This is just something I had to do for math (don't ask me why it's related to halloween when we're in april, i have no idea.) so i just thought i'd post it. It has nothing to do with Needing Them whatsoever. Hope you enjoy! (Even though it's pretty stupid)
A Shortcut to Die For
"This is gonna be AWESOME!" Jerry Martinez says eagerly as we near the gates of the Seaford Fun Park. He had been excitedly babbling ever since we started the drive here, alternating between English and Spanish. He normally does that when he gets excited or scared (and sometimes, though rarely, angry). I can't help but smile at my Latino friend's enthusiasm. They added a bunch of new rides to the park last summer, as well a modified some of the old ones, and all seven of us have yet to go on any of them.
"Maybe they'll have some new cafés there, too," Eddie Jones fantasizes, giddy with anticipation as he rubs his hands together. The possibility of new eateries was all that the chubby African-American boy had been thinking about.
"Great. More food that will probably give you indigestion. As if there wasn't enough Halloween candy there already," Milton Krupnick comments sarcastically. The redhead had been the most skeptical about coming to the park, even more so than Rudy Gillespie, the only adult in our group and also the only one that isn't fourteen.
"Lighten up, Milton," the so-called 'adult' whines. "That's usually only with you guys' cafeteria food." He shudders. "Man, am I glad I'm done with high school." Rudy may look like a thirty-year-old man on the outside, but on the inside he's a ten-year-old boy. It's a wonder how he's responsible enough to take care of the dojo with his childish attitude and love of fun. Then again, he does have his serious moments.
Milton rolls his eyes.
"Besides, if you don't want to go on the rides, then we can guess on how fast their going based on estimates of their weight and the angles at which they're moving, or make up some sort of close-to-impossible Halloween word problems," Kiara Brewer says nonchalantly, brightening up Milton's mood instantly while twirling a lock of her long brown hair. He always loves doing math problems, and Kiara is the only one in our group of friends that reached and understood his level of intelligence. Translation? He could use all the big words he wants in a sentence and she would understand every single one.
"I really don't get how you guys actually like doing that kind of stuff," Jack Brewer, Kiara's twin brother, states. Unlike most twins, Jack and Kiara are actually pretty similar in their mannerisms as well as their appearances. Both have fiery determination, both are more than a little bit intimidating when angry, and both are deviously mischievous when it comes to making plans. But, Kiara is the more hot-tempered of the two; Jack is (usually) pretty level-headed.
"Well, it's what they enjoy. How do you enjoy skateboarding without being worried that you're gonna break your neck?" I say, speaking up for Kiara and Milton. After all, everyone has their own interests.
"Skateboarding is an art, Kimberly!" Jack immediately replies, defending the activity that was his favorite pastime when he wasn't at the dojo. He knows that the use of my full name irks me, as I prefer to be called Kim, but I roll my eyes and let it slide for now. Being a Crawford, I can get annoyed pretty easily. Jack knows it and uses it to his advantage as much as possible. He's the only one that can do that and live to tell the tale. Kiara usually teases me, saying I do that because I like him (which I DON'T… for the most part.) but I always respond saying it's because I do the exact same thing to him.
We walk up to the front gates of the park, which are decked out in black and orange banners for the holiday. Rudy steps in front of us, getting out his wallet so he could pay for the tickets. I check the time on my phone (3:14 P.M.) before looking around, waiting for him, when a bright banner on an orange and black wall catches my eye:
'Solve This Freaky Fraction and Get Seven Free Tickets!'
"Rudy, wait a second!" I say excitedly. He looks back at me in confusion as I walk over to a table underneath the banner. It's covered in a black cloth that's ripped near the edges to fit the Halloween theme. Behind the table sits a cloaked figure wearing black; the hood of the cloak hides the person's face. On top of the table is a single, laminated, orange card. It reads:
'Behind me lies a wall of brick,
(Listen close so this will stick),
2/9of the wall is dreary and gray,
While the rest of it is in an orange array.
If sixty-three orange bricks make up this wall,
Then how many gray ones is the rest of it all?
