“So read them.”
The sound of the rubber band being pulled off. Pages rustling.
“Whoa.”
“What?” This was the kind of thing that made Iggy crazy: other people getting all the info much sooner because they could see. He always had to wait to be told stuff. He hated it.
“These are files on, like, patients,” said the Gasman. “Not students from this school. These are patients, and they’re from the . . . Standish Home for Incurables.”
“What is that? Sounds like a whole bunch of not-fun.”
Gazzy read, and Iggy forced himself to be patient.
“Wait—,” said Gazzy, and Iggy thought, Oh, like I have a lot of freaking choice.
“This is weird. I mean, as far as I can tell, this school used to be, like, an insane asylum, until maybe just two years ago. These files are on patients who used to live here. But why is the headhun
ter saving them?”
“Maybe he had something to do with them? Did he run the nuthouse? Maybe he was a patient and he killed all the others and opened this school—”
“Can’t tell. There’s a lot of stuff here. Too much to read right now. Let’s show these to Max. I can stuff them under my shirt.”
“Cool. We better be heading back.”
“Yep.”
Iggy followed Gazzy to the stairs. Let’s see, almost lunchtime. Wonder where Tess will sit today—Then Gazzy paused for a second, and Iggy almost ran into him.
“That’s funny,” Gazzy muttered. “There’s a door here I never noticed.”
Iggy heard him step forward and open it. Dank, cool air wafted out at them.
“What is it?”
“A tunnel,” said the Gasman, sounding taken aback. “A long, dark tunnel going farther than I can see. Right under the school.”
77
I was kind of dreading seeing Sam again at school. Would he blow me off? Had he told anyone about us kissing? Would I get teased and therefore have to kick serious butt?
It was fine. I saw him in class, and he gave me a discreet and yet special smile. No one seemed to be watching him or me to see us interact as gossip fodder. During free period, we sat at a table across from each other and talked and read and studied, and not even the headhunter came down on us.
It was cool. For almost that whole day, I felt like life didn’t totally suck. And that lasted all the way till I got back to Anne’s, so we might be talking new record here.
“A tunnel?” I looked at Gazzy and Iggy in confusion. “Why would there be a tunnel under the school?”
“Excellent question,” the Gasman said, nodding. “Plus the secret files.”
I flipped through the files again. “Nudge? Do a check on the school. Didn’t I see something that said it had been there for, like, twenty years?”
“All the brochures said that,” Fang confirmed. “Plus there’s a plaque in the front hall that says Founded in 1985.”
Nudge got onto the laptop we’d more or less appropriated from Anne. I kept flipping through the files, which were all about patients who had entered the sanitarium and never come out. The files were dated mostly from the last fifteen years or so, until just two years ago. In other people’s lives, ending up at a school that used to be a mental hospital and had a tunnel under it would be very interesting but coincidental.
In our lives, it was like a great big red warning light blinking on and off.
“Huh,” said Nudge. “The school’s Web site says it’s been in that building since 1985. But when I Google it, nothing shows up before two years ago.”