain.

I fall to the floor, curl up in a ball, hands over my ears.

“Whoa, buddy. What happened? Did you trip?”

I open my eyes, and a big guy with gray deadlocks and intense blue eyes is staring down at me. After blinking hard for a few seconds, I can finally talk.

“Yeah, I guess so.” Foggy, confused. “There was this really loud noise.”

“It’s that damn door,” he says, shaking his head. “I keep trying to fix it, but it needs to be replaced. Every time it slams shut, it’s like a bomb went off.”

“A crash. Or something,” I say.

He looks at me, all curious, but then just nods. “You okay, then?”

“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say lightly, though my head is throbbing. He offers a hand to help me to my feet.

Nervously, I glance at the stage, imagining every face turned toward me, staring. But nobody other than the janitor seems to have noticed that I just fell to the floor like I’d been shot in the head.

The janitor nods slowly, as if he’s reassuring himself I’m not a lawsuit about to happen. “Okay then. Take it easy.” He lifts up the vacuum cleaner with one hand and walks out of the auditorium, keys jangling on his belt.

Sitting in the last row, I wait for my head to stop vibrating, for the gray spots in my vision to clear. Why the hell would the sound of a crashing door cause me to throw myself to the floor like that? Another question without an answer.

I stuff my plastic bag of clothes under the chair in front of me and turn my focus away from my problems and on to the redheaded girl sitting on the stage.

As if sensing my eyes locked on her, Hailey turns and looks up to where I’m sitting, leaning my arms on the seat in front of me, watching her. She squints, and then with one hand, shields her face from the lights on the stage so she can see me better. Encouraged, I stand up and start walking toward her.

Hailey hops off the stage and we meet in the aisle. She looks happy to see me.

“Hank,” she says, and gives me this sweet, shy smile. “What are you doing here?”

“I, uh, well, my dad is in town, looking at houses and property and stuff, and I didn’t feel like going along. I went for a walk and ended up here.” These lies come so easy, I’m proud and ashamed at the same time.

“Does that mean you’re transferring soon?”

She sounds hopeful, and I wish I could tell her yes. I wish I was a normal person who could go to this school and attend classes and take Hailey to dances and cheer for the Patriots sports teams.

“I might,” I tell her. “Although it’s so late in the school year, I might just hang out in Concord and, you know, do stuff on my own.”

“Stuff on your own?”

“Like home-schooling. To finish up the year.” I shrug and go for a confident smile to back it up.

She turns her head to one side and crinkles her forehead at me like she doesn’t get it. I notice that she’s wearing two different earrings, a dangly gold musical note in one ear, and a silver G-clef in the other.

“But where are you living, if your parents don’t have a house out here yet?”

“Oh, I have this, well, uncle who lives in town. I’m staying with him.” All these stacked-up lies are starting to make me nauseous. I gesture toward the stage. “So, what’s going on here?”

Hailey looks behind her at the stage. “Oh, it’s this thing we do every year called the Battle of the Bands, coming up in a couple weeks. It’s a big deal, with sets and lights and fog machines and stuff. A big deal for us, anyway.”

“That’s cool. You in the show?” I ask.

She looks away, shrugs. “Nah. I’m just helping backstage, organizing and stuff.”

From the stage, the suburban gangster is staring at the two of us.

“That your boyfriend?” I jut my chin toward the kid.

Startled, Hailey follows my gaze. “Cameron? No. He lives next door to me and we’ve known each other since we were kids. That’s all.” She shrugs. “Well, I should get back to work. Stick around for a while if you want.”

“Sure. Can I help?” I ask her.

Hailey introduces me to this hyper blond lady named Ms. Coleman who’s obviously in charge of the event.

“This is Hank, he’s a new student here,” Hailey says, cutting me a look that says, just go with it. “Can he help out?”

“Of course, of course,” Ms. Coleman says. She’s so busy she barely even looks at me. “Welcome aboard.” She points out a toolbox and gives some vague directions about building sets.

For about an hour, I join the other kids (who ignore me for the most part, which is fine with me), working on the sets and trying to be helpful. It turns out I’m good with my hands, adept at drilling into wood frames and thinking through how things should fit together. Building stuff comes naturally to me. My hands remember. Maybe my dad taught me.

Then I recall the voice I heard in the woods this morning, calling me. It wasn’t Thoreau and it wasn’t Thomas either. It was my father. I know this. Although I can’t conjure a picture of him in my head, at least there’s no warning slash in my gut when I try.

“Hey, you.” There’s a voice coming from somewhere above my head. I glance up to see Cameron standing on a platform above the stage. “Can you bring up that spotlight for me?”