I frown. What the heck?
"Kiara, Milton, get over here!" I call out to them. They come over, looking confused. "Can you solve this?"
Milton crosses his arms as he contemplates, while Kiara tilts her head to the side slightly.
"Fourteen," they both say at the same time after one or two seconds. Wow; they're good.
The cloaked figure raises their head just enough to reveal a pale skin tone and a red lipstick covered mouth pull itself into a smirk. "Well done, children." By now, the others had curiously walked over to see what was going on. "Your tickets are on the table."
I look down at the table and blink, surprised to see the seven tickets spread out in a fan-like formation. They weren't there before, and the woman didn't appear to have moved at all…
Oh, well. We got free tickets!
We thank her and start to go back to the entrance, but she calls after us. The gray and orange brick wall starts sliding to the side as we turn around, revealing a hidden passageway.
"You can enter through here," she says.
"Will it take us to the park?" Rudy asks.
"Eventually," she replies.
Rudy looks at us shrugs, and starts to lead the way. When we're all in the passage, the wall slides back into place behind us.
"Ok, I guess going back has been ruled out," Milton grumbles, looking around with wary eyes as we start to walk down the hallway. The walls seem to be made of dirt, making me think that we had somehow gotten underground. The ground is made of a light brown brick. Off to my side on the floor is a suspicious dark red stain. I inconspicuously move away from it. Every few feet on the ceiling, there was a light bulb. Some of them have gone out. Overall, this was a sinister looking hallway; not exactly what you'd expect to lead to the bright and colorful lights of an amusement park
"This is a pretty creepy place for a hidden passage to an amusement park," Jerry states, voicing my thoughts. The fear is evident in his voice.
"Maybe they decorated it for the holiday?" Kiara suggests.
"Hey, there's a door over there!" Eddie suddenly exclaims. I look ahead of us and see a wooden door, and the passageway branches off to the left and right in front of it.
"And there's also two different directions that we could go in," I point out. We stop in front of the door, wondering where to go.
"Let's try the door first," Rudy finally says. "If it's a dead end, then we can come back out and choose which way to go."
It sounds like a reasonable thing to do, so Rudy opens the door…
…only to have a skeleton jump out at him.
He screams, backing away, but it makes a howling sound (that would haunt me for the rest of my life) and starts clawing at his face.
"DO SOMETHING!" Rudy yells, panicked as we stand there in shock. Jack is the first one to snap out of it as he performs a roundhouse kick that takes the skeleton's head off. The undead monster howls again, flailing around for a few seconds. I watch in sickening fascination as the dismembered skull moves back towards its place on the neck and reattaches itself.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kiara looking around for something that would help. Jerry and Eddie are freaking out, and Milton seems to be thinking furiously about what to do.
"There's something on the door!" Kiara exclaims, pointing at it. She frantically reads it aloud.
"To stop the skeleton,
That causes your fear,
You must solve this puzzle,
So listen here.
4/7 of the beast,
Is only a picture,
And another 2/7,
Is just part of its fixtures.
So to find the remaining seventh,
That will banish your foe,
You must destroy the crucial bones,
That we call the 'toes.'"
"What in the world is that supposed to mean?!" Eddie asks.
"Sabía que esto erauna malaidea," Jerry rambles in Spanish. "¿Cómo hemosllegadoaquí? Deberíamos habercomprado las entradas, como todos los demás. Perono,había queconseguir entradasgratisy ahora mira! Somos─"
"Jerry! English!" Jack snaps.
"Picture…" Milton trails off thoughtfully. "… maybe that means that some of the bones are only images that we're seeing?"
As if to confirm that, Rudy, now on the floor, grabs the animated skeleton's wrists to keep the hands away from his throat. His hand passes right through one of the bones in the monster's arm where it should have been up against it.
"That doesn't matter! Just figure out what to do so you can GET THIS THING OFF OF ME!"
I frown. 'Here goes nothing…'
I move forward and stomp on its ankle, effectively breaking the bone. I quickly grab the foot and gasp at the power of the invisible force that's trying to get the foot back to its rightful place. I grab the wiggling big toe first, grimacing before snapping it off and doing the same to the other four toes on the appendage. The skeleton clearly weakens with every break.
