The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [31]
“You guys should come over,” he said as soon as I answered. He sounded very excited.
“Over where?”
“Aldshot. Where else? We can go on the roof.”
“What?”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s all kicking off. We can get an amazing view from the roof. I know how to get up there.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“Who is it?” Jazza asked.
I cupped my hand over the phone.
“It’s Jerome. He wants us to go over to Aldshot. To the roof.”
“Then you’re right,” she replied. “He is insane.”
“Jazza says you’re—”
“I heard her. But I’m not insane. Leave Hawthorne the back way and cut around to the back of Aldshot. No one is going to catch you. Everyone’s been checked in for the night.”
I repeated the message. Jazza glanced over from her folding. Her expression conveyed the idea that she still wasn’t very impressed with the suggestion.
“Say this,” Jerome said. “Say these exact words. Say ‘she’d never think you had the guts to do it, which is why you should.’”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Just say it.”
I repeated the message exactly as he said it. The words had a strange, almost magical effect. Jazza seemed to lift up off the bed a bit, her eyes aglow.
“Have to go for a moment,” Jerome said. “Text me when you’re coming. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We’ll be able to see everything from up there, and no one will know, I promise.”
He hung up. Jazza was still suspended there, half sitting and half standing on the edge of the bed.
“What kind of voodoo was that?” I asked. “What did that mean?”
“He means,” Jazza said, “that Charlotte would never suspect I had the guts to use the exit.”
“The exit?”
“There’s a way to get out. The ground-floor bathrooms. There are bars over the windows, but one of the windows . . . the screws that hold the bars on have been loosened. All you have to do is open the window, reach outside and give them a little turn, and they fall right out. Then you can push the bars back enough to get out of the window. I know about them because Charlotte was the one who developed that system. She loosened the screws. We can’t, though. We’d get expelled.”
“They said anyone caught leaving school grounds might be expelled,” I said. “It is school grounds.”
“Yes, but we can’t be in Aldshot,” Jazza said, her voice getting lower and lower. “That’s just as bad. Well, not just as bad, but bad . . .”
Maybe it was simply that I had flown all the way to England and then been locked in a building for a month. I really, somewhat bizarrely, wanted to see Jerome. Jerome with his floppy curls and goofy Ripper obsession.
Jazza prowled the space between her bureau and the closet, stoking some internal fire. I had to add more fuel, and quickly.
“Who’s most likely to catch us? Charlotte. And is Charlotte going to report her own vandalism? Is she really going to rat on someone using the exit she made?”
“Possibly,” Jazza said.
“Let’s set that possibility aside, then,” I replied. “Come on. You know it would burn her if you had the guts to use it and she didn’t. And you’ve been good forever. No one is going to suspect you of doing this. So you have to.”
Some emotion took Jazza over for a moment. She got up and clenched her hands together, then studied the arrangement of her books with great intensity.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do it now, before I back out. Tell him we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
First, there was feverish changing. We pulled off our pajamas and threw them to the floor. I put on my Wexford sweats, while Jazza put on a pair of black yoga pants and a dark hoodie. We both tied our hair back and wore sneakers. Action wear.
“Wait,” Jazza said as we were about to step out the door. “We can’t wear the shoes. We were just downstairs in socks. It’s going to look like we’re up to something. In fact, we should put our pajamas back on. We’ll change downstairs in the toilets.”
So we pulled off those clothes and put the pajamas back on and stuffed our sneaking clothes into our bags, because