Paper Things (16 page)

I can tell that Gage wants to argue some more, but eventually he gives me Briggs’s big white shirt to wear and lets me go.

Daniel is standing outside Eastland when I arrive. My feet are soaked, but I’m too nervous to mind. “Did you bring tape?” I ask him.

“Of course,” he says. Thankfully, he doesn’t ask me why I didn’t bring any.

Daniel strides up to the front door and gives it a confident tug. But nothing happens. He frowns and tries again.

“Locked!” he says, like he can’t believe the door wouldn’t be open at six thirty in the morning.

“What now?” I ask, stamping my feet to try to warm them.

Daniel looks around and then smiles. “Tracks!” he says, pointing to large footprints in the snow — footprints that definitely don’t belong to either of us. We follow them with our eyes from the front door back up the walkway and to the parking lot, where the janitor’s car is parked. A thin layer of snow dusts the windshield, though the hood is clear — probably because it’s still warm.

“Come on,” Daniel says, walking around the building. “She’s gotta be in here somewhere!”

Sure enough, we see someone vacuuming in one of the third-grade rooms. We rap on the window and the vacuuming stops.

As the figure approaches, I see that it’s not Mrs. Hurley, the janitor, but Yan, her helper. I wonder if he walked to the school or if he and Mrs. Hurley carpooled. Anyway, he frowns when he sees us and motions for us to go back around the corner to the nearest door.

He opens the door just a crack, his frown deepening. It’s clear that he doesn’t really want to let us in. My stomach ties a knot or two.

“Eastland tradition,” says Daniel, as if he’s twenty and not eleven. “We’ve got to hang up snowflakes today.”

Yan has only worked for Mrs. Hurley for a few months, so I’m not sure what he makes of this talk of
tradition
and
snowflakes,
but he slowly steps aside to let us pass.

“Be good!” he calls as we tear down the hall toward the front office.

Being in the school when no one else is here is both really cool and very eerie. Now more than ever I feel like a ghost — though a ghost with a friend this time. I think of the things we could get away with right now: sneaking into the teachers’ lounge, rearranging desks in classrooms, hanging safety posters upside down. If I wasn’t trying so hard to get into Carter, I might suggest some of these things to Daniel.

I wonder if this is what it’s like for kids like Linnie, who don’t have to worry about being good all the time, because they don’t care about getting into Carter. Is life a lot more relaxing and fun when you don’t have to try so hard?

Daniel quickly surveys the window outside the front office. “Help me pull this bench over and we can begin up high.”

Before you know it, the front hall of our school has been blitzed with snowflakes. Just like old times, snowflakes appear to float from the ceiling to the floor in the main hall. It looks amazing, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it, especially Sasha.

“We’ve still got an hour before school starts,” Daniel says. “Want to make more?”

“Snowflakes?” I ask stupidly. “Where would we put them?” The walls and windows of the main hall are practically filled with flakes already.

“Anywhere!” Daniel says.

His enthusiasm is catching. “We could put some in Mr. O.’s room,” I suggest. “He always liked the snowflake tradition. And maybe in the cafeteria, too.”

We head down to the art room for scissors and raid the recycling bins for paper. “Don’t be too particular about these,” Daniel says as we start folding and cutting at the large art room table. “It’s the overall effect we want.” So we mass-produce the easiest snowflakes we can. They’re not very fancy, but we’ve learned to cut more than one at a time, and soon they’re piling up.

We finish decorating Mr. O.’s room in record time and move on to the cafeteria. We can hear movement now in the hallways — teachers and students arriving — and we start taping even faster than before. At one point we’re almost caught, when Ms. Finch walks by the doors, but we duck behind the tables and she doesn’t see us.

Ten minutes before the bell is supposed to ring, we head to the hall where our lockers are located, acting like we’ve just arrived. But my stomach is jumping like it’s Christmas morning.

The school looks amazing. I can’t believe that we were able to hang so many dazzling snowflakes, that in less than two hours we created this wintry magic. Sasha approaches me with Keisha at her side. I wonder where Linnie is. Has Sasha ditched her, too, and moved on to Keisha?

I hold my breath, waiting to hear what Sasha has to say. Will she know that the snowflakes were my doing? It’s weird to keep such a big secret from my best friend — or maybe my former best friend.

To my surprise, Keisha grabs my arm. “Hey, Ari,” she says. “That shirt looks really cool. Doesn’t it, Sasha? Where’d you get it?”

At first I worry that she’s making fun of me. Briggs’s shirt was just as big as I’d feared it would be, though I’d worn it under my vest as Gage had suggested and rolled up the sleeves. Maybe the look
was
pretty cool. “I borrowed it from a friend,” I say mysteriously.

“Cool,” Keisha says again. Sasha just gives me a wide-eyed look.

I smile and turn to head into math. I decide to keep my secrets just a little bit longer.

I’m in my seat, trying madly to complete last night’s math homework before the bell rings, while still listening to the reactions to the snowflakes. I can’t help it.

Most of the kids are guessing that adults did it — either the PTO or the basketball boosters or something.

Some kids are a little grouchy about it. “It was fun when
we
got to do the snowflakes,” they complain.

Their reactions make me realize that we probably should have involved more kids from the beginning.

Class is just about to begin when Mr. Chandler’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. “Would the young man and the young lady who decided to enter the school unlawfully this morning and, further, deface school property come to the office immediately.”

Unlawfully? Deface?

