H2O (15 page)

It was like the worst of your most embarrassing nightmares about school come true. You know, when you suddenly realize you don't actually have any clothes on in the middle of math class, and everyone is laughing at you, and whatever you find to cover yourself with shrinks to the size of a Kleenex or goes see-through in your hands; or you suddenly need to go to the bathroom and all the toilets are locked, but it's coming out anyway, and you have to run everywhere trying to find a private place to go, but there isn't one; or you dream you're kissing some disgusting—like, really disgusting—boy you wouldn't ever EVER EVER want to kiss.

You know what I mean? The kind of nightmare you wouldn't even want to tell your best friend? 'Cause it's TOO weird and TOO disgusting? Even though you basically trust your best friend completely, but there's this fear she might laugh her head off and tell everyone? (And then they'd all laugh at you, just like how it was in your nightmare?)

When I woke up, I was in the recovery position—know what that is? It's how you lay people when they've just fainted or had some other kind of hideous thing happen—so they don't choke on their own vomit. I woke up with the side of my face stuck to a garbage bag and…and…I opened my eyes, and practically lying on the garbage bag in front of my face was another face. The bespectacled, spotty, nerdy face of…

Freak. Bespectacled, spotty, nerdy, nobody freak.

“Ruby?” he said.

His face was about half a nanometer from mine.

I gasped in utter horror, shoved him away, and sat up—too fast. Little fuzzy fairyballs of light danced in the air around the face of—

“Here,” he said, practically drowning me as he sloshed water into my mouth.

I peeled the garbage bag off my face, snatched the bottle from him, and glugged; it was yukkily warm.

Sip
, I heard my mom say.
Sip, Ruby.
For another few seconds more, I ignored her; then I forced myself to slow down. To sip.

I remember I looked at that bottle, and I could see backwash flecks floating in it—which couldn't have been mine, being as how I'd not eaten anything. YEURCH!

That is pretty much when I knew for sure that I wasn't having some weird nightmare/dream thing, but I really was where I was…with—

“What have you done to your hair?” he said.

Darius Spratt.

Unlike whatever they do in novels and stuff, making up all sorts of fancy names to make some kind of lit-err-arr-ee point, or even what they used to do, changing names to protect the innocent in newspapers and things, this name has not been changed.
Darius
Spratt
. If that were my surname, I would change it immediately. And even if I couldn't or I felt like I shouldn't for some family reason—like maybe my ancestors had discovered a country (Sprattland) or at least an island (The Isle of Spratt), or left their tiny village (Sprattington), emigrated, and founded a city (Sprattsville, USA)—I would definitely, no way, not ever call my child Darius. I would call him, I dunno, Mark or Steven or something. Calling your kid that—Darius—it's just drawing attention to it, isn't it? It's just like putting up some massive arrow, pointing to the word S-P-R-A-T-T, so you see it in huge white letters, like the Hollywood sign.

SPRATTYWOOD

It amazed me, even then, even in the middle of the most massive trauma that had ever happened to me or the world—not the fainting, specifically, but the whole of the rest of everything—that I could remember his name, that I even knew who he was. I had never spoken to him before in my life. Why would I? He was the King of Loserville. No, not the king at all—that'd probably have to be Ross Ramsden, so massively a creepy loser that his only friends were teachers, and you could tell even they didn't like him much.

Darius Spratt was not the King of Loserville; he wasn't even the crown prince; he wasn't even a lowly serf. He was, like I said, a nobody nerdy freckly freak.

My knight in garbage-bag armor. HAHAHAHAHAHAHUUUUUUUUR.

“Nothing!” I snapped in response to the hair question. Total nerve, nerd boy.

“Do you need something to eat?” he asked.

Urch! TONE. Tone like…like Simon's. Like asking a question when really there is no question. URCH. YEURCH. Like when really he was saying, “Young lady, I think you need something to eat. Right now!”

He glanced at the sky, removed the elastic bands (oh yes) from the tops of his bright yellow rubber gloves (they're all the rage this season) so he could get them off, and then tore (manfully—not!) through the garbage bag covering his weedy chest. He was wearing a raincoat under it anyway, and on top of that, there was a backpack; he rummaged in it and pulled out a crumpled jumbo bag of peanuts. An open, crumpled jumbo bag of peanuts. Well, that would explain the backwash.

YEURCH! CAN YOU EVER IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE
DISGUSTING?!

I scarfed a couple handfuls.

“Got any more water?” I asked, teeth sticky.

He looked at the sky again—as if it would have changed that quick! No cloud is that fast!—and then (manfully, not!) tore off more of his garbage bag armor until he could get to the backpack on his back. This he plonked down and opened, and pulled out a bottle of water, but not before I saw the bag was full—I mean, like, FULL—of water and boxes of medicine. Whatever. I snatched the water off him and glugged. Sipped. Glugged. Sipped. Glugged—Darius Spratt snatched the water back.

“Hey!” I said, getting to my feet. Little fuzzy fairyballs of light danced in the air, but not so many.

“Slow down,” the Spratt said.

I snatched the water back and glugged more.

