Dweeb by Aaron Starmer

Author:Aaron Starmer [Starmer, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89344-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

ELIJAH

The situation was now worse than Elijah could have imagined. As he lay in his bunk on Tuesday morning, he kept thinking about Tyler. Denton had insisted Tyler was putting them on, but Elijah knew Tyler wasn’t that talented an actor. While he loved to mess with people’s heads, he always struck immediately. He never left a room without letting you know who was in control.

Last night, there had been no punchline. No punch, even. Nothing resembling the real Tyler. It was scary.

Eddie’s description of the school only worried Elijah more. They had missed only a day and a half, but it sounded as though the entire place had been transformed. Fast-food trash everywhere. A library purged of books. It was the stuff of bad dreams.

It took McKenzie’s arrival with breakfast to make Elijah rise from bed.

“Halfway there,” McKenzie said with a smile. “Not an easy feat. Keep at it.”

With each day, the coach seemed to ease up on them a little. Elijah assumed he must have known more than he was letting on. Maybe they were going to be down there longer than Snodgrass had told them, and McKenzie just didn’t see the point in destroying their self-esteem anymore. Elijah had seen a television show once about prisoners on death row. The guards often treated them better than all the other inmates.

This scared him too.

No one else was sure what the next step should be, either. Over breakfast, they discussed their options in low whispers.

“We could be trapped here forever,” Elijah said, sniffing at his glass of cranberry juice. He placed it down, deciding against it.

“We need hard evidence,” Denton said.

“What we need is Nurse Bloom to come back,” Wendell said.

It was like summoning a genie. Almost as soon as the words came out of Wendell’s mouth, the door opened slowly and Nurse Bloom walked in.

Her eyes were washed-out and pink. Elijah wouldn’t have described her as haggard, but she looked run-down, exhausted. Beneath her white coat, she wore a wool turtleneck sweater, an odd choice for the middle of spring.

She closed the door and smiled reassuringly.

“Nurse Bloom. Thank God,” Wendell said tenderly.

But Elijah wasn’t as easily swayed. He watched anxiously as she patted Wendell on the head. Then she pinched one of his hairs between her thumb and forefinger and plucked it.

Wendell winced but didn’t say a thing. She patted him on the head again, as if it were her best try at an apology. Then she produced a plastic bag from inside her jacket and carefully dropped the hair into it. A piece of masking tape was stuck to the bottom edge of the bag. In black marker on the tape, someone had written Wendell Scoop.

In a swift movement, Nurse Bloom was standing above Elijah. Before he could object, she plucked a hair from his scalp and dropped it into another plastic bag. She quickly moved on.

As she plucked the hairs from Denton’s, Eddie’s and Bijay’s heads, they each greeted her with befuddled stares.

She was a nurse, so she was careful, and it didn’t seem to hurt anyone.

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