Lena held out both hands, presenting the photograph to Maggie the way soldiers present a folded flag at the funeral of a fallen hero, with the utmost respect and gravity.
Maggie looked at the photograph. It was the same one she’d seen a thousand times, the one that was taped to her computer screen at home: her father standing on the lawn at MIT in front of the Great Dome. But in this photograph, Maggie was there, too. Right next to him. His arm was casually draped across her shoulder, and her arm was wrapped around his waist. They were staring at the camera and smiling. Both of them were smiling. Together at MIT.
“How did you . . . ?” Maggie reached forward, almost afraid to touch it for fear it might dissolve. She took it from Lena, holding it in both hands, staring and staring at the image. She wanted to fall into the picture and never come out again.
“Do you like it?” asked Lena, her voice rising in excitement. “I am really, really good at Photoshop. I mean, insanely good. Like, I could join the CIA and do some crazy stuff. But I never would.”
“It looks so real.”
“But do you like it?” asked Lena, suddenly sounding worried, as if a thought that hadn’t occurred to her before was suddenly worming its way into her brain.
Didn’t see that coming, said Maggie’s father’s voice inside her head, clearly impressed.
“I love it more than anything else on earth.” How had Lena known? How had she seen? Was it that obvious? The one thing she desired above all else? After all, she and Lena had met less than forty-eight hours ago. Scientifically, it didn’t make sense.
Lena sighed happily. “You like it. I’m really glad.” Then she dove under the covers again and rummaged until she resurfaced holding two Milky Way bars. She handed one to Maggie, who began to suspect that the bed was like a magician’s hat. Who knew what Lena would pull from it next?
Lena ripped open the wrapper of her candy bar and took a giant bite. “You know,” she said, her words mangled by the goo of caramel on her teeth, “I’ve been thinking about our next hack. . . .”
THIRTEEN
“THE MOUSE IS IN THE HOUSE! The Mouse is in the house!” became a frequent chant at Oda M in the next few weeks.
At Table 10, arguments erupted on a daily basis about where each new hack ranked on the Top Ten list of Mouse attacks.
Jenna declared, “Absolutely number one: when Principal Shute’s entire desk was wrapped in ‘mouse-king’ tape. Did you see it? The desk looked like a mummy, and there was a little toy mouse wearing a crown sitting on top of it. It was the cutest thing ever!”
“No,” said Tyler, shaking his head vigorously. “The best one was when Principal Shute was doing the morning announcements and he kept getting interrupted by the sound of squeaking. Every time he started a sentence . . . SQUEAK! I mean, when was the last time you heard a principal swear during morning announcements?”
“Actually,” said Lyle, “my favorite was the day we came to the cafeteria and there were spray cans of Easy Cheese at each table. What’s better than liquid cheese you can spray right into your mouth? Nothing!”
“Yeah, except Tyler sprayed it up my nose!” said Max.
“Your fault,” said Tyler. “You moved.”
The Mouse is in the house! The Mouse is in the house!
The third Monday, the students noticed something peculiar on the front door of the school. It was a traffic sign that looked so real, you would have thought it was stolen from one of the signposts in town, except that there was one little difference:
WARNING: MOUSE WORK AHEAD
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
Throughout the school, signs were posted on doors, on walls, on railings and desks. They looked like real road signs, down to every detail.
NO PARKING: MOUSE LANE
STATE LAW: YIELD TO MOUSE
PUSH BUTTON FOR MOUSEWALK
WEIGHT LIMIT 10 MICE
Principal Shute was in a fury—and was doing a poor job of hiding the fact. All day long, the students could see him tearing down the signs as quickly as he discovered them, but new signs kept appearing. These were hastily drawn, each one in different handwriting, scribbled on blank sheets of notebook paper or on the back sides of class handouts:
NO STOPPING: MOUSE LOADING ZONE
MAX HEIGHT: 50 MICE
TURN BACK: WRONG MOUSE
No matter how vigilantly Mr. Shute patrolled the halls, the signs kept popping up. By lunchtime, someone had taped a cartoon on the door to the empty, locked library; it showed a man wielding a baseball bat, with the caption: Principal Shute plays Whack-a-Mouse.
