Alice in Wonderland High (11 page)

“Send Alice to get the supplies.” Kingston flicked his wrist at me.

Whitney swirled her mug along the glass table, leaving behind streaks of green. “Yeah, it's probably good if you're out of the way for a few minutes.”

“Whatever you need.”

“Fetch me my gardening gloves. There's also a fan somewhere; get that, too. Then wait there until we're ready.”

“Where are they?” I stood up.

Whitney shrugged. “I can organize missions, not myself.”

The three of them led me to the foyer and disappeared around the bend without another word. Upstairs, several closed doors lined the hallway. A picture of a skull and crossbones hung from the first door. How unoriginal. Must be Kingston's; he didn't strike me as a burgeoning well of creativity. I opened the only unpainted door in the hallway, the one going against the status quo.

A floral, earthy scent attacked my nose. Palm trees shielded Whitney's bed in a canopy. Flowers sprung from open drawers, nestled into soil instead of clothes. Above her bed, an enlarged architectural drawing took up the length of one entire blue-painted wall. A blown-up blueprint. Pushpins of varying colors stuck out in specific spots with tiny, almost-illegible handwriting scrawled beneath. Symbols that looked like crude hieroglyphics marked info I couldn't decipher beside each pushpin.

Curiouser and curiouser. A secret code for a secret society.

I climbed onto the bed. Each of the pushpins identified a target. I recognized some of the red ones from Lorina's information file. Large blocks of black marker censored whatever information Whitney had written under the location titles. My finger traced from the red pin by the school creek to the green one marking the school itself. Paragraphs of text remained visible and untainted.

Ideas to cut off power supply: flood school so water damages wire. Maybe with creek?

My skin tingled. These words had been crossed out with a single pen stroke. So the creek mission had nothing to do with irrigating the land? If so, why did that seem to be checked off with a red pushpin?

New plan. Cut wires? How to do w/out getting fried or caught? No access in teachers' lounge. K checking other areas.

That was why she'd snuck into the lounge that day? Not to steal supplies but to look for a power source?

Outside, a car door slammed, and I jumped. Last thing I needed was to get caught snooping. I headed over to her messy desk and rifled through some of her papers. My fingers traced over math problems and AP chemistry lab reports. Underneath one stack, I found the battery-operated fan Whitney'd been using the other day, like the kind I used on hot summer days outside in the garden. Fan down, gloves to go.

The sounds of hushed voices, a car trunk opening, and a few sharp thuds provided guidance to the others' progress. My hands dangled at my sides as I looked around, trying to think like Whitney. Finally, I spotted a pair of mud-encased gloves hanging from the back of her door as footsteps stomped on the stairs.

“Here, put this on.” Whitney tossed me a black hoodie with a white-flowering vine crawling up the back. “It'll conceal your hair.”

I lifted the hood over my head. As we walked toward the car, I snuck a glance at the foyer mirror. No longer would I be mistaken for a goody-goody. I looked like I belonged with Whitney and her friends.

As I slipped into the back seat of Kingston's truck, I caught a glimpse of the clock and immediately tried to forget what I'd just seen. I told myself I was already in enough trouble with Lorina; a little more wouldn't make much of a difference. Kingston caught me looking. “Now who's angry with time?”

“It's later than I thought.”

“Of course it is.” He tapped the digital numbers. “This clock is precisely two days late.”

Chess filed in beside me. I scooted an inch toward him. “What are we doing?”

“We like to call it reforestation. Opposite of deforestation.”

“Clever. Another drive-by planting at an abandoned warehouse?”

“Something like that,” Whitney said from the passenger seat. “Not a warehouse this time.”

“I love what you're doing. Taking all these dead and lifeless places and giving them new life.”

“That's not the point of this.” Chess shrugged in an offhand way.

“If only it were,” Kingston said. “Then maybe I'd wake up.”

My knee rested against Chess's denim-covered leg. So casual, he probably didn't even notice, but somehow it felt close. It took all my willpower not to press my knee harder into his and see if he registered it.

