Hidebehind

Ten

I was eating my lunch in the bathroom the next day, at school, when there was a bang on the stall door. Somebody had come in the day before and just gone to the empty stall next to me, but this person banging on the door apparently wanted to use my toilet. Nervously, I tried, "I'm in here! Go to the other one."

"What're you doing in there?" came a familiar voice. "I got something to show you."

I climbed down from my precarious perch on the toilet and unlocked the door. When I opened it, Jay was standing on the other side, like I'd expected.

He motioned to the sandwich in my hand. "What've you got there?"

I glanced at it, feeling kind of embarrassed. "Peanut butter."

"Oh."

We just stared at each other for a minute.

"You wanna come outside? I got something to show you."

I looked over my shoulder at the toilet, then to my sandwich, and then to Jay. "Yeah," I agreed. "I'll come." On the way out, I tossed the remainder of my lunch in the trash.

Outside, kids were running around everywhere. It was recess time. I'd avoided it yesterday. Now, I was walking right into it.

"Did yeh see it on TV last night?"

I was distracted momentarily by the sight of a familiar person jumping rope over by the gym entrance—Maisie. I'd recognize that long shiny hair anywhere. "Huh?"

"Earth to Rob."

I frowned and turned back to Jay, irritated. "See what on TV?" Did I really even want to be out here?

"The graffiti. On the school wall."

My interest returned. "Oh, yeah! I did. I actually did. My Great Grandma—I mean, the Old Raisin—she had that show on, and we saw it. But I didn't get such a good look at it. Is that where we're going?"

"Sure! We can't go too close, though. They roped it off."

Jay looked over his shoulder, but not at me; he was making sure nobody was watching us. Then, he motioned me to follow him through some bushes, and we ended up in a secluded area, where the walls of the school wrapped around three sides of us. It was an area with a couple of benches and a few flowers planted, like somebody thought it'd be nice to have some outdoor seating. But it wasn't too nice anymore, because on one of the walls, the right one, was a huge black paint scrawl. It might not even be proper to call it graffiti, because it didn't look like much more than some random black squiggles. Like someone with a paint can had come and not known what to write, so he just went wild with a meaningless pattern. The paint covered a good number of bricks. No wonder it had been on the news; it would take the school a long time to clean it off.

"What does it say?" I asked, knowing that it didn't say anything.

Jay sucked in a breath importantly. "Nobody knows. Maybe some language from outer space. An alien might've come down and done it."

I almost believed him, as serious as he sounded, but then I shook sense back into my brain. "Aliens? Nah. I bet it was just some teenager trying to do something stupid."

"None of the teenagers I know ever do graffiti."

"Oh yeah? And how many do you know?"

"Tons. Lots and tons of them."

This time, I did believe him. "Well, then who could it have been?"

"Like I said, nobody knows."

"Yet."