THURSDAY, 2:36 P.M.
The closet shelves were empty. The walls seemed intact. The ceiling and floor showed no sign of harboring a vent or door.
David was just gone. There one second, not there the next.
Xander stepped in and felt the shelves. They were solidly mounted. He poked at the walls, on the sides, and behind the shelves. They felt firm and unmoving. “David,” he called.
He sighed. “All right, I’m doing exactly what you did.”
He pulled the door completely closed. Blackness engulfed him. The floor seemed to move as though the closet were an elevator. But his stomach didn’t lurch the way it did on elevators. A wind swirled around him and was gone. He felt dizzy. Someone wrapped his arms around him and squeezed.
“David?” he said.
But then he realized it wasn’t a someone. The walls of the closet had squeezed in, becoming so narrow he had to turn sideways. Slits appeared in the closet door. Level with his eyes. Light poured in, blinding him.
“David!” he yelled, panicked now. He pushed against a side wall. It flexed a little and made a metallic popping sound.
He pushed his behind into the back wall. The same kind of flexing. The same sound. He pushed his palm into the front door. It felt like cold metal. “David!” he screamed again.
A metallic click and thunk. The door opened, but its width was now no more than eighteen inches. David stood smiling, holding the door, a step below him. Beyond David, sunlight came in from huge windows. This was not the second-floor hallway. He peered around. He was standing in something like a metal coffin. A coat hook almost snagged a nostril.
“What’s going on?” he said to David. “Where are we?”
“Step out and look.”
Xander squeezed through the metal threshold and stepped down to a tiled floor. He was standing in a short corridor.
To his right, the corridor met another, wider hallway, which
disappeared around a corner. He walked to the corner. Windows lined one wall running the length of the hallway. What lay beyond seemed familiar to Xander, but he couldn’t immediately place it. He turned to see what he had just emerged from. It was a locker, one of a series that occupied the entire wall. They were all painted bright blue.
He said, “What the—”
“We’re in the school!” David said.
“What school?”
“Our school. The one we’re going to next week.”
Xander recognized it now. Outside the windows was the school’s yard of lush grass and picnic tables. Beyond that, the parking lot. In fact, Xander realized, their 4Runner was in one of the slots. He pushed his face close to David’s and whispered, “Dad’s here.”
“What do we do?” David asked.
Xander smiled. “Let’s look around.” He walked back to the locker and shut the door. “Remember this number. One-nineteen.” That made him think of something. He asked David, “That is how you got back, right? Through the locker?”
“Yeah, that’s how I got this.” He pointed to the gash above his eyebrow.
The two of them rounded the corner and headed toward a set of double doors at the far end. Every forty feet or so, the lockers gave way to windowed classroom doors. The lights were off in each one. Soon, the place would be full of kids and teachers with hardly a moment of inactivity. Schools were not meant to be empty. At times like this they seemed lonely and forlorn. Almost sacred, like empty churches.
Ooh, Xander thought. School . . . sacred . . . Two words that did not belong together.
He felt like a trespasser. Which, he guessed, they were. He had not asked to come here. In fact, you could say, he came by force. Besides, his dad was the principal. What were they going to do to him? This was one of those times he’d rather not find out.
David asked, “Why the school, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think it was an accident, or did somebody plan it?”
“I don’t know,” Xander said again.
“Do you think other people know about it?”
“David, I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do.
Anything else?”
“Yeah, do you think all the lockers lead somewhere?”
Xander stopped.
David took three more steps before realizing Xander was no longer by his side. He looked back inquisitively.
“One way to find out,” Xander said.
David took in the lockers nearest them. “Really?” he said, unsure.
“How else are we going to know?”
“Do we have to know?”
Xander thought knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn’t have to work too hard to get it. And especially cool knowledge: how to assemble and fire an M16, how to get your movies to play at Sundance, which lockers were really teleportation devices.
“You don’t want to know?” Xander asked.
David thought about it. His face slowly twisted into an I’m-gonna-eat-it-but-I-know-I’m-not-gonna-like-it expression. “Yeah . . . I kinda do.”
Xander stepped to the nearest locker, number 76. “You or me?” he asked.
David did not approach. “Um . . . why not both of us?”
“Because in The Fly, two life forms teleported at the same time and ended up all mixed together. As much as I love you and all that, I don’t want to be you.”
“I think I saw something like that in SpongeBob. It was pretty gross.”
“So . . . you or me?”
“You?” David said, closing one eye.
Xander shrugged. He put his foot in the locker.
David stopped him. “No, no, wait. I’ll do it. I did it the first time; I can do it again.”
Hey, if Dae wanted to. “You sure?”
David climbed in without a word. Xander started to shut the door. David stopped it with his hand. “What if I end up in somebody else’s linen closet . . . or worse?”
“What’s worse? Like on their dining room table while they’re eating? A trash compactor? You want me to go?”
David closed his eyes. “Shut the door.”
Xander pushed it until the latch clicked tight.
The scream was hideous. For the first time Xander understood the meaning of the term “bloodcurdling.” He pulled up on the latch. His fingers slipped off. The scream went on. He pulled again. Got it. He opened the door. David was hunched over in the tight space.
Laughing.
“Did I get you?” he said.
Xander half-yelled, “You and Dad! What’s with you?”
David looked around. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Unfortunately.” Xander slammed the door. He stormed toward the double doors at the end of the hall, then pulled up.
He turned back to the closed locker door, said, “David, don’t keep it up. Don’t make me come open that door.” The latch rose by itself and the door opened. David popped his head out, displaying a sheepish smile.
Xander said, “You’re getting smarter.”
David stepped out and approached him.
“Look,” Xander said, “all this is weird enough. This is not the time for practical jokes. Don’t you think that whatever can take you from home to school faster than a blink could make you scream like you just did?”
David lost his smile. He bowed his head.
“You could have really been in pain, dying,” Xander continued. “If we’re going to be there for each other, you can’t cry wolf. Understand?”
David nodded.
“Next time you scream, it might be for real and I won’t come because I think you’re joking.”
“I know what ‘cry wolf ’ means,” David said quietly.
Xander gripped David’s shoulder and gave him a little shake. “It’s okay. Just don’t do it again.” When David looked up, Xander saw in his face that he really got it. He didn’t want David to be like Dad with his practical jokes, especially now; and he didn’t want himself to be like Dad with unending lectures. So he patted David on the back and they walked on.