The Mouse is in the house! The Mouse is in the house!
You could hear it chanted in the cafeteria, in the classrooms, in the rotunda, even at football games, where the Wildcats were off to an incredible start to the season, having beaten the Mifflinburg Miners 40–14, the Bloomsburg Huskies 47–0, the Central Columbia Blue Jays 42–21, and the Warrior Run Defenders 57–0.
This week, the entire town was gearing up for Friday night’s away game with the Lewisburg Panthers, but on Thursday night, Lena and Maggie found themselves creeping through the darkened halls of Oda M on their way to the cafeteria. Both girls carried heavy backpacks and were dressed all in black. Maggie was wearing a dark purple Wildcats ski cap. She had stuffed as much of her wildly unmanageable hair under it as she could, but a few stray strands of yellow curls exploded about her face.
“How do you even know about this secret passageway?” asked Lena. They were making their way to the balcony that overlooked the cafeteria.
“It’s not a secret passageway,” said Maggie. “It’s more of a utility corridor.”
“It’s hidden and it’s locked. That makes it a secret passageway in my book.”
“This is it,” said Maggie. The hallway became the top level of the cafeteria here, forming a balcony that looked down on the main dining room, originally built to hold five hundred students at once. It seemed strange to think that there’d been a time in Odawahaka when such a school was necessary: a sprawling school, a growing school, a school full of energy and potential and ambition. Even in the darkness, Maggie could feel the bigness of it—the empty, unused space all around them. She and Lena were like two marbles rolling around in a large, empty shoe box.
“Flip on your headlamp,” said Maggie as she switched hers on.
Both girls wore camping lights strapped to their foreheads, and Maggie pulled a bobby pin from the hair at the base of her neck. (She always kept a few stashed there, just in case.) She snapped the bobby pin in two, bent one half to create a tension wrench, and bit off the plastic nub on the other half to create the pick. She knelt down in front of what appeared to be a small cupboard door, wiggled both pieces of the bobby pin into the lock, and had it sprung in less than fifteen seconds.
“Very James Bond!” whispered Lena.
“No,” said Maggie sadly. “It’s a crummy lock. I could have picked it with my teeth.” Sometimes, she wished the school presented more of a challenge. It made her feel less than her father to have such easy obstacles to overcome.
Your time will come, whispered her father.
“Okay, in we go,” said Maggie. She crawled on her hands and knees into the small passageway. It was like a square miner’s tunnel, three feet wide by three feet high.
“Whoa!” said Lena. “I thought you said it was a hallway.”
“Think of it as a small hallway. A hallway for . . .” She was about to say mice, but then stopped herself. Probably not the best way to get Lena to enter. We really have become the mice in the walls of Oda M!
“I didn’t think it would be that small.” Lena backed away. “I thought we’d be able to stand up, or at least stoop.”
“It’s plenty big,” said Maggie. “See? It’s easy to turn around.” She showed Lena how simple it was to maneuver in the tight space. Of course, she was much smaller than Lena and had always liked the feeling of being in close quarters. When she was little, she used to crawl inside th
e clothes dryer just to relax.
Lena kept backing away. “We’ve only known each other for about four weeks, so I might not have mentioned this yet, but I’m crazy-mad claustrophobic. I think it’s why I enlarge my photos. I like things big. Big art. Big food. Big rooms. Big beds.” The whole time she was talking, she was slowly backing away.
“Lena,” said Maggie. “You can do this.”
“I can’t even step into a closet!” said Lena. “Did you notice in my room? All my clothes hang on racks.”
“I thought it was just some kind of artist thing,” said Maggie, flashing her headlamp on Lena’s face.
“No, it’s because I have out-of-control panic attacks. I can’t do small spaces.”
Maggie started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She was afraid of heights, and Lena was afraid of small spaces. What a hacking team they made!
