Punk 57(16)

But he’s not watching me. I follow to where his flashlight is shining, and I finally see the wall. Dropping the notebook to the bed, I peer up as Ten runs the light over the entire surface.

ALONE.

It’s written in large black letters, spray-painted and jagged, each letter nearly as tall as me.

“Real creepy,” Ten repeats.

I inch backward, glancing around the room and taking it all in.

Yeah. Photos on the wall with faces scratched out, ambiguous poetry, mysterious, depressing words written on the wall…

Not to mention someone is sleeping in here. In this abandoned, dark tunnel.

The distant whine suddenly catches my attention again, and I follow it, leaning down closer to the bed. I pick up the headphones and hold them to my ear, hearing “Bleed It Out” playing.

Shit. I immediately drop the headphones, a breath catching in my throat.

“The iPod’s on,” I say, shooting up straight. “Whoever he is, he was just here. We need to go. Now.”

Ten moves for the doorway, and I turn away from the bed, but then I stop.

Spinning back around, I dip down and rip the page out of the notebook. I have no idea why I want it, but I do.

If it is a guy living here, he probably won’t miss it, anyway, and if he does, he won’t know where it went.

“Go,” I tell Ten, nudging his back.

And I fold up the page and stuff it in my back pocket.

Holding up our phones, we step out of the room and turn left. But just then someone catches me in their arms, and I yelp as I’m squeezed until I can’t breathe.

“Gotch-ya!” a male voice boasts. “So how about that ride now?”

Trey.

Squirming, I pull out of his hold and twist around. Lyla, J.D., and Bryce stand behind him, laughing.

“Damn!” Ten shouts, breathing hard. He was obviously caught off guard by their sudden appearance, too.

“You might’ve turned off the flashlights,” Lyla scolds with a smirk on her face. “We could see them as soon as we came down.”

I move past them, back toward the stairs, ignoring her. If we hadn’t been investigating that room, the flashlights on our phones would’ve been off.

“What are you guys doing down here anyway?” J.D. asks.

“Just go,” I order, losing patience. “Let’s get out of here.”

Everyone moves ahead, back down the tunnel, and I glance over my shoulder, scanning the nearly pitch blackness and the doorway to the room where we’d just been.

Nothing.

Dark corners, shadows, dank glimmers from the fluorescent light hitting the puddles of water… I see nothing.

But I breathe hard, unable to shake the creepy feeling. Someone is there.

“This was not the kind of fun I was thinking of when you guys suggested the Cove,” Lyla whines, side-stepping the small pools of water.

I turn back around, ignoring my fear as I rush up the steps. “Yeah, well, don’t worry,” I mumble just loud enough for them to hear. “The backseat of J.D.’s car isn’t far away.”

“Hell yeah.” J.D. chuckles.

And I resist the urge for one more glance back down the dark tunnel.

I climb the stairs, still feeling eyes on me.





“Let’s go, ladies!” Coach pounds her fist on the lockers twice as she passes by. The girls giggle and whisper around me, and I comb my fingers through my hair, sweeping it up into a messy ponytail.

“Yeah, I hear they’re installing cameras,” Katelyn Stephens says to a group as she sits on the bench. “They’re hoping to catch him red-handed.”

I roll on some deodorant and toss the container back into my gym bag before checking my lip gloss in the mirror on the locker door.

Cameras, huh? In the school?

Good to know.

I pull the top of my cheerleading uniform down over my head, covering my bra, and smooth my shirt and skirt down. We’re recruiting new team members, since so many of us are graduating soon, so Coach has been asking us to wear our uniforms to school some days to hopefully get more freshman interested.

“I was wondering what their next move was going to be,” another girl chimes in. “He keeps getting past them.”

“And I, for one, hopes he keeps it up.” Lyla adds. “Did you see what he wrote this morning?”

Everyone falls silent, and I know exactly what they’re looking at. I turn my head, glancing to the wall, right over the doorway to the gym teachers’ offices. Flapping ever so gently from the AC blowing out of the vent is a large piece of white butcher paper taped haphazardly to the wall.

I smile to myself, my heartbeat picking up pace, and turn back to finish getting ready.

“Don’t knock masturbation,” Mel Long says, reciting the message we all saw laying behind the butcher paper before morning practice a while ago, “it’s sex with someone I love.”