Emma and the Minotaur (3 page)

“Emma Wilkins!” Miss Robins said. “Sit down right this minute. That’s one strike for disturbing the class!”

Over on the side of the room, on the wall, there was a poster board with the word “STRIKES” written at the top of it. The rest of it was blank but Miss Robins took a permanent marker and wrote on it:

EMMA WILKENS: X

Emma was mortified in equal amounts by being the first one on the Strike Board and by the misspelling of her last name. She tried to protest but the teacher hushed her down and threatened to give her another strike immediately if she didn’t stop talking.

She pressed her lips together into a thin line to keep herself from speaking. She reasoned that at least now she knew that the boy was, in fact, a wizard and there was a strong indication that she was the only one who could see him. She was more determined than ever to find out his secrets and question him about the disappearance of Andrew Milligan.

The chase went on that same way for the next day. Emma didn’t give up trying to catch the boy but he always got away from her somehow. He was always in the classroom before she got there and he always rushed out before she could catch up to him. He wasn’t in the cafeteria during lunch time.

On Thursday morning, the boy didn’t show up at school at all and his desk stood empty. Emma raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“May I go to the bathroom?”

Miss Robins nodded and continued her lesson. Emma stood up. On her way out, she paused in front of the boy’s desk. Suzie Collins gave her a quizzical look.

“Are you here?” Emma whispered at the empty chair. She waited a moment but, when there was no answer, she waved her hand through the air above it. “Oh, alright,” she said and looked up to see a look of puzzlement on Suzie’s face.

“Emma,” said Miss Robins. “Are you going to the bathroom or are you just going to stand there all day?”

Emma ran out of the room.

The worst time of the day at the Wilkins household, as Emma saw it, was right after dinner because it was the time for violin practice. Mr Wilkins, being a physicist, idolized Albert Einstein. Because Einstein had played the violin, he was trying to learn to play it as well.

Emma was sitting in the living room trying to do her math homework on the coffee table but the screeching from her father’s office was making it difficult. She put her pencil down, went to his door, and knocked on it.

The screeching continued uninterrupted.

“Dad!” she screeched back and knocked again.

The door opened and she let herself into the room. Early on, Emma had figured out a trick that cut down on practice time. Mr Wilkins always set a countdown on his computer for exactly one hour. If someone interrupted him, he never remembered to pause the timer.

Her father’s office was messy. There were bookshelves full of physics textbooks mixed with fiction hardcovers. On the floor, there were boxes overflowing with scientific papers. His desk was really a long table in the shape of an L that fit into the corner of the room. On top of the table sat his monitor and his computer. The screen showed a paused instructional video and an unpaused timer applet.

Emma sat down on a great, big book that was lying on the floor. It was called “The Handbook of Physics.” This edition was from 1989 and it had close to two thousand pages. Emma knew this because she had tried to read it once before but it was made up of mostly number tables and funny math symbols.

“Hey, Dad,” she said.

“Hey, Emma, I was just practising,” he said and sat down on his chair.

“I know, Dad,” she said. “I could hear you. I just wanted to talk to you.”

He put the violin down so that it leaned against a box on the floor. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing much,” Emma said. “Have you heard anything about Mr Milligan?”

“No, not really. He’s still missing, and there have been rumours going around the school about more people disappearing, but they’re just rumours, I’m sure. No one can name any one specifically and that usually means that it’s just a rumour.”

“I still think he’s a wizard,” Emma said.

“That’s possible, of course, but very unlikely,” he said, smiling. “Have you caught the wizard you were chasing yet?”

“Nah,” she said. “No luck. I think he can turn invisible too.”

“He must be very powerful.” He spun his chair sideways a short distance like he always did when he was thinking. “You know, Emma,” he said finally, “if he isn’t actually a wizard then maybe he’s going somewhere outside of the school when he disappears, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. But we’re not allowed to leave the school during lunch.”

“I know,” he said, “but just suppose he did. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so.”

“And if he’s leaving the school, then he probably leaves the same way every time. How many exits are there at Briardale?”

“Uh, three or four, I think. Why?”

He smiled. “I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to the student,” he said.

“Dad!” she said, but she knew that it was pointless to argue. Her father did this sort of thing all the time.

Emma stood up.

“Thanks,” she said and gave him a hug. She went back to the living room to work on her homework and mull over her new puzzle.

It didn’t take long for Emma to figure out what her father had meant and implement it into a plan. She found out from Will that there were four ways in and out of Briardale Middle School. There were the main doors at the front of the building, the big doors leading to the playground in the back, and two smaller side doors. If the boy was leaving the school during lunch time, then he had to go through one of those exits, and if he always left through the same exit, then all Emma had to do was to wait for him at the right one. If she waited at a different door each day, then it would take her four days to catch him at the longest.

But Emma narrowed her options down even further. She didn’t think that the boy would leave through the main doors because they were the main doors and not good for sneaking. The back doors were also out of the question because one or two teachers were always near them during lunch as they watched the playground. The only possibilities that remained were the two side doors. This meant that Emma had a fifty percent chance of catching the boy on her first try.

There was a small problem that she had to overcome. The boy, because he sat closer to the door, always ran out of the room before she could. He seemed to be always prepared for a quick exit. Emma needed to think of a way to leave the classroom before the boy did.

