The Limit (9 page)

I found Coop standing frozen outside the first door in the hall, his finger to his lips. “Dude, listen.”

“Whose . . . is that Reginald’s room?” It clicked. Reginald—first cubicle, first room. Me—fifth cubicle, fifth room. It only took me what—three hours to figure out? They were going to drop-kick me off the top floor if I didn’t start catching on to things a lot faster around here.

“He’s in there.” Hitching his thumb, Coop
tapped Reginald’s door. A soft, constant, metallic clanging noise made it through that heavy top-floor bedroom door.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“Beats me.” Coop’s wide, goofy smile wiggled around his face. “I dare you.”

My eyebrows arched high. “To . . .”

“Find out whatever you need to know, man. Get answers to all your questions.” He made circles in the air in front of my face with his index finger. Slowly he lowered the finger.

“Coop, what are you . . . No!”

He pressed the finger firmly against the neon-green rectangle of light on the wall right next to the doorknob. Before I could suck in my next breath, he zipped back through the door to the cubicle area and out of sight.

“Coop!” I whispered my scream, knowing it wouldn’t do any better if I bellowed it. One loud metallic clunk came from inside the room and then silence. I twisted to look way down the hall, to my bedroom. Nope, I’d never make it. Follow Coop? Maybe I could make that. Heavy footsteps pounded toward the door. I glanced up, wondering where the security cameras were. What kind of punishment would a Top Floor get for doorbell ditching?

“Who is it?” The voice coming through the door was very deep. This Reginald guy must be old.
Sixteen or seventeen, maybe.

“I . . . uh . . . I’m Matthew Dunston. Um, you know . . . I’m new to the top floor and I thought it would be nice to meet everyone.” Rolling my eyes, I shook my head in disgust at how wimpy and high-pitched my voice had come out.

“Oh.” Long pause. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

Silence. Awkward, eternal silence. Isn’t it a normal reaction for people to open the door when someone rings the bell? I may have been the newest newbie on the top floor, but I was getting the picture pretty darn clearly that Reginald was not your typical “normal” person.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” I said.

“No.”

No?

“How’s it going, dude?” Coop had sneaked back into the hall. “No Reginald sighting yet, huh?”

“I’m working on it,” I whispered back to him. “So, Reginald, we . . . uh, were just wondering if you want to see this . . . cool thing Coop has.”

Coop’s eyes bugged out, and his mouth dropped open, forming the word
What?

“We’ll think of something,” I whispered.

“Can’t,” came Reginald’s deep voice.

“Sure you can,” I said. “We still have a few minutes until lights-out. Just open the door.”

“Go away now.” A few seconds later the metallic clanking started up again.

Coop and I kept our ears pressed to the door.

“Maybe he’s building something,” I said.

“Right,” Coop deadpanned. “He must have an anvil in there. Do you think he’s making a suit of armor?”

Three musical dings reverberated throughout the hallway—the five-minutes-until-lights-out warning.

We headed toward our rooms.

“No, wait,” I said. “I’ve got it. He’s chipping away at his wall. He’s trying to break out.”

“Yeah, right.” Coop’s hair flopped around his head as he laughed. “Like he’d want to do that.”

The door between Coop’s and Isaac’s opened, and Jeffery poked his head into the hall. “I hope you two best buddies had a
great
time. You couldn’t come close to how much fun I had. I’m halfway finished with my LEGO sculpture of an electron microscope. Oh! Another delivery.”

He bent down and scooped up the two boxes that were sitting on the floor outside his door and disappeared back inside his room.

“Time’s almost up. Tomorrow, dude.” Coop hustled into his own room.

I made my way alone to the second to last door. My room.

I’d only gotten as far as putting on my pajama bottoms before—just as Coop had warned me—all the lights in my room began to fade. I glanced at my watch. Yep. Ten o’clock on the dot.

Coop was wrong about one thing. Brushing your teeth in the dark isn’t so bad.

My eyes popped open. The clock on the nightstand told me it was just after one in the morning. The clock was neon-green, instead of red like the one at home. It took me a minute to remember where I was.

I sprang out of bed. Shoot. I’d let it slip my mind. What time was it again? Too late for a live contact. I’d meant to try to call—if I could ever get a signal—or e-mail my parents and Brennan and Lester before I went to bed. This top floor had a way of distracting you.

Ouch!
I stubbed my toe on the leg of one of the table chairs as I felt my way to the closet. Overcorrecting to make sure I cleared the rest of the table, I crashed into the sofa.
Okay. Slow down. The end of the sofa is
—I slid my hands across the back of it until it dropped off—
here, so the closet is to my left—forward and at an angle. Nothing else there to trip over, if I remember right.

I hadn’t remembered I’d dumped my gym shoes outside the closet, and I stumbled over them. Forget groping around in the dark. Coop had to be wrong.
There
had
to be a way to get light in the middle of the night. What if some kid got sick? I found the wall and slid my hand along it, feeling for a light switch. There weren’t any.

Eventually, I made my way to the big walk-in closet. I found my jeans right off—underneath my sweaty gym clothes—since they were one of the few items of clothing in there and I’d dumped them right in the middle of the floor. The other clothes I owned—the pajamas I’d ordered the night before and the clothes I’d worn to the workhouse—had magically morphed from a dirty pile in my room on the first floor into neatly washed, ironed, and folded bundles I found sitting on the wide shelves of my top floor closet when I first arrived. Even my boxers had been ironed. Talk about freaky. Made me consider throwing out my dirty underwear and ordering a new pair each day.

