Pass/Fail (2012) (11 page)

“I had to stay with you,” Megan said. “I had to make sure you were okay.”

Cody went on, “I followed him half way to the teacher’s wing, but then he just disappeared. He turned a corner and when I went around that same corner he was nowhere to be seen. I think they must have a secret passage there somewhere.”

“Then Cody came back to us,” Megan finished, “and we agreed we couldn’t just leave you there. So we carried you here. There were kids in the halls—it must have been between periods—and they just stared at us, nobody even offered to help. There was one kid, in a black t-shirt, he asked if you were dead and I just didn’t know. I didn’t even answer him. Cody thought this would be a safe place so we brought you here and—”

“And—” Cody said.

Jake held up one goopy hand to stop them.

“Thanks,” he said. He was looking at Megan.

She smiled back.

“So,” Jake said, closing his eyes. He felt weak and small, but the sunlight on his skin was helping. “So now I know what happened. I’m still wondering how it happened.”

“What do you mean?” Cody asked.

Jake nodded. “Cody, did you take the galvanometer out of the music room or did you just leave it there?”

Cody looked away. “I was afraid to touch it. Do you want me to go back and look for it?”

Jake shook his head. “The Proctors or Mr. Zuraw or somebody will have taken it away by now. They don’t want me to get my hands on it again. They know I would take it apart to see how they did it, whether there was actually a battery in there or a capacitor or whatever.”

“I didn’t think,” Cody said.

Jake shrugged. “Honestly, it’s not that important. What really bothers me is that

when I went to Mr. Irwin, I hadn’t told anybody about my plan. About how I was thinking of taking a lie detector test. But when I told him what I was looking for, he went right to that galvanometer and gave it to me. He didn’t even open the box. Which means he must have had it ready in advance—rigged up to give me that shock as soon as I touched the handles. But how did he know?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“You’re saying that Mr. Zuraw knew what you were going to do before you did it,” Cody said, picking his words very carefully.

“He knew,” Jake said, “somehow, that Megan wouldn’t believe me when I told her about the Curriculum. And he knew that I was going to try to convince her that I was telling the truth. He knew how I would react. Or at least he knew me well enough to plan for a possible reaction.” He shrugged. “I think it’s safe to assume he’s not psychic.”

“Really? Are you sure that’s a safe assumption?” Megan asked, wide-eyed. “He’s got access to technologies we’ve never heard of. Portable telephones. Mass hypnosis. Whatever that box in his desk drawer was. For all you know he’s got mental telepathy and precognition, too.”

“This from the girl who believed none of this a couple days ago,” Jake said.

“I’m not saying it’s likely. Just possible.”

Jake shook his head. “I see what you mean but if we start thinking like that, where does it stop? Maybe he has a time machine and he comes from the future, so he already knows what I’m going to do next? No, I think there has to be a more logical answer. He’s got a PhD in developmental psychology. The last time I was in his office I saw his diploma. So he’s probably very, very good at guessing what someone my age will do in a given situation. But that’s not enough, either. He’s got something more, another way to keep ahead of me. I think he’s watching me. All the time.”

Cody looked over his shoulder as if the guidance counselor would be standing right there. “What, like, even when you’re in the bathroom?”

“Probably even when I’m asleep. I think he has cameras and microphones hidden all over the school, and in my house, and probably a lot of other places, too. I think he’s got me under constant surveillance. I mentioned my plan to Cody. Not in any great detail, but enough maybe for him to prepare the rigged galvanometer before I even thought to ask for it. Everything we say and do must get recorded, analyzed, processed and then acted upon. I’m sure he’s watching you, Cody, and now, Megan, I’m sorry to say it, but—”

“But I should start turning out the lights before I get undressed for bed at night.” She shivered visibly. “What a nasty thought. Mr. Zuraw watching me…”

“Wouldn’t we see all these cameras?” Cody asked.

Jake glanced over at Megan. She seemed distinctly perturbed by the idea that she was being watched. That was probably a good thing, he told himself. It meant she would be careful. “They might be very small. Or they could be hidden in the light fixtures, or in the radiator vents in the classrooms—who knows? As Megan said, he’s got technology we’ve never heard of. If he can build a telephone you keep in your pocket, surely he can create a camera you’ll never see.”

“We need to find them. Figure out a place where there aren’t any,” Megan suggested. “So we have a place we can talk safely.”

