Among the Imposters

Seventeen

Promptly at two o’clock, Luke eased the door open a crack and peeked in. His timing was good — boys were walking to and from classes, their heads bowed, their eyes trained on the ground. But a hail monitor stood directly across from the door. Luke ducked back.

Look away, look away, Luke mentally commanded the monitor. Luke waited. Then, just when he moved over, ready to peek again, he saw the door slide shut.

Oh, no. Luke tried to figure out what had happened. Had the monitor seen the door open, thought that one of his marauding gang had forgotten to close it, and merely shut it to save his own skin?

Or did he know Luke was out there?

Stay calm, Luke commanded himself, uselessly His panic boiled over. And his anger. He hated that monitor. He was probably one of the boys who’d trampled Luke’s garden.

Luke could have looked for another door. He could have waited another hour, in hopes that a different hall monitor would be manning this spot, and not paying as much attention. He could have even gone back to the woods and waited until his usual time to come back.

But he didn’t He grabbed the doorknob and yanked.

As the door swung open, Luke saw that the hail monitor wasn’t looking directly at the door just then. If Luke was sneaky enough, he could slip in without drawing attention to himself. But Luke let the door slam behind him. A cluster of boys with their eyes trained on the ground were jolted by the noise and even looked up briefly. Some of them started running, as panicked as if someone had fired a gun. Other boys didn’t even glance Luke’s way.

The hall monitor jerked his head around immediately. Luke quickly joined the slow-moving group of boys with their heads down. But just before he lowered his own head, Luke caught the hall monitor’s stare. Their eyes locked for just an instant Luke waited for the monitor to grab him by the collar, to yell, to haul him off to the headmaster’s office. Luke could feel his shoulder hunching into a cower.

Nothing happened.

Luke shuffled forward with the other boys, and dared to look up again. The hall monitor was carefully looking past Luke.

He knows I was outside, Luke thought And he knows I know he knows. Why isn’t he doing anything?

It was like a chess game, Luke realized. He remembered one winter when Matthew and Mark had brought home achess set from school. They’d had a blizzard after that, and they’d been snowed in for a long time, so Matthew and Mark spent hours playing chess. Luke had been a lot younger then, maybe only five or six. The game that fascinated his brothers only puzzled him.

“Why don’t all the pieces move the same way?” he had asked, picking up the horse-shaped piece. “Why can’t this one go in a straight line like the castle?”

“Because it can’t,” Matthew had replied irritably, while Mark squealed, “Put that down! You~ re messing up our game!”

Now Luke almost trod on another boy’s heel. The boy didn’t even turn around. If everyone at the school were a chess piece, Luke realized, most of the boys were pawns. The hall monitors and the other ones Luke thought of as starers were the big, important pieces. The bishops. And the king. Luke remembered that Matthew and Mark had treasured those pieces, sacrificing pawns and knights and castles to protect them. But Luke hadn’t understood why. And he didn’t understand the hall monitor now.

But he knew how to find out about him.