Pass/Fail (2012) by David Wellington Page B

him until he was sitting up. He hadn’t realized he was lying down. There was dirt on his face and he rubbed at his cheeks and mouth to clear it away. Instead he got a face full of goopy cream that smelled like medicine. “Where am I?” he asked.
    “The ruins,” Cody told him. Cody’s shadow fell across Jake’s eyes and that helped a little. “Megan wanted to take you to the nurse’s office but I figured they would just shoot you full of arsenic there. I mean, they clearly want to kill you.”
    Jake shook his head. “No. They’re willing to kill me. But they don’t want to kill me. That makes all the difference, the way they see it.” He slowly turned his head. There was Megan, squatting down next to him.
    “Hi,” he said, sleepily.
    “Hi, yourself.” She pressed one palm against his forehead and frowned at him. “I’m glad to see I didn’t kill you.”
    He smiled at her. It felt good to have her touch him, to have her close by. In the week since she’d decided he was crazy he’d been missing her terribly.
    “So what happened?” he asked.
    She looked away. “I turned the knob, just like you told me to. You—well, you screamed. It was hard to stay focused with you screaming right in my ear but I did it, I turned the needle all the way to P. Then it dropped back to zero, almost instantly, and you let go of the handles and fell out of your chair. You were totally out of it and I started yelling at the Proctor, I was kind of convinced you were dead, and—”
    “Then I woke up,” Cody told him. “I guess the Proctor woke me up. He was just walking out of the room as if nothing had happened and I was lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, that’s all I knew. But I figured I should follow him. See where he went.”
    “I had to stay with you,” Megan said. “I had to make sure you were okay.”
    Cody went on, “I followed him half way to the teacher’s wing, but then he just disappeared. He turned a corner and when I went around that same corner he was nowhere to be seen. I think they must have a secret passage there somewhere.”
    “Then Cody came back to us,” Megan finished, “and we agreed we couldn’t just leave you there. So we carried you here. There were kids in the halls—it must have been between periods—and they just stared at us, nobody even offered to help. There was one kid, in a black t-shirt, he asked if you were dead and I just didn’t know. I didn’t even answer him. Cody thought this would be a safe place so we brought you here and—”
    “And—” Cody said.
    Jake held up one goopy hand to stop them.
    “Thanks,” he said. He was looking at Megan.
    She smiled back.
    “So,” Jake said, closing his eyes. He felt weak and small, but the sunlight on his skin was helping. “So now I know what happened. I’m still wondering how it happened.”
    “What do you mean?” Cody asked.
    Jake nodded. “Cody, did you take the galvanometer out of the music room or did you just leave it there?”
    Cody looked away. “I was afraid to touch it. Do you want me to go back and look for it?”
    Jake shook his head. “The Proctors or Mr. Zuraw or somebody will have taken it away by now. They don’t want me to get my hands on it again. They know I would take it apart to see how they did it, whether there was actually a battery in there or a capacitor or whatever.”
    “I didn’t think,” Cody said.
    Jake shrugged. “Honestly, it’s not that important. What really bothers me is that
    when I went to Mr. Irwin, I hadn’t told anybody about my plan. About how I was thinking of taking a lie detector test. But when I told him what I was looking for, he went right to that galvanometer and gave it to me. He didn’t even open the box. Which means he must have had it ready in advance—rigged up to give me that shock as soon as I touched the handles. But how did he know?”
     

Chapter Twenty-Three
    “You’re saying that Mr. Zuraw knew what you were going to do before you did