* * * * *
I spent the last few days of summer vacation either a.) holed up in my room with the curtains closed, b.) sticking with Penny and Ryan as much as possible, or c.) going with my parents on all their boring errands so I wouldn’t be home alone. Plus I had to keep Ryan out of his hopeless home life as much as possible, so I kept him distracted from it all by struggling through the Darkworld card game with him and walking around town quite a bit.
It also helped that I was grounded yet again, this time from going out after dark for three months. (Not, of course, that I was planning on doing that ever again.) In other words, being bored was what my parents wanted me to do, so they actually made me go on errands with them.
Especially bad was the one where my mom shopped for some new kitchen towels for two hours and fussed over finding some that matched the dull cream color of the whole house. She spent the entire time telling me all about Missy getting caught cheating on Blake and their tabloid argument. Then she drove us over to the pharmacy where she tried for the millionth time to get me interested in makeup, and sighed as loud as she could when I said no.
Almost as bad was the errand where my dad had to get some new hinges for the laundry room door.
“Isn’t this fun?” he asked, sifting through a bin of them at the hardware store.
“Yeah. Loads,” I said, checking the aisle for shadow people. Thanks, Shadow Regime, for these moments. If it wasn’t for them, I could be off spending time with Jerry and doing something fun.
I know it’s going to sound weird, but I couldn’t wait for school to start. Because it was frustrating twiddling my thumbs when the Ruler of Ageism was out there working his evil and threatening my cousin. The fact that this was all my fault didn’t help any. I tossed and turned at night, trying to find a way to help Jerry or get the word out about the Shadow Regime. Calling him was a bad idea. Writing him a letter was out, because of the whole address thing involved. Going to his house was a big no since the Shadow Ones had it staked out. The only good part about it all? Jerry’s car still appeared in front of the Kool Spot every day. That meant they hadn’t taken him away—yet.
Penny and Ryan walked all the way out to my house to meet me the day school started. They did that a lot now. It was like having the Secret Service around me every time I left the house. Not that I complained. Luckily, I wasn’t grounded from seeing them.
The Westonville High School building loomed over us as we made our way past a bunch of buses and a couple of bike racks. Penny sighed as we neared the front entrance. “Looks like they did pass eighth grade.” She pointed to the bike rack, making a face.
Two silver bikes sat in the rack. Make that two really nice bikes. They made mine look like crap, hands down. Silver swirls covered the frames and they looked like someone went over them with polish. At least twenty gears held the tires together.
It wasn’t that that made me grit my teeth. It was the two people shoving them in the rack.
Every town has a couple of juvenile delinquents who pretty much live to annoy everyone else. Josh and Kristina were those people. And—you guessed it—they were the ones who had the nice bikes.
Kristina dropped her bike (which she probably ripped off somebody) and glared at us with her block face. Josh’s nostrils flared like a bull’s as he flicked his cigarette to the ground. Now maybe he could afford a bike like that. He lived in the rich neighborhood.
I pulled my backpack farther up my shoulder. “Great. Now we get to deal with them until they drop out.”
“We all know they’ll quit school in a year,” Penny said. “Their parents probably won’t even notice.”
“Amen,” Ryan said in a low voice. His gaze sunk to the ground as he walked. I had a feeling he was thinking about his mom.
“Hey,” I said to change the subject. “Penny wouldn’t be our friend if it wasn’t for them.” Josh and Kristina used to toss her books around back in middle school, and she became my friend after I stuck up for her one day. That’s how the whole me-watching-her-back-while-she-helped-with-my-homework thing started, anyway.
I quickly forgot about Josh and Kristina as we made our way through the front doors and through a crowd of confused people. Even Ryan perked up. We stopped next to some orange lockers so Penny could pull out her schedule. “Okay. We all have the same first hour. Biology must be a pretty big class if we’re all in it.”
“That’s because they make all the freshmen take it,” Ryan said.
The science hallway had to be the dimmest in the whole school, and they all had some burnt-out lights. Our class waited at the very end of it. At least the crowd thinned out here and I could breathe again.
