Chapter 11

The girls of the Robotics Club, minus one, marched up the hill to Overton House with their heads hanging, like a chain gang of convicts, with Warden Linda bringing up the rear. Michelle fought the urge to make a break for it. To run away and hide, just as Endora had. But that would only make things worse. She wouldn’t just be a rapist then. She’d be a fugitive rapist on the run. So she kept her head down and marched on.

From time to time, Ms. Linda’s radio came to life, crackling with static. Though nothing discernable could be heard, Michelle had a pretty good idea what they were saying. The cops were on their way. Soon, they’d all be handcuffed, pushed into the backs of police cruisers, and hauled away to juvenile hall. A bored police officer would then call her mom and dad to explain that their daughter was being held on suspicion of kidnapping and rape, as well as other charges yet to be determined. Her mom would cry and her dad would yell.

Would they come to see her in jail, she wondered? Would they bail her out? Was bail even an option for kids? She had no idea.

Even as she contemplated her future bright orange wardrobe, Michelle kept going back to something Ms. Linda said earlier. She told Ms. Rosen that the perpetrator was in custody. Perpetrator. Singular. Not perpetrators. She also alluded to ‘catching him red-handed,’ and when she was filming the evidence of their crime, she seemed entirely focused on the unconscious Mr. Messina, instead of the eight guilty girls.

Could Ms. Linda possibly have misread the situation so badly that she somehow concluded that Mr. Messina was the bad guy in all this, and that they were the victims? It seemed such a ludicrous notion to her that Michelle nearly tossed it aside as nothing but wishful thinking, but she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. The thought that she might somehow be able to exploit such a misunderstanding to avoid jail was simply too tempting not to consider.

There was only one problem. She’d have to screw over Mr. Messina to pull it off. Could she do that to him? What would happen to him if she did? Prison, surely. She didn’t have a strong enough grasp on the law to know for sure, but one thing she did know was that child rapists received pretty rotten treatment in jail. Plus, there was the inconvenient little detail that he was actually the victim in all of this. Could she live with herself, knowing that she put an innocent man, whom she had helped to drug and rape, in jail for drugging and raping them?

No. Of course not. She’d rather do hard time than do that. As desperate as she was to save her own skin, she could never bring herself to do something so diabolical to a kind, thoughtful man like Mr. Messina. He didn’t deserve that. No one did.

However...

Michelle’s brilliant, analytical mind kicked into overdrive. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to get out from under this mess without throwing Mr. Messina under the bus. There’d been a lot of confusion down in that basement. A lot of ways the situation could have been misinterpreted. What if there was a perfectly logical, and legal, explanation for all of it? Maybe there was a way to bend justice far enough to slip through the cracks.

That was a lot of maybes. Perhaps, with sufficient time, she could work out such a scheme. Formulate a plan to save them all from jail. The problem was, she didn’t have time. The cops were already on their way, speeding up the mountain with their sirens blaring. Michelle sighed miserably. She wished she had just a little more time to think.

Her wish was granted when Ms. Rosen met them in the dormitory’s large foyer, along with the school nurse, Mrs. Gasparian. The common areas downstairs were packed with girls talking loudly over each other about the power outage and a strange light in the sky

“The phones are down,” Ms. Rosen said loud enough to be heard over the commotion. “A tree must have taken down a power pole or something.”

“Is your cellphone working?” Linda asked Ms. Gasparian.

“No,” she said, taking her phone from her pocket to check it again, “I can’t get a signal.”

Ms. Rosen said, “I was going to take Renata with me to check on Sophia and Mike.”

Ms. Linda held up her hand. “Wait. Renata, you go. And send Theresa back here when you get there. Rachel, I need you to stay here to look after the girls. Take these ones up to their dorm room and make sure they stay there, and keep everyone else inside the house. No one leaves. I’m going out to see if I can find Endora.”

Ms. Rosen nodded. “Do you know how to get into the basement?” she asked Mrs. Gasparian.

“I think so. Behind the teacher’s lounge, right?”

