8
When we reached Miss Robles’ campsite, Elliot parked the RV. He left it running, and leaned over to turn on the GPS.
“Now, it looks like she covered the road up with brush. Once this thing tells us where to go, we’ll be back on the road.” He waited a few minutes, and finally said, “There! Come on!”
We followed Elliot out of the van and ran to a clearing. There was brush, logs and rocks piled up, and underneath it, a road. Julian climbed onto the hood of the van and cleared the leaves from the windshield.
“She’s pretty sneaky,” I thought about Miss Robles, as I carried a heavy boulder across the road and dumped it into the woods. I wondered why she did this. Was it for us?
We took some of Miss Robles’ things and placed them in her tent, including her coffee for the morning. If she decided to come back, she would have everything she needed. But if she needed supplies, she could stay at the seventh grade camp. That way, she would have a clear perspective on what it was like for us, and she could help us when it came time to arrest Mr. McThorn. A pile of books and papers covered the little kitchen table that was built into the wall of the mobile home, so I gathered everything up and shoved it beneath the seats in a cabinet.
The path was clear, and we were moving again.
“I never explored past this point. It was obvious that there was a road somewhere, otherwise this rig wouldn’t have been able to get here.” Elliot told us. The GPS was directing us off the mountain.
“Wake me up when we get there” Julian requested from the back room. He was sprawled out on the queen-sized bed.
It was a very comfortable mobile home, even the way Elliot was driving.
We drove downhill on a dirt trail for about half an hour, and reached a gravel road. There were no signs of civilization yet, and we continued along the way. Eventually, we came to the highway. Elliot turned onto the ramp, and gunned it.
Elliot was beaming with excitement. His eyes were glued to the road. He looked in both rear view mirrors, and merged into traffic.
“Have you ever driven on the highway before?” I asked him. Anxiety and fear were officially back, lurking in my mind, and I did not feel safe.
“Of course not, Nines!” He said. “I’m only thirteen!”
The ride was much smoother now, and we were able to start planning what to do next. We were two hundred and seventy two miles from Shadyside. Sam and I did the math, and figured it would take about five hours to get back to Shadyside if we drove at fifty-five miles per hour. We would need to get gas eventually. Luckily, Sam had been carrying her money around in her pockets. It was part of their plan to escape.
What to do when we got to Shadyside became the main topic of discussion.
If we went straight to the police, they might not believe us. Not to mention, we did steal an RV and drive it without a license. It would be safer to get an adult first. Sam wanted to get her father, and we all agreed to that. Elliot wanted to make sure that he could be there when they arrested McThorn, but I said it might not happen because the principal is probably prepared to defend himself, after all of those documents he made the parents sign.
Sam and Elliot had not been there when I read the papers to the class at the Lodge. It seems that McThorn had devised a plan to make all of this seem perfectly legal. The permission slips described Jason as our teacher. The words had been manipulated to convince the parents that he would be there with us, without actually stating it. There was a photograph of Jason, and even a biography that described his work experience and training. McThorn also wrote in the agreement that he would be “stopping by often,” something he probably wasn’t planning to really do.
Everything had a scapegoat. They couldn’t prove that the computer had tried to kill Mark, or that our parents had never received our emails. Someone was probably hacking in to everything we wrote, and they would just say it was technical difficulty.
“We need to find Mr. Crane,” Elliot said, and it made sense. Mr. Crane had always been a great Assistant Principal. We knew he would never let this happen. He probably had been fooled just like everyone else. “You know, I do my best thinking when I’m driving.”
As we were contemplating this mess, we heard Julian crying from the bedroom. Sam and I walked to the back to check up on him, and found him watching a sad movie on Miss Robles’ DVD player. It was a tragic love story.
“Don’t leave him!” Julian sobbed. We closed the door and left him to cry.
It was starting to get dark when Elliot pulled into a truck stop for gas. It was called The Flying W, and there was a huge parking lot, a restaurant, and a gift shop that had everything you could possibly need on the road. We all got out, stretching and getting some air. We were still far from any towns. We walked through the gift shop and bought some food, filled up the gas tank, and reassembled.
“I’m thinking we should stay here overnight. We can pull into one of the parking areas in the back and sleep,” Elliot decided.
“Really?” Julian asked. “We won’t get in trouble?”
