CHAPTER TEN
“Bastard,” Brin said, jumping up from her chair and racing toward the door, not thinking about the consequences, not considering that her second vision of Droz since her return to Grisly might be a figment of her imagination.
“Brin?” Ash said as she elbowed the door open. She looked back, only briefly, to see Ash whisper, “What are you doing?”
She didn’t even look at Paul. She slammed the door behind her and started running down the hall.
It only took a few seconds for one of the superintendents to catch sight of her.
“Hey!” the burly man shouted. “No running in the halls!”
But Brin didn’t care. She knew she was in trouble already, and one more sprint out of the school wasn’t going to change how the faculty, how the Principal, how all of Grisly, currently felt about her.
Brin turned the corner and smashed her body against one of the four front doors of the school. Her right foot collided with the side of the rail, but she saved herself from tripping and smashing her face against the cement ground. She turned to her right and started racing past a set of small trees, over to Mr. Barker’s window.
Brin darted her eyes in every direction. She didn’t see Droz. She didn’t see anyone.
Come on, you son of a bitch. Show yourself.
She ran up to the window. She looked in to see Ash, who did a double take when he saw Brin outside.
She turned around to see a security officer and two superintendents jogging over to her. The officer spoke fierce and intensely into his walkie talkie, like he was calling in a bomb threat.
“Brin Skar!” one of the superintendents shouted at her. “Stop now!”
She had made it this far. She couldn’t stop now.
Brin turned to her left and started running again, this time to the side field of the school, where she could get one more glance at the front of the campus. She jumped over some hedges and raced past the tiny school theatre, finding the packed parking lot. She stopped at the edge of the curb and looked forward, blocking the sun from her eyes with her hand. She didn’t see anything unusual. She turned to her left. She caught sight of a giant fence, one that separated the school from the soon-to-be-opened Macabre Golf Course. She even thought she could see a glimpse of one of the fairways in the distance. But she didn’t see Droz.
She turned around. The school. She turned to her left. More cars. She turned back around.
A figure dressed in black glided into an alley on the other side of the street.
“Oh my God!” Brin shouted. “That’s him! That’s—”
The security guard tackled her to the ground before she could run toward the street.
“Get down on the ground!” he shouted.
“What are you doing?” Brin said. “I’m not the one you want!”
“Get off her, Sam.” Brin glanced up to see Principal Stine.
“But Sir,” the officer said,” “she was—”
“Step away, Sam,” the Principal reiterated, pulling Brin up by her arms. She was surprised to discover he was much stronger than he appeared to be.
“Mr. Stine,” she said.
“What are you doing, Brin? What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I thought I saw something.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“What? What did you see?”
Brin stared at him, her face cold, stiff, and tired. What am I supposed to do? Tell him that I saw the scary leader of a vampire clan who played a large part in putting down Chace and Sawyer last weekend?
She didn’t have a way to talk herself out of this mess. So she said the first thing that came to mind.
“I thought I saw…” She tried to cry. It wasn’t hard to fake it. “I thought I saw Chace and Sawyer.”
She planted her face against the Principal’s shoulder and started to weep.
“It’s OK, Brin,” he said, not in a rush to push her away. “I know… I know this has been really hard for you.”
“I just want them back,” Brin said. She was going for the Oscar with her crying, but part of her was still sad enough to wring out real, actual tears. “I’m tired of everyone being so sad.”
“I know,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get you back to class.”
They started heading back toward the school. Brin tried to walk like she was fragile and feeble, even though she had enough strength at the moment to run 100 miles.
“And please, Principal Stine… please don’t fire Mr. Barker. He had nothing to do with what happened.”
The Principal nodded but didn’t say a word. He wasn’t about to debate this subject. They made their way through the front doors and into the main hallway.
“There’s just five more minutes left of class, Brin,” he said. “Be well… and please… don’t blame yourself.”
Brin wiped her eyes with her palms and nodded. “OK. I’ll try.”
She walked down the hallway and quietly entered Mr. Barker’s classroom. Everyone turned to her with varied amounts of interests.
There were no movies playing; no serial killers, no zombies, and certainly no vampires displayed on the pull-down screen. There wasn’t even a relaxing soundtrack playing over a speaker to put the class’s fears at ease. Mr. Barker was nowhere to be found, and only a few of the students were making conversation. The loudest audible sound was the ticking of the classroom clock up above Barker’s tall bookshelf, once chockfull of books and DVDs, now just empty and depressing.
“He’s really leaving?” Brin said to Ash.
Ash nodded. He looked like he wanted to throw up. “Yeah… I guess he is.”
“This is so messed up.” Brin looked back at dozens of students, all with blank looks on their faces, like they didn’t have opinions on the matter. “Are we gonna stand for this? Are we really gonna let them fire Mr. Barker?”
So many had been staring at Brin all day that it felt weird for people to noticeably look away from her. The students looked out the window, at the ground, at the ceiling. But nobody spoke up. Not even Dylan, or the usually reliable Anaya, said a word.
Brin looked back at Ash, and he shrugged.
“There’s nothing we can do, Brin.”
“Like hell there’s not.”
Brin kicked her chair out from under her and marched up to Mr. Barker’s closed office door. She was heated, both from all that running outside and from her increasingly turbulent emotions. She knocked on the door and started tapping her shoes against the hardwood floor.
“Mr. Barker? We need to talk to you!” She said ‘we,’ even though she knew ‘we’ at this moment was going to mean ‘me.’
Brin listened for a response, but none was given. She looked back to see students rising to their feet, not to help her on her quest to save their teacher’s job, but to race out of the classroom as soon as the bell rang.
She knocked again. “Mr. Barker? Hello?”
Brin tried the handle; the door was unlocked. She pushed it open and looked inside the tiny space to see cluttered tables, drawers, and papers.
But no Mr. Barker.
“What the hell?”
She stepped forward and peered around the corner. There was nothing but a wall draped in pen markings and spider-webs. There weren’t any windows in the office, no tunnels or secret passageways.
Where could he have gone?
“Brin?” As the sound of the bell bellowed through the entire school, and as the grating noise of footsteps erupted in the classroom, Ash approached the office door. “Brin, what is it?”
He poked his head in and surveyed the room, so messy with endless crap scattered everywhere that he made a face that screamed, filthy pig.
“So?” Ash took a step inside. He wasn’t a germaphobe but he clearly refrained from touching anything. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning around with an irked frown on her face. “Way to make me look like an idiot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Making me believe he was in here. You could’ve said something.”
“No. He was in here.”
“I know. But when I went outside, to chase after—” She stopped. “I mean, when I was outside, Mr. Barker left the room, right?”
“Brin.” He grabbed her arm with his sweaty hands. “I watched the door like a hawk. Mr. Barker never left this room.”
She shook her head, dumbfounded. “What?”
They just stared at each other for a moment.
Brin pressed her lips together and suppressed an urge to scream. She kept her eyes on Ash.
“If Mr. Barker never left this room,” she said, turning toward the back of the messy office, “then where is he?”