“You okay?” Jane asked. Shaken from my thinking, I realized that most of the other students were on their feet and heading out the door. She was still sitting in front of me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“The first week is always the hardest,” she said. “Everyone has trouble.” Jane put her elbows on my desk and rested her chin in her hands, grinning mischievously. “You’re a little more vocal about it than some, but everyone thinks like you at first.”
I looked at the people filing out of the room, chatting excitedly about the dance. “How long does it take to get brainwashed?”
“Listen,” she whispered. “You’re in the V’s, and we agree with you. A lot of terrible stuff happens here.” There was something in her eyes, some hurt that I couldn’t identify. “But have you ever stopped to think about where you’d go if you left? You don’t have any family. No one here does.”
“I’d have my freedom.”
“Freedom to do what? Get a minimum-wage job and live in a run-down apartment—if you’re lucky?”
I snatched my textbook from my desk. “So you’re here because you like it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
Jane pulled back from my desk and took a breath. She tiredly ran her fingers through her hair. Finally, she stood and extended her hand to me. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
Chapter Nine
That afternoon we didn’t have classes. Instead, Iceman announced that we had last-minute time to complete our contracts before they were renewed. The V’s met in the maintenance room, and Curtis and Carrie handed out our assignments.
In addition to the vacuums and mops, the maintenance room had a wide selection of hand tools—hammers and wrenches and saws—and I immediately thought of how I could use them for escape. I searched the peg board for wire cutters, to get through the fence, but didn’t see anything too promising. There was a pair of pliers that might work, but it’d be suicide to get all the way over the wall only to have them fail.
Extension cords, on the other hand, were as good as rope, and there were at least three of them. I couldn’t help smiling as I turned back to Curtis for my assignment.
It turned out to be trash duty.
It was interesting, being able to walk the halls of the school in silence, to inspect all the nooks and crannies. I started on the top floor, rolling a large garbage can down the halls of the guys’ dorm—another V girl was doing the same on her side—dumping the small trash bins. I peeked around some of the other rooms, but no one had much to look at. A few guys had some books, one had a guitar, and three rooms had TVs and video games. Mason had told me that those took almost six months’ worth of points.
I don’t know what I was expecting in Oakland’s room—a gun collection? A list of people to beat up?—but other than an unmade bed and some smelly socks, nothing was out of the ordinary.
I moved floor by floor, room by room, but the building was so big and there were so few of us that most of the trash cans were unused.
On my way down to the basement I stopped by Becky’s office and emptied her bin, but Isaiah was talking to her and I didn’t want to hang around.
I searched the basement for the detention room. The infirmary was down there, as well as dozens of small storage areas and a boiler room. I checked every door on the floor—the chip in my watch opened all of them since we had the maintenance contract—but none of them looked like what I expected for the detention room. It was just like the basement of any old building: cramped, dark, and plain.
And then I found it, after I’d almost given up. It looked like the other storage rooms—cement walls, poorly lit. But I noticed the door was heavy when I swung it open, and as I looked closer I could tell it was metal, painted to look like the other wooden doors. And the floor had a hollowness to it, like I wasn’t walking on foundation cement anymore. I was standing in an elevator.
I stepped out quickly, suddenly nervous that it might drop out from under me.
As I stood at the door, I could see scratches in the paint. Doomed students trying to get out before the floor lowered?
My muscles tensed and I wanted to run, but something stopped me. I took a deep breath, looked up at the security camera—its glass, lifeless eye staring back at me—and I spit into the detention room. Then I went back upstairs.
When the garbage bags were all gathered by the outside doors, I peered out the windows. I could see a few Havoc members, one in the distance riding a large lawn mower, and two more close by, trimming the bushes and edging the grass. Curtis had said that even though the rules allowed me to take the garbage out to the incinerator, the doors wouldn’t open for me. I’d have to get one of them to open it.
I held up my hand to pound on the window, but behind me I heard someone call my name. Jane.
“Hey,” she said, jogging down the hall toward me. She was holding a push broom and set it against the wall when she reached me. “Let me go with you. The V’s use the buddy system.”
She pulled a few loose strands of red hair from her face and readjusted the elastic that held her ponytail. Her eyes sparkled happily, as though taking out the trash were her favorite pastime.
I turned back to the window so that I wouldn’t stare at her.
“So, how do you like being a janitor?” she asked with a grin, as she started knocking on the windows.
Through the glass I could see two people walking toward us. One was Skiver, and the other was a girl I didn’t know.
“It’s awesome,” I said. “That’s why I signed up for this school in the first place.”
Bringing Jane along didn’t make me feel any safer, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. And, besides, I didn’t feel as nervous around Havoc as I did the day before. I’d refused to turn in Oakland and Mouse to the paintball refs for the overkill, and I’d cut Mash’s handcuffs off. I figured they might cut me some slack.
I tried to pick up all the bags, but Jane scowled at me and took two of them.
“So, who’s Private Ryan?”
“Huh?”
“You started to talk about him yesterday. Private Ryan at Omaha Beach. Was he a relative of yours?”
“What? No. It’s a movie. You’ve never seen that one, either?”
Jane blushed. “I’ve been in here for two and a half years.”
“That one’s even older than Cast Away.”
“I didn’t watch a lot of movies before I got here.”
I wondered how old she was, how old she’d been two and a half years ago. But the doors opened before I could ask.
“Well, if it isn’t the new kid and his girlfriend,” Skiver said. I ignored him and pushed my way outside, turning to make sure they didn’t stop Jane.
“Just heading to the incinerator,” I said. Jane didn’t seem bothered by Havoc, but she didn’t look at either of them in the face. When she was past them we headed toward the back of the school.
In the distance, closer to the forest’s edge, I could see one of the Society’s guards on a four-wheeler.
“You need some alone time?” Skiver shouted. They were walking slowly, following us.
“How old are you?” I asked Jane, trying to get her mind off Havoc.
She looked up at me with a smile. “How old do I look?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Seventeen?” I figured it was probably best to aim high.
“Sixteen,” she said. “I’ll be seventeen in June.”
Skiver wasn’t far behind, but it didn’t look like he was trying to do anything other than intimidate us.
“So when you got here,” I said, trying to do the math in my head. She cut me off.
“Thirteen. Pretty great, huh?”
I couldn’t imagine coming into a place like this so young. No one here now was younger than fourteen, and there were only a few of them. I looked over at her. I wanted to say something—it seemed so terrible—but I couldn’t think of anything.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Seriously. That’s what I keep telling you. This place isn’t that bad once you get used to it.”