December Park(146)

“I just remembered there’s an open window in the back,” I said. “At least it was when I was a kid.”

“Why in the world would you come out here when you were a kid?” Michael asked.

“I was flying a toy airplane.” I pointed through the thicket. “The woods end up there along a cliff that overlooks the bay.”

As we walked to the back of the building, I kept catching glimpses of Stanton School in its fa?ade—but those glimpses were like seeing fleeting sanity behind a crazy person’s eyes. This building was something else, something other.

The rear of the building was overgrown in ivy. It looked deliberately camouflaged, and I was overcome by the unsettling notion that the building was an ancient and living thing that purposely hid itself from the rest of Harting Farms. It didn’t want to be found. It wasn’t part of our world.

But yet it was.

“There,” I said, pointing at a high window that was mostly overgrown with ivy. It was the black pit, the Cyclops eye I remembered from my youth.

“If the interior is anything like Stanton,” Peter said, “then this would be where the gymnasium is.”

Adrian came up beside him. “That window is pretty high. How are we supposed to reach it?”

“We’re not,” Peter said. “That’s the point.”

“That’s the only way in that I can see,” I said. “I wonder if the ivy is strong enough for handholds.”

Adrian approached the building and grabbed a fistful of ivy. The leaves came away in his hand, revealing spaghetti-thin vines underneath. “Not a chance.”

“That’s nothing,” Michael said. He juggled bits of stone that had probably come off one of the busted statues. “I can get us up there.”

“Yeah?” Scott said. “How?”

“My parents are freaks. They’re always worried I’m gonna get hit by a car, drown in the river, or die in a fire. I’ve got this fire-escape ladder in my bedroom in a box. We can hook it to the window and climb up.”

Peter nodded. “That could work.”

“Of course it’ll work. Why wouldn’t it? We can come back tomorrow when I get out of school.”

“It’s getting late,” Peter said. “We should call it a night.”

“I’m not going home,” Adrian said.

“You have to,” I told him.

“I don’t care about the stupid curfew. I want to go in there.”

“We will. Just not tonight.”

“I can feel it,” he said. “We’re at the end of it. Whatever we’ve been looking for is in there. I want to go in and find it.”

“We will,” I said again. “Tomorrow.”

“I want to find out what happened to those kids.” Adrian looked at me. There was a firmness to his face that I’d never seen before. “You guys go if you want, but I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. I’m going to find a way in.”

I snagged his backpack off the ground. It was heavier than I’d expected. “We’re going home, man.”

“No.”

“We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“No!” Adrian dropped to his knees and hung his head. I didn’t know what he was doing until I heard him release an agonized sob.

We stared at him in utter amazement.

“You guys don’t understand,” he bawled. “This is important! Do you think this is some kind of game?”

“Hey, man,” Michael said, taking a step toward him. But he froze and said no more the second Adrian spun his head around to glare at him. His face was red, and slick tracks of tears spilled down his cheeks.

Peter put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “If the cops catch us out here after curfew, we’re in big trouble,” he said to Adrian. His voice was calm and reasonable. “We’ll all be grounded, and we can forget about coming back here for the rest of the summer. Do you understand?”

“I won’t get grounded,” Adrian returned. “The cops can’t do anything to me.”

Just as calmly as before, Peter said, “Then you’ll have to finish this on your own. But then you’re breaking your promise.”

“What promise?”

“The promise that we stick together, that we do this together.” His words were almost visible things that got caught in the air like flecks of dust in a spider’s web.

I anticipated another hysterical outburst, but Adrian remained on his knees and stared at Peter in silence, his Adam’s apple jouncing each time he swallowed. He flexed his hands in the dirt and cleaved trenches in the soil.

Adrian stood and brushed the dirt off his legs. He sniffled, then wiped his nose on his arm. When he looked at us, his grin was so unexpected it frightened me.

“Okay,” he said in his small birdlike voice. He could have been ten years old as he shuffled over to me and took his backpack strap out of my hand. He worked his shoulders through the straps, a runner of snot glistening across his left cheek like the trail of slime left behind by a snail. “Let’s go home.”





That night I dragged a folding chair out to the front porch and, with a book in my lap, kept watch over the Gardiner house. Adrian could fool the others but he didn’t fool me: I knew it wasn’t beyond him to sneak out and go back to the Patapsco Institute by himself.