We passed by LEGO building after LEGO building in the sprawling landscape of Wonderland, pressed so close together they were almost attached. The farms that had once existed here were now fairy-tale myths. The site of the old nuclear-power plant Whitney had mentioned was now just vast pavement, littered with a few stray cars. As we drove to our destination, my knee bounced up and down. This high was greater than any triple-espresso shot. “Thanks for letting me come.”

“You might think differently if the police show up.” Whitney tugged the cords of her hoodie tighter to conceal her hair.

“Jail? Not fun.” Kingston gunned the engine. “All those jokes about not dropping the soap bar? I didn't even get a freaking soap bar.”

I swallowed. I had been hoping his mug shot was Photoshopped. “Why'd you go to jail?”

“Botched mission,” Whitney said.

“I took one for the team.” His voice contained more pep than a can of Red Bull. “Maybe next time you'll be the one who has to sacrifice.”

Was that why they had let me in? Chess nudged his leg against mine to stop it from shaking.

“Kingston, stop trying to scare her,” he warned. But it was too late. My heart raced and my throat felt tight. I was officially terrified.

I had expected the mission to take place in a dilapidated part of town. Warehouses with broken windows, and asbestos seeping into the air. Some dead place we could bring to life. It had never occurred to me this mission might be the opposite. Some newborn place we would destroy.

We parked in front of a set of brand-new houses, each with construction stickers plastered in the windows. “Sold” signs sprouted out of the manicured lawns. This particular cul-de-sac was a replica of several others we had driven by. A virginal development, not yet broken in by the living.

“What's wrong with this place?” Even my feet hitting the pavement couldn't disguise the panic in my voice. “I mean, I was happy when they built it.”

Three sets of eyes narrowed at me.

“Because of the solar panels on the roofs?” My head volleyed back and forth between them. “It's environmentally friendly!”

This was Wonderland's answer to the energy problem. Citizens fed up with living like vampires in their houses were snatching up the new properties in less time than it took to build them. Since housing prices in the rest of Wonderland had dropped so low, I'd heard rumors that a lot of young, fresh-out-of-college families were bidding as soon as they went on the market. The social class was always greener on the other side.

“Not even six months ago, this place,” Whitney stabbed her finger toward the houses, “used to be a farm.”

“A fucking great farm with a lot of land that provided crops to several cities in the area.” Kingston unloaded a plant from the back of the truck and set it on the ground.

“The last farm in a hundred-mile radius, actually,” Chess added.

“But now it's a housing complex,” I whispered, understanding.

“It's a devastating loss.” Whitney tossed a metal shovel onto the ground with a tinny
thud
. “You know how much land the farm has left?”

I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid of the answer.

“None,” Chess said. “The township confiscated it all, kept changing zoning laws and permit regulations and raising taxes until the farm owners couldn't fight anymore.”

“What happened to the farmers?”

Chess lifted a leafy plant from the trunk that obscured his face in shadow. “They fled the area. Couldn't afford to live here anymore.” He paused. “We think,” he added as an afterthought.

“So what are we going to do?”

“Not what I want to do. Which is destroy this place. That would really get the message across.” Kingston brandished a pair of gardening shears like a weapon.

“We're making a statement. Showing the town what they lost, what this used to be,” Chess said.

“What it still could be if they tear down the houses and turn it back into a farm.” With her gloves on, Whitney picked up one of the potted plants and a bag of soil and carried them over to the front of the house.

I chose a tray of purple azaleas and headed after her. “You're just like your mother,” I teased.

Whitney rolled her eyes.

“You are
revising
, aren't you?”

She set the plant down on the front steps and pulled a screwdriver from her pocket. She jimmied the front lock until it popped open. “Chaining yourself to a tree is cliché and you'll get arrested. This will get noticed. It has to. There's a family moving in tomorrow.” Keeping the door propped open with her foot, she reached for the potted plant.

