True Talents(22)

I guess Cheater told Lucky what happened because at the end of the third week, on Friday evening, as soon as we’d gone upstairs after dinner, Torchie let me in on their secret. “Friday nights,” he said, looking nervously around our room as if the walls and ceiling were filled with hidden microphones, “we do something special.”

“Oh really?” I asked, trying to sound surprised.

He nodded. “Yeah. There’s no way anyone would know. That’s because we’re real careful. We never tell anybody. But we talked about it and everyone thinks you’re okay. What we do is we sneak off into town. Want to come?”

“Absolutely.” My pulse sped at the possibility of getting outside of Edgeview. Even a few hours would be wonderful. We were allowed into the schoolyard, but that was as far as we could go. It almost seemed as if they were afraid to let us be seen in town. They never let us leave the school unless our folks came for us on the weekend. Mine hadn’t. I was getting ready to climb the walls. “Where do you go?”

Torchie shrugged. “Usually the arcade, sometimes we just hang out.”

“Sounds fine to me.” Maybe I could even get a slice of pizza or some other real food. The very thought was enough to make me drool.

So that evening I learned the story of Lucky’s great escape route.





WHY I LIKE BEING ME

PHILIP GRIEG





WAY OUT

Torchie whispered the whole story to me in our room. “Lucky was fooling around behind the school last October. You know, bouncing a tennis ball against the back wall. So anyhow, one time the ball got past him. When he was looking for it, he noticed this round place in the ground. He’s always finding stuff. Anyhow, he decided to check it out. He got a stick and started poking around. Guess what he found?”

I shrugged. “Not a clue.”

“There was this manhole cover. He called me over and we got it up. Guess what we found?”

I just shrugged again.

“A pipe,” Torchie said. “This big old tunnel. I guess it was a drain or something. We followed it. I didn’t really want to go, but I wasn’t going to be a chicken if Lucky went. It doesn’t go far, but—get this—it comes out on the other side of the fence, down at the bottom of the hill.”

He paused, I guess to let me fully appreciate the meaning of that. It was the perfect way out. Since the fence was ten feet high in back, nobody ever checked to see if kids were there. They locked the front gate in the evening when the guard left.

“Which door do we use?” I asked.

Torchie shook his head. “Too dangerous. We could get caught. Lucky’s room is in the back. So we go out his window.”

“I thought Lucky had a room on this floor,” I said.

Torchie nodded. “He does.”

“But—”

“We made a ladder,” Torchie said. “Lucky found some broomsticks in a closet. And we borrowed a bunch of rope from Mr. Briggs’s supplies. I tied the knots myself. I was a Cub Scout. I would have been a Boy Scout, too, but I got kicked out because of this fire in my tent. Man, canvas really burns a lot faster than you’d think. But that’s not important.” He stood up and said, “Come on, let’s get ready.”

Torchie showed me how to stuff clothes under my blanket to make it look like I was asleep in bed. That was just in case anyone checked the rooms. It probably wasn’t necessary. Once classes were over, nobody seemed to care all that much what we did, as long as it didn’t involve too much violence or vandalism. The teachers went home in the evening, except whoever had gotten stuck with night duty, which just meant sleeping in that room on the second floor in case there was an emergency.

“One more thing,” Torchie whispered as we cracked open our door. “Remember, don’t ever mention stealing to Lucky. Okay?”

“Sure. No problem.”

I followed Torchie down the hall to meet Lucky. True to his name, he had the room to himself. The rope ladder was already dangling out the window. A long stick tied to the top kept it from falling through. From the sharp chill in the room, it felt like the window had been open for a while. I watched as the others climbed down one at a time. When my turn came, I wasn’t sure I could do it. I got my left leg out the window fine, but it took three tries before I managed to swing the other leg past the ledge.

The ladder swayed like a funhouse floor and I had to dig with my toes to get each rung away from the wall. Halfway down, my hands started to grow numb from the cold. I hurried to reach the ground before I lost my grip. Despite visions of splattering myself into a huge pile of roadkill, I made it without any real slips.