CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

her phone for a week, there wasn’t much else in the way of a real threat.

It might seem unlikely for them to be found out so soon in both cases, but they’d been here nearly a week and the teachers were starting to twig that the excessive number of pranks might all be from a single source. Or rather, a double source of double trouble. Laura smirked. They’d show the teachers yet. They’d show their parents this boarding school was a bad idea.

When Miss Cuthbert’s heavy steps finally faded, Laura climbed out of the tree and headed in the opposite direction, back towards the dorms. She climbed upstairs and slipped into the tiny room she shared with her sister, shut the door and hoisted herself to the top bunk. It creaked slightly as she flopped down and closed her eyes.

She didn’t have long to wait. The door opened. Laura peered over the edge.

Alena stomped in and slammed the door, her dancer’s frame seething with tension. “Urgh!” she spat out.

“What did she do?” Laura rested her head on her hand, only to receive a glare.

“She’s moving me. I’m supposed to pack all my stuff and use a bed in the big dorm.”

Laura swung upright and dangled her feet over the bed’s edge several feet from the floor. “But—but she can’t do that! Dad paid for this private room for us—”

Alena hauled out a duffel. “You think I didn’t try telling her that? See if you can do any better.”

There was a rap on the door. “I said no talking!” The voice was muffled, but unmistakably Miss Cuthbert’s.

“She’s trying to stop us from planning stuff.” Laura bounced her left foot on the ladder.

Alena rolled her eyes. “Well, duh.”

“This calls for Plan B.”

The two locked gazes. Alena nodded. “Plan B it is.” She stuffed a few more things in her bag and shuffled to the door.

After she was gone, Laura glanced at the two tiny desks and grinned. Both were still piled high with schoolbooks.

As the midnight hour drew near, Laura opened the ancient wooden window of her room. It was well-oiled by now, of course, and swung out without a sound. She hooked the climbing rope to the radiator and fed it gently out until its full length was extended. A final check of the room—yes, the door was locked from the inside—and she pulled herself up onto the windowsill.

Between the knots in the rope and an occasional push on the nearby drainpipe, she made her way past the darkened ground-floor window below hers and dropped to a crouch in the bushes. A critical glance up at the rope told her the brick-like camouflage colouring would hold for now, but she’d do well to seek out a more permanent type of fabric paint.

Darting among shadows cast by the nearly-full moon, she made her way back to the pohutukawa tree. Climbing it was only slightly harder in the dark. Laura heaved herself up to her usual perch and settled comfortably.

“There you are.”

The whisper jolted Laura, but she recovered quickly. “You’re early.”

“Meh. I got bored waiting. Everyone in the big dorm just goes to sleep at lights out, can you imagine how boring their little lives must be?”

“I know, right?”

They giggled a little, then hushed. That small sound was unlikely to be mistaken for a late-waking pigeon, if anyone had happened to hear it. Suspicion would be running high tonight among the staff. But the night remained still.

“Plan B works at least, so that’s good,” said Alena.

They’d discussed meeting here at midnight in case of separation. “Easy enough to get out of the dorm, then?”

“Oh, I just walked out.”

“And all the way downstairs and out the front door? Heh. Cool.” Laura nodded in the dark.

Alena took a deep breath and huffed it out. “So now that we’re here—what next?”

“Seems pretty clear to me.”

“Well, yeah, the target’s obvious, but not the method.”

“We do possess the ideas.” Laura tapped her fingers on the rough bark.

“And the creativity.”

The soft approach of footsteps turned them both to stone. A wandering figure paused as if looking up into the branches. Laura held her breath. Finally, the person sighed and walked on.

“So,” said Alena. “I say we throw everything we’ve got at Miss Cuthbert.”

Miss Isobel Cuthbert seated herself at her desk and laid her palms flat on the mahogany surface. It was time to do something about those Schultz twins—why, almost every day this week they’d pulled some kind of outrageous prank.

Yes, she would write to their father.

Diplomatically, of course. He’d made an enormous donation besides the substantial fees and private room for his daughters, and she hated to complain so early in the school year. She began to see why he had been so generous.

She pressed the switch on her computer tower, and it whirred into life. As she waited for it to start up, she gazed at the patch of blue sky beyond the office window. She squinted. Something was falling across the light, like dust motes, but… shiny? Frowning, she got up and walked around the desk, and straight into a cloud of glitter.

It appeared to emanate from the back of the computer. Waving to clear the air, she leaned down and found a piece of paper rolled into a funnel and placed over the computer’s fan. A last handful of glitter blew out of the paper and into her face.

She blinked, avoiding the stuff that came for her eyes. The paper was empty now, and she straightened, peering around the room. As a prank, it was fairly tame, but it meant that someone had been in here overnight, and she had a good idea who it might have been.

A sound of running water from above drew her attention to the ceiling. An innocuous sound. But there wasn’t a bathroom above her office. Her eyes narrowed as the ceiling tiles bulged out to the size of a grapefruit—and burst open.

“Gah!” She spat and grabbed at her face; a yellow liquid with a strong