“What’s that smell?” Penny asked, her nose wrinkling. “It smells like that pond behind my house.”
“Pond” didn’t quite cover it. “Swamp” just might. The closer we drew to our class, the stronger it got.
Ryan shot me a look. “I hear frogs.”
I strained my ears as someone in front of us walked into the Biology room. He was right. I could hear frog croaks. Maybe this teacher had an aquarium full of them or something.
The smell overtook me as I stepped over the threshold and into a classroom that had more green and brown in it than well, a swamp. The bad part? A bubbling aquarium sat next to the door. Sitting on top of it were five of those plastic, motion sensing frogs that croak when someone passes by. They let out a chorus of croaks as I went past them. No avoiding it.
The other bad part: Josh and Kristina sat in the back corner of the tightly packed room. A head of dirty blonde and curly black hair towered over everyone else.
“Duck. It’s Raging Rita,” someone said near the front of the room.
“Great,” I said. My first day in high school already stunk. Literally.
Now I’m not squeamish about bugs or nature or anything, but this went over the line, even for a science classroom. Tanks bubbled away all around us, including a putrid-looking green one that no one had sat next to. Probably because it stunk. Jars of slimy stuff filled the shelves. A glass box of moldy fruit sat on top of a stack of dusty books. The teacher’s pet millipede crawled around its tank on his desk, wiggling its five hundred rows of little legs. A grimy aquarium against the wall held a couple of really big goldfish, and a bunch of Venus flytraps grew out of the one by the window. I bet they were there to deal with, well, the flies. And the tank next to Josh and Kristina’s table held a huge black and orange tarantula. Kristina scooted her chair as far from the spider as possible, grimacing.
Note to self: Kristina is scared of spiders.
We found a long table in the middle of the room to sit at. People shuffled around tables and settled in chairs, making faces. Ryan didn’t look too happy, either. He hated bugs.
Our first teacher, Mr. Gorfel, sat at his boat-sized desk with a stack of papers in front of him. Dim light shined off his bald head and gray stuff stuck up around his ears like fuzzy mold.
And the second I sat down, he looked up from the papers and stared right at me.
Yeah, right at me. And I hadn’t even done anything wrong.
He eyed me like I was some kind of bacteria under a microscope. A few seconds passed, which turned into a whole bunch of seconds. With every one that passed, the creepy factor went up by ten. I couldn’t imagine why this guy I’d never seen before in my life had the nerve to stare like this.
I tugged on Penny’s sleeve to distract her from flipping through the new binder her parents got her. “Look.”
“What?”
Mr. Gorfel lowered his gaze back down to his desk as if he’d been caught spying. That just made the creepy factor go up by twenty.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You didn’t see that? The teacher decided to have a staring contest with me.”
“Shudder,” Ryan said. Translation: I saw it too.
I didn’
t have time to think about it. The plastic frogs all croaked again as Mr. Gorfel walked over and closed the door. For some reason, it sounded like a prison door closing. He strode back to his huge desk at the front of the room and stood in front of it, red tie dangling off his white shirt.
“As you can see on your schedules, my name is Mr. Gorfel,” he began. “I’ve taught Biology, Zoology, and Botany for almost thirty years now. This is my first year teaching at this school, however. Be quiet back there, I’m speaking!”
Josh and Kristina had started snickering about something. Typical.
“Please be aware that I will not have disruptions in this classroom.” Mr. Gorfel threw a piece of paper away, making the plastic frogs all croak. What a hypocrite. “I will deal with it harshly. Now we’ll go over the rules.”
Mr. Gorfel read us the rules, which were the same as every year. No gum chewing. You needed a pass to go use the bathroom. Turn in your work on time. Then we got our Biology books, which had more in common with cinder blocks than other books. Once finished, he turned and wrote a homework assignment on the board.
“Read the first section and answer all of the questions, including the Critical Thinking,” he said with a little smirk. “Go ahead and read the second section as well.”
