Read The Monster Variations for Free Online Page B

smile.
    “Now,” he said. “I know there’s stuff we’ve talked about doing but were too scared. I been thinking about this. All day I been thinking. James: you used to talk about climbing the fence and getting in the old swimming pool.”
    “Yeah, but that was forever ago—”
    “And Willie, you used to talk about wanting to get on the roof of the MacArthur Building and see how far you could see. Remember? You used to yap about it all the damn time.”
    Willie was nodding dreamily.
    Reggie grinned with so many teeth that James felt his own face grin in return. He hated himself for it; thisre action was just what Reggie wanted. Conversations like these were like fighting without fists, and James didn’t know how he was supposed to fight back. It was too late anyway—by now Willie was grinning, too, and nodding to himself, his arm stump twitching like some kind of newborn animal.
    James couldn’t bear it anymore, he had to know.
    “What about you? What do you want to do?”
    Reggie laughed.
    “The school, dummy,” he said. “I want to hide out and spend the night at the school.”

Everyone Just Leaves
    I t was true. Reggie had wanted to hide out in the school for years. It had started one day when they were sitting together under the slide at recess eating candy from a paper bag, the chill of an early autumn snaking down their backs, and Reggie saw smoke coughing from a school chimney.
    “I never noticed a chimney,” he said.
    A few days later, while the class single-filed to the art room, Reggie overheard a conversation about the teachers’ lounge.
    “I never knew there was a lounge,” he said.
    The following week at lunch Reggie paused to get an earful of a custodian’s exchange with a teacher. The custodian was holding a box full of props left over from a Columbus Day play the fourth graders had performed for the school. Moments later, Reggie slid his tray down between James and Willie, his eyes shifting and lit.
    “Somewhere in this school is a costume room,” he said.
    Soon Reggie had sketched an impressive mental map of an alternate Polk Elementary, one with secret passageways and underworld chambers. Wouldn’t it be cool, Reggie said on repeated occasions, to hide somewhere inside the school, wait until all the teachers and custodians had gone home, and then go exploring in the night? They could scream and yell as loud as they wanted. They could read private student records. They could bounce kickballs off the principal’s door. They could
roller-skate
.
    It was summer, of course, and school was out. But that didn’t stop Reggie. Last year he had neglected to hand in dozens of assignments and was forced to suffer summer school, a strange daily ritual that Reggie described to his two friends as “just like normal school, except hardly anyone’s there, and you can get as many questions wrong as you want because the teacher just wants to go home.” Summer school had lasted for six weeks and, though Reggie had hated it, it had given him deeper insight into teachers. “Teachers are just like us,” he explained. “They hate school, too.”
    Neither James nor Willie hated school, but they’dnodded anyway. It was better not to get in Reggie’s way when he was caught up in one of his schemes. If you did, he was likely to turn against you, attack you for being too wimpy, a little girl unworthy of being included in his plan. He might hate you for days, even weeks. So James played along, but reflected how strange it was that Reggie was finally excited about school, only now for all the wrong reasons.
    With a vigor he never applied to his schoolwork, Reggie compiled a long, detailed catalog of all of the gear they’d need to bring along. Four flashlights (an extra in case one broke), extra batteries, a camera, two rolls of film, a notebook, pencils, snacks, soda pop, a blanket, a baseball, roller skates, a Frisbee, four or five books they could use to prop open doors (so they didn’t get locked