Magian High (5 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Mr. Petercriss stared at Amity when she walked into Chemistry.  As she turned down the aisle to come back to our lab station, he actually shouted after her. “Aren’t you going to stay in the hall with all your little friends, Miss Griffin?”

Amity and I exchanged a look of surprise
, and then she spun around to face him.  “Nah, I’m staying in
here
with my friends,” she said.

That drew a wide variety of reactions
, from sneering to thumbs up.  She sat down next to me and avoided eye contact with Petercriss.  “Is he about to blow me up?” she whispered.  I had to cover my mouth to hide my smile.  “Hey, maybe he’ll waste some emotional energy hating me,” she giggled.  “Wouldn’t that be funny?  Was I catching what Flinckey was saying—?”

“Class, quiet down.
  It’s time to start.  We’re diagramming various chemicals today to determine their volatility…”

We settled into quiet
paper work and, five minutes later, Amity passed me a sheet filled with labeled bubbles of elements with electrons and protons.

“How do you do that so fast?”

She thumped the page with her finger, and I looked more closely.  It took me a minute to see what she was pointing at.  She had drawn diagrams all right, but instead of analyzing chemicals, she had written letters to form words—a note.  I read each cluster of bubbles:
Do es st ro ng em oti on tr an sf er ma gi c?
  I nodded.  We locked eyes for a long time, and I could tell she was thinking hard.  Then, she got back to work, and I took the sheet she’d used as a note and crumpled it up quietly.  A couple of minutes later, she passed me another diagrammed note saying we should be careful about the invitations to the party on Friday night because some of the people on the guest list were sitting out in the hall protesting.

Petercriss started down the aisle, checking students’ work.  She slid the note under a blank sheet and got to work on the real assignment.  I think Petercriss saw her, but when he came to look over her shoulder, he frowned and nodded.  He looked at my sheet, too, and said, “I’ll give you credit for not cheating off of your partner’s work, Kincaid.”

I figured that meant I had most of the diagrams wrong, so I started checking over my answers carefully.  A few minutes before the end of class, Amity slid another paper over to me.  I thought, for a second, she had given me the answers, but it was a single diagram:
I th ink I lo ve yo u!

My mouth went dry
even as I felt my neck sweat.  I took her note and folded it several times.  Stuffing it in my pocket, I smiled at her.  Before I got the guts to say anything, Petercriss told us to pass our papers forward.  I’d only done two pages, but Amity turned in four.  She’s amazing.

***

Mr. Blakely’s voice came over the speakers in the hall while everyone was picking their way over Wiser kids’ legs to get to fourth period.  “Your attention please: Mr. Whittle has agreed to facilitate a discussion about the student protests.  Students who wish to present their complaints are invited to go to the library now.  All students who attend will be given an excused absence from fourth period for today only.”

My curiosity was piqued.  As I entered the library, I saw Amity.  She
came up to me.  “You, too, huh?”  She surveyed the room.  “Most of these kids are Wisers.  Are the other people Mages or Corporals?”

I didn’t actually see any Mages except Jack and two of his Punker buddies, hanging out near the door.  Curry was conspicuously absent, and I wondered if Jack knew about Rikki.

By the time the bell rang, most kids had taken seats in the central reading area where there are rows of old wooden tables and chairs.  Some were reading while they waited for Mr. Whittle.  One of Jack’s boys looked out the door down the hall, presumably waiting for him.  Jack himself was at the water fountain.  A moment too late, I realized he’d made a Water Ball.  He threw it right at my face.  The guy never misses.  I lost it and headed over to him, but he and his friends let loose a shower of sparks that filled the air and backed away.  Everyone nearby screamed.  By the time the sparks had landed on the tiled floor, the Punkers were out the door, laughing.  Jack’s voice rang out: “It’s only a matter of time, Kincaid.  The Nomers are never going to survive Magian High.”

I banged on the bar of the door, but it wouldn’t budge.  The
jerk was probably holding it shut on the other side, and I wasn’t about to push against it with all my strength just to have him swing it open so I could fall flat on my face.  Instead, I went over to the water fountain to get a drink and cool off.  Jack had obviously messed with it so that it locked in the ‘on’ position.  It also looked like he’d jammed something in the drain because the water spilled over the edge of the basin and onto the floor.  All of a sudden, it started spraying with about ten times its normal force, splashing water all over the floor.  The other students reacted with alarm.

“What’s going on?”
shouted a girl, trying to open the door on the opposite wall.  “Hey!  It won’t open!”  She kept banging on it.  Soon others were helping.

“
No use.  We were locked in.”

For the first time, I noticed that there
weren’t windows, since it was the central room of the building with everything else built around it.  It was essentially a concrete box with some shelves of reference books.  And, as usual, the librarian wasn’t there to help.

“Fire!”

Jack’s sparks must have caught on the shelf nearest the door he’d gone through.  Flames had eaten about a row and a half of books.  No wonder.  The books were old and dusty, which made them perfect kindling.

One of the other kids went for the fire extinguisher, but the hammer was missing from the case.  He pounded on the glass
with his fist, but of course the glass wouldn’t break.  Another kid picked up a dictionary and tried smashing the glass.  Others scooped water in their hands, trying to splash it at the fire.

One guy punched me in the arm.  “C’mon, Mage
, throw one of your Water Balls at it.”

“I…can’t.  That’s not my—”

“Take off your shirt!” ordered Amity.

“What?”
  I turned and she grabbed at my shirt.

“Take it off. 
Hurry!”