The incapacitated leading the incapable, muttered her father.
“Hey!” said Maggie. She thought that comment was uncalled for. After all, one way or another, they’d managed to pull off each hack.
“Hey, what?” asked Lena.
“Hey . . . I need you,” said Maggie. “It takes two people to work the pulley system, and I can’t take down the interior panel by myself. You have to come in here.”
“I don’t know that I can,” said Lena. Her voice sounded very small. We really have turned into mice, thought Maggie.
You are not mice, said her father. You are colossal. Monumental. Unstoppable.
“Try this,” said Maggie. “Take out your camera and look through the lens. Tunnel vision, same as when you take photos. Just keep looking through your camera. The whole world around you doesn’t exist. Just what you see through the lens. Then work your way forward, slowly, looking through your camera.”
As Maggie spoke, Lena entered the tunnel, her camera held in front of her eye.
“Good!” said Maggie. “Just keep inching forward. You’re doing great! Now see these latches?” she asked. “There are four of them. You need to undo each latch, while I hold onto these knobs, or else the whole panel will crash to the ground.” Lena continued holding the camera lens to her eye with one hand as her other hand fiddled with the latches. Maggie removed the panel, and suddenly they were staring out over the cafeteria from thirty feet up in the air.
“Okay, now I’m fine,” said Lena, putting her camera down. “As long as I’m not closed in, I’m totally okay.”
Maggie swooned backward. “I might throw up.” She turned away from the thirty-foot drop and stared at the closed dark space of the passageway, which made her feel safe. Enclosed. “How does that make any sense that you feel okay now?” she asked. “It’s not like you could jump out of the hole if you had to! The fall would kill you!”
Lena reached for her backpack. “Well, it’s not like you’re suddenly going to catapult over the edge. Phobias don’t make sense. They’re irrational. What do we do next?”
Maggie examined the pulley system that held the football banners in place and felt her spirits sag. It was exactly as she had feared: the pulleys were so rusty that the links in each chain had practically fused together from neglect. Not only that, but actual mice had built nests in the gears, jamming up the mechanism. They had gnawed most of the way through one of the cables that attached to the fifty-pound counterweight, and they had chewed extensively on the wooden shaft that anchored the pins in place.
“You know,” said Maggie as she retrieved a can of oil from her backpack and began to grease the chain, “mice are small, but when they work together, they can do impressive things.”
They unhooked the old banners from the pulley system and allowed them to flutter to the cafeteria floor below. Then Lena pulled the “new” banners from her backpack and hung them according to Maggie’s instructions.
When Maggie and Lena (both happy to be out of the tunnel and back on the ground) inspected their work from below, they had to admit, it was hard to notice that anything had changed.
“The perfect hack,” said Maggie.
No hack is perfect, her father reminded her, but Maggie decided to ignore that particular comment.
“How long can it possibly take one human being to look up?” asked Lena. For the past twenty-five minutes, not one student in the cafeteria had noticed the new banners. All anyone was talking about was that night’s game against the Lewisburg Panthers—one of the toughest teams the Wildcats would face all season. Lunch period was nearly over, and no one had noticed that the banners were different. Lena had worked hard on those banners, and Maggie knew she was impatient for the fun to begin.
But Maggie smiled knowingly. “Sometimes you have to wait. Each hack unfolds in its own time, in its own way.”
“You sound like a Zen master,” complained Lena.
No, I sound like my dad, Maggie thought. “Don’t worry,” she said, putting a hand on Lena’s shoulder. “There’s always something that comes along, shakes things loose, gets the ball rolling. . . .”
“Listen up!”
The sixth graders stopped their chattering and turned as one to look at the balcony where Principal Shute stood, directly over the clock. The banners hung in front of him, one on each side. “I have an announcement to make. It concerns the use of paper towels in the boys’ bathrooms!”
Mr. Shute began a long harangue about the problem of wadded-up paper towels and overflowing sinks, as seventy-one sixth graders stared up at their principal—and the banners that flanked him.
