When it was finally ten pm, Trent did his part of the deal. Jane waited in the stairs while her parents watched TV in the living room. Trent went there and stood next to the TV, where he began to randomly talk about college.
"Come back in exactly an hour" Trent told her before he went to the living room ". I'll open the back door for you".
Jane nodded. With Trent entertaining Amanda and Vincent she was sure they wouldn't randomly decide to go somewhere else in the house. Trent distracted them well enough for her to leave the house through the front door. Trent also made sure of telling them that she had already gone to bed. But Jane was outside, waking to school like she did in the mornings.
When she got there she found Charles, like he had promised, in front of the school. She greeted him with a kiss, more out of nervousness than love. All she was thinking about was that her parents would ground her forever if they found her room empty and that she hoped everything went okay inside the school.
When they were inside the hallways, Jane took a small flashlight from one of her pockets and Charles took his own flashlight. They started to walk, guided by Charles.
"Why do you worry so much?" Jane whispered because she noticed Charles' distressed expression and assumed it was because of the same thing that always worried him whenever they were together.
"Jane, despite of my behavior, you are the only girl so far who seems to care about me... who doesn't seem to hate me, I mean. That's important to me. I really like you and I feel like I don't know what am I going to do if you don't like me back".
It was surprising for Jane that she actually felt somehow touched by Charles. Nobody that she remembered had seemed to like her as much before. He had even stopped being utterly annoying just because he had noticed that had a positive impact on their relationship.
"Do me a favor and don't worry about it. I like you too, okay? Just because everyone else will go back to normal and find this weird that doesn't mean I find it weird. We're okay. But please, we need to solve this first, then we can focus on, well, us, I guess".
He agreed and started to work exhaustively on calming himself down.
The rest of their way to the place was rather quiet with only a few interruptions in which they asked things to each other and made commentaries on the empty school and the room that they were trying to find.
When they reached the place where Charles had said he had seen the room, they were surprised by some narrow stairs apparently hidden inside a locker. Charles did not remember the locker, but he didn't give it much importance. It was dark, but when they found the wall and eventually the doorknob, it was Jane who was guiding inside the locker, Jane's voice whispered something that frustrated them both.
"It's locked" she meanwhile tried to open it, but nothing happened ". I can't open it. What if we hit it with something and break it?".
"We can't do that, someone may be there or at least someone is inside the school and could hear us. Let's do something, we already know the door is behind the locker. We can come tomorrow when we figure out some method to open a door without a key".
Jane felt a little angry, she just wanted to get in there and tell whoever who had done that to make things go back to normal, but she knew she couldn't.
She looked at her watch and noticed she still had 20 minutes free before having to go home.
"Hey, I have 20 minutes, then I have to go home. Wanna go for a walk?".
"Sure" Charles agreed.
They left the narrow passage and then the school, and started to walk around the football 's field was fried and tired. She had never felt so much stress in such a short period of time. She took Charles hand, kissed him and asked him to shut up.
"Right now I need you to do me a favor. Just don't say a word and lie in there while I take off my clothes. I don't want any commentaries or any word at all for that matter, got it?".
Charles nodded.
On one hand, Jane had said her brother he didn't have to worry. On the other hand, she was too tired to care about his brainwashed brother at that moment.
