Variant

It was colder than it appeared from the window. Becky folded her arms tightly, her shoulders raised as she tried to fend off the chill.

It smelled good out here. Completely different from inside the school, but also unlike the cold nights back home. Fresh and earthy. For a moment I thought I got a whiff of wood smoke, but couldn’t be sure.

Freedom. I felt free.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said.

Her arm touched mine as she stood beside me. “Okay.”

“Who decides the punishments?”

There was a pause. She seemed like she’d been expecting something else.

“The school,” she finally said, as if it was obvious.

“Does Isaiah have anything to do with it?”

From the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head. “No. We get the list of punishments every morning, and then the teachers read them in class.”

“They come on your computers?”

“Well, no. They come on Isaiah’s computer,” she said. “So, I was wrong. He distributes the list to the teachers to make the announcements. At least, that’s what would happen with Laura, back when…”

Her voice trailed off.

I wanted to believe her. But she’d never believe me.

“What if-” I stopped myself. What was I going to say?

Becky turned to me. She was shivering now, but didn’t move back toward the door.

“What if,” I continued, “things here aren’t what we think they are?”

She smiled, but it seemed sad. “What are they?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked down at her, her face pale in the dim light. I wanted to put my arm around her.

“We can go back inside,” I finally said.

But Becky just stared at me, the smile gone from her face. Her eyes flashed out to the forest and then back to me.

“What time is it?” she finally asked.

I checked my watch. “Seven thirty.”

“It feels later,” she said, staring out at the cold, dark forest.

“We can go in. Your feet have to be freezing.”

She nodded absently and exhaled long and slow, her breath a puff of gray in the cold air.

“I want to show you something,” she said, and motioned for me to follow her. Before I could say anything she was down the steps and heading across the lawn. I jogged after her to catch up.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to show you something,” Becky repeated. We were going around the front of the school, walking past the deep window wells. The last time I’d been outside in the dark, I’d been right here, with a girl. I could see it all, replaying over and over.

I tried to push it away, to focus on something else. The distant hum of a four-wheeler engine. The crunch of the frosted grass under my shoes. The swirling clouds of frozen breath that escaped Becky’s lips.

She led me to the corner of the school. Directly above us was the boys’ dorm, but no one could have seen us. We were too close to the building.

She stepped into the garden and crouched down. I didn’t see anything. Just the foundation-bricks and cement and dirt. It was too dark to make out any details.

“I had the groundskeeping contract once,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “A long time ago, before the gangs. A bunch of the girls bid on it together-me and Laura and Carrie and… some others you never met.”

She took my hand and pressed it against something at the base of the wall. It was ice cold. Metal.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s too dark to read it, but can you feel the numbers with your fingers?”

It was some kind of pipe jutting out of the cement, and I could tell there were raised bumps, but they were rough and uneven with rust and age. I couldn’t guess the numbers.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Eighteen ninety-three,” she said. “Around the bottom side of the pipe it says Steffen Metalworks, but you have to lie down in the garden to read it.”

“What does it mean?”

Becky stood, shivering now. “Let’s get back inside.”

I followed her. “Does that mean this place was built in 1893?”

“The pipe is from 1893,” she said.

“What was in New Mexico in 1893?”

“No idea,” she said, rubbing her arms to stay warm. “But there wasn’t much. There wasn’t much in Arizona in 1893-mining towns and Catholic missions and Native Americans. Probably the same for here.”

“Maybe they just used an old pipe when they were building this.”

We climbed the stairs, and the door unlocked for her. Warmth poured out of the foyer as we stepped inside.

“Maybe,” she said, turning to look at me. Her cheeks were red from cold. She lowered her voice, even though no one was in sight. “But either way, this building is really old, and it seems designed to be Maxfield Academy. Even the elevators don’t look like a recent addition.”

“What are you saying?”

“People have been here for a long time. A really long time.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Becky’s trademark smile came back. “Since when does anything here make sense?”

I almost told her, right there. I almost spit it all out.

But there’s a difference between believing that the building was really old and believing that one of our friends was a robot.

I needed to show her. I had to find a way.