Not knowing what she
had in mind, I pulled my shirt over my head.  She took it from me, ran over to the growing puddle by the water fountain, and soaked it.  Then she started slapping at the flames with it.  Several other guys followed her lead, and in a minute, they’d beaten the flames out.

We all stood there, panting and staring at each other.

“This place is crazy!” yelled one of the guys who’d put out the fire.  “I’m leaving.”  He sloshed over to the door and shoved his big body against it, but it didn’t give an inch.  He started swearing like a madman.

That’s when I
noticed that no water was seeping out under the door.  I stared, horrified.  “The door’s been sealed,” I said.

“What does that mean?”
asked the big guy.

“It’s Elemental Magic
—advanced.  A
grown up
did this to us.”

“Can you get us out with Magic?”
asked a girl hopefully.

Suddenly the sprinkler system went on.
  Late, since the fire was already out.  Magian High really was a dump, after all.  Girls screamed and tried to cover their hair.  I squinted up at the ceiling and counted the faucet heads: twenty-two.  That would pretty much turn all the books in Magian to sludge in a matter of minutes.  Wet Nomers started banging on everything to make noise and vent frustration.  Only Amity and I stayed quiet, watching the door that didn’t open…or let the water seep out.

“You know, we’d better find a way out of this soon.  I can’t swim,” I
said.

Amity gave me her classic look.  “Kincaid
Riley, you scare me with the number of things you
can’t
do.”  I think my face showed the sting because she quickly changed her tone.  “It’s not drowning we need to worry about.  The room’s too big to fill very fast.”  She spun and faced the crowd.  “Hey, everybody, we’ve got to get up out of the water before it hits the outlets!”

Everyone’s eyes searched the walls by the baseboards, and a new wave of screaming and swearing ensued.
  I’d never noticed how close to the ground the outlets were in this room—an inch or two above the floor.

“Hold still, you idiots!” screamed Amity.  “If we stir up the water, it might splash up higher.  Get up on the
chairs and tables or something.”

The sprinklers continued spraying, and I was cold without my shirt.
  The water was seeping into my shoes.  Everyone stared at me, blaming me somehow for what another Mage had done. “C’mon, guys!  We can fit all of us on the tables and the chairs.  Start climbing!”  I lifted Amity up beside me on a chair.  In a minute, we had all crammed ourselves onto the slippery wooden islands, but pretty much everyone had to ditch their books and backpacks to fit, which really made the Wisers mad.  I could see their frustration—all their brilliant work floating in a huge soon-to-be-electrified pool of water.

Some of the
girls were crying, but most were staring down at the water by now.  We had to hold on tight to each other so we wouldn’t fall in.  Everyone voiced the same concern in their own way:
Why hadn’t anyone come to help yet?

I felt horrible about the whole thing.  Like it was partly my fault that these people were being bullied so dangerously, all for some ideal that I had never thought through.  I closed my eyes and buried my face in Amity’s
back.  The room erupted in screams. I opened my eyes and couldn’t see anything.

“What happened to the lights?”

“Must have blown a fuse when the water hit the outlets!”

Amity squeezed my hand.  “This is great,” she said.

“Your idea of ‘great’ and mine are not the same,” I said, shivering in the dark.

“That will have power out all over the school.  Someone will
have
to take action now,” she said.

We listened in the darkness.  The sprinklers had stopped
—probably when the power cut out—but it sounded like the water fountain was still spraying.  Out in the hall, people were yelling and running.  Overhead, it sounded like a marching band practicing formations.

“Does this mean the wate
r is safe?” asked a girl.

There followed some debate, and with the presence of doubt, we all decided not to risk it.  No one felt like getting electrocuted. 
There was a splash and a yell.

“Did someone fall in?  Is
everyone okay?”

A
light appeared above us—a flashlight—and I heard a familiar voice.  “You guys in there?” called Hadley, peeking through a hole left by the fallen ventilation grid.  He swept the light around.  Everybody still clutched each other for dear life, and the glare of the moving light was really disorienting.

“Get us out of here, Hadley!”

“Hang on,” he said.  “I brought help.”

His head and the light disappeared back into the ceiling
with a shuffling sound.  A moment later, a girl hung upside down through the same hole with a light in one hand.  She reached out towards the nearest table.  “Take my hand!”

“What?  Are you
crazy?” asked one of the girls.

“It’s okay.  I’m secure.  I’ve got
two guys holding me up.”

“But you’ll drop me.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Wait!” called
someone else.  “We can’t risk falling in the water.  It might be electrocuted.”

“It’s okay,” said the
upside-down girl.  “We turned the breaker off to make sure.  No juice.”

“What’s up there?”

“We’re in the air duct system,” called Hadley’s voice.  “C’mon, Kincaid, get ‘em moving.  Up up up!”

“Are you sure about the breaker?”

“Curry did it himself,” said the upside down girl.  “And the fire department is on its way.”

“Rikki?
  Is that
you
?” I asked.

“Yeah,
hi!  Can you hurry?  The blood’s rushing to my head.”

I laughed.  “It’s okay, gu
ys.  The electricity’s off!”

“I don’t trust a Mage,” shouted one guy. 
“Especially not a Punker.  They’ve been harassing the Wisers—”

Rikki grunted and pulled herself back up into the hole in the ceiling.
  She stuck her head back out with the flashlight shining at the guy.  “You are so stupid, you know that?  Let me tell you something.”  She swept the light across the group back and forth.  “Mages rely on magic, and Wisers rely on brains.  You’re both stupid.  You should learn that people need to rely on
each other!
  I’m up here hanging by my toes trying to save your sorry butts and you still don’t trust me?”