Gleeks Ahoy Chapter 7

7 Perfect Plans

Part One of the plan was to let Lexie know what was happening and to tell us if she got another phone call to steal the note.  That part went even more perfectly that we could have hoped; even as I found her in the cafeteria eating breakfast, she was on the phone, and the confused look on her face when she saw me was enough to tell me who she was talking to!  I let her finish the call while I went ahead and sat down at her table.  As if she knew what I was thinking, she was pointing at the phone and mouthing "it's him" at me, then talked to the person on the other end.  "Okay, I'll get it, I promise!" she said desperately, "Just don't…yes, I promise I'll get it, I really will!"  She seemed to want to keep begging the person, probably to not tell anyone about her and Tanner Hendrickson (ick!), but she sort of stopped, which pretty clearly meant that she had been hung up on.

"He told you to get the note from Serenity again, didn't he?" I asked, pretty much knowing the answer.

"I didn't even know she had another," Lexie said miserably.  I could tell she hated being blackmailed like she was, and if we were right, our little plan would help her out of her mess.

"So someone's keeping an eye on the video cameras, at least in the gym," I said mostly to myself.  "They know about the note already.  I wonder if they're following 'Ren in particular or anyone in the detective club?"

"It sounds dangerous," Lexie mewled, and I remembered the way 'Ren would call Lexie a chicken.  I was seeing that first-hand again!

"Not if we can find out who it is," I told her.  "They told you to leave it behind the ticket booth again, right?"

"Uh-huh," Lexie agreed.  "They said it was in Serenity's English book."

"She's going to leave it in the team room, so you can put it there.  But please don't lock her in the ball room again."

"So what are you going to do?"

I wasn't sure what to tell her, in case she told whoever-it-was our plans.  "Figure out who's making you leave it, of course."  And I left it at that.
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The next part was to make sure that nobody could get the note from the ticket booth without being seen.  Our idea was pretty simple; make sure someone was around the field all afternoon.  That would give 'Ren time to sneak into a nice secret place to see who finally showed up to get the note.  She would be at practice that evening until about six, which was about the time our rehearsal would be over, and Trent Barker promised to stick around after football practice doing extra sprints and such until 'Ren would be in place after practice.  She would hang around after soccer practice and find a place to hide.  She gave us a text when she got into place, and we left.  This is where 'Ren herself has to tell you what happened next.
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I should have known something was wrong when I had to hide around the corner of the field house until dark!  The last time someone came for the note, it was during the daylight, you know!  But there I was waiting and waiting and waiting until I was beginning to think that maybe they wouldn't show up.  I was starting to think that maybe they'd found out about our plan and decided to stay away, which would make sense.  And if that made sense, it also made sense that that little derp Lexie Archer might have told them what was going on with our plan and warned them off!  I was getting just about ready to go beat the crap out of the little derp when I finally heard noises around the ticket booth!  Finally!

I started to stick my head around the corner to see who was getting the note, and maybe getting a picture on my camera.  It was a matter of going real slow so I didn't attract any attention, and getting a real careful shot with my zoom because by then it was pretty dark outside.  Real slowly, I started poking my head around the corner—

But I didn't get a chance to get that picture, because even before I could get my phone out of my pocket this pair of arms reached out from behind me and grabbed me!  And whoever it was, they knew what they were doing, because one arm went for  my mouth to keep me from yelling and the other one went for my arms.  But when you've been captured as many times as I have, you learn a few tricks, and managed to keep one of my arms free.  Okay, so it was probably just dumb luck, but give me a break anyway!  I tried to swing my fist backwards to nail the guy grabbing me, but I couldn't reach.  I hoped maybe I could get his eyes or something, but he was dodging me.  That's when my brain finally started working, and I decided to bite his hand so I could yell for help.  Hey, it worked for Taylor Jensen more than once!

