• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 279 0

it was perfectly normal to carry your bag around the building for your books or your computer. We crept downstairs, though there was no crime in going down the stairs. Everyone, including Claudia, was riveted to the news, so we were able to slip by the common room door and continue on to the end of the hall, to the bathroom. The bathroom on this floor wasn’t as big as our bathroom, because it didn’t have showers, and it wasn’t designed for thirty girls to get ready at the same time. This was the bathroom you used when you were in the common room and didn’t feel like going up the stairs. It had one stall, which was unoccupied. Jazza and I changed quickly. Jazza went into the stall, opened the window, and climbed onto the toilet seat so she could work her arm through the bars at the right angle.

“I can feel it,” she whispered. “I can twist it off.”

She scrunched up her face as she worked. I heard the tiniest, tiniest tink as the screw hit the sidewalk below.

“That’s one,” she said. She turned gingerly on the seat and started working on the other. Tink again.

The bars were one large unit, all attached together. Jazza pushed them out. There was an opening of about a foot and a half for us to squeeze through, and a short drop to the ground.

“Ready?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You first,” she said. “Because this is your idea.”

We awkwardly switched positions. I got up on the seat and stuck my head outside, taking a deep breath of the cold London air. Once I went out this window, I was breaking the rules. I was risking everything. But that was the point, really. And who cared what we did when there was a killer out there? We were only going a few feet to another building, anyway. Mentally, I was already rehearsing my “but it wasn’t off the grounds” defense.

I got up on the sill and put my legs through the opening. It was an easy jump to the ground, barely a jump at all. For a moment, I thought Jazza wasn’t going to come, but she got up the courage and did the same thing.

We were out.

12

IT HAD TURNED INTO A CRISP, PERFECT AUTUMN night. The sky was clear, and I could smell leaves in the air, and just a little bit of burning wood. We couldn’t walk through the square, obviously; we’d be seen by someone looking out one of the windows. So we had to run over a street and come around the long way, using off-school property. We’d approach Aldshot from behind. It would take about ten minutes to go this way, and we were now definitely breaking the rules, but we’d started this thing, and we had to continue it.

Once we were clear of the building and around the corner, we slowed to a fast walk.

“Rory,” Jazza said breathlessly. “Is this stupid, what we’re doing? Not because of the school thing, but because of, you know, the Ripper thing. What with him being out right now, killing people.”

“We’re fine,” I said, blowing on my hands as we hurried along. “We are literally walking around a corner. Together.”

“This is stupid, though. Isn’t it?”

“What you need to remember is that you are doing the interesting thing, and Charlotte is not. And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I’m armed.”

We walked faster, speeding down one of the small residential streets that backed up to Wexford. Inside many of the flats, I could see lights and a few parties of people drinking. You could see the reflection of televisions in so many of those windows—the now-familiar bright red and white logo of BBC News shining out into the dark. We made a sharp left at the shuttered shoe repair shop and ran the last block to approach Aldshot from behind.

Aldshot was the twin of our building, except that it had the word MEN carved in bas-relief over the front door. Even without that hint, you could tell that this building was full of guys. Hawthorne had distinctive and pretty curtains in many windows, the occasional plant on the windowsill, or some other decorative item. Even the light was different, because of all the lamps girls brought in, with paper shades diffusing and coloring the light. In Aldshot,