I glance at Daniel. Neither of us moves.

A few minutes later, Mr. Chandler’s voice comes over the loudspeaker again. “Would Daniel Huber and Arianna Hazard please come to the office?”

My wobbly knees are not to be trusted, but I stand up. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Daniel doing the same. The kids around us are shocked. “Ari?” I hear Sasha gasp, and I don’t dare look at her. Daniel and I grab our backpacks and head for the door.

“How does he know it’s us?” I ask as soon as we’re in the hall. “I didn’t think Yan even knew who we were.”

“There’s probably a security camera,” says Daniel. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” My stomach is back to doing flip-flops, and that’s when I remember that I didn’t have any breakfast this morning. I didn’t pack a lunch, either. Not that I can imagine eating a thing.

“I don’t know,” says Daniel. “But think about what you’re going to say to Mr. Chandler. Why are Eastland traditions important?”

I try to think of this like an essay for Carter. If I had to explain why I wanted to reinstate the traditions at Eastland Elementary, what would I say? Maybe something about how traditions give us a sense of belonging, that doing the same activities each year, the very same activities that our older siblings or even our parents did, makes us feel like we’re all one big family. And events like the fifth-grade campout give us something to look forward to as we grow older.

But rather than feeling prepared, I feel a little light-headed. My stomach continues cramping. I don’t know how I’m ever going to survive this meeting.

Mr. Chandler stands at the end of the hall, watching us approach. He’s wearing that look that parents and teachers have when they’re disappointed in you, and I can’t help feeling that it’s directed more at me than at Daniel. While Daniel has “visited” the principal’s office regularly since kindergarten, including more than a few times this year with Mr. Chandler (as Mademoiselle likes to say, Daniel is always thinking outside the box), I’ve never actually been sent to the office. Up until now, I’ve been known to Mr. Chandler as “Janna’s girl.” Janna is one of those people who always volunteers — mostly, I think, because she likes to be the boss. I wonder if Mr. Chandler has noticed that she’s stopped volunteering lately.

“Does Janna know what you were up to this morning?” he asks once we reach him.

“No, sir,” I say, my voice quavering. How am I ever going to get through my speech?

He takes a breath, leans back on his heels, and digs his hands deeper into his pockets. “Do you two know the hours that Mrs. Hurley and Yan will need to spend to get glitter off these recently polished floors?” At this, he lifts his shoe to reveal the glitter that has stuck to it.

I shoot Daniel a guilty look. The only snowflakes with glitter had been mine.

Mr. Chandler continues without waiting for an answer. “It was one thing to enter the building before school started and to post paper and tape on the walls of school property. But to create hours and hours of extra work for two people who already work quite hard — well, that’s truly unfair.”

Daniel screws his face up, and I can’t tell if he’s thinking,
A few sparkles never hurt anyone,
or
It was pretty stupid, Ari, to make snowflakes with glitter,
or something else entirely.

“Follow me,” says Mr. Chandler, and he leads us toward the custodian’s closet.

“Speak up,” Daniel whispers to me.

I widen my eyes and shrug my shoulders. What could I possibly say? Mr. Chandler is right about the glitter; it was inconsiderate.

He unlocks the closet and turns to us. “First I want you to take the snowflakes down, and then I want you to use these mops to get the glitter off the floor.”

“Say something, Ari,” Daniel whispers when Mr. Chandler heads down the hall ahead of us. “He’s making an example of us.” I can tell that Daniel’s pretty bummed right now.

My stomach lurches. “Mr. Chandler,” I say. It comes out as a squeak, so I try again. “Mr. Chandler —”

He turns and looks at me.

“We didn’t mean to cause extra work. The glitter is my fault. I didn’t realize —”

I stop. My stomach is lurching. Before I even know what’s happening, a huge wave of tuna-noodle casserole rises from my belly, explodes past my tonsils, and sprays down the hall at a record distance.

I crouch over, holding my stomach and crying, but not before I see the splat on Mr. Chandler’s pant leg and the look of horror on his face. I know Daniel well enough to know that there’s probably a look of sheer delight on his.

I don’t dare move, but I can hear Mr. Chandler directing his secretary to make three phone calls: one to Mrs. Hurley, one to the school nurse, and the other — before I can think how to stop him — to Janna.

The first time I wake up, I’ve forgotten that we ever left Janna’s. My old flannel nightgown, the one I love even though there’s a hole in the elbow, is wrapped around me. I pull the down comforter up to my chin and glance around the room, listening for familiar voices, wondering whether it’s a school day, whether Janna is going to pop her head into the room and tell me to get my sweet butt out of bed.

And then I remember.

I remember throwing up on Mr. Chandler’s leg, burning up in the nurse’s office while waiting for Janna to come. I remember Janna placing an arm around me and leading me to the car. I remember her suggesting I sit in the front seat and handing me plastic shopping bag in case I needed to throw up again. I wanted her to tease me, to say something funny to help make up for the humiliation of what had just happened, like Gage would have. I wanted her to say, “God, I’ve missed you.” But she didn’t.

The second time I wake up, I don’t have to remind myself of what happened; my stomach is doing a repeat performance. I lean over and puke into the trash can. I don’t want to think of Janna, of where she might be or what she’ll say when she comes into the room and smells the vomit. Instead, I think of Gage. What time of day is it? Did he go to Head Start to pick me up? Has anyone told him where I am? But these worrisome thoughts mix with my feverish dreams and I fall back to sleep again.