Jon left his sister’s room and went back to his own, getting his things together and deciding to leave before his mom could rope him into doing anything else for Zoe. As he strolled to school he kept expecting the whole glamour thing to be a trick and it’d fail halfway there so that everyone would see him as a catboi, but fortunately no one he passed paid him any more notice than usual.
He arrived at school early and wondered what to do now. It’d be some time before Karyn showed up, and he didn’t want to risk wishing her there and her getting teleported half-dressed, and he was still a touch paranoid about the glamour failing so didn’t want to risk staying out in the open. He looked around for somewhere to hide away and suddenly had an idea.
Off to one side of the school was the old bell tower. A few years ago there had been a fire in it which had spread to the adjoining classrooms. The fire brigade had managed to get it under control before too much damage was done and even though the safety inspectors had deemed it safe, the school had decided that it wasn’t worth renovating so had plaster boarded over the corridors in the main building leading to it and left it alone. Most of the students stayed away from it, and those that did were mostly the ‘unpopular’ cliques like the goths and stoners who wouldn’t be in this early, so it would probably be deserted.
He hurried over to it and slipped inside the double doors at its base. Inside was a spacious foyer at the base of the stairwell that lead up four floors to the mechanism room where the machinery for the old automated bells had been, and still were as far as he knew, left to rust. The foyer was dark, the only illumination coming from the dim light from windows in the higher floors and in the doors, but it was enough to see by. Off to one side old desks and chairs were stacked in a heap, dumped there to free up storage space elsewhere in the school, while under the stairs to his left and in front of him were a couple of old sofas and arm chairs, likely rejects from the teachers’ staff room that had also just been dumped here and had been appropriated by the goths to make their makeshift ‘clubhouse’ more homely.
As he’d thought, no one was around, so with a sigh he crossed to one sofa and slumped down into it. He was just wondering what his next move should be when a dark figure landed in the middle of the foyer, having jumped from a floor or two up. Jon gasped and leapt backwards, clambering onto the seat when the figure spoke.
“Relax mate, it’s just me,” said...