He points to a black unit by my feet, with metal flaps in front of a large bulb, and a loop on top like a handle. “Sure.” It’s heavier than it looks. The only way up to the platform is a makeshift ladder, blocks of wood nailed into the wall. With one hand carrying the spotlight, the other grasping the ladder, I climb up to where Cameron is kneeling at the edge of the platform. It’s hard to stand there and lift up the light without losing my balance, but I manage.

Cameron waits a beat longer than necessary to reach out for the light, like he’s hoping maybe, just maybe, I’ll slip and fall. I see it in his eyes. He reaches to lift the spotlight out of my hands, but just as I’m letting go, he releases his grip and the weight of it comes down on me. A*shole. Instinctively, I reach for the spotlight with both hands, afraid to let the unit go crashing to the floor, and I almost fall backward off the ladder. Just in time, Cameron grabs my arm. “Sorry,” he says, not looking in the least bit sorry. “Lost my grip.”

I smirk at him, drilling into him with my own unflinching eye contact. “Yeah, right.” I say.

He turns away from me to hang the spotlight, standing on a narrow catwalk and reaching up into the blackpainted rafters. The platform at the top of the ladder is not a big area, just about the same size as Thoreau’s cabin. Still, there’s enough space for a guy to stand and hang lights. Or hide.

“Okay, good work, everybody,” Ms. Coleman calls out. “We’ve made a lot of progress. Let’s clean up and have some lunch.”

In the kitchen, there are boxes of pizza somebody ordered for the cast and crew. I feel awkward around the other kids, like an intruder, but the last thing I’d do in my situation is refuse free food. So I take a couple of slices of pepperoni and chow down. The other kids sneak glances at me, but nobody talks to me. Fair enough. I don’t try to start a conversation either. It’s hard to talk to people when I’m a stranger, not just to them, but to myself.

I look for Hailey, but Cameron has taken her aside, doing his possessive act again, telling her some long involved story (she keeps looking in my direction; am I only imagining she wants me to rescue her?), so I casually slip out of the kitchen.

With nothing better to do, I wander into an open room adjoining the auditorium. There are music stands, lockers, instruments, and random pieces of sheet music scattered on the floor. The band room. And there in a corner, somebody has left an acoustic guitar. It’s not a fancy or expensive guitar, just a dusty old Yamaha, but for some reason, I’m drawn to it. I pick it up, run my fingers over the wood on the neck. Placing my fingers on the top frets, I play a D chord, and wince when I hear how out of tune it is. So I twist the pegs, get it in tune, and start playing a song I don’t recognize, but my fingers seem to remember by heart.

Now this is cool. I know how to play guitar. Music, as it turns out, feels as natural to me as breathing. Feels so good, I forget where I am. Close my eyes, let my fingers fly, and play the hell out of that old guitar.

At first I think I’m imagining things when I hear singing. But I open my eyes, and there’s Hailey, leaning against the lockers.

“No, Hank, keep playing,” she says. “I love the Beatles. My mom played their stuff all the time when I was little.”

So the song I’m playing is something by the Beatles. A spark of memory snaps into place, like synapses repairing themselves. The Beatles. Of course.

I try to start the song again, but I’m flustered and forget how to play, unable to pick up where I left off. Then I make myself relax, return to that place where my fingers did the remembering. It comes back, and Hailey sings. She has a gorgeous voice, silky but with this raspy quality that makes it unique. Sexy. Here and there I miss a chord because I’m distracted by her singing, and she misses a few words, but while we’re playing, I feel like I’m on a different planet. A planet where only Hailey and I exist, like we’ve been making music together forever.

And as she sings, I listen to the lyrics and remember the name of the song. “Blackbird.”

The last notes of “Blackbird” hang in the air for a while after we’re done, and I hold my breath. “Wow,” I say at last. “You have the most amazing voice.”

She looks away from me then, shrugs. “I dunno,” she murmurs, but I can tell she’s trying not to smile.

“So explain to me why you’re not performing in the Battle of the Bands.”

Hailey plays with the zipper on her red sweater. “Couldn’t get a band together. I mean, I did it last year, but it didn’t work out this time.”

“When is the show?”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s enough time to pull your band back together, isn’t it? Maybe I can help.” Call me delusional, call me impulsive, whatever, but under the new influence of music, I feel like anything is possible. Plus, I’d grab any excuse to spend more time with this girl. There’s just something about her.

“I don’t know,” Hailey says. She won’t look at me. “Last year, there was this thing. But look, it’s no big deal. We can talk about this later. Even if we don’t enter the competition, we can play together for fun if you want. You still have my number, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll call you. Definitely.”

She nods and smiles this cool, really pretty smile. “I’d like that. Thanks.”

I set the guitar back in the corner, and together, we head back down the hallway and into the auditorium.

Later, I stand inside the front lobby of the school with the rest of the kids, pretending to watch for my parents’ car pulling up in front of the school to fetch me. After Hailey leaves, giving me a wave and flashing that dimple, I excuse myself to go to the boys’ room, but nobody seems to hear me, or even notice I’ve slipped away. Perfect. I hang out in the bathroom until all is quiet, and I’m pretty sure the last kid has left.

