Dead Seat

Row C

Zoey's POV

The gym smelled like rubber and old sweat and something underneath both of those things that I could never quite name. Floor cleaner maybe. Or just the specific smell of a building that has absorbed years of stress and competition and pretending to care about sports.

I had been inside the Westbrook gym exactly four times in my life. Twice for mandatory assemblies freshman year. Once when I accidentally took a wrong turn looking for the art room. And now this.

The lights were off.

Not completely dark — the early morning October sun was coming through the high windows near the ceiling, that pale grey kind of light that doesn't actually illuminate anything properly, just makes shadows look uncertain. I stood just inside the side door and let my eyes adjust and told myself this was completely normal behaviour. People went into school gyms before first period all the time.

They did not. I knew they did not. But it helped to tell myself things.

The main gym floor was empty. The bleachers were folded up against the wall. The basketball hoops were raised to the ceiling the way they did when the space was being used for something other than basketball. Six in the morning and Westbrook was quiet in the way that school buildings only get when students aren't in them yet — like the building itself was exhaling.

I crossed the gym floor quickly. My sneakers made small sounds against the wood that felt too loud in the silence. I kept moving.

The locker rooms were at the far end. Boys on the left, girls on the right, and between them a narrow corridor that led to what the school called the auxiliary storage area and what the students called the cage — a long, low-ceilinged room lined with grey metal lockers that weren't assigned to anyone in particular. Athletes used them during season. Nobody used them in October.

The door to the corridor was unlocked.

I pushed it open and went through.

Row A. Row B. Row C.

The rows were marked with small plastic letters screwed into the wall at the end of each line of lockers. Row C was in the back, against the far wall, slightly darker than the rest because the one fluorescent light back there had been half burnt out for what looked like months. It flickered when I walked under it like it was trying to decide whether to commit.

I stood at the entrance of Row C and looked down the line of lockers.

They were all identical. Grey metal, standard combination locks, slightly dented in various places from years of use. There was nothing to tell me which one I was looking for. The tip had just said Row C. Not a number. Not a description. Just Row C.

I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight.

Then I started at the beginning and I walked slowly, running my flashlight along the locker fronts, looking for something that was different. Something that didn't fit. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for which is the most uncomfortable kind of looking — the kind where you have to trust that you'll recognize it when you see it.

I was at locker C-17 when I found it.

It wasn't the locker itself that was different. It was the lock. Every other locker in the row had a standard combination lock, the kind the school sold in the main office for four dollars, all of them the same dull silver colour. The lock on C-17 was different. Smaller. A different brand. The kind you bought yourself because you wanted to be the only one who could open it.

Someone had chosen this locker specifically.

I crouched down and looked at the bottom of the locker door. There was a small mark there, scratched into the grey paint. I leaned closer with my phone light.

It was a tiny drawing. Just a few lines. Rough and quick like it had been done fast. But I could make out what it was.

A bird. Small wings, beak pointing left, scratched into the grey metal with what had probably been a pen tip or a key.

My heart did something strange in my chest.

Declan drew birds in the margins of his notebooks. I had seen them from behind for six weeks without ever registering what they were until this exact moment.

I stood up slowly.

The locker was locked. Of course it was locked. The small personal lock was firmly shut and I did not know the combination and I had not thought this far ahead, which was embarrassing but also very on brand for the way this morning was going.

I stood there in Row C under the flickering light and I thought.

He had hidden something here. The tip had come from someone who knew about it. Which meant at least one other person knew this locker existed, which meant Declan had either told someone or someone had followed him here.

Neither of those options was entirely comfortable.

I looked at the lock again. It was a three digit combination. Which meant a thousand possible combinations, which I was not going to stand here and try one by one at six in the morning.

I thought about Declan. What I knew about him, which was not much. A green hoodie on Mondays. Cedar and old books. Careful drawings that knew exactly where they were going.

I thought about the bird scratched into the door.

Then, because I had nothing else and nothing to lose, I tried the only thing that made any sense to me. I turned the dial to the number of letters in his first name. Six. Then his last name. Six. Then — and this was a guess based on nothing but the feeling in my chest — I tried the number of weeks he had sat in front of me before he disappeared.

Six. Six. Six.

The lock clicked open.

I stood completely still for three full seconds.

Then I opened the locker.

There wasn't much inside.