Of course, that's when another guy showed up and put a knife to my throat!  Wearing some kind of ski mask, too, which shouldn't be a surprise, but the important thing right then was that I was up against two guys, and one of them had a knife!  You'd be surprised how quick that gets you to stop fighting!  "If you don't want hurt…"  Well, you know the kind of cliched stuff the guy with the knife said, I'm sure, and it ended up with the two of them walking me into the woods behind the football field.  I was looking for a chance to escape, but they both stayed right with me, and the fact they each had one of my arms  and I was actually being sort of marched into the woods didn't help either!  I tried to talk then out of taking me, but they weren't listening any more than to say that if I made any more noise, they'd slit my throat, and since they now both had knives out, it was a chance I really was a little too scared to take!

A couple yards into the trees, well, of course they found one and started tying me to it, sort of like we'd done yesterday to Lexie.  It was a thin tree, and one guy slammed me up against it by my back, and the other guy grabbed my hands and pulled them around behind the trunk and tied them real tight!  Wow, not as if it was anything like the first time I'd ever been tied up by bad guys, but of course my bladder couldn't tell the difference, and I had to go even before the guy had my hands completely tied!  Meanwhile, the other guy took out a long strip of cloth of some kind and blindfolded me, then shoved another cloth into my mouth to gag me.  I tried to keep my mouth shut so he couldn't, but he used that old trick of pinching my nose shut until I had to open my mouth to breathe, and that was pretty much it.  Have I told you lately how much I hate gags?  Well, it probably didn't even take a minute, but I was pretty tightly tied to the tree, blindfolded, and gagged!

Considering all the teasing I took at summer camp, I expected them to start making jokes about how much I had to be liking getting tied up, which I wasn't, by the way!  It's one thing to be tied by Joey (especially since I can always get loose when I want to when he ties me up!), it's another to be kidnapped by strangers!  And speaking of strange, as soon as they were done tying me up, one of them started talking to me.  "Should have known you'd try something stupid and hang around waiting to see who picked up the stuff!  Ain't that just like a nosy girl!  Didn't we warn you about doing stupid crap like this?"

Who was he kidding—nobody warned me about it!  Of course, I couldn't really say anything back to them because of that stupid gag, but I sure shook my head!  "Look, don't try to act dumb, okay?  You knew you'd be in trouble if you didn't follow our directions and stayed out of it, but you still didn't listen!  So you better listen to this if you know what's good for you!"  That left me more than a little confused, because nobody had given me any warnings like they say they did, and I began to suspect that they thought I was somebody else.  "You just do whatever we tell you to do!  No arguing back, no sneaking around trying to figure out who we are, or so help me, people finding out about you and your little games with your cousin will be the least of your worries!  You hear me?"  Now, I might have been scared, and nervous, and yes, I had to pee already, but I wasn't so out of my wits that I couldn't figure out that these idiots thought they'd caught Lexie Archer!  It occurred to me that I needed to let them know they had the wrong girl, but I couldn't really do that with my mouth stuffed with what felt like a torn-up sweatshirt.  Then, even as I was really feeling my bladder fill up, it sort of struck me that there was a sort of opportunity in this.  Well, at least there was an opportunity in this if I could get myself loose!  I had to get rid of these guys, and the only way I could do that was to be a good little Lexie Archer and wuss out on them like the real Lexie would, so I just whimpered and nodded my head, trying to make my whimpers sound like Lexie's.  "Okay, then, little kissin' cousin, you just don't forget it, you hear?"  I gave out a few more Lexie whimpers and nodded my head again, and I felt one of them loosen one of the knots in the rope just a little.  "If you work at it, you'll get yourself loose, but you just remember what you've been told, Lexie!  Just mind your business!"  I whimpered out an okay through my gag, nodded my head, and heard them walk away from me.

I listened real close to make sure they didn't pull on me the same thing we pulled on Lexie the day before, the pretending to sneak off and leave her alone.  But after a while I decided I was really alone.  And when it really came to me that I was alone, all tied up, blindfolded, and gagged against a tree behind the football field in the night, well, you can just imagine how bad I needed to go!  But on the other hand, it really motivated me to get loose, and I found that after a while I could get my hands untied, and when I took out my gag and took off my blindfold, I ran like heck out of there!  Okay, first I peed, then I ran like heck out of there!

Usually when you panic, you do really stupid things, but every once in a while you do something smart instead!  I was so upset, and so much just wanted to get the heck out of there, I stuffed the ropes and the cloths they used for my blindfold and gag in my pockets without even thinking!  I finally managed to get a look at my phone and saw it was after nine o'clock, which meant I was dead when I finally got home unless I could come up with an excuse really fast!  Lucky for me, I'm pretty good at coming up with excuses fast, and this time I called Abbie and told her the quick version of what just happened to me.  She said she'd have Richie come out to get me in his truck (which was probably about as dangerous as being caught by bad guys considering how rusted-out his truck is!  All I can say is, you better have had your tetanus shot before you get in his truck!), and would call my house to apologize for me not calling and telling them I was with her all afternoon, and I would have called myself but I was in the bathroom.  Okay, okay, so it was Abbie who thought of a good excuse!  It worked, anyway!  

Richie was there in just a couple minutes, and pretty soon we were pulling up at Passmore Street, where Abbie was staying again.  Richie pulled up in front of his house, and when the dome light came on (yeah, it's a rusty truck—I didn't say it didn't work right!), he saw some of the cloth and ropes sticking out of my pockets, and of course he decided to tease me about it, how Joey probably tied me up and then forgot about me.  I didn't yell at him—well come on, he's Abbie's big brother, and besides, he's about three times my size!—but his teasing made me realize I really had brought all that stuff with me.  "Actually," he grinned, that wide big-lug grin of his that yeah, even I like, "you were just bringing home the evidence, right 'Ren?"  And then it really hit me that yeah, it was evidence!  Like I said, sometimes you do smart things unintentionally when you panic!

I didn't have much time at Abbie's place before I'd really have to go home (and somehow do my homework and sleep at the same time), but we decided to check out the evidence I had.  The rope, well, that wasn't a whole lot to that, just some old cotton clothesline they cut and used to tie my hands.  But the stuff for my blindfold and gag, that was a whole different thing!  I thought at the time they caught me that they were part of an old torn-up sweatshirt, and I was right!  The pieces were from old gray fleece sweatshirts; one was a big wide piece I recognized as the one they used to blindfold me, and the others were a long narrow strip and a crumpled-up wad.  I thought at first they might have been all from the same sweatshirt, but I was wrong!  On one end of the blindfold, we saw  a Y NOR in curving block letters that are used a lot on sweatshirts, in royal blue with a white outline around them.  On the other hand, the wad and the narrow cloth did seem to come from the same sweatshirt.  The wad looked like it was cut from a collar, because a piece of it was still attached, and it was in red!  Then, on the strip they used to hold the wad in my mouth, we found the letters TONT in red curving letters.

The thing is, we weren't really thinking too much about the cloths, but more about the fact the two guys thought I was Lexie Archer!  Abbie thought that was hilarious, and I told her it wouldn't have been so hilarious if it was her tied up in the woods at night instead of me, and of course she teased that nobody could mistake her for Lexie Archer!  Well, I guess that's true enough, because of course Abbie's a brunette with a shape that drives guys (especially Jaden) absolutely crazy; she always complains that she'd like a little less "on top," you know, and I always tease back that I'd take whatever she didn't want, and Abbie must have been thinking the same sort of thing, because then she said, "Well, look at it this way, Serenity.  If they confused you with Lexie, maybe you're not as flat as you think!"

"And maybe we have a trick we can use on them!" I said back.  "If they don't know Lexie well enough to be able to tell us apart, we can use that against them!  All I need to do is…yeah, I think I'll have me a talk with the little derp tomorrow!"  Right then, I got the you-better-get-your-buns-home-right-now call I was expecting from Mom, so Richie drove me to my place.  I was stuffing the rope and cloths back in my pockets as Richie pulled up in front of my house, and only then did I really realize about those cloths, and when I did I felt my ears turn red!  I got out my phone, and called Abbie.  "We need to get the club together!" I told her.  "After school so Mrs. P doesn't know!  I think I know what's going on!"  And I didn't like it either, one little bit, let me tell you!