The Perfect Escape (The Perfect Escape #1) - Suzanne Park Page 0,23
you let on.”
More rummaging. “Why do you have a keyboard in here?” She didn’t pull it out all the way but wiped off dust from some of the keys. “It doesn’t look old.”
“My dad used to work at an IT department of a big tech company. He had this IBM keyboard from the nineties and gave it to me. Push down the keys. They’re buckle-spring and make a loud clickity-click sound when you type. It’s very satisfying.”
She laughed and typed her name. “I haven’t used a regular keyboard in a while. I’ve been only doing touchscreen typing lately.”
The keyboard went back into the crate as she continued her detective work. She opened the closet door and yanked the dangling string to turn on the single, low-watt bulb.
“What the hell?” Kate panicked, stumbling backward as the overhead string swung back and forth like a hypnotic pendulum. Her butt slammed into the tall bookshelf inside my walk-in closet displaying my vintage Harry Potter and Minecraft Lego collectible sets, still in original boxes. The bookcase swayed, and my foot-tall Lego Dumbledore toppled onto the carpet, dismembering his head from his body. The damage could have been much worse. I was lucky an embarrassing plume of dust didn’t poof from Dumbledore’s face-plant into the flooring. I hadn’t vacuumed in there for years. Maybe even never.
Directly across from Kate was my autographed, life-size foam-board cutout of my entrepreneurial idol, Robbie Anderson-Steele. CEO of Digitools. The way the color instantly drained from her face you’d think she had discovered my closet was a secret zombie actress murder room.
I let out a high-pitched, nervous laugh. “Meet Robbie Anderson-Steele. I won him at an invention competition. My friends Zach and Jaxon brought the cutout home and put it in my room. It’s sort of a joke.” Not really, though. I won a five-hundred-dollar gift card too. “He’s this famous entrepreneur who’s written a lot of bestselling business books.” Which I stood in line for at Barnes & Noble for two hours for to get signed. And I watched his recent TED Talk maybe a hundred times. “I was going to throw that away soon. It’s kind of ridiculous because it takes up so much space.” Probably not, though. I kind of love it.
Kate shook her head like she was trying to knock Robbie’s image out of it. She broke her gaze to pick up Dumbledore and put him back in standing position. With a staggered breath, she admitted, “Well, I definitely wasn’t expecting that.”
“Sorry. Am I weird? You can just say it,” I said, shoulders slumping.
“Hey, I like weird. Weird is good. Weird is interesting,” she assured me. “And I’m the weirdo who roped you into a zombie survivalist competition, remember? Speaking of which, while we have time, let’s go to the army-navy place and see what basic supplies we can get for the competition. They said we’re all allowed one backpack per participant, and we can swap things out during the competition if we see anything better lying around.”
“It’s like in one of those Resident Evil games where the player is only allowed to use one weapon at a time.” I grinned. “We should read the game rules together later.” Grabbing my set of keys from my desk, I shouted, “Mom! Dad! I’m going out for a bit!”
No answer.
Outside my bedroom window, Mom knelt in her garden, wearing thick canvas gloves and a wide-brimmed visor. Lucy was next to her, digging holes with a toy shovel. Farther away, Dad mowed the grass, wiping his brow by pulling up his undershirt and swiping his forehead with the frayed hem. As he trimmed the yard’s edges, he leaned his body away from our tilted, humidity-warped back fence. Another broken thing on Dad’s handyman to-do list. Fixing the fence was something he just never had time to do. He was always do-it-yourself-fixing something more mission-critical, and Mom and I were always looking up on YouTube how to fix his fix after he went to bed. The Home Depot folks knew us all too well.
Kate tidied up the electronics in the crate and pushed it back into its original spot. “This feels like a setup to a bad joke. A former Eagle Scout and Girl Scout walk into an