A grey zip-up jacket, folded neatly and placed on the top shelf. A pencil case. A small water bottle. And on the bottom of the locker, placed carefully flat like it was something that needed to be kept from bending —

A sketchbook.

Black cover. Medium sized. The kind that art students bought from the supply store on Fletcher Street because the school issued ones had paper that was too thin. It was held closed with a thick rubber band and on the front cover, in handwriting I had never seen before but somehow immediately recognized as his, were three words written in black pen.

For whoever finds this.

I picked it up.

My hands were steady. I was proud of that. My hands were completely steady even though the rest of me was doing something complicated and difficult to describe.

I pulled the rubber band off carefully and opened the cover.

The first page was a note. Not a drawing. Just words, small and neat and pressed firmly into the page like he had needed the pen to stay still.

If you found this then I'm already gone. I don't know who you are. I don't know if you're looking for me or if you just got lucky or if someone sent you here. It doesn't matter. What matters is what's in the rest of this book.

Don't show anyone until you understand what you're looking at. Don't go to the principal. Don't go to Hendricks. And don't — whatever you do — go to Halliday.

Look at the dates. Look at the faces. Look at who is in the background of every single drawing.

You'll see it. I promise you'll see it.

— D

I read it twice.

Then I sat down on the floor of Row C with my back against the locker and I started going through the sketchbook.

The drawings were extraordinary. Not in a way I could have explained to someone who hadn't seen them — they weren't pretty drawings, they weren't the kind that made you feel good. They were exact. Precise. Like Declan had been trying to capture not just what things looked like but what they meant.

The first section was the school. Hallways, classrooms, the cafeteria. Detailed enough that I could identify specific places — the water fountain outside the science wing, the particular arrangement of tables in the south end of the cafeteria, the bench outside the main office where students waited when they were in trouble.

But it wasn't the locations that mattered. It was the people.

Every drawing had people in them. Students, mostly. Sometimes teachers. And in almost every single drawing — sometimes in the centre, sometimes to the side, sometimes half visible in a doorway or background — was the same figure.

Tall. Broad shoulders. A whistle around his neck in some of them. A wide easy smile in others.

Coach Halliday.

I turned the pages slowly. My mouth had gone dry.

The drawings were dated in the bottom right corner of each page. The earliest was from six weeks ago. The same week I had first noticed the green hoodie in the desk in front of mine.

Declan hadn't just been drawing in the margins of his notebooks to pass time in class.

He had been documenting something.

I reached the last drawing in the book. It was dated the Friday before he disappeared. Unlike the others it wasn't a scene — it wasn't a hallway or a cafeteria or a classroom. It was a single image. Two figures. One of them was clearly Halliday, recognizable even without the whistle. The other was smaller, younger, standing in a way that made something tighten in my throat — shoulders in, head slightly down, the body language of someone who wants to take up less space.

They were standing at a locker.

I looked at the locker in the drawing for a long time.

Then I looked at the locker I had just opened.

Same locker. Same row. Same flickering light overhead.

Declan had drawn his own hiding place.

And the person standing next to it was the person he was hiding from.

I put the rubber band back around the sketchbook carefully. I tucked it into my backpack between my English textbook and my laptop, flat and protected. I closed locker C-17. I clicked the small personal lock shut.

I stood up. I turned off my phone flashlight. I walked back through the corridor, across the empty gym floor, and out the side entrance into the pale October morning.

The first bell hadn't rung yet. Students were starting to arrive, coming through the main entrance, moving in groups of two and three, talking about things that had nothing to do with what I was carrying in my bag.

I stood outside the gym entrance for a moment and breathed.

Coach Halliday walked past me on his way to the main building. He was back to being the normal Halliday — loud, easy, saying good morning to three different students by name in the space of thirty seconds. He didn't notice me. I was leaning against the wall in a grey sweater and he had never once learned my name in the two years I had been a student at this school.

He walked through the main doors and disappeared inside.

I watched the doors close behind him.

Then I pulled out my phone and opened the blog. I read the anonymous comment again.

Check the gym lockers. Row C.

Someone had known this was here. Someone had known and instead of taking it themselves, they had pointed a stranger toward it.

Which meant someone out there had decided that a nameless anonymous blogger was the safest person to trust with whatever was inside that sketchbook.

I put my phone in my pocket.

I picked up my bag carefully, conscious of the weight of the sketchbook inside it, and I walked toward the main entrance.

I had forty minutes before first period.

It wasn't enough time to understand what I had found.

But it was enough time to start.