I transferred my weight from foot to foot. Maybe I'd been wrong to want to be involved. This family would probably be super excited to come to their new home tomorrow, only to find it vandalized when they got there? That wasn't doing good for the environment; that was breaking and entering.

She poked her head out the door. “You're not second-guessing yourself, are you?”

“No.” I picked up the azaleas and followed Whitney inside.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said. “But it's not a random family. It's the owners of this new development. And we're not going to mess things up. The family will still move in; they'll just have to bypass a few plants to do it.” She headed to the kitchen where she opened the bag of soil and dumped one quarter of its contents into the sink. “Think of it more like . . . decoration than destruction.” She removed the pink flower from its pot and replanted it into the soil. After patting it down, she ran the faucet and looked up at me. “There are more sinks and bathtubs.”

I lugged the flowers to the bathroom. After I finished the sink there, I hustled back to the car for more supplies. A lizard scurried across my path. I yelped, jumping back a step. Kingston snickered at me. I squared my shoulders and kept going. Chess unloaded large planks of plywood from the trunk and carried them toward the house, one by one.

“What are those for?” I asked, passing him on my way back to Whitney.

“Planting flowers in sinks is annoying, but its not going to make anyone stop building stuff over farms.” Chess grinned in a way no emoji could replicate. “We're barricading the door.”

My stomach practiced for an Olympic-gymnastics tryout. This was getting harder to condone, but still, what they were doing wasn't
too
damaging. I kept reminding myself of that.

Kingston bent down and inspected one of the flowerpots. “Not much, sir,” he said, saluting it. He glanced back, squinting at us, then leaned into the flower conspiratorially. “Your secret's safe, don't worry.” He patted the petals and straightened up, getting back to work as if nothing odd had occurred.

After Whitney and I finished inside the house, we deposited two large pots on the porch guarding the door. She secured them down with some kind of sticky substance she glopped on the bottom. Using the battery-operated fan, she lay on her stomach and blew air into the small crease where the pot met the porch. A few minutes passed and she tested the strength of the bond by yanking the pot this way and that. Satisfied that even a tornado couldn't budge it, she moved on to the next plant.

“Krazy Glue?”

She capped the bottle. “That's for amateurs. This one's my own concoction.”

I thought back to the AP chemistry notes I'd found in her room. In eighth grade, she took first prize at the science fair for her chemistry experiment but had never entered another competition. Maybe she hadn't quit after all, just stopped advertising her talents, stopped drawing attention.

Meanwhile, Chess and Kingston looped ropes through the holes at either end of the planks and secured them with Boy-Scout knots onto the drainpipes. The planks stretched across the front of the house like window-washing lifts. They loaded them with plants, slapping on the same glue Whitney had used on the porch.

Kingston stopped every now and then, bracing his hands on his knees and gasping for breath. I wanted to tease him because he had teased me, but I wasn't that sadistic. Whitney, however, didn't share the same philosophy. “What? Do the planks weigh more than five pounds? Maybe you should practice with soup cans.”

“Shut up. I'm still sore from when you both abandoned me and made me do that warehouse all by myself.”

“Wimp. That was forever ago,” Whitney said.

“I don't see you lifting these heavy planks.” Kingston stretched his arms skyward and forced himself to keep going. His pace slowed, like he was trying to trudge through quicksand.

Stepping back, my breath caught in my throat. Long assembly lines of plants covered the entire bottom half of the house in four neat rows, blocking the door so the family couldn't get inside without removing them. A vertical forest. We weren't destroying the house, but our statement couldn't be ignored. A smile curled on my face as I watched my new friends in awe.

“Hey, where's the ladder?” Chess asked Whitney when we had finished filling the last of the planks already attached to the house. The top third of the house remained uncovered.

“See, this is why bringing her was a bad idea.” Kingston gestured to me with his chin. Beads of sweat outlined his forehead. His skin looked pale, flu-like. “We couldn't bring the ladder with her in the back seat.”