Saturday's Storyteller: "No, you can't go to the movies until you finish your homework."

by Belinda Roddie

"No, you can't go to the movies until you finish your homework."

"Awww, Mom!" Shana cried out, her hands curling into frustrated fists as she stood up from the couch.

"You heard me," her mother snapped. "I've told you this before. Until homework's done, there's no time for fun."

"Have you also heard of the line, 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'?"

"Yes. And from last I checked, your name is not Jack, and you are not a boy. Now homework. Stat!"

Shana stormed up to her room and threw herself onto the bed with all the exaggerated pubescent anguish she could muster. This was the worst. Her biggest crush in the whole wide world had asked her to see the latest Roland Emmerich movie - the London Eye blew up in it, so it had to be good - and now she would have to cancel. All because she hadn't finished her essay on Walden. Who gave a shit about her thoughts on Walden? She was not the type to go out into the woods and measure some stupid lake. Thoreau was not someone she could relate to, and therefore, she held no interest in giving him the time of the day.

Still, she was never the one to defy her mother, who she saw as more of a terrifying dragon than her father - a man who was, in truth, more like a toothless Komodo dragon (intimidating on the outside, helpless on the inside). So, accepting her Thursday night fate, she pushed herself over to her clunky desktop computer and loaded up the screen.

"That's funny," she thought to herself. "I don't remember ever looking this up."

A stark, text-inundated news article was glaring at Shana, and not an article one might expect. It wasn't about Walden. It wasn't about Henry David Thoreau. It wasn't even about lakes. Instead, it looked like something straight out of a Roland Emmerich film - a complete, detailed history of the real destruction of a building called the Mad Man's Eye. Shana had never heard of the Mad Man's Eye. Truth be told, it looked like the White House, but darker and more circular. And it seemed to be perched right on top of an elevated, metallic plateau.

The truth was, while the article went very much into detail about the explosion and the casualties and injuries, almost gruesomely - it said little to nothing about the year, location, or reason it happened. Shana was ready to yell at her brother for playing with her computer again when she heard a voice from behind her.

"It will happen, you know. Soon."

Shrieking, Shana grabbed the closest thing to her - a giant Spanish textbook - and threw it as hard as she could over her shoulder. She heard a loud crack as it hit something obviously fleshy, then a small curse from something that was obviously human. Turning slowly around in her chair, Shana gawked at the stocky, blazer-wearing girl rubbing her nose where the book had struck her.

"Joan?"

"Hi, Shana," Joan groaned. "Ow. Hi. Ow."

"What the Hell are you doing in my room?"

"Um..."

"Did my mom let you in?"

"No..."

"Did you climb through the window?"

Joan looked sheepish, her face turning the same color as her reddened nose. "It was open, and it's a one-story house..."

"That's creepy!" Shana shrieked.

"Shut up!" Joan insisted. "And you know what's creepier? This Mad Man's Eye thing. Did you read it?"

Shana didn't know what else to do but nod, considering that her classmate from biology had snuck into her house and managed to access her computer.

"Okay, well, it's an article I saw, and it has a hidden message." Joan smirked. "It was easy, you highlight what appears to be a blank white box in the middle of the article. No one's taken the thing down yet, so I'm guessing it's pretty important."

"I have to do homework right now."

"No, you don't," scoffed her classmate. "I bet you don't want to, either. C'mon. Tell your mom I'm studying with you, and we'll break it to my hideout."

"Your hideout?"

"The treehouse my dad built me when I was nine! There'll be people there. We're the Mad Eye Motley."

"What...I...but..." Shana stuttered.

"No time. Let's go!"

This week's prompt was provided by Arden Kilzer.