Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 24

Henry had successfully invaded the campus by slipping under the fence, strolling right into the cafeteria with slumped shoulders and a scowl, and picking up a tray in the line as if he were any other registered student at the Northern Reserve Academy. The guard on duty at the front door had given him a dirty look when he'd first stumbled in from the freezing cold, snow covering his shoes, but the guard had been too busy looking at Facebook on his phone to wonder how a student might have fallen almost twenty minutes behind his classmates on the way to lunch.

"So then I see this guy sitting at a table eating macaroni and cheese, and I sit down across from him, and he doesn't even look up at me," Henry chuckled, casting a side glance at Trey on the other side of me. "I had to kick him under the table and be, like, Trey, man, long time no see."

I elbowed Trey in the ribs gently to chide him, and saw a glimmer of a smile on his lips. I was sure Henry Richmond was probably the last person he expected—or hoped—to see sitting across from him in the cafeteria at the Northern Reserve Academy.  

"I wasn't sure what was going on," Trey admitted. "Maybe it should have been obvious, but I didn't realize he broke into school. I thought for a second, you know, that maybe he'd ended up there, like me. All I knew was that the original plan had been scrapped, because I had a note in my mailbox at the dorm saying my mom had cancelled my doctor's appointment, and I didn't know what you guys were up to."

"I've got to say, bro," Henry said in high spirits, "I don't know how you've suffered through the food in that joint. You'd be better off eating toilet paper and chalk."

I could sense Trey fighting the temptation to be friendly with Henry and was privately a little humored that the wall between them seemed to finally be crumbling. Demonstrating maturity far beyond his eighteen years, Henry seemed to understand how dire it was to release whatever competition existed silently between them.

"Pretty much," Trey agreed.

The drive to Mt. Farthington would take us ten hours. My eyelids grew heavy from physical exhaustion, and the endless miles of flat, snow-lined road that spanned the windshield from one side to the other blurred my vision. The dullness of wintry northern Wisconsin was like a visual lullaby. I nestled my head against Trey's shoulder and drifted off into an uncomfortable, shallow sleep.

Around three in the afternoon, when Henry considered the distance we'd put between ourselves and the Northern Reserve Academy to be adequately safe, we stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch. Trey carried his box of Malibu Sunbeam off to the men's room without an argument, requesting that we order a turkey burger and fries for him. Even though he barely had a half-inch of hair around his head, he agreed that disguising himself would be in our collective best interest. He did, however, admit that the idea of being a criminal on the run, just out of reach of the local police, kind of appealed to him. I would have found the humor in our situation, too, if the complexity of cornering Violet and forcing her to play a game with us wasn't still so terrifying.

I left Henry at the register and took the waxy fountain cups that we'd been given by the fast food clerk behind the counter over to the soda machine. The restaurant was quiet at the odd hour—an older gentleman wearing a Brewers baseball cap sat in a booth alone, his jaw gently rolling in a rhythmic motion as he chewed, his eyes fixed in an upward gaze at the television mounted from the ceiling. The quiet audio drifting out of the television suggested that a late afternoon televised court show was on rather than the local news, which was a small blessing. When I absent-mindedly withdrew the first cup I'd filled with ice from the automatic ice dispenser, ice continued to pour out of it, spilling onto the floor. I placed another cup beneath the machine's spout and tried to manually adjust the lever with my hand to make it stop. But the lever was loose, and no matter how I positioned it, the ice just kept falling...a clamorous, wet avalanche that filled the second and third cups within seconds.