Jake shrugged. “If such a place exists. We’ll look,” he assured her. “Who knows? We might even get lucky and find something. For now, I think we just need to start paying attention to what we say to each other.”

The three of them agreed to that readily enough.

“Okay. If we’re done for the day, then I really ought to get over to English class,” Cody said. “We have a midterm coming up soon and I still have to worry about letter grades.” Before he left he looked sheepishly at Megan, then grabbed Jake into a bear hug. “I’m glad you didn’t die,” he said.

“Me, too,” Jake said. He smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t crack your head open when you fell down.”

Cody nodded and headed back to the school.

When they were alone again Megan let Jake put his arm around her shoulders—just to support him, she said, since he was still feeling weak and barely able to walk. As they crossed the narrow strip of desert between the ruins and the school she asked him, “Aren’t you scared? I would be petrified right now. I wouldn’t be able to make plans or anything. I would run home to my parents and spend the rest of the day crying.”

Jake shrugged a little, leaning hard on her shoulder. She was a lot stronger than she looked—she was carrying most of his weight. “Of course I’m scared. They tried to kill me. But I can’t tell my parents about it or they’ll think I’m crazy and they’ll make me take antipsychotic drugs and spend all day in therapy. I can’t just go home, either. I need to keep thinking. The Proctors may not want to kill me, but they’re willing to let me die if I don’t figure out how to pass the tests. So I can’t afford to let my fear keep me from thinking, ever. I have to stay sharp.”

“I guess,” she said, “that one of the advantages of being a girl is that you’re allowed to have human emotions. Or at least to show them in public.”

Jake laughed. Then he realized that Cody was gone, and he was alone with Megan—which meant he could finally ask her the big question. Yet as usual he found he had trouble thinking of the right words. He eventually settled on, “Um, so.”

“Yeah,” Megan replied. “So. Obviously, everything you told me was true. I thought you were a paranoid schizophrenic. Now I don’t think that.”

“I guess my lie detector trick worked,” he said, trying to make a joke.

She didn’t laugh. “You could have been killed. You were trying to protect me from that, from knowing that I could kill you if I wasn’t careful.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Don’t do that anymore,” she told him. “I’m part of this now. You tell me everything, because I need to know everything if I’m going to be any help to you.”

“That’s what you want? To help me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is that… all that you want?” he asked.

She knew, of course, what he meant. He was asking her if they could pick up where they’d left off—making out. Dating. Being boyfriend and girlfriend.

“We’ll see,” she said.

They had reached the door that led back into the teacher’s wing of the school. She let go of him to pull the doors open and he managed to totter inside on his own power. He thought he was going to be okay.

As soon as he got home that night, he went up to his room and crawled into bed, and slept for almost twelve hours straight.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Morning light came through Jake’s windows and painted his blankets white. It was a little after five AM, much earlier than he normally got up, but he was awake now and he knew he couldn’t just turn over and go back to sleep. Not with that light streaming in. He’d forgotten to close the blinds the night before. He’d forgotten to brush his teeth, as well, and his mouth felt furry on the inside. As if deposits of mold had grown along the sides of his teeth and underneath his tongue.

He sat up, careful to avoid a head rush, and started to swivel his legs around to put his feet on the floor. He intended to get up and go to the bathroom down the hall. He might as well get the day started. Before his bare feet touched the cold floorboards, though, he heard a sound near his door and he froze in place.

Someone was out there. Just outside his door. In the crack between the bottom of the door and its jamb he could see their shadow. Jake stopped breathing. Was this another test? Had Mr. Zuraw sent an assassin to kill him in his sleep?

The person outside the door bent down with creaking joints and then the edge of a pale blue envelope appeared in the crack. Slowly, quietly, the envelope was pushed inside his room.

No assassin, then. Just a messenger. Someone had come to deliver the PASS he had earned the day before.

Jake wanted to know very badly who it might be.

Even before the envelope was all the way under the door he sprang, throwing himself at the door, knowing that the second he landed and made the slightest sound the messenger would run away. His shoulder collided painfully with the door and he heard a muffled curse outside. It sounded like someone swearing through an electric fan. A Proctor, then. Jake reached up to yank on the doorknob even as he heard the Proctor spin around on his heels and start dashing away.

