“Whatever you’re thinking, Honey, don’t do it.” Mr. Whitlock’s tone is pleading. “You can talk to me. Let me be your confidant.”
What in the ever-loving hell?
I read his thoughts about me all wrong. The shitty thing is, I’ve never been anything but cooperative in this class, in any class. I’m on merit roll, for god’s sake.
I climb onto the aluminum stool and start unscrewing the chipped and peeling ventilation shaft cover halfway up the wall with my multi-tool.
“Honey!”
I glance at Mr. Whitlock over my shoulder and keep turning out screws. He makes a motion to grab me but thinks better of it and reaches for his cellphone. He knows it’s against school rules to touch students, which gives me a necessary advantage.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Whitlock. This isn’t about me, or you, or anyone. I just have to find my sisters. I know what I’m doing.” I hesitate for a second and offer my best advice. “I don’t care what protocol is for this school. Don’t stay in this room. It’s harder for someone to hit a moving target. Get everyone out of here and make sure they run and weave.”
I keep my eyes trained on our teacher as I sling my EDC into the air shaft. My gaze shifts ever so slightly, and I see my lab partner go completely cross-eyed behind him a split second before she stone-cold passes out and crumbles to the floor.
THREAT ASSESSMENT CORRECTION:
SHAWNA MOONEY
10/10 WOULD IMPEDE GROUP SURVIVAL IN EMERGENCY SITUATION.
Mr. Whitlock mutters, “Christ,” under his breath and goes to see if she’s okay.
And then, I do the dumbest thing. I hesitate and look for Rémy Lamar. I don’t know why. I don’t care what he thinks. But I do care that he’s watching me through the lens of his camera like I’m a sight to be recorded, for personal entertainment not posterity. Photos are forever once they make it online and I’m not allowed that level of exposure. Thank god Mr. Whitlock collects cellphones at the start of every class or I’d already be all over the internet.
I hold a hand up in front of his lens. “Don’t. This isn’t what they think.”
He lowers the camera and I pull myself into the ventilation shaft, sliding onto my belly.
“Honey, stop! Miss Juniper. It’s not safe,” Mr. Whitlock calls after me, his unvarnished voice dulled by the building material separating us. As if his usual politeness can keep me from following my own protocol.
A few seconds later I hear him say, “Mr. Lamar, get down. Don’t even think about following her,” and he isn’t as nice about it with Rémy.
Rémy trying to come after me is shocking. Mostly because I didn’t think he had it in him to go against the rules. But there’s no time to contemplate his reasoning now. Rémy Lamar is not one of us.
I cough and try not to inhale too deeply. The square, aluminum shaft is clothes-dryer hot and stuffy and filled with clots of gray dust and insects both dead and alive. Spiders. Flies. There’s only six inches of space around me for wiggle room as I push my EDC forward and army-crawl toward the first visible opening. Students in the classrooms below me lift terrified eyes to the ceiling as I pass. I know they can’t see me—Honey Juniper, that weird chick with the Sarah Connor vibe—and I can’t stop to assuage the sobbing and assure them I’m not the threat. That I’m not any threat during daily life as we know it to anyone but myself. A few more pops and minor explosions reach me. I scooch fast as possible over more and more classrooms, trying to avoid banging the metal shaft like a drum. I don’t want to draw more attention to myself.
Thick gray clots of accumulated dust are tucked against the sides of the passage, along with the black pellet droppings left by clever mice that figured out a way to remain out of sight. I’d rather be a mouse than a rat. Different connotation.
The air shaft turns sharp right. I have to wriggle my body so I’m three-quarters sideways to make the turn before I can roll onto my stomach. I reach forward to break a spider’s web spun corner to corner, artfully woven to catch anything that flies unwittingly into its path, including me. My left knee snags on an uneven seam where two sections of sheet metal meet and the razor sharp edge tears through the fabric of my thin, stretchy jeans. A searing sting zips from my nerve endings to my brain without delay and I bite down hard on my bottom lip to avoid letting profanities fly. You can tell just by the pain sometimes what’s gone too deep and will bleed. Add this gash to the list of scars and scrapes I’ve gotten while training for doomsday over the past year.
I remind myself this isn’t an exercise and to get moving. It doesn’t feel like an extinction-level event on a global scale, either, but that doesn’t mean lives aren’t on the line, including Birdie’s or Blue’s.
TOBYISMS FOR ACTION
1
CHANGE YOUR LIFE
MY CANISTER OF spray paint is mocking me tonight. Hissing and hushing like it’s trying to silence my thoughts and actions all the way up until the last particles discharge from the nozzle with my signature. I step backward and let the sharp smell of acetone and liquefied petroleum gas dissipate, but the chemical cloud hangs tight in the air around me. I snap a quick photo with my phone. One and done. There’s no extra time to admire my work. I have to flee the scene or risk getting caught. I’ll drive by tomorrow to inspect it in daylight. Jonesy says most criminals return to the scene of their crime. It’s one of the reasons we’ve never moved. That said, will my return make me an artist, a criminal, or just someone interested in pointing out the truth?
Maybe all of the above.
I sneak into our house around two a.m. and find my mom asleep in front of the late-night news with our dog at her feet. The television is sending flickering rays across her face, illuminating the open spaces between her thick swatches of dark wavy hair. I catch the glint of her tiny nose ring. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen, the most hip and tragic forty-five-year-old woman you’ll ever meet. Strangely, she looks more like me when her hair is wild like this, a little dirty and in need of washing, or maybe I look more like her. She once held my face between her hands, scrutinizing me, before calling it raw grunge meets feminine. The description wasn’t meant as an insult. My mom sees everyone and everything through an artistic eye. That’s the one intangible thing she’ll never lose.
I leave my backpack on a kitchen chair and glance around for hints of what she’s been up to while I was gone. There’s no sign of Special Agent Blake Jones having made his presence known tonight, just page after page of charcoal drawings laid side by side. The gigantic rectangular bowels of whatever dystopian creature inhabited the world inside her head. Her three-point perspective is masterful. I couldn’t do it. I’m a street artist and don’t have her chops or her training, but that’s not the point. The point is the walls in her art studio are covered with obsessive drawings. There’s not an inch of bare wall space left in the room. For a while I was worried she might paper over the windows and block out all signs of life in there. Not unlike the post-apocalyptic subject matter she’s been drawing for the past year.
That’s the one room in our house Jonesy hasn’t seen in the five years they’ve been dating. Mom calls her studio off-limits, but it’s more like off the wall. I wonder what he’d make of her overlapping scenes of military personnel, mass destruction, and strange, eradicated landscapes. Maybe nothing at all, since they’re in alignment with the threat of nuclear attacks being spewed on television for all to see by the current POTUS that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. The fact that he’s actually in office is often harder to accept than the potential nightmares we can all see brewing, told by an idiot full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.