Adams Lives

“So, my uncle can get a bunch of aluminum foil for cheap. We break in, get into the principal’s office. Foil up everything. Leave him a note, something like, ‘Keep things fresh!’” Shannon beamed. The response from the others was underwhelming.

“Or ‘Something to reflect on!’” Mark added. His smile and rapid head nodding really tried to sell it, but the response was the same. Lydia to his left and Wilson to his right, both shook their heads in disappointment.

“...Okay…” Sean took a deep, contemplative breath. Here, in the coffee job they’ve all come to for years, in the same corner they’ve gathered in morning after morning, each of them waited patiently for Sean to just tell them the plan already. They would all follow his lead regardless. “We’re the last Senior class of the combined Miller-McCormick High. Next year they split again; it’ll be Miller High and McCormick High. This Senior class prank needs to be remembered forever.”

“It won’t be McCormick High,” Dylan added. “They’re renaming it, remember? It’ll be New Day High.”

“Why change the name?” Mark asked. He transferred in two years ago and still hadn’t taken the time to learn the history of the area.

Dylan spoke up, “Six years ago, the original McCormick High burned to the ground. A lot of weird circumstances started coming out right after it burned. Apparently, there was some shit going down there, real hush-hush, right before it went up. Some say the principal there set the fire on purpose, try and cover everything up.”

‘Shut up,” Mark huffed, incredulous.

“I’m serious! Next school year will be the grand re-opening, and since we had to merge with Miller, we’re the last graduating class of Miller-McCormick High School.”

“What happened to that principal?” Mark asked.

“Adams? No one’s seen him since that night,” Shannon said. “They were on to him about some kinky things, and people think he burned the school to hide the evidence.”

Lorelei listened without saying a word. She just watched the side of Sean’s face, her eyes running down the edges of his jaw, his lips. They’d been dating for eight months now, an eternity in teenage years. She loved how smart he was, how much of a leader he was. Maybe he’d be a lawyer, or a politician. She would often imagine being the governor’s wife, or the mayor’s wife, something where she could raise a big family and be the wife of someone important. She wasn’t hopeless in her own right, but in her mind, Sean was the ticket. The ticket to mattering.

“Guys,” she spoke confidently, “we’re getting off-track. Forget the creepy principal. None of us ever met the guy. Sean was about to tell us what we’re doing for the prank. Tell them, babe,” she curled up again under his arm.

“I genuinely don’t know,” Sean spoke, and everyone listened. “I just know it needs to be something good. New Day High School starts next year. Miller goes back to being Miller. This is the last year for Miller-McCormick. We have to go out with a bang.”

“Wait,” Mark slapped his hands on the table repeatedly, shaking the coffee cups, “I might have an idea. Maybe. Half an idea. New Day… it’s being built right where McCormick used to be, right?”

“Yeah,” Dylan nodded.

“Well, that’s some horror movie shit right there! Ghost story shit.”

No one knew where Mark was going with this.

“You said dude’s name was ‘Adams’, right? We start a rumor that Adams never left. That he’s haunting the new building right now. That he’s capturing kids, setting their asses on fire, something like that.”

“That it? Dylan asked, “Ghost stories?”

“We can all go on social media,” Shannon thought out loud, “Start spreading it that way?”

“Sure, but the real prank: we break into New Day and tag it, everywhere we can. Write ‘ADAMS LIVES’ everywhere we can. In closets. Bathrooms. Under tables and desks.”

“The building’s more or less done, and they’ll have a whole summer to just paint over our work,” Sean shook his head. Lorelei, supporting him, added, “What would be the point if they can get rid of all the tags?”

“Not all of them, “ Mark insisted. “We get creative enough, split up, tag the school a couple hundred times each, they can’t catch everything. Even if they get, like 80% of them covered up, that’s still enough ‘ADAMS LIVES’ tags that the legend will build. ‘The Ghost of McCormick High’ will be told for years, generations. It’ll be awesome! How many people can say they legit created an urban legend?”

They all smiled and nodded.

“Tonight?” Sean asked.

Again, smiles and nods.

*********

The day passed swiftly. Throughout the day, each of them took turns going to various hardware stores, big box stores, art stores– anywhere they could score spray paint cans and permanent markers without raising eyebrows. Dylan, Wilson, and Lydia spent their art classes making stencils in different fonts and sizes, each saying “ADAMS LIVES” to make their tagging experience simpler and faster. They posted on social media, laid the groundwork for the legend, artificial intelligence articles about ghost sighting in McCormick and Native American tribes upset about the building of the new school accidents happening during its construction. They each started asking about what may have happened to Principal Adams, tagging news articles about his investigation and disappearance.

That night, they all met again at the front door of New Day High School under the sign hanging above the door saying “School’s in session coming this August!” Mark wouldn’t tell anyone where he learned how to lockpick a door, but when the front latch popped, they were all smiles. They each gathered their backpacks full of spray paint and marched into the colossal concourse. They stood in awe of how beautiful, clean, and almost sterile the new school was.

