It felt good to be home. The first thing I did when I got to my room was take the phone out of my backpack and stash it in the back of the junk drawer in my night table. I stuck it under some stuff so my mom wouldn’t come across it while cleaning.
For the first couple of days I was home, my mom treated me like a fragile flower. She didn’t want me to lift a finger. But soon life returned to normal. I went back to school and everybody was really happy to see me. On Thursday, my mom didn’t want me to go to Zeke’s birthday party, but I talked her into letting me go.
Have you ever been to an escape-room party? They’re actually cooler than I thought. Basically, you get locked in a room and you have an hour to figure out how to get out. There’s usually some kind of a theme to the room, like it’s a haunted house, a space station, or a secret laboratory. You have to solve a series of riddles and clues that lead to a solution in order to escape. Escape rooms were a big thing a few years ago. Everybody was doing them.
So Zeke and I, his dad, and a couple of Zeke’s other friends from his church went to this escape room place in Harlem. They have four different rooms. One is called “The Hoosegow.” One is called “Zombie Attack.” One is called “Treasure of the Catacombs.” The room we were locked in was called “The Dungeon.” It was described as “a human research project.”
The room looked like a prison cell and everything in the room was there for a reason. Everything was a clue. For instance, there were a bunch of gummy bears glued to one wall. At first we just thought that was strange, but then we figured out that the numbers of red, green, yellow, and blue gummy bears gave us the solution to a four-digit combination lock—4-5-2-3.
The lock opened a cabinet. There was only one thing inside the cabinet—a flashlight. But it wasn’t a regular flashlight. It was a black-light flashlight. When we turned off the lights and shined the flashlight at the wall, a bunch of letters appeared there that couldn’t be seen in the regular light. That letter code opened up another lock.
You had to solve a bunch of puzzles like that in a specific order to get out of the room. There was a timer on the wall that counted down to tell us how much time we had left.
I won’t bore you with all the details. The words we saw on the wall didn’t make any sense, but we noticed that the first letter of each one spelled “skoob.” That’s where we got stuck.
The puzzles were really hard. When the timer clicked down to ten minutes and we still had a few clues to solve, we knew we weren’t going to get out of the room. We were stumped.
The whole thing was exhausting for me, because there was no place to sit and I hadn’t done a lot of standing in a long time. It was still fun anyway. When the timer buzzed, the door opened and one of the employees came in to “rescue” us.
“What does the word skoob mean?” I asked her.
“Sorry, but I’m not allowed tell you the answers to the clues,” she replied. “Come back and try again sometime.”
“Oh, come on!”
She told us not to feel bad, because most people don’t figure out how to escape from the room. She gave us discount coupons for a return visit.
Afterward, Zeke’s parents took us all out for dinner at this place that makes amazing ice-cream sundaes.
It had been a long day for me, and I fell into bed early. I tried to read a little bit from my science book for school, but felt my eyelids closing. So I turned off my light and pulled my covers up around me. That’s when I heard a soft buzzing sound.
Bzzzzz…bzzzzz…bzzzzz…
What’s that? It sounded very close, like it was in my room. I flipped the light back on and looked around. The buzzing sound seemed to be coming from my night table.
I opened the drawer.
The cell phone I had stashed in there was vibrating!
I flipped it open.
These words were on the screen…
“YOU COULD HAVE ESCAPED.”
That was it. Huh! The phone actually works, I thought to myself. But I figured it had to be a prank.
“Who is this?” I whispered. I didn’t want my mom to hear me from her bedroom. “Zeke?”
There was no response.
Of course not, I thought, slapping myself in the forehead. It was a text, not a call. The phone didn’t work as a phone, but it could transmit texts. Or it could receive them, anyway.
“Who is this?” I tapped clumsily on the little keypad, making a few typos along the way and correcting them.
There was no response.
“Is this you, Zeke?” I tapped.
Nothing.
It was probably the escape room place, I figured. They were taunting me. I’ll bet they send that text out to everybody who doesn’t escape so they’ll come back and try again. Zeke must have gotten the same message. I made a mental note to ask him about it at school the next day.
I put the flip phone back in the drawer and lay there with my hands behind my head. It was hard to sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking. How did anybody get that number to send the text? And why would they be sending a text to this random phone in the first place? I never gave them a number. I didn’t even know the number myself.
These thoughts were going around and around in my brain. And one more: Who left the box with a flip phone in my hospital room? And why?
For a moment, I considered getting up and going to tell my