Kiara treads down heavily on the other foot, deciding to just crush the whole thing altogether. As soon as she breaks down the toes part completely beyond repair, the skeleton starts falling apart. Some of the bones fade away, while the rest of the clatter to the ground. The skull rolls around on its own accord, its jaw moving up and down but no sound coming out. Rudy stands up and crushes it beneath his foot, looking strangely satisfied for someone who just got attacked by something that should be underground.
"Well," Milton says, the first one to speak up. "That was…"
"Strange?" Kiara offers.
"Exhilarating!" Rudy exclaims happily, already forgetting his near death. I flash him a death glare.
"Murderous," I ground out.
"Totally swag!" Jerry says, crossing his arms and nodding.
"Hunger provoking," Eddie grumbles.
"Something that should only happen in the movies," Jack finishes.
"So… right or left?" Kiara asks.
"Everyone who thinks we should go right, raise your hand," Rudy says. He, Milton and Jerry all raise their hands.
"Left?"
Jack, Kiara and I raise our hands.
"Eddie, you didn't vote," Milton says.
"Uhh… right?" Eddie randomly says.
"RIght it is!" Rudy says. We all turn to the right and start walking.
Ugh, it feels like we've been walking for hours. 'How do you not know exactly?' you say? Well, maybe because of the fact that our phones don't get signal down here and the watches of the people that are wearing them have mysteriously stopped working!
…
I'm sorry, my mood worsens when I don't feel like I have something productive to do. As if that wasn't bad enough, we accidentally scared a bunch of bats a few minutes (or hours) ago, and one of the poor little flying mammals got stuck in my hair. Now, I'm pretty sure my hair looks like a rat's nest, and my scalp is still tingling from when it was yanked on so many times.
I'm in the very back of the group, wanting to avoid snapping at someone as much as possible. Jerry glances back at me for a split second, before looking back at me with a puzzled expression. He stops walking.
"What?" I snap. It comes out harsher than I intended.
He furrows his eyebrows, looking a little hurt. "Sorry. I just wanted to know why there's a puppy following you."
I blink, and turn around to see a cute little yorkie following me. My bad mood disappears; I have a pretty big soft spot for animals. It looks up at me and sits down.
"Aww!" I gush, bending down and smiling. I reach out to pet it…
… and everything goes downhill.
The face of the innocent-looking dog contorts so it can accommodate a HUGE mouth. It snaps at me with razor sharp teeth that don't belong on a yorkie. I gasp, falling back on my butt. Someone behind me says something frantically, but I'm too preoccupied with this dog-gone-bad to pay attention to it. The dog growls and tries to take a chunk out of my foot. I yank the appendage back just in time, scooting backwards to try and put some distance between the evil canine and myself. Each time I move a foot back, Doggy takes a step forward and bites at the one closest to it, leaving me no opportunity to pause long enough to stand up.
"Bad dog! Bad dog!" I scream hysterically. I mean, it's kind of cut when a normal, non-life-threatening yorkie tries to bite someone, it's kind of cute. But this is NOT a normal yorkie, it's an evil dog with an oversize mouth that's trying to get fresh me. "A LITTLE HELP HERE?!" I yell back at my friends.
"Allow me," a familiar female voice says. "Here, Princess."
The dog stops trying to make a snack out of my foot and runs behind me. I let out a sigh of relief and stand up, turning around. I see Jack lets the baseball bat (where the heck did he get that?!) in his hands clatter to the ground as he rushes over to me.
"Are you okay?" he asks, gently gripping my arms and looking at me with concern.
"I'm fine," I reply, smiling and feeling my cheeks warm up a little. He smiles back (oh gosh, it should be illegal to have such a heart melting smile), looks down at his hands for a second, and lets them drop to his sides with a sheepish expression on his face.
I just barely catch Kiara's knowing look, and I mouth "shut up" at her. She smirks, but doesn't say anything.
