They found it,
separately. Sometimes one at a time,
sometimes in small groups. They all
instinctively shied away from each other, accepted without argument that
certain hallways would remain locked to them.
What did they want to see each other for, anyway? They didn’t.
They didn’t, and they wouldn’t.
Once they had all
arrived and found themselves their own shadowy corners, the teenage boy
appeared. He went to a courtyard in the
middle, surrounded on all sides by brick walls with windows that opened from
the inside. On a white sheet spread out
on the concrete ground he very deliberately started placing red plastic
drinking straws. No one watched him and
he paid attention to no one else.
Over time the straws began to form an intricate pattern. Those hiding in the brick building did not
want to look at it, and when they did, they pretended not to understand. Was it a formula, they asked? The kind you needed to be a math genius to
understand, perhaps? They were not math
geniuses, so they would never understand it.
Satisfied, they slid away from the windows.
But the group of
pirate boys living in the trees overhead did not leave. They watched from the tree house they built
high in the branches. They knew what the
red straws on the white sheet meant.
They knew it was a key. A key to
a map that would lead everyone in the building to the one place no one wanted
to go.
No one, that is,
but them.