“That’s it,” Ms. Rosen confirmed.

Mrs. Gasparian slung her small medical bag over her shoulder and left the dorm. Ms. Linda went to a low cabinet by the front entry and used one of her dozens of keys to unlock it. Inside were several large flashlights, LED camping lanterns, and packs of spare batteries. From the top shelf, she removed a thin red binder with the words SCIREWOOD ACADEMY - EMERGENCY OPERATIONS MANUAL printed on the spine and handed it to Ms. Rosen.

“The blackout procedure is in there somewhere. Read it and do whatever it says,” she instructed, then turned to leave.

When she had gone, Ms. Rosen regarded Michell and the others with a scornful expression. “Alright, you heard the woman. Upstairs,” she said, then clenched her jaw and hardened her eyes. “I’m very disappointed in all of you. What you girls did to him was unforgivable. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Now go, and so help me, if I find you anywhere other than your room, your ass is mine. You got me?”

“Yes, Ms. Rosen.”

Upstairs, the girls collapsed onto their bunks. No one said a word. Discussion was unnecessary because they were all thinking the same exact thought. How fucked they all were. They stewed on the horrible thing they’d done, and the inevitable fate that awaited them all.

Olivia lay in her top bunk with her hands clasped together over her stomach, staring at the ceiling. “What are we going to do, Michelle?” she asked, breaking the silence. When Michelle didn’t answer, Olivia turned onto her side to look at her. “They’re going to arrest us, you know.”

“I fucking know!” Michelle said, her stress spilling over. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to fix it!” Olivia snapped. “This is all your fault!”

Michelle sat up. “How is this my fault? I’m not the one who drugged him. Besides, you were right there with the rest of us. How come you didn’t do anything to stop her?”

Olivia frowned and turned over onto her back in a huff. “You ruined my life,” she said bitterly, then started to cry.

Michelle flipped her off and laid back down as well, then started to plan.

Mike felt woozy and nauseous, but the fog in his brain had finally lifted. He felt alert now, and could move around and sit up on his own. When he realized he was naked, he covered himself with the moving blanket, wincing because his dick was so hard it caused him pain. What the hell happened? The last he remembered, Marcus and Theresa had just left, he returned the moving truck, then set to work leveling the machines ... and that was it. He was leveling the machines, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up naked on the floor with a raging case of priapism.

The school nurse, Renata, squatted beside Sophia Bryce, who looked to be in about the same state as himself, minus the erection. Renata checked her pulse and blood pressure, and asked her questions about what happened. The nurse continually looked back at Mike during the interview, casting suspicious, even resentful looks his way.

How had Sophia even gotten inside the room with him, he wondered? Linda had cc’d the faculty on the bulletin banning students from the lab, so he knew she shouldn’t have been there, which made her presence all the more troubling. When he first woke up, he saw that both Theresa and Marcus were there as well, and Mike could sense their extreme concern, even though they tried their best to hide it.

Theresa brought Mike his clothes, all neatly folded, and helped him to dress. Though she tried not to be obvious about it, Mike noticed the way her eyes occasionally flicked to his erection until he finally covered it with his boxers and slacks.

Marcus stood nearby looking at his phone, after opening the rollup and receiving doors to give everyone some light to work with. That was another mystery. Why were the lights out in the basement?

“The director said she needs you back at the dorm,” Renata told Theresa for the second time.

“I heard you,” Theresa said, her tone snippy.

When Mike finished getting dressed, he held out his hand to her. “Help me up, please.”

“Are you sure? Why don’t you wait until Renata checks you out.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Just give me a hand.”

A wave of nausea washed over him when he stood, but it quickly passed. He didn’t have a throbbing headache, or pain behind his eyes, or any other indication that he might have a concussion, which made him feel a little better. However he ended up on the floor, he hadn’t cracked his skull. Mike had been concussed once before on a movie set. A programmable robotic rig used for manipulating a spaceship cockpit had malfunctioned and swung around while he was setting it up, smacking him in the back of the head and knocking him out cold.