Oops! My Croissant Started a Coup! | Complete (ONC 2021 Longlister)

11. A Careless Plan

The party raged on long after I reached the tree house, but I spent most of my time sitting by the snacks and occasionally nibbling on my bread crown. Somehow, I had ended up laying on the table with the food haphazardly stuffing handfuls into my mouth as I slowly drifted toward sleep.

Unsurprisingly, I had fallen asleep atop the snack table with my face pressed into a licorice. A normal person probably would have been concerned by that fact, especially given whatever it was they put in the beer, but waking up with licorice stuck to my face was actually a pretty normal day for me.

When I started to regain my consciousness to the sounds of yelling and footsteps running through the house, I wasn't overly surprised, thinking that the party was still raging despite my little nap.

"Keep it down I'm sleeping over here," I said to no one, batting at the air and reaching for something to hold over my ears to keep the noise out.

A fog horn blared through the air and the ground shook. I reached my hand into the popcorn bowl and shoved some into my mouth. Who put salty chips in there? Unfortunately the crunching of food did little to block the party sounds from entering my ears.

"Go away!" I emphasized the second half of that word, wishing I had something to throw in the direction of the foghorn. Alas, I was forced to roll myself into the corner of the table and press my cheek into the cold tile on the wall, hoping that I would fall back into the bliss of sleep.

It might have worked, too, had the table not been pulled out from under me. I literally rolled right off the table and landed flat on my back on the hard wooden floor of the tree house. The smack made me think I must have broken something. The pain that shot through my body only solidified my suspicions.

"Get up we gotta go!" The man who held his hand out to me appeared to have fashioned himself a hat out of water balloons, streamers, and printouts of my tweets.

"Where are the girls I came with?" I asked, rubbing my eyes and then the back of my head, wiggling my legs to test if anything was broken.

It's not like I know the girls I came with, but at least I know Winnifred's name. Who is this guy?

"I don't know!" He slid his arms under my elbows and pulled me up. "We'll find them later. We have to leave before we get caught by the suits."

So I'm dressed in some prison uniform that looks like I was pretending to be a nurse for a children's costume party, with a half eaten bread crown on my head, and chasing after a guy who's basically throwing me off the deck of a two-storey tall tree house into the waiting arms of more people I don't know and can't trust.

And only in the precise moment of falling through the air did I even stop to think what on earth I was doing trusting these people to take me into the middle of a forest. But I guess when you escape prison with people you have an unbreakable bond that means you'll follow them into the dangerous wilderness.

Or, at least that was my experience from my precisely one day of incarceration.

There were a lot of bright lights overhead as I followed the strange men — and almost everyone else — into the depths of the forest. Once we were under the canopy, the light was barely making its way through at all. Which was a good thing, because we wouldn't be easy to spot, but also a very bad thing given how many tripping hazards there were on the forest floor.

I cannot be running through tripping hazards in the middle of the night! I can't even be running over tripping hazards in the broad daylight, really.

"Where are we going?" I asked no one in particular. And that is exactly who answered. So, as everyone ran expertly through the forest, disappearing over a bush here or behind a log there, I was left to feel my way through a thick wooded area almost entirely alone.

As time went on, the number of items I tripped over grew exponentially and the number of gross things I accidentally stuck my hand into is something I don't really want to talk about, honestly.

I had long since been left behind by the group of men who flung me from the tree house when there was a commotion behind me. Another group of people. There were little pricks of light shining through the forest and they were mostly avoiding speaking to each other, but their feet crunching the undergrowth was unmistakable even in the darkness.

Any logical person would have probably hidden somewhere until they could figure out what was going on and if these new people were friend or foe. But I didn't do that. I just stood, like a deer in headlights, in the middle of the forest, waiting for the crowd of people to arrive.

"Harper?" a woman called. "Harper, are you there?"

Fortunately I had enough common sense not to answer them that time.

"Harper?" another woman called.

"Oh, my God, I can't believe we lost her! We had one job!"

"We haven't lost her yet. We just have to keep looking."

Winnifred. That one was definitely Winnifred.

"I'm over here," I tried to call loudly enough for them to hear me, but my voice came out something like a crackle of static on the radio. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Winnifred! I'm over here."

"Harper?" Winnifred's relief was palpable despite the great distance between us. "Stay where you are. We are coming to you."

There was a chorus of voices as the specks of light grew larger and the snapping of branches converged on my location.

"Winnifred," I called out again when the movement stopped a few hundred feet from my location. "I'm over here."

All of a sudden the lights went dark and someone moved swiftly towards me, snapping several branches as they went. "Shh," came Winnifred's voice as someone grabbed my upper arm. "We have to keep moving. We're being followed."

Of course we are being followed. Why wouldn't we be?