“Alright, no doddling,” Sean began. “We split up, start tagging. Dylan and Wilson, go right. Lydia, Shannon, and Mark, go left. Lorelei and I will stay center. We meet back here in an hour to check in. Everyone good?”

“Yessir, Cap’n,” Dylan saluted him, mockingly.

Sean rolled his eyes, and each group split, walking their separate directions.

*********

Lorelei clung to Sean more and more as they walked down the center of the main hallway of the school. Even with the white emergency lights spread sporadically across the rafters and the light pouring in from the glass panels running wall-to-wall across the ceiling, the main corridor seemed hauntingly dark. The sterile white walls reflected back what little light poured down from the ceiling, but it helped very little. Small beams of light poured out of each of the open teacher’s doors, each classroom with its own security lighting and its own giant windows to the outside.

“Why is this so creepy?” Lorelei asked in a whisper.

“Because it’s empty,” Sean comforted her. “Six months from now, the walls will be painted, there will be black and red accent colors everywhere. You’ll see posters and student work, and each of these classrooms will be decked out and personalized to whatever teacher is inside them. It’ll have character, culture. Right now it’s just a husk. A shell.”

“And we’re going to destroy that,” she sighed.

“No. We’re adding to it. All cultures have stories, legends. We’re building the lore of the school, a little bit of the Old McCormick with the new. And we’ll be remembered for it.” He smiled at her, but the look on her face wasn’t terribly reassured.

They went to work, classroom by classroom. Under each brand new desk. Inside the brand new teachers’ desks. Inside closets, On ceiling tiles. They wrote “ADAMS LIVES” in permanent marker in the corner of white boards. They wrote it in each stall, under each seat, on every mirror, along the automatic hand dryer. They sprayed it on water fountains, on lockers, even in lockers.They found a few walls that had yet to be finished and wrote “ADAMS LIVES” on the studs and beams. Despite the darkness, despite the constant creaking and settling sounds of the new building, despite the ghastly feeling raising every hair on Lorelei’s arm to the ceiling, they did their job and they did it well.

“Let’s head back to the front and start rounding everybody up,” Sean whispered to Lorelei without even meaning to whisper. She nodded her response and, hand in hand, they walked quietly back up the shadowy corridor heading to the front concourse. Walking through the double doors into the concourse, they heard a noise inside the door marked “Front Office”. Their shadows stretched to the center of the enormous room, backlit from what little light poured in from the center corridor, and both of their eyes drew to the front office door as the noise grew louder and closer. Suddenly, out from the door burst Mark, sweating and laughing loudly. They blew out their relief, but the anger on their faces was harder to mask, “Dude, what the hell?”

“Sorry,” Mark laughed, wiping the sweat from his brow as he slowly walked towards them, “I left Lydia and Shannon. They had everything in order. I thought I’d come get the new principal’s office. Nothing says ‘Welcome’ like the haunted words of the old principal.”

Mark continued to laugh until he saw the anger in Sean and Lorelei’s faces fade into looks of concern, then of fear. Mark turned around to find the source of their terror, and he found it, he did. Standing, haloed in a pool of soft, dim light from the security light overhead, stood a man. He stood tall and fierce, slender but with a tension and strength held in only by the form-fitting three-piece suit he wore, dark navy with pinstripes. He moved only enough to prove he was alive, that he was real, and that same movement made the shadows cast by the lighting overhead seem dreadful. On his face he wore a mask, cartoonishly large. It was white and black, and it resembled the stereotypical face of an angry old man, with upturned, angry eyebrows and a smug, diagonal grimace of a mouth. His otherwise porcelain white face was bespeckled with drops of a red liquid that contrasted brightly with the white mask. Only his head turned, oddly so, with his chin swinging slowly like a pendulum, scrutinizing the three teenagers before him.

“Holy shit!” Mark screamed. He started to sprint, but his legs didn’t listen to his brain directly. The stranger pulled his arm from behind his back, and in his left hand he held a yardstick, wrapped tightly with barbed wire. He swiftly swung the yardstick at Mark, aiming for the calves exposed under his khaki board shorts. The barbs tore chunks of flesh from the muscle, and Mark screamed and fell to his face. As Sean and Lorelei looked on in fear, the stranger stood behind Mark, lifting him on his knees. From inside his jacket, his right hand removed a long, sharp blade. He reached down, lifted Mark’s t-shirt, and he swiftly, cleanly sheared a deep, horizontal slice from hipbone to hipbone. Sean and Lorelei turned and sprinted back through the double doors as Mark screamed and his insides poured out upon the clean, linoleum floor.

Sean sprinted with Lorelei’s hand squeezed tightly in his; he pulled her screaming down the center corridor, past all the classrooms they had just vandalized, to the very back of the school. The rear exit to the student parking lot and the football stadium was locked tightly with a chain on the outside. They muscled the door, but to no avail, “We can’t stay here! We’ll go left and see if we can find Lydia and Shannon. Maybe we find an exit that way.”

