When Shaggy lunges for my sister, I stick out my leg and SPLAT! He’s facedown on the floor. A perk of being invisible. Shaggy didn’t even see it coming.
I don’t even have to tell Quinn what to do next. In a split second we’re both out the door and racing across the lawn. My feet are pounding the ground as hard as my heart is pounding in my chest.
Shaggy has scrambled up, and now he and Buzz are running after us. But Quinn is really dragging. “Faster, Quinn,” I tell her.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she says, panting.
The Reggs are gaining on us. Up ahead, I spot the spout of a sprinkler. If only I knew how to wish it on. Maybe it would keep the Reggs off the lawn.
“Zack,” Quinn says, nearly breathless. “I can’t keep up.”
I tuck an arm around her, sprinting faster than ever. It’s like my legs are doing the work for us both. There’s a roar of wind in my ears. I barely hear the click, click sound in the background. The sprinklers! They’re on!
“My hair!” Quinn whines in my ear. “It’s soaked!”
The droplets bounce off me like Ping-Pong balls. I glance behind. The Reggs are farther in the distance now, on the part on the lawn that isn’t being swept with water.
“Hey, you there!” a voice rings out. “Off the grass!” Coming up behind the Reggs is a man waving a pair of garden shears in disapproval. He manages to catch up to Shaggy and Buzz.
Quinn and I have reached the sidewalk at the far end of the field. She bends over, holding her knees with her hands, trying to catch her breath. The end of her braid is drip, drip, dripping onto the cement. I know we’ve got to keep running, but I don’t know where to.
“We just seeded the lawn,” the gardener is yelling at the Reggs. “Didn’t you see the sign to keep off it?”
“But that girl,” Shaggy says. “She was on the grass, too, and she’s getting away!”
“You worry about yourselves,” I hear the gardener say. “That’s the trouble with kids these days—always more concerned with what others are doing and no-accounts themselves. I’ll deal with her after I deal with you.”
“He’s going to deal with me?” Quinn gasps.
I spin around, trying to think of where to run next, when I see the building with big black iron letters spelling it out, plain as day: PRESTON H. TWENDEL III HALL.
“That’s where Trey lives!” I say, pointing to the dorm that bears his name.
“How do you know?”
“I just do—get that key card ready.” We break into a run—well, I run and drag Quinn along with me.
We’re at Twendel Hall III. For a split second I think maybe I’m wrong about the dorm. Maybe Trey wouldn’t want to live in a building with his name on it. But when Quinn swipes the card in the slot, it totally works.
Inside is a lobby, not as large as the one in Twendel II, but still pretty fancy. There’s a dark wood floor so polished, I can practically see my face in it, and red leather wingback chairs on either side of a fireplace.
Quinn collapses into one of the chairs, while I look around. To the right is a hallway leading to dorm rooms, and a stairwell, which I guess leads to even more dorm rooms. From the outside, we could see the building was three stories tall. “Come on,” I tell her. “There’s no time to waste.”
She trudges down the first hall with me. I’d been worried about how we’d figure out which room is Trey’s, but now I see every door is decorated with a cutout of a big red balloon showing the names of the two kids who live there:
Adam Upton and Eric Ballard
Keith Washington and Derek Strausser
Gabe Pickler and Charles Martin
I don’t feel bad about going into Trey’s room without permission because we have his key card, and besides, technically Quinn is Trey now. But I feel a little strange about going into his roommate’s room without permission.
I shouldn’t have worried, though, because there at the end of the hallway on the third floor is the only door with just one name in the red balloon. The name that matches the name on the building: Preston H. Twendel III.
Well, to be accurate, there’s another name on the balloon. It’s blacked out, but I can see that the first name starts with an N and the last name ends with an X. Directly across the hall is a door with three names on it. The third name is squeezed in on the bottom of the balloon, and it says: Nick Marx.
My guess—this Nick Marx found out he was rooming with Trey and wasn’t having it. The other kids across the way felt bad for him, and they let him move in. I feel a pang for Trey, because I know what it’s like to not have friends.
But then I remind myself: I have a friend. Eli. Plus, Uncle Max, plus, my cousins. Plus, I didn’t exactly think Trey was so nice when I met him, and I wouldn’t want to room with him, either. I’d be a way better roommate. I’d keep everyone safe.
But there’s still a problem. The door doesn’t have a swipe thing for a key card. There’s a keypad by the handle, and I guess to open the door you have to type in the right number combination. Figuring that out would take hours—days even. And we don’t have that kind of time.
“Now what, genie?” Quinn asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit.