“What do you mean you don’t have my pictures?” Lois asked. It was an effort to not allow her voice to rise into a shriek. “I gave them to you yesterday.”
The man behind the counter shrugged. “The pictures didn’t turn out. There was nothing but blanks.”
“No,” Lois said. “There’s nothing wrong with my camera. I use it all the time.”
Shrugging, the man said, “It happens sometimes. The film slips off the rollers. Maybe there was a mistake at the developers. We subcontract the work out to a local company. In any case, there’s no charge.”
“Are you sure it’s my pictures we’re talking about?” Lois said. “Check again.”
The man checked, flipping through a drawer filled with pictures and prints then shook his head. “I’m sorry. We don’t have any other pictures for you.”
As Lois turned to walk away, she swore she saw the man smirk.
**************
Getting the information on the subcontractor had taken almost two days, but eventually Lois had managed to discover that her prints had developed without any problem, and that they’d been delivered to her local CostMart without any problems.
She’d double checked, hoping that maybe they’d gotten mixed up with another batch and had gone to a different store in the city.
As far as she could tell, the pictures had arrived at her CostMart branch and then they’d disappeared.
It didn’t make sense. These weren’t naked pictures that were likely to disappear into some store clerks person collection and be labeled as lost. No one would have any interest in those pictures other than Lois.
She’d double checked her camera as well, taking pictures and having them developed both at CostMart and at the place down the street with the stoners. There were no problems.
This left her in the uncomfortable position of having to do the whole thing all over again. The risk of discovery once had been high. The risk of being discovered again was even worse.
Lois looked around nervously, and then turned the door handle to the coach’s office. It was locked.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and she shrieked, jabbing her elbow backward as she’d been taught to do in her beginner’s martial arts classes. It was like hitting a brick wall; her arm immediately felt numb.
Turning, she saw Clark standing behind her, his hair wet and his gym bag in his hand. He was dressed this time, and Lois couldn’t help but feel a moment of disappointment that surprised her.
He didn’t look like the jab to his stomach had affected him at all. Instead he looked annoyed. “You’d better get out of here,” he said. “They’ve been watching for you for the last couple of days, and they’re already on their way back.”
Lois grimaced, holding her arm, but nodded.
For a moment, his expression softened, and he said, “Let’s go.” Gently taking her by the arm, he quickly led her toward the entrance into the school, but then he froze.
He looked around and a moment later he lunged for one of the lockers, pulling it open and shoving her inside along with his gym bag. Shutting the locker door, Lois couldn’t help but gasp as she heard the sound of a lock being placed on the door and snapped shut.
The locker was dark and smelled even more strongly of dirty feet, Lois felt trapped, with the metal walls closed in all around her. If she wasn’t as slender as she was, she’d never have been able to fit in it at all. As it was, she felt herself gasping for air even though the locker was well ventilated, with slats she could look through.
Before she could shove at the door she froze, hearing the sounds of multiple feet approaching.
“She’s in here somewhere,” she heard the voice of the team captain, Tom Church. “We don’t stop looking until we find her.”
Boys began opening lockers and slamming them shut. Lois couldn’t help but tremble, but froze as the boys reached the lockers to the sides of her.
She tried not to move as a boy jerked at the lock of her own locker for a moment. He hesitated, and for a moment Lois was afraid that he’d called out, that he’d seen the white of her eyes through the slats in the darkness.
After a moment, however, he moved on to the next locker.
It seemed forever, but couldn’t have been more than five minutes before the sounds from the team retreated and everything became silent again.
As she sat stood in the stinking locker, she tried to shift her position to get a little more comfortable. She gasped and her chest felt tight as she realized that she couldn’t move. Worse, her elbow throbbed and she couldn’t even reach around to massage it.
Her nose itched, and it was driving her crazy.
It occurred to her that it would be better to be caught by the team than to be trapped in the locker for hours. Weren’t there kids who died in refrigerators? Even though there were slats for ventilation, the smell of dirty feet made her feel light headed.
She’d thought he was helping her, but Clark Kent had locked her here. Maybe he was working with the team as a probationary member. Someone had obviously tipped the team off to what she was trying to do; why not him?
Just as Lois considered screaming, hoping that her air would hold out long enough for someone to hear, she heard the sounds of movement in the room outside.
