Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [15]
“Maybe she’s morning sick!” said the same one who’d said it yesterday.
Jack stopped and looked at her. He wanted to get in her face and tell her it wasn’t funny the first time and how about straining the two sporadically connected neurons that passed for her brain to come up with something new and perhaps even remotely clever.
Instead he moved on. Drawing attention to himself was the last thing he needed.
What those girls needed, though, was something else to talk about.
And Jack was going to give it to them.
He scouted the halls till he found Toliver, then followed him again. As before, Toliver strolled around like the school’s godfather. Finally he stopped at his locker, removed a couple of books, and moved on.
Jack let him go. He slowed his pace to a crawl as he passed the locker. Number 791. He checked out the lock: a regular spin-dial combination model. He didn’t think he’d have any problem getting past that, but first things first: He had to be able to sneak back into school when no one was around.
He looked up and stifled a yelp when he found himself inches from the white face and pink eyes of the albino piney girl, Saree.
“Why can’t I see you?” she said.
“What?”
“I can’t see you.”
Jack waved his hand between them and she flinched.
“You can see me.”
“No.” She looked at Toliver’s locker. “I can see him. He’s all sorts of dark, almost black as night.”
Jack remembered Levi’s warning to Elvin about Toliver yesterday: You know what Saree says about him.
“What’s that mean?”
She shook her head. “But you … you’re hiding from me.”
What was this girl talking about?
“Gotta go,” he said.
No lie. Lunchtime was winding down and he had to get to the boys’ room pronto.
SBR had two of them, one on the east side, one on the west. Jack stood in the east room and washed his hands at the sink closest to the windows. But instead of paying attention to his hands, he was studying the windows: identical top-hung casement types, four feet wide and maybe eighteen inches tall, set a good five feet off the floor. Each had two latches. He didn’t know if they were ever opened, but he could tell from the hinges that they swung out. One overhung his sink, the other looked over the last stall.
That stall was empty, so Jack dried his hands and slipped into it. He stood there, waiting. Lunch break was almost over. He hung out until the bathroom emptied, then he stood on the seat for a closer look. The handle on the bottom told him this was a simple push-pull window. If it had been the kind of casement that needed to be wound open and shut, he’d have been sunk.
He studied the latches—simple levers on the bottom of the frame with blades that swung up and down, in and out of slots in the casing. He tugged on one but it wouldn’t move. He tried harder, grunting with the effort, but the thing wouldn’t budge. He tried the other with the same result. Obviously they hadn’t been opened in a long, long time.
He was going to need some sort of tool for prying. He searched the stall. Nothing. He returned to the sink area and looked around. More nothing. A screwdriver would have been perfect but not the sort of thing he carried around …
But he did carry a pen.
He fished out his ballpoint as he returned to the stall. He wedged it under the latch handle, and using it as a lever, managed to budge the latch. It moved only an eighth of an inch, but that was enough to allow him to open it the rest of the way by hand. As he was prying at the second latch, the hard plastic of the pen shattered, but not before it had succeeded in doing its job. Jack pried the latch the rest of the way by hand. He was about to push on the handle when he caught a flash of movement off to the right. He pressed his head against the glass to see who or what it was, but saw nothing. Had someone been out there? Had someone seen him messing with the window?
Couldn’t worry about that now. He pushed on the handle, and with a squeak and a groan, the window opened an inch.
But something