Blending into the hollow silence of the school, I set out to explore. Walking down the empty hallways is kind of creepy, like being the last person left alive after a nuclear attack. But then I start thinking, hey, if there was a nuclear attack and I was the sole survivor, everything I need to keep myself alive is right here at Henry David Thoreau Regional High School.

Clothing? All set. Not just the clothes I already own, but when I investigate the boys’ locker room, I find a big cardboard box shoved up against a wall in the corner, marked Lost and Found. It’s full of T-shirts and gym shorts, collared shirts and jeans, even sneakers and jackets, and some look like they’re my size. How rich are the kids in this town that they can completely forget to bring home all these clothes? I’m sure Thoreau would have plenty to say about that.

As for food, the cafeteria has all the food I can eat, if I can get past the locked door. Through the window in the kitchen door, I see enormous cans of food like applesauce, tomato sauce, and peaches stacked on the counters. I’d never go hungry.

Turning away from the kitchen door, I’m trying to figure out where I can lie down and get some sleep. All the classroom doors are locked, the nurse’s office is locked, the library is locked. I’m thinking maybe the best I can do is head back to the auditorium and try to curl up in one of those red seats, when a woman in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans comes bursting out of a closet clutching a mop. We collide right into each other and she tumbles backward, landing on her butt on the floor. The keys attached to her belt loop make a jangling crash, and the mop goes flying.

“Oh man. I’m so sorry,” I say, reaching over to help her to her feet.

“Excuse me,” she says, wide eyes startled. She has gray-streaked hair in frizzy curls past her shoulders, but her face looks young somehow. Innocent.

Once she’s on her feet again, I get the mop and hand it back to her. “Are you all right?”

The woman stares at me for a long moment, narrowing her eyes. “Michael?” she whispers.

My heart lurches. Do you know me? I search for something familiar in her thin face. She’s sort of pretty in an all-natural, former-hippy kind of way.

“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head as if she’s trying to wake up from a weird dream. “You look like somebody I knew once,” she says.

Michael. I examine the name, repeat it in my head, but feel no spark of recognition.

Heavy footsteps approach, then a man’s voice interrupts. “You still here, kid?” Turning, I see the dread-locked janitor. His intense eyes snap at me with intelligence and suspicion.

“Well, I—I was helping out with sets, and my dad hasn’t come for me yet. Can you tell me where there’s a phone so I can call him?”

“You don’t have a cell phone?” he asks. “I thought all you kids had phones.”

“I don’t have one at the moment. It…broke, and I don’t have my new one yet.” With his unflinching gaze on me, my lies seem completely transparent.

“There’s a pay phone by the front door,” he says. “You never noticed?”

“I never noticed,” I say lightly in what I hope is a charming way. That’s when I see something shimmering on the cafeteria floor, where it skittered under a chair. It’s a set of keys. They must have fallen off the janitor’s belt loop when she fell. I rip my eyes away from the keys, hoping the janitors won’t notice.

The woman clears her throat softly behind me. “Billy,” she says. “Doesn’t he look a lot like Michael?”

Billy’s expression softens when he looks at the woman. “Maybe a little. Around the eyes. But come on, Sophie, we need to finish up. Some kid puked in the back hallway.” He cuts a resentful look in my direction, as if he suspects me. “As soon as we get it cleaned up, we can get out of here.”

I wonder if the two janitors are a couple. Billy and Sophie, lovers and high school custodians. Michael’s parents?

Sophie opens the closet next to the kitchen, takes out a huge wash pail on wheels, and pushes the handle into Billy’s hands.

Please don’t notice the keys on the floor. Please don’t notice the keys.

“I was just leaving,” I say to them both. “Have a good one.”

With one last wistful look at me, Sophie follows Billy down one of the long hallways, and I head toward the front door. I put the heavy black phone to my ear and pretend to make a call.

Once the two janitors disappear, I set the phone quietly in the cradle and slip back into the kitchen, making sure my sneakers don’t squeak on the clean tile floor. With an eye on the cafeteria door, I reach for the keys under the plastic orange seat of the chair. Scoop them up, muffle the jingle, and stuff them into the front pocket of my jeans.

Then I slip noiselessly into the auditorium and ease the door shut slowly, so it won’t make that crashing sound. Grabbing my bag of clothes from the place where I tucked it under the seats earlier, I hurry toward the stage. Imagining I hear a sound like maybe a tall janitor wielding a large mop, I scale the ladder to the upper platform in seconds.

Curling up on my side, I make a pillow of the clothes Magpie gave me and a blanket of my coat. I stay there on the platform until my heart rate slows down, until the building grows dark around me with the setting sun. Until I fall asleep.