“No,” Elliot answered. “It’s a rest stop. That’s what they’re for. My dad and I have done it a million times. We drove to Alaska one summer when he was working in Denali. There were some nice rest stops on that ride! There’s bathrooms here, showers, an arcade, and the diner. There’s a pay phone in there, but I don’t think we should call home until we come up with a solid plan. Does everyone agree?”
Sam spoke first. “I think it’s the best thing to do. We don’t want Elliot to fall asleep at the wheel, because then we’d all be dead. I’m okay not calling home yet – we don’t want them to freak out. So, I agree.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Me three,” Julian added.
“Me four,” Elliot decided, and drove the RV to a corner of the parking lot with a view of the foothills.
That night, I read an amazing book while everyone else was sleeping. I found it in that pile of books I stored in the cabinet under the kitchenette table. I sat in the driver’s seat until midnight, under the glow of the green neon “Open” sign blinking in the parking lot, reading Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.
The next morning we awoke to the sounds of diesel engines starting up. The rain had stopped, and the truckers were getting ready to go. The sun rose purple and orange over the eastern mountains as we scrambled out to the diner for breakfast. We wore assorted pieces of clothing that we had found in Miss Robles’ RV, and carried our wet clothes in plastic bags to wash at the truck stop Laundromat. I thought we must have looked disheveled, until I saw the other people at the rest stop looking worse for wear. As the light grew brighter I noticed several other RVs had parked here for the night as well. I recognized them from the road. They each had their own special name, like a boat. There was Free Spirit, Adventurer, and Born Free. Ours was called Independence.
We were having so much fun that we didn’t even think about yesterday’s problems until we got back to the RV, and had to decide what to do next.
We didn’t want to leave. Our newly acquired freedom felt so good. We had passed the point of fear, and learned that we really didn’t need to follow anyone else’s rules. We never would have learned what we know now if we were still sitting in the cement block classrooms of Shadyside School.
“I miss our people,” Julian said, referring to the classmates we left behind. “We were so united at camp. I hope they’re okay. Was it mean for us to leave them?”
Sam said, “We’re rescuing them. If we hadn’t left, we’d still be on that mountain too.”
“But what about the moose head with the camera?” Julian asked.
I reassured him. “We don’t know if anyone ever heard our messages, Julian. And what is McThorn going to do? Say, ‘Oh, sorry kids, my bad, come on back and destroy my school again?’”
“But what if we promise to be good?”
Elliot had a response to that. “There’s no way I’m going back to the old ways. I?
??m done. I’ll home school like I did in Alaska. We can do it together. I thought of that when I was driving yesterday. I really get my best ideas when I’m driving!”
We sat at Miss Robles’ mobile kitchen table. I took out some paper from her pile and made a chart listing all of the details of our situation, the pros and cons, our resources, strengths and weaknesses. We were quiet for a while letting it all sink in, and then I got it.
I don’t know how I got it, but I did.
Home school. United. Independence.
Maybe it was the ancient Sumerian Gods coming back to me from Ninevah, or maybe I was inspired by Thoreau. I don’t know how, but I got it.
“I got it,” I said. I looked up at my travel companions.
“We’ll write a Declaration of Independence, for the United Seventh Grade of America.” I was smiling so hard that my eyes must have looked like I had just sucked a lemon. “The principal is an absolute despot! We have the proof!”
Elliot loved the idea.
Sam’s response was, “How are we going to do that?”
Julian asked, “What’s an absolute despot?”
“It was our vocabulary word last year, Julian! Remember? We were supposed to memorize the beginning of the Declaration of Independence.”
“I didn’t really understand it,” Julian replied.
“I didn’t know we were supposed to memorize it. I thought we just had to read it,” Sam said.
“An absolute despot is someone who rules over people in a cruel way. A tyrant. I’ll write the declaration. I understand it because I saw the original one in Washington D.C., when I was there with my parents. You know how they are with history. It’s in a glass case, next to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Charters of Freedom, they’re called. But I need to go back to the camp and get some books from the sanctuary. With the right research, I can make it better than they ever believed we could accomplish as seventh graders. They think we’re dumb, and we have to prove them wrong. Everyone has to sign it, like the original one. We have to go back.”
They looked at me, they looked at each other, and they looked at the mobile home. Suddenly, the desire for freedom for the good of the whole was stronger than our need to go home. There was a sudden rush of energy as we all jumped up and got ready to leave. We were going back to the mountain to get our people.