March!” Mrs. Wolfowitz pointed toward the wall. Owen glared at Summer. She grinned at him. Summer Crawford might think she was funny, but I knew that the look on Owen’s face meant trouble.
“Now!” Mrs. Wolfowitz ordered.
Owen stomped off toward the side of the room. Everybody else in the lunchroom sat at their tables and watched him go. There was no talking, no laughing, no slurping, no chewing. The only other sound in the room was the gurgle-gurgle-gurgle of the water fountain.
“WHAT ARE THE REST OF YOU WAITING FOR? GET MOVING!”
Max and the two boys from Mrs. Novotny’s class got up and slunk over to join Owen at the wall. Summer and I hurried after them double-time.
Mrs. Wolfowitz made us stand in a line with our backs against the side wall. “And stay there until I tell you to move,” she warned, then returned to her seat in the center of the room.
We stood there so long I thought I might keel over. I watched the kids at the tables like I was watching a movie of a lunchroom. Or a movie of a teacher’s idea of a lunchroom. It was weirdly quiet. All the other kids finished eating their lunches in a kind of careful slow motion. No one looked at us, not even when the bell rang and they had to file out right past where we were standing. They avoided contact with us like they thought our trouble might be contagious. Even Nick didn’t look at me. He just blinked and blinked as he walked by. His face was about as white as a freckled face could get.
After everyone else had left, Mrs. Wolfowitz pulled a big ring of keys from her pocket. She marched to the wall next to the food counters and stuck one of the keys into a lock. I’d never noticed a door there before. The door creaked open. It was very dark on the other side.
“Go,” she said.
One by one we filed into the darkness. Mrs. Wolfowitz stepped in and slammed the door behind her. I gulped. I shut my eyes and opened them again to make sure my lids were up. They were. Was this how that kid had disappeared? What would Nick tell my dad when I didn’t come home today? The smell of wet cat filled my nose and I started on a slow burn. I knew whose fault this was. Owen would always be Owen, but none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for Summer Crawford.
There was a deafening crash. Then a light came on. The first thing I saw in the harsh glare was the lunch lady holding the pull cord from a dangling bulb. Just behind her was Owen, sprawled in a collection of janitor’s buckets. Mops stuck out from the wringers at crazy angles.
“Get up,” Mrs. Wolfowitz said to him. “Then all of you, in line.”
We stood shoulder to shoulder facing the lunch lady. She looked us over, sizing us up for something—jail cells…or worse. The dim bulb swung back and forth with a slow eek-eek-eek.
“You!” We all jumped. She was pointing to the bigger boy from Mrs. Novotny’s class. He let out a whimper.
“No talking!” Mrs. Wolfowitz grabbed a big trash barrel and pushed it toward him. She handed the short, round-faced boy a broom. Max and I got sponges and spray bottles shoved into our hands. Summer got a dustpan and whisk broom. “You clear off the tables and clean up after the broom boy,” the lunch lady said.
“Since you like the buckets so much, you get this.” She rolled a bucket at Owen, holding it by its mop. The wheels squeaked and soapy water sloshed around inside. “As soon as the others clear a row, it’s your job to mop the floor.”
Mrs. Wolfowitz opened the door again. I had never been so glad to see the zoofeteria.
“Clean this place until it sparkles,” she said, “and then you can go back to class.”
I looked around at the tables gobbed with food. I surveyed the floor, ankle deep in greasy napkins and popped milk cartons. Then I kind of wished she had just made us disappear. Forget recess, forget class, and forget free time. It would take hours to clean all this up. It seemed entirely possible that we’d find that missing fifth grader buried under a pile of mushed-up hot dog buns. Now I get it, I thought. We’ll never leave here. This actually is how Mrs. Wolfowitz makes kids disappear.
“C’mon, Nadie. I bet we can finish way before these guys,” Summer said, louder than she needed to. She looked at Owen and pushed her hair behind her ears.
“No talking!” Mrs. Wolfowitz snapped.
Summer started sweeping trash from the tables into her dustpan. Owen ran to the end of the row, pulling his squeaky bucket with him. I followed Summer, sponging the tables she had cleared, but I kept my distance. This was already the worst trouble I’d ever been in. No good could come of challenging Owen to a cleaning race, and I knew it.
Max wiped down the benches while I wiped the tables. He brought along a dishpan of soapy water for rinsing the sponges.
Mrs. Wolfowitz called Mr. Allen and Mrs. Novotny on the intercom and told them we’d be late coming back to class. “That’s right, Mr. Allen,” she said, nodding. “Owen, Max, Nadine, and the new girl.”
She went into the kitchen area and sat down on a stool. Mr. Jacobs, the cook, handed her a mug of coffee. I wondered for a minute why Mr. Jacobs, who had a total of maybe six hairs, wore a hairnet every day. Then I went back to sponging. There’d be plenty of time to ponder this and other lunchroom mysteries if getting in this kind of trouble meant my noon meetings at the Springville Spark were over.
How much trouble will I be in because of this? I worried. What if someone else gets to take over my job on the Spark? Mr. Allen had already mentioned to me that Gordon was interested in being art editor. I didn’t want to give up my job on the magazine, but even more important, I didn’t want to give up our lunchtime meetings, the only time in the whole school day when I could just be normal with Nick.
All Gordon ever wanted to draw were robots anyway. What kind of a magazine would that be? I squeezed the sponge into the dishpan. The water had turned greenish brown, and now it gave off a moldy kind of smell. I thought I might throw up, but I held my breath and kept wiping.
After a few rows my arms and shoulders ached from scrubbing, so I stretched and looked around. Summer had almost finished clearing off the tables and was already sweeping up the trash piles on the floor. The bigger boy from Mrs. Novotny’s class was following her with the trash barrel, and the boy with the broom was working his way down the rows, sweeping steadily to make way for Owen and his mop.
When I bent back to my scrubbing, I thought I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye—a quick, sneaky kind of motion. But when I looked over, all I saw was Owen, mopping the floor. He didn’t seem to be racing Summer at all. For some reason that gave me a bad feeling in the bottom of my stomach.
I kept checking on Owen, but he always just seemed to be concentrating on his job. Then I caught him. I saw him quickly scoop a pile of stuff from a trash can and dump it on the floor. He was making more messes for Summer to pick up. I heard Mrs. Wolfowitz and Mr. Jacobs laughing in the kitchen. I had to get Owen to stop before things got too out of hand. I mean, how much more trouble did he want us all to get into?
“Owen,” I hissed.
Too late. Summer had seen him, too. She grabbed her dustpan and whisk broom and made a beeline for Owen. Now he was dumping trash piles as he went, dragging his bucket along with him and slopping water everywhere. This could only end in disaster. I shook my head. I waved my sponge. But I might as well have been invisible. They were on a collision course and the crash point was me. Max and the other two boys just stood there and watched Summer and Owen close in.
Owen veered around the end of my row carrying a handful of trash to dump somewhere. Summer raced toward him from the other end of the row, holding the dustpan in front of her. I dropped my sponge and held my hands out to keep them apart.
“Yah!” Owen shouted. He shoved the mop and bucket at Summer. It rolled past me and I grabbed for the mop handle. The bucket skidded over with a sickening crash. Gray-green water streamed across the floor and slopped over the feet of Mrs. Wolfowitz, who had reappeared on the scene with enormously bad timing.
The lunch lady looked down at her shoes. Then she looked long and hard at me. I was still holding the mop.