Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 23

The Northern Reserve Academy was located off of Route 53 in the very most Northwestern corner of Wisconsin, nestled in between two state parks that appeared to be identical from the rural highway on which we drove. At ten in the blindingly bright morning, Henry and I drove in circles twice around the complex of enormous brick buildings, observing. Like the Dearborn School for Girls, Northern Reserve was set back from the street in a somewhat remote location, not close enough to any main roads or strip malls to have made an escape by any student particularly easy. The school had a large track, just like the high school in Weeping Willow, but unlike the track back in my hometown, the one at Trey's military school was enclosed by a chain link fence seven feet high with rusty razor wire at its top. As bad as Dearborn was, Northern Reserve seemed much more like a prison.

We told ourselves we were staking out the territory, making a plan. But during our second pass around the building, I knew what we were really doing was panicking. My eyes scanned frosty window panes on the school's three floors as we drove past. I allowed myself to imagine that I might catch a lucky glimpse of Trey daydreaming out the window in one of his classrooms, and upon seeing me, he'd know it was time to slip away and run through some unguarded laundry room door or cafeteria loading dock to meet us outside. But the roads that framed the school's property were simply too far away from the actual buildings to catch a glimpse of anyone moving around inside. We slowed the truck down on our third drive around the campus when we saw two single-file lines of boys crossing a courtyard briskly without jackets from one building to another. The lines were flanked in the front and back by guards wearing uniforms and heavy winter coats.

My heart swelled for a split second—it would have been perfect if Trey had been in that line and seen our truck—but out of all the boys marching through the snow in those two lines, wearing crisply ironed white, short-sleeved button-down shirts with shaved heads, none of them appeared to be Trey. Catching my first glimpse of Trey's classmates, I felt a little afraid for him. He had never mentioned feeling intimidated by the other guys in his classes at his school, but some of them appeared to easily be twice his size. It was hard to believe that all of the boys in those two lines were under the age of eighteen—they looked like men compared to all of the guys I knew back in Weeping Willow.

"We should park somewhere and make a plan," Henry said, turning left instead of right to bring us back onto the highway rather than loop around the school a fourth time. "If a big pick-up truck drives around a school building four times in a row on an otherwise empty road, someone's bound to notice."

"Agreed."

In a McDonald's parking lot ten minutes away in the very small town of Superior, Wisconsin, we sipped coffee in silence, both of us knowing that time was slipping away. In a matter of hours, classes would be wrapping up at the high school back in Weeping Willow, and the junior class would be boarding rented buses bound for Michigan. We really couldn't afford to waste time developing some kind of master plan to spring Trey out of school, but we really couldn't drive off to Michigan without him, either.

"I don't see how we're going to get his attention from outside the school," I finally said. "I mean, unless we do call in a bomb threat or something, but that's got to be illegal, and it's random enough that he might not realize it's us."

"Yeah," Henry agreed. "Bomb threat is out of the question. I'm already eighteen and if cops get involved, I won't be sent to a military school, it'll be much worse. What if we just get someone to go inside and tell him we're waiting for him? Like an electrician or a delivery man or something. Or a janitor! Janitors must work there at night, right? If we wait until the evening?"

I agreed that sending an outsider in with a message seemed like a good idea, but it had its flaws. "Well, we'd have to pay them. No one is going to help two kids hanging around outside a military school by delivering a message to someone on the inside for free. And then, even if we found someone to take our money, there's no way they would know which kid was Trey unless they were in the school, interacting with students, every single day. I mean, if we said he was a thin white guy, around five-foot-eleven, with blue eyes and a shaved head, there are probably like, a hundred guys who fit that description inside the school."