My cell phone was easy enough to find in the front pocket of my jeans. Still no signal. Sheesh. You’d think this building was in the back of a cave, or buried a hundred feet underground or something. The phone wouldn’t have lasted long, anyway, since I’d left the charger at home. It did put off enough of a glow to help me find my way to the computer sitting on the desk next to the door.

The computer wouldn’t turn on either—shut down
for the night like all the lights. Grumbling, I slumped back to bed, where I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours.

First thing in the morning I shot off some e-mails to Brennan, Lester, Mom and Dad, Nana—wondering what ever happened with the broken ankle situation since the limit crisis sort of took over—and, at the last minute, Lauren.

It’s a race
, I said to them, even though they couldn’t hear.
Let’s see which one of you is the first to write back.
My bet was on Brennan. He lived on the computer almost as much as I did.

No one won. Not a single person wrote back the next day.

Or the next.

I received messages from Honey Lady, and I sent out more messages to my family and friends.

By day three I knew there was a problem with the network or the programming or something. The people on the outside might have gone a day or two without answering me, but three? No way. I sent a message to Honey Lady:

I’d wanted to blame the silence on a computer problem, but Honey Lady’s response put an irritating grain of an idea into my brain. What if my family and friends really weren’t writing to me? What if they were beginning to forget all about me and were going on with their lives like I didn’t exist anymore? I could disappear in this workhouse, and no one outside would even care.

EIGHT A.M. TIME FOR SCHOOL
.

I headed out my bedroom door, my stomach full and satisfied. Biscuits and gravy. Who’d have guessed a warm breakfast could taste so good? Mom was a fantastic cook, especially when our oven worked, but she wasn’t much of a morning person. The most she ever did to prepare breakfast was point the way to the cereal cupboard.

I’d been experimenting for two weeks now. Every day since I’d arrived at the FDRA workhouse, I’d tried something new and exciting for breakfast. Belgian waffles with strawberries and cream. Breakfast burritos. Stuffed crepes. French toast. Blueberry pancakes. And lots of eggs with bacon or sausage.

I’d probably weigh three hundred pounds by now if Coop didn’t keep me running around the paddle-wall-ball court or swimming every second after work.

“Hey, Coop,” I said as I shut my door behind me.

“Hey, bro.” We didn’t have anything else to say to each other. Nothing new to report since we
split up last night ten minutes before lights-out. I’d gotten good at my timing so I wouldn’t have to get ready for bed in the dark anymore.

“More boxes.” I nodded my head at the one large and two small boxes sitting outside Jeffery’s door.

“Things never change much on the top floor,” said Coop.

Jeffery’s door flew open. The moment he saw us, his entire face soured.

“What’s the delivery today?” I asked, pretending the two of us had ever had a civil conversation together.

“Like you even care,” he said, scooping up the small boxes. “You can’t blame a guy for trying to fill up the long, boring hours he has to spend by himself each night because
someone
came along and stole his only friend.”

Coop reached out and clamped a playful hand on his shoulder. “Hey, little dude, call a time-out.”

“Jeff, you know you’re always welcome to join us for paddle-wall-ball. Anytime.”

He glared at me, squinting his eyes until they were almost completely closed. “It’s
Jeffery
.” Ugh. I knew that. He’d told me at least a dozen times over the past two weeks. I just couldn’t get used to using such a formal name on a twelve-year-old kid.

“Sorry.”

He dumped the small boxes inside his room and
moved on to pushing the larger one through his doorway, since it was too heavy to pick up.

“And just what would the two of you do with me if I showed up in the middle of your precious paddle-wall-ball game? Use me as a target? Gee, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

“Fine. Be like that. See if we ever try to be nice to you again.” I nudged Coop, and the two of us headed down the hall.

“Sorry, little Jeffery man, I really do like hanging with you when you’re not teed off at me.” Pausing in front of the last door before the hallway ended, Coop put one finger to his mouth.

“Is he in there?” I whispered.

“Don’t think so, but we can try. Just to be sure.” With his goofy grin plastered on his face, Coop started pounding on Reginald’s door and ringing the bell over and over again.

“Forget it.” I headed into the cubicle area. “We’re never going to get out here before he does. See?” I threw an arm toward the glass cube, the sliding door securely closed. I even risked a visit from a security guard by tugging on the handle. Locked. “He must wake up at like, four in the morning to make sure he beats everyone else.”

“We’ll get him someday,” said Coop.

“You bet we will—it just won’t be in the morning.”

We reached Coop’s cubicle. As he was about to begin his daily ritual of shooting free throws with his Nerf ball and hoop before sitting down to his computer, I snatched the ball and swooshed it through myself.

“Bro!” He swiped the ball off the floor, and I slipped around the wall into my cubicle.

Time for my own morning ritual.

Shoot!
They still hadn’t fixed the problem with my e-mail. The only item in my in-box was Honey Lady’s daily motivational, rah-rah message. I didn’t even read them anymore. They were always sappy sayings, like,
Learn to LOVE to work HARD, and you will discover that it is not HARD to WORK. The person who remains down once he falls ends up with nothing but a mouthful of mud. The slothful and lazy not only lose the game—they lose at life.
Whatever.

I sent Honey Lady what was turning out to be my daily message to her:
PLEASE FIX MY E-MAIL!!!

Two weeks and nothing. After two
days
I started wondering if she was ignoring my requests on purpose. Since I also couldn’t make calls on my phone, I began to think she was trying to cut us workhouse kids off from the outside—why she would do this, I had no idea. Then I asked some of the other Top Floors, and every one of them said they had no problem getting their outside
e-mail. Good-bye, conspiracy theory. I was stuck with plain old boring technical difficulties. I knew Honey Lady was busy, but how long would it take for her to send a message to a tech support person?
Just fix it already, Honey Lady!