Emma came up with a solution and decided to try it out on Thursday. She would probably only have one shot at it and she thought that Miss Robins would perhaps be in a good mood because of the approaching weekend. Friday would be better but Emma didn’t think that she could wait that long.

It was twenty minutes before lunch time when she raised her hand and put her plan into action.

“Emma?” said Miss Robins.

“May I go to the bathroom please, Miss Robins?”

She had decided that if she waited too long to ask, then Miss Robins would make her wait until the end of class. Twenty minutes before lunch seemed about right.

“Can’t you wait until lunch?”

“Sorry, Miss Robins,” she said. “I really can’t.”

“Okay, go ahead,” the teacher said. She didn’t seem all that happy about it but Emma got up and left the classroom.

It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, as Emma crouched outside right around the wall from one of the side doors, that it occurred to her that her father would never suggest that she leave class early. Only now did it occur to her that if the boy left during lunch time, he also had to come back at some point.

“Dang it!” she said. “Too late now.”

A moment later, the door opened and out came the boy. He stuck his face out and peeked around like a mouse looking out for cats. He almost spotted Emma but she hid behind the wall just in time.

She thought that she could catch him right then, but she was also curious about where it was that he went when he left the school. She decided to follow him.

Emma kept her distance as she walked behind him down the street, past the school’s soccer field, and into the surrounding neighbourhood. Disapproving houses looked down on them from either side.

They walked for five minutes until they came to a park. It was a rolling expanse of grass with a trail running through it. In the near distance, Emma could see the tops of a few trees that peeked above the grass beyond where the field sloped down.

The boy went into the park and onto the trail. She followed him and they went on down the slope. Emma saw that the trees that had been peeking above the slope were only the tallest among many others.

To one side of the path there was a creek that wound its way through the woods. The boy walked up to the creek and then stopped to look around. Emma hid behind a tree so that he wouldn’t see her. When the boy was satisfied that no one was near, he went across the creek by walking on a log that lied across it. On the other side of the creek, there was a steep hill and the boy climbed it and disappeared over it.

Emma followed. The climb gave her difficulty because of her small size and so it was something of a scramble.

When she finally reached the top, she stood up and looked down on the disappearing boy.

He was sitting cross-legged on top of a big rock. There was a small waterfall behind him that fed the creek, which then wound its slow way around the hill. Across the creek the woods were thick. The boy was occupying the space where woods, waterfall, hill, and creek intersected. It was his own secret hiding place. His backpack was there next to him and there was a brown lunch bag in front of him. He was eating a sandwich and drinking from a can of soda.

“Hey, boy!” Emma called down to him. “Are you a wizard?”

The boy almost fell off the rock. “A wizard?” he said, looking up. He put his sandwich down and stood up, knocking his soda over in process. He wiped his hands on his pants.

“I’m just Jake,” he said.

“Jake? What Jake? Jake who?”

“Jake Milligan,” he said.

Emma went down the slope. This side of the hill was easier to manage than the climbing side had been.

She stood next to Jake’s rock and looked up at the boy. She thought that, with the sun shining behind his head like it was, he did look sort of wizardly.

“Hey, Jake,” she said. “I’m Emma Wilkins.”

“I know,” Jake said. He crouched down and packed his things into his old backpack. It was too small for him and there was a hole at the top of it that had already been mended, but now the mending was coming apart.

“Why do you come here?” Emma said. “You know we’re not allowed to leave the school.”

Jake shrugged. He kicked the now-empty can of grape soda and it flew into the water. He jumped off the rock and started for the hill.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to school,” he said. He didn’t look at her.

“But why? I’ve been trying to catch you for ages!”

“I know,” he said, not slowing down. “I’ve seen you.”

“I only want to be your friend,” she said.

“I don’t want any friends,” he said and walked on up the hill.

Emma followed and tried to talk to him but he only ignored her.

When they were out of the park, Jake started to walk faster and Emma couldn’t keep up unless she ran. She wasn’t about to run after a boy so she ended up trailing behind him all the way to the school.

They reached Briardale before the lunch period was over. Jake ran through the basketball courts and into the playground.

Will was playing basketball, as usual, and he saw Emma coming.

“Was that your boyfriend?” he said.

“That was Jake,” Emma said. “I finally caught him.”

“Doesn’t look like you did,” he said. “It looked like he was running away.”

Before Emma could respond, Miss Robins came storming toward them. “Emma Wilkins!” she said. The teacher looked furious. She stopped in front of her and crossed her arms, towering over the girl. “What do have to say for yourself?”

Emma opened her mouth to speak but Miss Robins didn’t let her answer.

“What do you think you’re doing disappearing like that? You’ve been gone since before lunch! I was worried sick and I thought that I had lost a student. Come with me right now,” she said. “You’re in serious trouble.”

When they were back in the classroom, Miss Robins gave Emma a long speech with lots of yelling, and she marked strike number two beside her name on the Strike Board. She also wrote a note for Emma to take to her father regarding her bad behaviour.

“Now go to your seat and just wait there quietly for the rest of lunch,” she said in the end.

3

Wizard Falls

On Thursday nights, Emma’s father taught a night class from seven to ten. Normally, he would come home at four in the afternoon and wait until after dinner before returning to the school, but today he had called the house shortly after Emma and Will had arrived. He'd said that he had a lot of work to do, and that he would be staying at the university until the late class was over.