Lena punched Maggie in the arm.
“Wait for it,” said Maggie. “Wait for it. . . .”
Colt was the first to notice, probably because his eyes were so well trained to read any words put in front of them. “Who changed the banners?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Shana. “The words are different.”
“And that’s a mouse,” said Brianna. “Or a very fat woodchuck.”
“It’s a mouse!” shouted Lena, and the decibel level in the cafeteria began to rise as more and more students noticed the altered banners.
The first banner looked exactly as it always had, except that the roaring Wildcat had been replaced with a smiling mouse whose ridiculously long tail oscillated along the edge of the sign. The slogan on the banner read, There is no substitute for WAVELENGTH and no excuse for a CRACK IN IT.
The second banner showed a chubby mouse staring over its enormous, round belly with the words: The WHISKERS and TAIL of the Odawahaka Wildmouse will not be entrusted to the WICKED or the SQUEAK.
Principal Shute continued to talk, threatening severe disciplinary measures if the use of paper towels was not immediately brought under control, but the unmistakable chant had begun: “The Mouse is in the house! The Mouse is in the house!” It grew louder and louder.
“I told you,” whispered Maggie. “Something always comes along that gets the ball rolling. You just never know what it’s going to be.”
“Shute!” whispered Lena gleefully.
“What is going on down there?” demanded the principal, descending the staircase and turning to see what the students were staring at.
He read the banners, several times. They looked so close to right. But they were very, very wrong. “Take them down!” he shouted, pointing at the offending signs. “Immediately. Get a ladder. Get two ladders. I want those banners off the walls. Now!”
Mr. Fetterholf, who was always on hand during lunch, readjusted the Wildcats baseball cap on his head. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure a ladder will do the trick. That’s not how the banners were hung forty years ago, and that’s not how these ones are coming down today.”
“What do you mean?” A large blood vessel on Principal Shute’s neck bulged over his tight collar. Maggie couldn’t help wondering if it was going to explode. She was surprised at how infuriated the principal was. After all, it wasn’t as if the banners were a danger. They weren’t about to fall and crush anyone. They weren’t about to reach out and strangle a passing student. What was so imp
ortant about getting them down immediately?
“What is his problem?” asked Lena, leaning over to Maggie.
“It’s disrespectful!” said Kayla indignantly. She crossed her arms, personally offended by the banners and their cheerful smiling mice.
Mr. Fetterholf was patiently explaining to the principal, “There’s a pulley system. Behind the wall. There’s a passageway that gives us access to the clock and the lights and the pulleys. Now, look over there. You see that panel? You’d have to be inside the passageway to take it down. So whoever hung those banners was inside the passageway. And frankly, I don’t know who could have done that.” He looked around at the sixth graders and smiled. “Except the mice!” Even when Mr. Fetterholf had been a student, there had been legends about the manic mice at Oda M.
“Well, get inside the passageway and take those banners down!”
Mr. Fetterholf scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Sure, I can do it. But it’s going to take some time. I can’t remember for the life of me where the key is for that door. And you have to be careful. You don’t want that panel falling thirty feet onto someone’s head. Right?” He looked over at Colt DuPrey and smiled, his eyes sparkling.
“Those banners are coming down this instant,” shouted Principal Shute. He called out to several of the boys, scattering students as he advanced. “Push the table up against the wall,” he directed. “You two, that side. You, on this side with me.” He was clearly a man who was used to giving orders.
“Mr. Shute,” said Mrs. Matlaw cautiously, “I don’t think anything of this sort should be undertaken with the students in the cafeteria.”
“Why not?” said Mr. Shute. “Let them see what happens when vandalism takes place at our school. This type of rogue behavior will be stamped out, Mrs. Matlaw. Stamped out. I will not have a lack of discipline swallow up the proud traditions of this school. Not on my watch!”
He vaulted onto the tabletop, pulled up a chair, and then climbed on top of it.
Maggie and Lena both knew how securely the banners were attached to the pulley system. And the system had been designed to withstand decades of strain.