I saw the kid then. The Mini-Me Thing with the space gun…the gun that was one of those super-soaking, water-gun things. Plastic. It—she, as I was about to find out—was all taped up. Seemed like the breathing hole wasn't quite in the right place because the garbage bag around it sucked back and forth, and you couldn't even see her eyes, although there were little slits for them.

“Who's that?” I said in between glugs.

“I dunno,” said Darius Spratt.

I lowered the bottle, and I looked at him like,
What?

“She doesn't speak. I just found her.” He thought for a moment. “She found me, actually. At school,” he said and pointed.

He pointed like I didn't know where our school was—which was, like, about three minutes up the road. I mean, of all the places I had thought about going and all the places I hadn't thought about and probably should have gone to, what had never, ever, not even for a trillionth of a millisecond crossed my mind was—

“
School?!
” I said.

(Tone. Note the tone. The whole world had…and he had…gone to
SCHOOL?!
)

Darius shrugged.

“Well, what are you doing here?” he asked.

I shrugged.

See, I think this is the worst thing you could know about me. Or one of them. It's worse than the guinea pigs. I would… I might…have just gone. If it hadn't been for bumping into Darius Spratt, I would… I might…maybe I would have just left those men. Maybe I would have done that. Maybe I was too scared to break into a police station and—

“There are people trapped in there,” I said. “I'm gonna get them out.”

Was I? Was I really?

He didn't shrug, but he made this noise, this “hn” grunt sound that was just the same as a shrug. It had no
tone
; it was just “hn.”

“You
knew?!
” I said.

“Hn.”

“Well, we can't just leave them!”

He didn't say anything then. Not even a
hn
.

“I'm going to get them out,” I said.

I snatched the peanuts off him, scarfed some, then guzzled some water. I think, honestly, I was sort of hoping he'd say something—like come up with some really, really good reason why we should just go. He didn't.

“Right,” I said. I looked around…er, yeah, like I was looking for some way to break in, and I wouldn't be able to find one, and then I'd have to go.

“I've got this,” said Darius Spratt. He pulled a teensy hammer out of his backpack.

“Thanks,” I said.

I took it, just hoping he'd go away so then I could too.

I stalked off and sized up windows.

GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY. Every time I looked around, Darius and the kid were still there, following me.

“Look, just
off, will you? If you're not going to help,” I said as I strode past him.

I got back around to the front door. I attacked it. It was some kind of special glass; the hammer bounced off. Who'd have thought it? Dartbridge Police Station has special anti-smash glass! With any luck, all the windows would be like that, and I could give up (with dignity). I stalked back around the building; Darius Spratt and the small black plastic one followed. I tried another window, and it smashed instantly, like normal glass smashes. And instantly—

“HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

You could hear them clearly.

“A little more clearly,” I want to say, but, really, it was totally clearly. There was no going back.

That window, it was too high up for me to just climb in on my own. I looked at Darius Spratt.

“HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

“This is stupid,” he said. “This is so stupid.”

I was going to yee-haa and then some, because the way Darius Spratt said that, it was like a Simon way to say that—like, YOU are stupid—but he stepped forward and gave me a leg up. I could feel his feeble arms straining while I hacked away the remaining glass; then I hauled myself in, on top of someone's desk.

“HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!”

I opened the window, and Beanpole Boy heaved himself in after me, backpacks and all, then turned and waggled a finger at the garbage-bag kid (GBK).

“You stay there,” he said. “Anyone comes, you run. You hide. Go to the school. You know where.”

I dunno whether the GBK understood that; she didn't move.

So there was this door to where they were, a door that was locked—a door that led to another door, with a nothing space, a bench in it, in between. On the other side of that, you could hear them shouting.

Locks have keys. Keys get kept places.

Annoyingly, it was Darius who found them—at the front desk, the place where you go to tell the police stuff, like
help, help the whole town's rioting
, or that someone's stolen your bike (which you'd forgotten to lock). Behind that was a ton of keys. Those got us through the nowhere space. When we came into the corridor of cells, those men started screaming.

The stench of bodies, dead and alive, was incredible. It hit your stomach as loudly as the screams, and the battering at the doors hit your ears. There was a peephole in each door, but I was too scared even to look. I think it would be fair to say that I was terrified. It felt like…if we let them out, we'd get torn apart—like they were wild dogs or demons.

I turned to look at Darius and saw my own terror on his face. We backed up into the nowhere room.

“We'll have to give them your stuff,” I said.

He hesitated.

“They're just hungry and thirsty. They're desperate. We'll give them your stuff and then we'll let them out.”

“They could be murderers,” said Darius.

“What, all of them?”

He shrugged. “Hn,” he said. “In here for a reason, aren't they?”

As much as I pretty much hate Darius Spratt, I can't claim I didn't agree with him. I can't claim I didn't want to just walk away; I wanted to run away—but then it came to me, the truth of it, that couldn't be denied:

“If we don't let them out,
we're
murderers.”

Darius stared at the floor for a moment, then groaned and dumped his supplies.

In the door of each cell was a hatch. We unbolted them, one at a time, and hands snatched what was offered. You had to shut your mind to it, the stink and the shouting and the swearing—and then the fighting you could hear starting up in the cells as desperate men battled over bottles of water, over crummy bags of peanuts.

“Let us out of here!
!
!
! Let us out!”