The door opened with a loud creak and Jake rolled out into the hall. At the other end of the hallway he could see someone in blue running down the stairs toward the front door. He gave chase, dressed only in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, but when he dashed out through the front door he couldn’t see anyone in the street.

“Damn,” he said, and ran his hands through his hair. It was still wild with sleep. He turned from side to side, looking for any sign of a running figure or a car driving away, but saw nothing. Heard nothing. Maybe the Proctor was hiding in the cactus bushes, but Jake doubted it. They were devoted to the Curriculum, he knew, but it would take a lot of devotion to jump into a stand of nopal cactus with its needle-sharp spines.

Maybe the Proctor had a hidden route to and from the house. It was a scary thought, but it made a certain amount of sense. They had secret passages in the school, he knew. They could have secret passages anywhere.

Hugging himself for warmth—the sun hadn’t risen high enough over the desert to scorch away the night’s chill—he stepped back inside and closed the front door behind him. He listened carefully to see if he had woken his parents up but he heard no sign of anyone moving inside the house. So he headed back upstairs to his room, intent on sitting down for a while and thinking about his next step. Should he spend the day searching the house for trick panels or hidden switches? There were probably more productive ways to use the day. On his way back into the room he picked up the envelope the Proctor had delivered and tore it open with his thumbnail.

He barely glanced at the card inside. It was a PASS, of course—the only way to fail the galvanometer test was to die in the process—and he went to shove it in his desk drawer with the others he’d collected.

Then he noticed it wasn’t exactly like the others. There was something written on the back of the card. In a careful cursive hand, in blue ink, someone had left him the message: I’M SORRY. I DIDN’T KNOW IT WOULD BE SO DANGEROUS. I PROMISE, I’LL FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT UP TO YOU.

It was signed MR. Y.

Jake knew who it was from, then. When he’d asked Mr. Irwin about the Curriculum, the teacher had explained why he couldn’t answer in terms of a logic problem. In the context of that problem Jake had been Student X, and Mr. Irwin himself had been Mr. Y.

Jake sat down on the bed and flicked the card between his fingers for a while. He didn’t know quite what to think. He was pretty sure he knew what Mr. Irwin meant with his message. Mr. Zuraw must have approached Mr. Irwin and asked him to rig the galvanometer to deliver an electric charge when Jake used it. The device hadn’t malfunctioned—it had been intentionally tampered with, and it must have been Mr. Irwin who did the tampering. Yet now he was claiming he hadn’t realized just how much of a shock it would give Jake when he used it. That he hadn’t wanted to hurt Jake.

Interesting. Maybe that was a very good thing. Maybe it meant Jake had a friend who might be very useful indeed. Or maybe it was a trap. Maybe he was supposed to think Mr. Irwin was a friend, when in fact he was just setting Jake up for another deadly test…

Either way, Jake knew what he had to do next. If Mr. Irwin was a friend, the message on the card could get him in a lot of trouble. Folding the PASS card in his hand so that the message was hidden from view, Jake went into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. Being careful not to make too much noise he tore the card into very small pieces and then fed them into the toilet bowl one by one. He flushed a couple of times to make sure they all went down.

It was the best he could do to hide the message. If Mr. Zuraw wanted to fish them out of the sewer and put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle, Jake knew there was no way to stop him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Typically the Proctors gave him a week in between tests. This time he only had three days. Fortunately, Jake had warning that it was coming.

He had Physics class three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He knew it was going to be tricky going into that class and seeing Mr. Irwin, knowing he couldn’t ask the teacher any questions or draw attention to himself in any way. No matter how much the teacher might like to help Jake, he’d made it very clear he would be in danger if he said anything or showed Jake any special treatment. The best thing that Jake could do for the teacher was to pretend that nothing had ever happened, that the galvanometer hadn’t been rigged, that Mr. Irwin had never written a note on the back of a PASS card. It was in Jake’s interest, too. He knew that the teacher would help him in some way, if he were pressed hard enough. His guilt over what he’d done—how he’d nearly killed Jake—would make him take some action, sooner or later. Yet if Jake rushed in and just started asking difficult questions, or demanded that help immediately, he would be throwing away one of the few advantages he possessed. If he asked the wrong question or Mr. Irwin was being watched at that moment, Mr. Zuraw could swoop in and fire the teacher before he had a chance to be any help at all.