Student Body (Nightmare Hall) by Diane Hoh Page A

were several problems, all of them looking, at the moment, insurmountable. “Another one? What is it?”
    He glanced around nervously. But no one on the Commons was paying any attention to us. Everyone was busy doing something fun, tossing a ball around, throwing a Frisbee, biking, jogging, running. No one but us was standing on the lawn, stiff as statues, discussing serious problems.
    “I’ve lost my key chain.”
    This time, I did laugh, bitterly. He’d lost his key chain? Hoop was hovering between life and death in the hospital because of a fire we’d let get away from us, I’d been threatened twice now by a monstrous, mummified creature, and Eli was mourning the loss of a key chain!
    “No, you don’t get it,” he said earnestly when I laughed. “I lost it there. At the park. Friday night.”
    I stopped laughing. “Oh, no, Eli, you didn’t! That key chain has your name on it.” I knew that because I was the one who had bought it for him, at Christmas. It was a thick, clear plastic replica of the campus tower with a hole punched in the very top, where the carillon was, for the key chain to slip through. On the reverse side of the tower, I’d had Eli’s name etched into the plastic, because he was constantly losing his keys. That way, if someone found them, they’d know whom to return them to.
    But I hadn’t once imagined that there would come a time when we absolutely would not want those keys found.
    “It was plastic, Eli,” I pointed out. He looked pale. I guessed that I did, too, in spite of my burn. “It would have melted in the fire, wouldn’t it?”
    “ If I lost it where the fire was hot enough. But what if I didn’t? What if it slipped out of my pocket somewhere else, maybe in the parking lot? The fire didn’t reach that far. The whole thing could still be intact, just waiting for someone to pick it up and read my name. Even if it did fall out in the fire, the plastic might have melted, but the keys could still be intact. It probably wouldn’t be hard for the police to trace the room key.”
    We did have another problem. “What are you going to do?”
    “I have to go over there. To the park. I have to look for that key chain. I think if it had been found and turned in already, the police would have been knocking on my door by now. There’s still a chance that I can find it. And I don’t want any of the others to know. They’ll panic if they know I left a calling card back there.”
    He trusted only me? Any other time, I would have been pleased. Now, it just seemed like one more ten-ton boulder on the back of my neck. “Eli, that whole area of the park is sealed off. No one’s allowed in there. The fire is probably still smoldering.”
    “Tory, you can’t seal off something as big as a state park. The entrance may be blocked, but we can go in the back way, by the river road. You have to help me. I can’t cover all that ground by myself.”
    If there was one thing I didn’t want to do, it was go back into that park. Not now, not yet. “Why don’t you ask Bay? Or Mindy or Nat? Why me?”
    Eli sighed impatiently. “Bay is acting really weird, Mindy’s been doing nothing but crying her eyes out, and I had a fight with Nat at breakfast this morning. Bay had just told us that you’d gone to the hospital last night, and she made some crack about you turning us all in to the cops. I got mad, because I know you’d never do that, and we had a pretty fierce argument.”
    He had defended me against Nat? That was nice. Had Bay done the same?
    I didn’t think so. The impression Nat had given me was that she and Bay were suddenly on the same wavelength.
    “Thanks, Eli,” I said sincerely. “Okay, I’ll help you look. But we’re going to have to really look casual when we head for the river road, as if we’re going bird-watching or canoeing or something. We don’t want anyone to guess that we’re headed for the park.”
    “Maybe I’d better hold your hand,” he said lightly.