Free Madly by M. Leighton Page A

office?”
“ Yes, sir,” Aidan replied, coming around to throw my arm around his shoulder and slip his hand around my waist. With virtually no effort, he hauled me to my feet.
“ Jersey, grab her bag.”
I heard the rustling of Jersey jumping to obey Aidan and then the patter of her feet as she followed behind us.
As soon as we were clear of Mr. Laraby’s room, Aidan steered me to the long line of army green lockers on one side of the hall and propped me up against the cool metal.
“ What was that all about? What is it?”
At first when he asked, I wasn’t sure how to answer, wasn’t really sure what had happened. But then, as the fog cleared from my mind, an image was left in its wake. It was the mental picture of someone I recognized.
“ It’s Lady Sheelah.”
As my vision came back into ultra clear focus, I saw Aidan’s pupils dilate and, for the first time since I’d known him, the jokester disappeared into the royalty that he was born to be.
“ Then we need to get to her.”
With that, he took my hand, pulled me away from the lockers and practically dragged me down the hall. I’d forgotten all about Jersey until I heard her speak up from somewhere behind us.
“ Um, hello? Is somebody gonna tell me what the devil is going on?”
“ Come on, Jersey,” Aidan called over his shoulder. “Keep up.”
“ I’m trying, but not all of us are giants,” she snipped.
When I turned to look back at her, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her short legs flying in her efforts to reach us.
“ Just like not all of us are shrimps,” I teased.
“ A shellfish joke? Seriously? Are you actually gonna go there?”
Jersey’s expression said she was skeptical. I smiled again.
It helped to have her around to lighten the mood. It gave me a reason not to focus on the sinking feeling that was pulling at my heart, a feeling that assured me that what had happened in Mr. Laraby’s classroom did not bode well.
The three of us made our way quickly from Building C to the dorms that crouched in a tight circle in the center of campus. Veritas Academy was a private school, so our handler, Lady Sheelah, stayed in our dorm acting as our Resident Advisor, a very human-looking position.
As we arrived at her room, Aidan took the lead and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so he knocked a second time. When still there was no sign of Lady Sheelah, he reached for the knob. It was unlocked, turning easily.
Pushing the door open a bit, Aidan poked his head into the room and said, “Hello? Sheelah?”
When there was no response, my breath began to come faster. Something was desperately wrong; I could feel it.
“ Stay here,” Aidan ordered as he swung the door wide and stepped inside.
He disappeared into the dark interior of the small room and Jersey and I looked at each other. Then, as she so often did, Jersey said exactly what I was thinking.
“ As if!”
I took the first step into Lady Sheelah’s room. Jersey was right behind me. I felt her fingers fist in the tails of my shirt, tails I’d purposely left hanging out over my cheesy blue plaid skirt.
Leaving my shirt untucked was my tribute to individuality among all the other uniform-clad students. “They” frowned upon it, but Jersey and I had decided two months ago that they could make us wear a uniform at Veritas Academy, but they could never make us all look the same. For Jersey, that meant wearing lots of costume jewelry and fingernail polish in every color of the rainbow.
In the quiet of the room, I heard nothing but the smack of Jersey’s lips as she chomped on her gum.
“ Jersey, shh,” I whispered over my shoulder.
“ I can’t help it. I’m ‘nervous chewing’,” she explained in a hushed voice.
I don’t know how it was possible that I hadn’t yet become accustomed to her loud gum-chewing. She’d done it almost all our lives, ever since she’d bought a pack of Hubba Bubba on our first trip to dry land.
Doing my best to tune it out, I called softly to