I turn to the source of the voice and see the cloaked figure that got us into the tunnel in the first place. She has the dog in her hands and is caressing it lovingly.
'Love knows no bounds,' I think, quoting some guy I don't remember the name of.
"When does this tunnel end?!" Rudy yells at her. "You said it would lead to the carnival!"
I chuckle a bit. 'And he's supposed to be the mature one.'
"You went the wrong way," the woman replies, sounding a little annoyed. "You were supposed to go left when you reached the door. This way never ends."
I swear my eye twitches a little.
"Wait, how can a tunnel never end?" Milton asks, confused.
"Keep walking for a couple of years and you'll find out," the woman deadpans.
"Well then," Milton grumbles. The woman disappears without answering him, leaving us to wonder where her and her murderous dog went.
So, we turn around and start walking the other way.
As soon as we pass by the "Skeleton Attack Beware" door (best name ever, right? I know.) I slip my phone out of my pocket and check the time, forgetting that we didn't get signal down here.
Or at least, we didn't before.
I almost drop my phone in shock.
3:14 P.M.
Almost the exact same time that we came into the tunnel. But that shouldn't be possible! There's no way that we were walking around down here for twelve hours… or a day… is there?
"Guys…" I whisper. "Look at the time."
Everyone does so and either gasps or says something related to "What?"
"How?…" Rudy trails off.
"Magical unicorns…" Jerry mumbles.
"Oh, do not bring that up again!" Milton snaps. He and Jerry both had a huge discussion on the subject a few days ago, which resulted in Jerry finding a horse (don't ask how) and insisting that its horn was just invisible.
"Let's just get to the end of this tunnel and wonder how everything is happening later!" Eddie whines. "I'm hungry!"
"Eddie's right," Kiara says. "Minus the hunger part. "We have to get out of here."
We start walking again, and it isn't even five minutes later when we find a huge archway built into the wall. We study it for a few minutes, wondering if this is the exit.
"Wait, there's something engraved here," Milton says.
"You run into the woods.
How far do you get,
Before you're going out?"
"It doesn't even rhyme," Jerry says, seemingly disappointed. I send him a 'Really?' look before thinking on the puzzle.
"Halfway!" Kiara suddenly says. "You're halfway! When you get to that point, then you start going out of the woods!"
The dirt in the archway starts moving upwards, and we're suddenly face to face with the back of the new and improved Ferris wheel.
"FINALLY!" Eddie yells, running for the first café that he sees.
Kiara and Milton start to walk off to a 'Test Your IQ' booth, while Rudy and Jerry go for the biggest roller coaster in the whole park.
"So…" I say absentmindedly, as Jack starts leading me somewhere. I really don't care where, I'm just glad to be out of that tunnel.
"So…" Jack echoes.
"Where'd you find the bat?"
He blushes a little. "Uh… the lady in the cloak gave it to me?"
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, I was just wondering," I say, curious about his reaction to the innocent question.
"Good," he replies, stopping. I blink, looking up at where we had stopped.
"The gazebo?" I say softly. He knows this is my favorite place in the park because of its calm atmosphere.
He shrugs. "I figured you'd be tired from all the walking."
I smile. "OK… but we're not going into the tunnel," I say, pointing off to the side at one of the park attractions. He chuckles.
"Wouldn't dream of it… wait, there's that woman that got us into it in the first place!"
I look over and see where he's pointing. The woman is sitting there with her evil dog, sipping tea as if this was a completely normal day.
"Hey!" I yell, suddenly furious. She looks up, and her mouth (all that we can see of her face) curves up into a smile.
"Oh, hey Kim."
My anger falters. How does she know my name?
"Oh, silly me. I forgot to take my hood off." She takes off her hood, revealing the face of our math teacher.
"Mrs. Applebaum?!" Jack and I exclaim at the same time.
The teacher shrugs. "You guys hate tests. This was my way of testing you on fractions. You pass!"
Yeah... I'm probably going to fail this assignment. Oh well (NOT! I WILL FREAK OUT IF I FAIL IT!). Hope you enjoyed!