“You can make people look older, younger, prettier, uglier — whatever you want. If I wanted to make my own fake I.D., I probably could,” she’d bragged.
But Jen had wanted to come out of hiding with her identity intact. She hated the thought of fake I.D.’s.
Staring at the faked pictures, Luke could understand. It was all too strange. He knew he should be reassured by how thoroughly his records had been doctored. But it frightened him instead. There was no sign of the real Luke Garner. Probably even his family would forget him eventually.
Luke didn’t have time for self-pity. He turned the page, hoping his admission papers would be next.
They weren’t. Instead, there was some sort of a daily log. Luke read in horrified fascination:
April 28—Student withdrawn, surly during entrance interview. Refuses to look interviewer directly in eye. Refuses to answer questions. Sullen behavior. Hostility believed connected to dissociation with parents. Can assume high risk of repeated attempts at running away. Treatment to commence immediately.
April 2.9—Sullenness continues. Attempts at interaction rebuffed. Teachers report disinterest, hostility.
The log continued in that vein, with an entry for every day Luke had been at Hendricks. There was repeated mention of therapy and treatment, and its success or failure. But Luke had had no entrance interview. He’d had no therapy, no treatment, no attention from the school officials at all. Obviously, this was another faked record.
But who had faked it? And why?
Thoroughly baffled, Luke turned the page. And there was the thick sheaf of his entrance papers.
Mr. Talbot was listed in the second column of the sixteenth page, as an emergency contact.
Luke grabbed the phone and started dialing.
Thirty Two
A woman’s sleepy voice answered.
“Is Mr. Talbot there?” Luke asked. “I need Mr. Talbot.”
“It’s three in the morning!” the woman hissed.
“Please,” Luke begged. “It’s an emergency. I’m a friend of—” He barely managed to stop himself from saying, “Jen’s.” Mr. Talbot’s phone was probably bugged by the Population Police. Maybe the school’s phone was now, too. Luke didn’t know But he tried again. “Mr. Talbot is a friend of my parents’s”.
There was only dead air in response. Then a man’s voice, just as sleepy as the woman’s.
“Hello?”
It was Mr. Talbot.
Luke wanted to spill out everything, from his first confusing day at Hendricks, to Jason’s treachery, to the oddness of the file Luke still held on his lap. If only he could explain all his problems, surely Mr. Talbot could solve them all. But Luke had to choose his words carefully.
“You told me to blend in,” he accused, hoping Mr. Talbot would remember. “I can’t. You have to come get me.” And four other boys, he added silently, as if Mr. Talbot were actually capable of telepathy. If only Luke could just say, flat out, “You need to get four more fake I.D.’s for these friends of mine. And you’ll need to protect their families, too.” But Luke couldn’t think of any code that would clue in Mr. Talbot, without clueing in the Population Police as well.
“Now, now,” Mr. Talbot said calmly, sounding like an elderly uncle dispensing wisdom. “Surely school isn’t that bad. You need to give it more of a chance. Is this finals week or something?”
Luke couldn’t tell whether Mr. Talbot really didn’t understand, or whether he was acting for the sake of the bug.
“That’s not the problem!” Luke almost screamed. “It’s— it’s like a problem I had before.”
“Yes, problems do seem to repeat themselves,” Mr. Talbot said, still sounding untroubled. “Usually, there’s some root cause. You need to attack that first.”
Was Mr. Talbot speaking in code? Luke hoped so.
“It’s all very well to say that,” he protested. “But the problems are multiplying. There are four others, now, I have to think about And they can’t wait until the, um, root cause is fixed. This is an emergency. You have to help.”
Luke was proud of himself. He couldn’t be any clearer than that, not using a potentially bugged phone. Surely Mr. Talbot would understand.
“You children can be so melodramatic,” Mr. Talbot said irritably. Now he sounded like a man ripped from sleep at three in the morning for no good reason. “I have every confidence that you can deal with your problems by yourself. Now. Good night.”
“Please!” Luke pleaded.
But Mr. Talbot had hung up.
Thirty Three
Luke stared at the phone. He’d tried so hard. It wasn’t fair that he didn’t even know if he’d succeeded or not.
No. He knew. He’d failed.
He’d heard the careless tone in Mr. Talbot’s voice. Luke couldn’t fool himself into thinking it was all an act, with each word carrying double meaning. It was three in the morning. He’d awakened Mr. Talbot out of a dead sleep. How could he possibly have understood what Luke needed?
Luke dropped the phone and put his face down on Ms. Hawkins’s desk. The file he’d been holding on his lap spilled onto the floor, dumping out papers filled with lies. He didn’t care. He didn’t care that anyone walking by would catch him where he wasn’t supposed to be. He was past caring about anything.
Had Jen ever reached this point, planning the rally?
Luke remembered the last time he’d seen her, the night she’d left for the capital. She’d seemed almost unearthly, as if she’d already passed out of the realm she shared with Luke. And she had. He was still in hiding, and she was about to risk her life to be free.
It was simpler for you, Luke accused silently. You weren’t confused. .
It was hard having a dead hero for a best friend.
I just can’t live up to you, len, he thought. I’m not you. .
He wasn’t Lee Grant, either. Slowly, just to get rid of them, he began picking up the faked papers and stuffing them back into the file. Moving like someone in a dream, he put the phone back on the desk and the file back in the filing cabinet, and shut the drawer. He walked out of the office and pulled the door closed behind him, making no effort whatsoever to hide the broken glass.
H&d have to run away, that’s all there was to it. He could take the other four with him. They’d just have to take their chances. They could head to the city.
Luke had lost all track of time, now. Before he woke the others and terrified them out of their wits, he decided, he’d peek outside and see how much time they had left before daylight.
He went to the door they always used, the one that led to the woods and had once led to his garden. He tried to turn the knob, but his hand must have been weak with exhaustion. His fingers slipped right off. He gripped the knob again, and tried harder.
The door was locked. Locked from the outside.
Panicked, Luke ran to the front door, the one he’d come through with Mr. Talbot that first day.
It was locked, too.
What kind of a school kept its students locked in, at night?
No school. Just prisons.
Luke rushed around trying every door he could find, but it was hopeless. They were all locked. And none of them had glass panels for him to break.
Finally he sank to the floor outside his history classroom.
We’re trapped, he thought. Trapped like rats in a hole. .
Luke was not the least bit surprised when he heard footsteps coming down the hall. He hardly dared look up. But it wasn’t Jason or someone from the Population Police standing over him. It was his history teacher, Mr. Dirk.