Chapter 2

The desks practically set themselves. By that, I mean they literally grew appendages and marched into position, like a militia into war. There is no war. not on Earth, at least. After setting up the desks, I knelt down by my backpack and began to scream loudly, not a fearful scream but more a scream of purpose, of intent, a scream terrified for reasons beyond its control.

I asked the teacher if I could "go to the bathroom". I then winked at her, as one would if their words meant something other that what they do. "But you just got here. Are you already done?" she said, not looking up from her book. I explained to her that yes, I was already done setting up the desks, but she wouldn't listen.

While she was buried in her book, I took out two bobby pins from my back pocket and straightened one out. I always carry two bobby pins in my back pocket in case I'm locked in a room with a teacher who has been enveloped by a book and I need to "use the restroom". I went up to the restroom door, which for some reason was inside the classroom, not even against a wall, just in the middle of all the desks, standing there, glowing.

I got down to eye level with the lock, making sure the teacher wasn't looking, but when I looked at her desk it was empty, a sign that read "gone fishing!" hanging on her chair. A sign clearly uninformed of the lack of fish in night vale, let alone the lack of water.

I carefully wedged the intact bobby pin into the bottom of the lock. Keeping that pin in place, I stuck the other pin just above that, and started picking. As I expertly wiggled the straight pin, I pushed the bottom pin counter clockwise, so that when the lock was finally picked the doorknob would turn automatically. Everything was going according to plan.

Until the door opened.

I closed my eyes tightly as I was violently shoved through the door, like dust to a vacuum or magnets to Robocop. When I opened my eyes, I saw no bathroom, but I knew it was still a bathroom. I knew that it was all bathrooms overlapping on a multi-dimensional plane, a hypercube of toiletries and toilets themselves. There was too much information for me to process and yet suddenly I was able to, and I knew everything. my life, my death, laid in front of me in one long continuous strand of existence that was finite but so infinite in its greatness. "You know what, I can hold it" I thought, and yet somehow heard outside of my head. I turned around, but found that the door was gone, replaced instead by a 3 to 1 replica of my face, horribly mutilated into something resembling a toilet.

I fainted.

"Keep...it...together..." it whispered.

"ANDRE!"

I woke with a sharp jolt as the teacher slammed her large, hairy fists onto my desk. "Do NOT fall ASLEEP in my classroom AGAIN!" she screamed.

The she mumbled something about me under her breath that I wasn't able to hear, but knew was about me because she was staring at me the entire time she was mumbling. She continued to explain the syllabus, but I couldn't listen. I was tired, and hungry, and I still had to pee, and I just couldn't listen. Of course, I was much too scared to tell her that I needed to use the restroom, especially after that horrible dream I just had. Then again, how do I know it was a dream? can I even separate dreams from reality in a town this strange? And who was whispering to me in my dream?

I couldn't answer any of these questions; that didn't matter. Even if I could, I would just be horribly tortured by the secret police. At least, that's what the secret police told me.

I then remembered that my moms had packed me a couple of cliff bars, so I picked up my bag, put it in my lap, unzipped it, and turned it upside down, dangling it over the floor as I did so. Amidst the sea of cliff bars that spilled out of my backpack was I small wooden sign with a piece of wire attached to the top with a few nails. I flipped it over from the top to bottom, shocked at what I had found. it may have been upside down, but I still knew what it said. "Gone Fishing".

I dropped the sign on the ground, and it landed with a loud clatter. It was final, I 'd had enough. I needed to leave school until I could figure out what was going on, and prevent it from happening a third time.

I needed to tell Carlos.