Superheroes

Chapter Twelve - Rock Bottom

                                     Chapter Twelve – Rock Bottom

With one week left of school before the Easter holidays, it was fair to say that we were getting desperate.

Due to be packed off home for three well-earned weeks of holiday, my year was advised to knuckle down with exam preparations. I hadn’t even given exams a second thought what with all that had been happening. For everyone else, however, the topic began filtering into all of their conversations, and Trent Buchman quickly became irrelevant. In their eyes, the one true tragedy of that year was that we had to take tests at the end of it.

Three months had passed since Trent’s death. It simultaneously felt like less and more time must have gone by. I felt like I’d lost a month somewhere, that it was impossible that Trent had died so long ago. At the same time, our investigation seemed to have been going on for years. 

True, the holidays did not signal the end of the year, nor were they really that long. Still, they felt like a deadline. I called it psychic instinct whilst Andrew called it paranoia, but I felt that if we hadn’t started solving the case by the end of term, then we were never going to solve it at all. Even though he disagreed with my theory, it was clear that Andrew was feeling the pressure too.

We had only one solid clue left to go on: the cue card left in my locker. Whilst it didn’t actually tell us anything - like all of the clues we’d picked up along the way - it was our one true connection to the killer. If we could just figure out who had written it, we’d have our very first valid suspect.

Back when we’d first found it, we’d asked around to see if anyone had spotted the culprit hanging around my locker and sneaking something inside. In return, we received the expected response of people staring back at us with dazed expressions. No one paid attention to other people screwing with lockers; it was too common an act for that. First years learnt right away that the most basic practical joke at Hawthorne Academy was to nuke people’s lockers with various items, from rude messages to ‘scented packages’ that would perfume a locker for weeks.

Distracted by the other clues, we hadn’t given the cue card much thought since finding it. In our last week, however, desperation ignited a new surge of interest. With great diligence we tried everything both practical and pointless. We found out where the paper had come from: the school library, accessible to everyone and subsequently useless. We scoured the Internet for meanings of the font used, for codes that could be hidden in the text, or for any references it could have been making.

Once again, we found nothing.

I knew that we were well and truly fucked once Andrew started suggesting we try using our magical psychic powers on it.  The worst part was, I didn’t even say no. I had nothing else left either.

We took turns babysitting the card, holding it to try and get some great epiphany to shower down upon us. By Wednesday it was dog-eared and rather miserable in its appearance, the white paper turning a pale yellow, a tea-stain marking one corner. Despite it being his suggestion, Andrew always made a point to comment on how ridiculous our new tactic was. That didn’t stop him from trying though.

Bestowed with an unexpected free period last thing Wednesday afternoon, having had my Mathematics class cancelled due to my teacher’s sudden case of irritable bowels, I headed across the sports fields. The weather wasn’t great, the sky spitting a feeble dribble of rain, turning the grass to mulch. I ran with my coat pulled up over my head, all potential witnesses to my embarrassment thankfully stowed away safe indoors.

Slowing to a walk as I approached the stairwell, I was relieved to spot the back of Andrew’s head through the entrance. Drawing closer, I then had to repress a snort.