“How did you do this?” he asked.
Keira beamed. “Like it?”
“You did this?”
“Kind of a hobby.”
“Writing like my mother is a hobby?”
“Well, not just your mother.”
“How did you even know what she wrote like?”
Keira shrugged. “Same way we were able to start school today. Ronan and Uncle Carl made a late-night visit to the school office. After they entered us into the computer system, they checked out a few files, specifically yours, where they found old notes from your mom.”
“Hello? None of this matters,” Fiona said. “We need you to drop this off at the office so we can get out of here.”
“But I have to go to class,” he protested. “Our report’s due today.”
“Your report? Eric, if you go to class, it might be the last one you ever attend.”
“Wh…what?”
“Let’s move it,” she said, pushing him in the direction of the office. “There’s not much time.”
The hallways were deserted now, everyone having already entered their fifth-period classrooms. Eric was sure Vice Principal Rose would suddenly appear and order all three of them to class, but they made it to the office without getting stopped.
“You’ve got to do this on your own,” Fiona said outside the door. “If we come in with you, someone might get suspicious. You can do that, right?”
“Yeah,” Eric said, not exactly full of confidence. “I guess I can do that.”
“Good. We’ve got something we need to do, so we’ll meet you in front of the school in a few minutes.”
Eric entered the office, again expecting to run into Vice Principal Rose, but the vice principal was either in his private office or off somewhere else terrorizing other students.
“Can I help you?” Mrs. Cameron asked.
Eric hesitated, then said, “I have to go to the doctor.”
He put the note on the counter, suddenly sure he was about to get caught.
Mrs. Cameron opened it and then looked at Eric over the top of her reading glasses. “Are you sick?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then why are you going to the doctor?”
What an obvious question. He should have prepared an answer for that. All he could think to say was the truth. “I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Mrs. Cameron looked at him a moment longer, then chuckled. “No, I guess you wouldn’t have.” She wrote out a pass allowing him to leave the campus and handed it to him. “Have a good weekend.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cameron. You, too.”
When he reached the hallway, he couldn’t contain his nervous energy any longer and started running. He didn’t care if Vice Principal Rose popped out of nowhere and tried to stop him. He wanted to get out of there. Now!
To get to the main school entrance from the office, you had to go to the end of the hall and turn right into a shorter corridor that led to a set of glass doors. Two minutes tops at a fast walk. Running, he would make it in a quarter of the time.
“There you are,” Peter Garr said as he stepped out from behind one of the pillars along the hallway wall. Once more he was talking in the strange monotone.
Eric stopped and tried to take a step backwards, but someone pushed him from behind.
“I don’t think so,” Tommy Bird said, his hand on Eric’s back. Like Peter, his voice was also a monotone.
“I…I…I’ve got to go,” Eric said. “My dad’s waiting for me. Doctor’s appointment.”
He tried to duck around Peter, but the plump Kyle Sanders got in his way, his tiny eyes staring down at Eric.
They closed in around him, using the corridor wall to box him in.
“Hard to run now, huh?” Peter said.
Tommy pulled Eric’s backpack off his shoulder and slipped it over his own arm.
“Hey!” Eric said.
“You don’t need it any more,” Peter told him.
Eric reached for it. “Give it back!”
Tommy’s focus seemed to waver and he started to hand the bag back to Eric but Kyle reached out and stopped him. “Peter said you don’t need it.”
Eric looked at each of them. “What do you guys want?”
Peter moved in close, then tilted his head back. Sniff, sniff.
He smiled. “You, of course.”
What Eric would have done to have that unicorn necklace in his pocket at that moment. He was sure there was a lesson in there somewhere, but he didn’t have time to figure it out right then.
“Why me?” he asked. “What did I ever do to you?”
“Nothing,” Peter said.
“Then why do you and your friends keep trying to beat me up?”
Peter moved his head to the side in the way a dog did when it heard an odd noise. He seemed to lose focus for several seconds but then he looked Eric in the eyes.
“That was…preparation. Are you ready? Or do we need to…intimidate you again?”
It was quite possibly the strangest question Eric had ever been asked, and that was saying a lot after dealing with the Trouble family. “I’m ready. Sure. No need for any more intimidating.”
Peter’s laugh was almost mechanical. “Good. Then you need to hold this.”
He pushed something into Eric’s hand.
Eric looked down to see what it was, or, rather, in his mind he looked down to see what it was. Because though his mind sent out the command, his head didn’t move. He tried to raise his hand but it wouldn’t move, either.
Peter grinned, and then he and his two friends started walking down the corridor away from the entrance.
No longer surrounded, Eric knew this was his chance.
Run! His feet didn’t budge. Run! Nothing. It was like his shoes were glued to the floor.
Peter laughed again, then said a single word, “Come.”
Completely out of Eric’s control, his body turned around and began walking after the three other boys.
This is SO not good, he thought. Not good at all.
He tried to tell them to stop it and give him his body back, but his lips wouldn’t part. He had absolutely no control over anything but his thoughts.
Peter’s little gang moved through the empty corridors with Eric following right behind like a trained pet. As they passed classroom after classroom, Eric could hear teachers lecturing and students talking. If one of them, just one, would look into the hallway and see what was going on, maybe that would break whatever — spell? magic? hypnosis? — Peter was using on him.
But no one looked. No one asked them why they weren’t in class. No one noticed them at all.
And where was Vice Principal Rose when you really needed him? Sure he was right on the spot when someone was running down the hall. But when Eric was being led to who-knew-where like a zombie by a gang of monotone-talking bullies? The vice principal was nowhere to be seen.
And what about Fiona and Keira? Even without rubbing the unicorn, shouldn’t they have come back to see what was keeping him by now?
So many options for rescue, but none happening. If he could have screamed in frustration, he would have.
The only thing he could do was try to figure out where they were going. His best guess was outside to a less populated part of the campus. But that idea vanished when Peter turned down a small, dead-end hallway near the auditorium.
The first thing Eric saw once they turned was a sign on the wall that read “Everyone Has a Brain. It’s What You Do with It That’s Important.” The second thing was the door to the basement.
He was sure he was about to be taken down to some kind of medieval-era torture chamber, all set up and waiting for its next victim. Racks and chains and boiling oil and who knew what else.
But Peter walked right past the door.
Now Eric was really confused. If they weren’t going into the basement, then where were they going? There was nothing else in the hallway.