Promptly at two o’clock, Luke eased the door open a crack and peeked in. His timing was good — boys were walking to and from classes, their heads bowed, their eyes trained on the ground. But a hail monitor stood directly across from the door. Luke ducked back.
Look away, look away, Luke mentally commanded the monitor. Luke waited. Then, just when he moved over, ready to peek again, he saw the door slide shut.
Oh, no. Luke tried to figure out what had happened. Had the monitor seen the door open, thought that one of his marauding gang had forgotten to close it, and merely shut it to save his own skin?
Or did he know Luke was out there?
Stay calm, Luke commanded himself, uselessly His panic boiled over. And his anger. He hated that monitor. He was probably one of the boys who’d trampled Luke’s garden.
Luke could have looked for another door. He could have waited another hour, in hopes that a different hall monitor would be manning this spot, and not paying as much attention. He could have even gone back to the woods and waited until his usual time to come back.
But he didn’t He grabbed the doorknob and yanked.
As the door swung open, Luke saw that the hail monitor wasn’t looking directly at the door just then. If Luke was sneaky enough, he could slip in without drawing attention to himself. But Luke let the door slam behind him. A cluster of boys with their eyes trained on the ground were jolted by the noise and even looked up briefly. Some of them started running, as panicked as if someone had fired a gun. Other boys didn’t even glance Luke’s way.
The hall monitor jerked his head around immediately. Luke quickly joined the slow-moving group of boys with their heads down. But just before he lowered his own head, Luke caught the hall monitor’s stare. Their eyes locked for just an instant Luke waited for the monitor to grab him by the collar, to yell, to haul him off to the headmaster’s office. Luke could feel his shoulder hunching into a cower.
Nothing happened.
Luke shuffled forward with the other boys, and dared to look up again. The hall monitor was carefully looking past Luke.
He knows I was outside, Luke thought And he knows I know he knows. Why isn’t he doing anything?
It was like a chess game, Luke realized. He remembered one winter when Matthew and Mark had brought home achess set from school. They’d had a blizzard after that, and they’d been snowed in for a long time, so Matthew and Mark spent hours playing chess. Luke had been a lot younger then, maybe only five or six. The game that fascinated his brothers only puzzled him.
“Why don’t all the pieces move the same way?” he had asked, picking up the horse-shaped piece. “Why can’t this one go in a straight line like the castle?”
“Because it can’t,” Matthew had replied irritably, while Mark squealed, “Put that down! You~ re messing up our game!”
Now Luke almost trod on another boy’s heel. The boy didn’t even turn around. If everyone at the school were a chess piece, Luke realized, most of the boys were pawns. The hall monitors and the other ones Luke thought of as starers were the big, important pieces. The bishops. And the king. Luke remembered that Matthew and Mark had treasured those pieces, sacrificing pawns and knights and castles to protect them. But Luke hadn’t understood why. And he didn’t understand the hall monitor now.
But he knew how to find out about him.
Eighteen
When dinner was over that night, Luke slipped out of the dining hail behind all of the other boys. Instead of going into the evening lecture room like everyone else, he ducked down a dark hall. It wasn’t a direct route to the door that led outside, but if Luke turned three corners and backtracked a bit, he’d get there.
I know the school really well now, Luke marveled. If I had a note I needed to read in private now, it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
Luke felt decades older than the scared little boy who’d worried so over the note from Jen’s dad. And gotten so upset when he read it.
It was just a scrap of paper. What did I expect?
Luke wondered: Would he ever look back on this day and regret getting so upset about his ruined garden?
No.
Luke had told himself it didn’t matter if he ran into hall monitors. He could just start asking them questions: Why did you destroy my garden? What if I toldthe headmaster that you’ve been sneaking out? But now, creeping down the deserted hallway, he was glad he didn’t have to test his bravado. As far as he could tell, the hall monitors only guarded the main route to the door. He’d suspected as much. The monitors didn’t have to be very cautious, because most of the boys at the school behaved like sheep, only going where they were told. And all of the teachers seemed to be gone in the evenings.
Luke reached the final corner before the doorway, and stopped. The sound of his watch ticking seemed to fill the entire hall. Luke pressed his wrist to his chest to muffle it. Then it was his heart pounding that seemed too loud. His ears roared with listening.
Was this how Jen had felt, the night she left for the rally? Brave, reckless, crazy, courageous, terrified — all at once?
It didn’t seem right to compare. Jen had been going to the rally — leading it, in fact — in an effort to win rights for third children all over the nation. Even her parents didn’t know what she was doing. But she had believed so strongly that nobody should have to hide that she’d died for it.
Luke was mad about a garden.
Thinking that way, Luke felt foolish. He wondered if he should turn around. But just because Jen’s cause had been enormous, that didn’t mean Luke’s was unimportant. Like Jen, Luke wanted to right a wrong.
Just then he heard the sounds he’d been waiting for: someone whispering, a muffled laugh, the click of the door latching. Luke waited a full five minutes — it was too dark to see his watch, so he counted off the tics. Then he tiptoed out of the shadows and followed the others out the door.
Nineteen
The moon was out.
It had been so long since Luke had seen the night sky that he’d forgotten how mystical it could look. The moon was full tonight, a beautiful orb hovering low over the woods. Luke also recognized the same pinpricks of starlight he’d been used to seeing back home. But the stars seemed dimmer here, overshadowed by a glow on the horizon beyond the woods. Luke puzzled over that glow— it was in the wrong part of the sky to be the sunset What else was that bright?
Luke remembered that Jen’s dad had said the school was near a city Could a city have lights that bright, that shone this far?
“I don’t know anything,” Luke whispered to himself. He’d thought that coming out of hiding would expose him to the world, teach him everything. But being at Hendricks seemed like just another way to hide.
A light flashed in the woods just then, and Luke realized he didn’t have time to hesitate. He’d planned to creep across the lawn, but the moonlight was so bright, he worried about being seen. He decided to take his chances with running.
Nobody yelled. Nobody hissed, “Get away from here!”
Luke reached the edge of the woods and hid behind a tree. Then he cautiously moved up to the next tree. And the next one. The light swung erratically, just ahead.
Luke wished he’d taken the time to explore the woods, to get his bearings. He was terrified of walking straight into a tree, stepping in some big hole or tripping over a stump. He banged his shin and had to bite his lip to keep from crying out. He stepped in something squishy and almost fell. He wondered if he was traveling in circles.