An Apple for the Creature

The crazed man continued down the hall to the left of the office, and I heard not a sound from the teachers and kids trapped in those rooms. I opened one eye. Though my angle of vision prohibited me seeing very far down the right corridor, which I was facing, I could see that the teacher in the first room had taped construction paper over the window in her door. That was amazingly smart. In the room across the hall, apparently the kids had hidden out of sight of the window, and Brady said, “Where the hell are they?” He sounded merely puzzled. He sounded like a real person, for just a second.

I could get up and run out before he could catch me or shoot me, I thought. He had his back to me, his attention was definitely elsewhere, and if I scrambled up and leaped to the front doors I could be down the sidewalk and behind the cover of the cars before he could get to the doors and aim.

At least, I hoped I could.

And then I wondered about the lone police officer out in front of the school. I didn’t know what kind of person he (or she) might be. He might be so shaken by the seriousness of the event that he was ready to shoot whoever came out the doors, especially a bloody stranger running directly toward the patrol car.

While I was doing my best impersonation of a dead person and listening as intently as I could to both Brady’s physical actions and his mental chaos, I kept cudgeling myself to develop a plan. If I was out of his sight for a few seconds, should I move? Was staying right here the best policy? If I hid, where could that be?

Then I did something I should have done before. I reached out for Hunter.

Hunter? You okay?

There was a long moment of silence. Aunt Sookie? Did he shoot you? We heard a gun.

He didn’t shoot me. I’m all messed up to look at, but I’m not hurt.

Who got hurt?

Ms. Minter is hurt, but I think she’s going to be okay, I told him. I hoped I wasn’t lying. She was still alive, anyway.

My cell phone is in my purse, honey, I told him. If Ms. Yarnell doesn’t have one, make sure she uses mine to call 911. There’s a police car outside, but only one.

Ms. Yarnell’s been talking to ’em.

Great! Tell her . . . I began, but then I stopped. There was no way Hunter could relay messages without revealing his secret to all his peers.

Crap.

Tell her you need to borrow the phone to talk to your aunt, Hunter. Hold it to your ear. I’ll be talking to you this way, but they’ll think it’s coming over the phone.

In a minute, he was back on the line—the telepathy line. I think she knows, he said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. What do you want me to tell her?

Tell her Ms. Minter is down, but she’s alive. I’m lying on the floor beside her. Ms. Javitts is locked in the janitor’s closet. The bad man is named Brady, he was Ms. Javitts’s boyfriend.

Why are you lying on the floor, Aunt Sookie?

I sighed, but I kept it in. This was not the best means of communication, but at least we were communicating. I’m pretending to be hurt, I explained.

You’re playing possum.

Yeah, exactly, I said, relieved.

Ms. Yarnell says she needs a straight shot at him.

I puzzled over that. Was Ms. Yarnell telling me she needed a direct field of vision to our attacker, or that she needed no one in between because she meant to literally shoot him? (I put off worrying about an armed kindergarten teacher until later.)

I’d been thinking so hard I’d forgotten to listen for Brady. His feet were right beside me all of a sudden. I closed down everything inside. I was afraid he was going to kick me again, and the anticipation of the pain was almost as bad.

He needed to move three steps back to be in a direct line of sight from the door of the Pony Room. There was no way I could make that happen without moving. I tensed my muscles in preparation.

“No, Aunt Sookie!” screamed a voice down the hall.

Oh, God, no. Brady, shocked, stepped away from my prone form and turned to look down the hall in the direction of Hunter’s voice.

Now! I said.

“Now!” Hunter said to Ms. Yarnell.