The class groaned a little. Ryan slumped in his chair. Penny bit her lip and started to copy down the assignment. Mr. Gorfel’s smirk grew into a grin. I decided I wasn’t going to like this guy.
I heard muttering to my left. Josh and Kristina had started chattering again.
Mr. Gorfel cleared his throat as loud as he could. “Did you hear what I said? One more time and it’s detention for both of you.”
The entire class fell silent. Josh’s nose flared as a bunch of swear words—his entire vocabulary—spewed out of his mouth.
I think everyone tensed up. I know I did. Mr. Gorfel’s face flushed pink. The volcano was about to blow.
“That’s it. It’s time for a lesson in respect. I want a three page essay on why it’s important to respect your teachers by tomorrow!”
I turned to share a grin with Ryan. Until Mr. Gorfel added, “That is, from the entire class.”
I felt as if someone had hit me in the stomach. What? This was wrong. This was evil. A second of loaded silence followed, and then the room filled with shouts of protest, including mine. Penny dropped her pencil and Ryan’s jaw fell open.
“But we didn’t do anything!” Aimee Randall pointed to Josh and Kristina. “It was just them.”
Michael Grover came a few inches off his chair. “That’s right. Why are you punishing us?”
Mr. Gorfel leaned against his desk and did the meanest thing he could’ve done. He smiled.
I gripped the edge of the table until my fingertips turned white, and a strange electric feeling raced up and down my arms as if someone had run a wire underneath my skin.
I froze. Whoa. That hadn’t happened before.
It grew stronger and turned into electric pulses. My palms grew warmer until they felt like a pair of hot plates. My heart started pounding in terror. What was this? A seizure? I flinched and wrung out my hands. The heat and electricity vanished in an instant.
“Rita? You okay?” Ryan asked through his grit teeth.
“Yeah.” I shook my head as my heart started to slow. What had that been? Maybe my blood pressure finally shot through the stratosphere and warped my brain. Possible, with all the stuff that happened in the past couple of weeks.
“I’ll tack on a page if you are not quiet in five seconds,” Mr. Gorfel taunted, which brought me back to reality. “It’s called collective responsibility. Everyone in the group needs to behave, or the bad apple is going to get the bunch thrown out every time.”
A tense silence fell over the heads in front of me. Mr. Gorfel grinned wider as if daring us to do something. I imagined dunking his face in one of the aquariums, even after what happened a few seconds ago. Especially the disgusting green one.
The electric feeling pulsed back into my arms for a second, but disappeared.
The bell rang and the class stomped out of the room, shoving in chairs and slamming books. Mr. Gorfel’s grin made me forget about my weird symptoms for a moment, and I joined the class in storming out the door. The plastic frogs all croaked as if laughing at us.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had such a horrible teacher.” Now that he was away from Mr. Gorfel, he’d show his anger. Ryan’s breath came in ragged gasps as his face turned the color of brick. He turned his head and glared at the doorway to Mr. Gorfel’s room as if his gaze could melt it.
Even Penny’s brow had lowered. “Well, we get a jerk teacher every year. What’s his problem? That didn’t make sense at all.”
“Plus he didn’t even give Josh and Kristina detention,” I added.
The two of them waltzed out of Mr. Gorfel’s class. Josh laughed and slapped Kristina on the shoulder. I could imagine what he was thinking. Ha ha, it’s so funny we got the whole class in trouble. No way they’d actually do the essays.
Ryan stomped away from us to go to his Drawing class while I followed Penny up the stairs to Basic Computers. The injustice of it all pulsed through me like poison. I’d had teachers do things like this before, tons of times, but nothing compared to Mr. Gorfel.
“Room five eleven…” Penny glared at her schedule, mumbling. We came to the right class after a minute, but she froze in the doorway as if she’d struck an invisible wall.
I stopped short, nearly crashing into her. “What?”
Penny twisted around. Her mouth fell open and the color drained from her face. In other words, uh oh.
“What is it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Mr. Gorfel,” Penny said, wide-eyed. “I think he’s working for the Shadow Regime.”