The sounds of the lock being rattled caused her to slide forward a little; when she saw Kent’s familiar face, she felt her breathing begin to relax.
The door opened and she squinted into the light.
He pulled her out of the locker, his hands gentler than they had been when they shoved her in. Lois grabbed him and held on, for a moment she was so grateful to be free that she could have kissed him.
She’d never realized that she’d had a touch of claustrophobia. Being in crowds or crowded elevators had never bothered her. Being trapped in a tiny metal box, though, especially when she’d thought she’d been abandoned, that was different.
His grip on her tightened for a moment, then he released her.
“What in the hell was that?” she asked. Now that the shock was wearing off, she was getting her emotional footing back long enough to realize that he’d been the one to shove her in the locker in the first place.
“I overheard the team this morning,” Clark said. “They were watching for you to go into the locker rooms. Whatever they were planning didn’t sound good.”
“You have a lot of practice, shoving people into lockers?” Lois asked. She stared up at him suspiciously. He’d shoved her into the locker awfully quickly, as though he’d been already been thinking about it. If she hadn’t been slender, the experience would have been even more difficult.
He shrugged. “I’m a quick study.” He didn’t look at her, instead staring at the wall separating the gym from the rest of the school with an odd expression on his face.
Lois looked around. “Where did you hide?”
He was too large to fit in one of the lockers; it had been a tight fit even for her. The bathroom stalls had no doors; there weren’t any obvious places for him to hide. It wasn’t like he could climb through a ceiling panel; as far as Lois knew, those wouldn’t hold the weight of a person.
“Who says I hid?” he asked. “Unlike you, I actually have a right to be here.”
Something in his expression told her he was lying. He wasn’t part of the team and he was hanging out in the locker rooms before school even started. This was the second time she’d seen him with wet hair.
“Why are you showering at school anyway? she asked.
He looked at her for a moment, than sighed. “I have a paper route before school. I don’t always have time to get home and shower before class. It’s this, be late for class or stink all day.”
“You have two jobs?”
“Not everybody has a rich father to buy them things,” he said. “If I’m going to college, I have to get there on my own.”
He pulled his bag from the locker, closed it and he slipped the padlock into the bag.
“Why do you have your own lock?”
“You think those gorillas out there wouldn’t love to steal someone’s clothes while he was showering?” Clark asked.
Right. Given what she knew of the football team, it had been a stupid question. Before she could say anything else, he put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s clear.”
She was out in the hallway before she could protest, only to find that he was right, it was clear.
“How did you know?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’ve got good hearing.”
She looked him dubiously. While it was true that the guys on the team tended to be loudmouths, they could just have easily been quiet, lying in wait for Lois. Of course, if they’d been waiting for her for a couple of days, they were probably a little less vigilant. None of the guys on the team seemed like the kind of people who could sit still for a long time.
“You need to watch out for the team,” Clark said. “I don’t know what you did to them, but they’re going to be after you. You probably need to stay out of the locker room for a while too.”
“I’ll be happy if I never see another one,” Lois said quietly.
It was true. The coach was obviously going to be on his guard from this point on. She’d have to get a little bolder and get what she needed from the principal’s office. She’d be more careful about who she sent her prints through next time as well.
“Good,” Clark said. For the first time she saw what might be a flash of something other than impatience. “I’d hate to have to make a habit of rescuing you.”
A moment later he was heading down the hallway without so much as another word or a look back.
Lois rubbed her elbow, which still throbbed. If the look at his body she’d seen before hadn’t convinced her that he was in great shape, the pain in her elbow would have. C lark Kent had abs of steel, probably from spending so much of his time riding bicycles.
Getting into the principal’s office wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe she needed to lean on Lou about teaching her how to pick locks.
Maybe she was getting ahead of herself. First she had to survive whatever hazing the football team came up with. At least it was Friday. All she had to do was get through the day, and she’d be able to escape from the harassment she was sure was coming her way. She’d hoped to have the internship in hand with it almost at the end of the semester before anyone found out what had happened. She wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the day.
As far as they knew, she hadn’t done anything yet anyway. It wasn’t like the CostMart people were going to go around showing her pictures to the team. There were just rumors and she’d live through it if she kept her head held high and denied everything.
All she could do was hope.