They turned and ran up the connecting hallway and through the double doors that led to the left wing. No noise, only shadows, moonlight pouring in from right to left through the high windows overhead. They crawled, inched their way up the hall, until at last, from a teacher’s room on the left came soft, repetitive breaths, strained and desperate. Sean leaned and peaked into the room, and it was seemingly empty. He and Lorelei crept in: it was sterile and clean, except for the whiteboard. On it was written “I will not talk back” again and again, several dozen times, gradually becoming less and less readable until, at last, it drifted and trailed off diagonally towards the ground. Slowly approaching the board, Lorelei screamed and wept softly into Sean’s shoulder at the sight of Shannon’s bod, dead on her stomach. When Sean turned the body over, blood poured from the horizontal slice in her belly, the carved “F” on her exposed chest, and from her mouth. When he looked up, he pulled her eyes from the view of what lay neatly upon the tray in front of the whiteboard, the silver tray that holds the markers.

It was Shannon’s tongue.

When Lorelei finally saw it, she bucked against his grasp and she screamed, her vocal chords tearing. He pulled her to her feet and drug her to the door only to find the stranger in the mask standing there. He lashed out with yardstick, catching Sean in the shoulder, tearing clean through meat as he wrenched it back. Lorelei stood, stepping forward, only to be met by the stranger’s fist, and suddenly, everything went black.

*********

When Lorelei finally came to, she was tied to a single chair in the center of a dimly lit cafeteria. Once the blurriness faded and she gathered her senses, she immediately screamed. Standing in front of her, two hands behind his back, was the stranger, the whiteness of his mask now bathed in blood. The greater whole of his crisp navy suit was now soaked in dark red. On the floor between them lay Sean; he was shirtless, and strings of meat and a river of red poured out from the open slash in his abdomen. Carved neatly across his chest was a large “F” circled and dripping.

“I expected better from this young man,” the stranger groaned, his voice deep and sharp, ‘His answers… dissatisfied me.”

Lorelei wept and screamed until she couldn’t any longer. He placed his blade on the bottom of her chin and raised her face to meet his, “You still have time to save yourself, however.”

“What… what..,” she struggled through the gasping and sobbing, “what do you want with me?”

“I just want to know the meaning of all of this. The boy with the long hair desecrated my office. He failed. The boy with the long hair, he was in the hall without a hall pass. He failed. The blonde girl kept talking back with the foulest of language. I tried to punish her, but ultimately, she failed, as well.”

Lorelei convulsed, the tears in her eyes running dry.

“Your young suitor here, he nearly met my approval. Eventually, he broke down into threats and petty insults. You see the results of his answers pooling on the floor beneath him now.”

It was here Lorelei stopped shaking. Her eyes went wide. She knew that her time was coming soon, and she strained herself to regain her breathing, slow her heart rate. He moved the blade from her chin to her t-shirt, tearing the fabric down the middle. She grit her teeth, trying her best to hold in the screams.

“What’s your name, young lady?”

She managed an answer, low and shaking, “Lorelei.”

“And why did your friends come to vandalize my school tonight, Lorelei?”

She coughed, managed to pull herself together, “It was a Senior class prank. We wanted to do something… memorable.”

The stranger laughed softly, although his expression from the mask neither moved nor changed. “Lorelei, my dear… if you manage to survive this conversation, do you think this is a night you’ll remember?”

She said nothing, only glared.

“Alright, my dear. This last question is for all the marbles. This is your final test. Take it seriously. Do you understand?”

She nodded silently. A single tear ran down her cheek.

“ Why did YOU come to my school tonight? Why did you, Lorelei, come to this school to cause this damage tonight? And I don’t care to hear anything about Senior pranks…”

She held his stare and worked the question in her head for a long time. Finally, an answer: “Him.”

The stranger’s chin swung curiously. He pointed the tip of his blade at Sean’s empty body. Lorelei, wide eyed, simply nodded. The stranger took a step closer, chin swinging to the opposite side, “Go on.”

“I… I don’t care about this school, or this prank,” she closed her eyes and the tears returned, “It was always about him. Impressing him. Supporting him. I just wanted him to love me enough to take me out of here one day.”

The stranger lifted the yardstick to her throat, the barbs digging in deep. He leaned in, and in a whisper: “Was it worth it?”

She convulsed sharply, then regained her composure, shaking her head “no”.

He took the blade, lifted it to her chest, and started carving. The cuts were not deep, though they were painful enough to draw screams from the depth of her soul. Soon, he was done, and he removed the blade. Slowly dripping red down the underwire of her bra and down her stomach was a drawing, carved into her flesh.

It was a “B-”.

When she realized the implications of the wound, she looked around. The ropes were untied, and the stranger was gone. She gathered herself, sprinted through the corridors and out the main exit. Halfway down the main drag, she turned and looked back at the school. On the glass door of the main entrance, written in blood, only the words “ADAMS LIVES.” Looking closely, she noticed a small flame building against the drywall inside the door.