The Amanda Project: Book One

The Amanda Project: Chapter Seventeen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I'd felt really tough and confident when I told Hal we'd be using the key Amanda gave me to break into Thornhill's office, but sitting in the library with the vice principal staring at us, I couldn't help feeling like even thinking about breaking a school rule was a very, very bad idea. It didn't help my confidence that when Jason Phipps and Todd Markham walked in to serve their detention, Mr. Thornhill called them over to the desk at the front of the room and said something to them very quietly, something I'm pretty sure included the word "expelled." Jason and Todd are juniors, and they hang out with this pretty rough group of kids who are always getting in trouble for throwing wild parties after the Enders win a game (a rare event, I'll grant you). I wondered what they were in for today, since football season was long over. Whatever it was that they'd done, could it be worse than breaking into the vice principal's office and going through his stuff in search of a student's classified folder and surveillance footage?

I highly doubted it.

And how could we be sure the key would even work? I'd lain awake half the night thinking of all the keys in the world stamped with do not duplicate. I mean, even if the key Amanda gave me had come from a school custodian, who was to say it came from a custodian at Endeavor? Amanda had said they'd moved around a lot. Maybe the key opened anothervice principal's office, one at a high school in Minnesota or Missouri, a junior high in Oklahoma, an elementary school in Maine. How would Amanda have gotten a key to Thornhill's office? And why would she have given it to me? By the time the sky started to get light, my definite feeling that Amanda had somehow known I'd need a key to Thornhill's office someday and had therefore given me one (without, of course, telling me what she'd given me) was so wobbly it wasn't even funny. Or it was funny. I was too tired to be clear on the difference, but either way, there was one thing I was sure of: the key that had been sitting in the bowl on my dresser with my loose change and random hair bands for the past few weeks was definitely not the key to Thornhill's office. I'd put it in my backpack last night when I was still suffering from the delusion that Amanda had literally handed me the key to solving our problem. Now, I couldn't figure out why I'd bothered.

I'd planned to tell all of this to Hal and Nia outside the school first thing in the morning, planned to tell them that we needed to go back to square one and figure out a different way to get into Thornhill's office, but even though I arrived half an hour early, so had Mr. Thornhill. And when Nia and Hal showed up, there was no way to pull them aside to tell them I'd had a change of heart, especially with the vice principal standing right there and watching us like a hawk.

There were only five of us in detention, and Mr. Thornhill put us each at our own table in the quiet study area of the library: me behind Hal, Nia over to my left. Which meant even if I did have the key to Thornhill's office (which I so clearly did not), how were the three of us supposed to coordinate a breakin when we couldn't talk to each other? And did Nia even know about the plan? Hal had said he'd call her, but there was no way to know if he had.

I needed to get a note to Hal. I reached into my bag for my Scribble Book and flipped through it in search of a blank page. When I found one, I wrote,

Plan is off. Key's a dud.

 

Just writing it made me feel better. Calmer. We'd reconvene and figure out some other way to get our hands on the surveillance footage and her file. And maybe we didn't even need Amanda's school records. Maybe she really did live downtown in that condo, and I was the only one she'd lied to about her address. Thinking of Amanda lying to me but not to Hal made me feel bad. I made a little stick figure with a tie like Thornhill's. Then I drew a box with lines going up and down it, like a cage. Then I drew three little stick figures in the box. I looked at my watch. Five minutes had passed.