The Class in the Basement

Chapter 1

The thing about Jacob is that he's really, really smart.

Jacob always gets A's, he finishes computer tasks and quizzes first, he always tops the class, and it'll mean the end of the world if he didn't. He's basically Einstein Junior.

And he never misses a day in school, if he got sick, he'd turn on his computer and have Ryan hold up a tablet so he could see the lesson through Facetime.

That's why we thought he died when he didn't come to school today. He didn't ask Ryan to Facetime the lesson for him, he didn't tell anyone the reason he didn't come to school, and no one could reach him, he blocked all our calls and messages.

We were standing around Jacob's desk, with scented candles, wishing him goodbye and that he may enter heaven safely (Clement made a joke that he was going to hell, and Cedric smacked him across the head)

'What are you doing?' Miss Wong asked.

'We're giving Jacob a funeral.' Chris said.

'But...he's not dead,' Miss Wong frowned, 'he moved to America to further continue his studies.'

'What? That's impossible, he never said anything about moving.' Gabriel said in disbelief, 'and that wouldn't explain why he isn't responding to any of our calls or messages.'

'Well, I don't know about that. But I want this cleaned up immediately.' Miss Wong pointed towards the candles and left.

We put out the candles but we did not believe Miss Wong.

'Miss Wong is lying,' Ryan said, 'there's no way this happened so suddenly. Everything was fine until yesterday after school, that's when he stopped responding to our texts and calls. There's no way he would just leave without telling anyone.'

'Something fishy's going on.' I said, the others nodded.

'How about we all try texting Jacob again tonight, and if he doesn't reply or give an explanation, we'll figure out what we do next.' Melvin suggested, we agreed.

THE NEXT DAY...

'Single grey tick,' Rene said, 'I mean honestly, what did we expect?'

'What if he got kidnapped?' Chris asked, we stared at him. Obviously, we'd know if Jacob had been kidnapped.

The school bell rang so we had to get into our seats and get ready for the day full of classes, although none of us could focus because of Jacob's disappearance.

At 8:45 a.m, Larris went to the bathroom and when he came back, he looked like he'd seen a ghost.

'I saw Jacob.' Larris said.

'What?!' I exclaimed. Kylie peered in to listen, Gabriel joined in too.

'I went to the bathroom, and when I was walking back, I saw Jacob walking towards the Secondary Section. He was carrying a box and there were some books in it. I tapped him on the shoulder and when he saw it was me, he ran away, he didn't even say anything!' Larris explained.

'That's crazy!' Kylie whispered-screamed.

'We need to tell the class!' Gabriel said.

AT LUNCHBREAK (WE TOLD EVERYONE ALREADY)...

'Well if Jacob is still in our school, then he should be in the school database.' Rainbow stated, 'if we could somehow get into the database, then we might be able to find something.'

'Yeah, we can find anything we need to know about every teacher and student in the database. There has to be something on Jacob.' Ivan said.

'We need to hack into the database and see what we can find.' Candice said.

Then we remembered we didn't know how to hack computers.

'I suppose we can just look it up on the school computer, in the office.' Ryan said.

Joshua rolled his eyes, 'I know you're not as smart as Jacob, but you do know that there's always going to be someone in the office, right?'

After ten minutes of thinking of ideas, Melvin came up with a full-proofed (at least that's what he called it) plan.

'Okay, so you know how my parents always park our car in the sports field (our school allowed that) right? A few of us could sneak into the car after school, stay there till it's night, then go into the office and search the school database on the computer. The rest of us could sleep over at Ryan's house and we can give you instructions on what to do next.' Melvin described his plan.

'That's perfect!' Joshua said, 'Ryan's mom doesn't care and his house is huge! I've got some earpieces, like the ones they use in spy movies! You guys can use those!'

'Okay, good plan. But who goes?' Hannah asked.

'Chris has to go, he's good with computers,' Melvin thought, 'Kaka can be back-up. Angie knows how to pick locks, so she should go too.'

Oh boy, I thought, I've broken into my mom's jewelry drawer before, but not the school! I nodded anyway.

'Hyson can be lookout to make sure no one sees you guys!' Faye said.

'Great!' Melvin replied, then looked at Ryan, 'Ryan, you should take some time to develop coding and hacking skills, Chris too. You guys are the second smartest in our class, and I suppose we're going to need those skills.'

'Got it!' Ryan answered, 'we'll execute the plan tomorrow!'

I didn't feel good about this, not about breaking into the school, but about what we're going to find.

--End of chapter--