Finally, I was standing right in front of Principal Van Dooren’s door. I looked at right palm again and the rubber controller was still there. It was a little wet because of the sweat in palms, but I still had it prepared. My knees were rattling, but I forced them forward anyways.

I knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, and heard nothing, but absolute silence. I knocked again and same as the first time, absolute silence. “Principal Van Dooren!” I called out, but nobody replied. “It’s me, Andrew Nilsson! You called for me!” Still, not a single answer. I looked through the window of his door and searched the room. The lights were turned on, but the place was completely empty. No Eden to be found and not even Principal van Dooren.

I really, really could not make out what was going on, so I just turned around and started walking away. I thought that the lady at the front office could tell me what was going on.

As I was walking down the silent hallway, a creak came from Principal Van Dooren’s door. I swiveled myself around and saw that the door was creaked open. “Could he be there? Did he not hear me the first time?” I thought. I walked back to the door and reached towards the knob.

I pushed the door open and took a step into the room. There he was: the tall, bold, dark-hair Principal. He was just standing right in front of me, with dark eyes and a blank face. A shiver ran down my spine by the fact that he was standing so perfectly still and just gazing at me, not moving a single muscle.

“Principal Van Dooren,” I finally said for the sake of breaking the silence.

Before I could process anything else, he lunged at me, grabbed my arms so tight I thought he was going to break them, and yanked me right towards him. I let out a quick yelp, and then he slammed me onto the chair in front of his desk. He slammed me so hard that I lost my grip on the rubber controller flew out of my hand. He kept his very, very strong arms gripped on me and pinned me against the chair.

“Principal Van Dooren!  What are you doing?” I cried  out.  “Stop! Let go! It really hurts!”

Next, I saw two figures coming out from behind the desk. I focused on them and saw clearly that they were Brett and Avery! They came to my sides and held my arms down as Principal Van Dooren let me go and backed away.

Whilst I was struggling and kicking against my two best friends, I glimpsed again towards the desk. A third figure slowly emerged from below it. My body instantly froze when I realized that the figure was Hector Markowski.

“Hector! Hector! What are you doing?” I shouted at him.

“Oh wet pantsed little Andy, stupid then, stupid now!” he mockingly replied.

“What’s going on? Where’s Eden?”

“You just get dumber and dumber every day. After the fight yesterday,  her parents transferred her to a private school in England before anything could get on her records.”

“Principal Van Dooren! What have you done to him?”

Hector gestured for Van Dooren to come to him. Hector lifted Van Dooren’s left sleeve up an inch and stuck on his wrist was a rubber controller that said, “I will be Hector’s slave.”

“How? When?”

“You shouldn’t have just walked to your Mommy yesterday, Andy! Right after you left, I came back, broke into the office, and smacked that baby right onto good Ole Van Dooren! It was so easy and Eden was okay with it! I told her to scram and that’s what she did off the bat!”

All the blood was rushing away from my head because of what was going on right there, but my brain could at least conclude, “You never meant for the third controller to be for me, did you? With Van Dooren, you can expel me? Give me a thousand detentions? Force me to walk around campus in my underwear?”

Hector grinned and said, “No, but those are really good ideas! Don’t you love having your friends torture you? It’s kind of different from me torturing you, right?

            “Why? Why? Why do you hate me Hector?”

He slowly turned his head to me in a snake-like manner and hissed, “ I hate little, scrawny twerps who have at least one best friend, and you have two! Or… had two.”

Before I could say anything else, Hector’s eyes shifted towards the rubber controller that I dropped. He dashed for it, studied it for a few seconds, reached out for a pencil on Van Dooren’s desk, and erased the old command I wrote. I stared at him as he wrote, “I will be Hector’s slave” on it.

He stepped closer and closer towards me, still struggling against my two friends, and whispered at my face, “Andy! It’s your turn!”