This part of the story is going to be concerning what I believe was a murder attempt; an attempt on my life. I believe it was pre-meditated, I believed it was planned and plotted and was set up to be made to look like an accident.
This is what happened, according to my memory, and I remember a lot and will be quite detailed here.
At this point in time, Scott and I had been friends for about five months, and it's now Christmas vacation 1974.
I came over to Scott's house, and today Scott was different. he was different, and he was about to start something, something big.
And this is how it all started.
After five months, and apparently for no reason at all, and after having showed no real interest before, Scott suddenly asks me, "I want to see you set a fire."
Now, it is true that when I first met Scott I was starting a small fire; a pile of leaves, and that I had done this sort of thing a few times; burn a pile of leaves, under safe conditions.
I told Scott, "I haven't set a fire since I met you, but if you really want to watch...," I said.
"Yes yes I do, " Scott said nodding his head up and down enthusiastically.
I thought it a bit strange that Scott was suddenly interested now to see me do this, but I went along with it.
"OK," I said, and we both proceeded to walk across the street to the school, climbing over the fence, because once again, the school was closed for winter recess.
...
When we got inside the school campus I said to Scott, "When you first met me, I was burning leaves on the ground, but the safest place is actually on the roof."
The roof of the school was the same exact type of roof my parent's house had, and was typical in Los Angeles. It was a flat rock roof; white rocks, to be precise.
Scott followed me up on to the roof of the school; the rock roof, and followed me as I picked a spot where I had done this before, where there was part of a tree limb that I could reach and grab some brown dead leaves off of as well as the leaves that were already in the rain gutter.
I then sat down, and made a small pile of leaves in the rain gutter. The rain gutter was made of metal; and the roof was nothing but rocks, there was absolutely no way this fire could burn anything but leaves; the leaves would burn themselves out, inside the metal rain gutter, which is exactly what they did.
I stared at the flames like I usually did, and found it quite amusing.
Scott however, didn't seem particularly interested. he was barely paying attention, standing a few feet away and seemed to be distracted by something.
"I don't know what's the big deal about this, doesn't seem very interesting to me," Scott said which only confirmed what I already had figured out-- Scott had no interest in watching me burn a pile of leaves. What he was really up to, I didn't know, but it wasn't to watch me burn leaves.
...
The day I met Scott, I remember he said I was really cool, and all this stuff, and I had originally thought it was because when we first had met he had seen me starting a fire, but I was already suspicious that this wasn't the case, now I was certain.
I didn't know why Scott thought I was cool, and smart, and all those nice compliments he obsessively made to me, not anymore anyway.
We got down from the roof, and I asked Scott, "So, what do you want to do?"
"Let's just walk around," he said.
We walked around inside the campus, and Scott led the way, and we ended up at the door to a certain classroom.
I knew the classroom. Not only was it my old third grade classroom, but it also was the classroom where the special-education kids were that I helped.
Scott tried the doorknob and it was locked. He then looked at me, "You're super smart, can you think of a way that we can get inside this classroom?" he asked me.
There was another one of those compliments. Did he really think I was smart, or was he just masturbating my ego, and if so, why? I didn't know.
I wanted to act smart though so I did. I thought for a moment, and then trying to sound a bit like I imagined Sherlock Holmes may talk I said, "Let's check all of the windows on the back side of the classroom, maybe one of them is open."
"Good idea," Scott said.
The two of is then walked around to the playground side of the campus where the back side of the classroom was.
On this side of the classroom, ground level was higher, and the windows were only about a foot off of the ground, although inside the classroom, the windows were about four feet off the ground.
They were the kind of windows that had multiple horizontal panes of glass.
I noticed that one of those panes of glass whose dimensions measured about 4 inches by about 8 inches, or something like that, was loose. In other words, the panes could be closed tight or opened. In this case, one lone, individual pane was open, while all the rest were closed.
"What do you know," Scott said, "a loose pane"
"Yea," I said curious.
"Do you think we could somehow get that pane of glass out of there?" he asked.
I got down on my knees, and I tried to remove the small pane of glass, and to my surprise, I was able to pull it right out.
I looked at Scott in surprise.
"Now we can get more!" he exclaimed. "See, I KNEW you were a genius."
Once we removed the one pane of glass, it gave us access to the adjacent perpendicular ones below and above it, which I could now manually turn so that they too were horizontal and then could be removed.
I think I removed three or four panes of glass, and that gave Scott and I enough room to squeeze into the classroom.
We left the loose panes of glass sitting on the ground outside.
Once inside the classroom, I grabbed Scott by the shoulder and said, "Why did you want to get inside?"
"Just to mess things up a bit," he said.
"I don't know...," I said reluctant.
"Don't worry, were not going to damage anything, just mess things up a little, nothing bad."
I frowned, but then finally said, "Just mess things up?" I asked.
"Yea, papers and things, that's all."
"Alright," I said,
Scott and I kind of separated at this point. Scott went to the teachers desk, and I saw him open the desk drawer and start disorganizing the contents.
I kind of repeated what I saw Scott do with individual students desks. I opened them up and just kind of messed things up inside.
I went from desk to desk. I wasn't causing any real damage, I was just messing everything up inside the desks.
I wasn't really watching what Scott was doing while I was doing this and after a few minutes I got bored with this, and also felt a bit scared that we might get caught.
I stopped what I was doing and walked up to Scott and said, "I think we should go, we've been in here long enough," I said.
"OK, just a few more minutes." he said.
I was shocked as I watched Scott open up some paint bottles that he found and were shaking the paint all over the teachers desk and the chalkboard and on the ground and trying to throw paint up onto the ceiling.
"I thought you said we weren't going to do any damage," I said.
Scott didn't answer me, as a matter of fact, Scott kind of went into a rage. He went crazy, running around and throwing paint all over the place. I refused to participate at this point.
I watched as he threw some scissors up onto the ceiling until they stuck.
After several minutes of watching Scott angrily throw paint and scissors everywhere I yelled, "SCOTT!"
This finally broke his trance and he stopped what he was doing finally and looked at me.
"You can stay here and do whatever the hell you want, but I AM leaving!"
"That's cool, I'm done."
"Good," I said and headed for the front door. I was very anxious to get the hell out of here, especially since Scott did some real damage with the paint-- this was no longer just messing things up-- Scott vandalized this classroom, and it was real damage.
When we got to the front door, I was relieved that it would open from the inside, I walked outside, and Scott was right behind me. I was holding the door open for him, when Scott suddenly said, "wait."
"What?" I asked impatient.
"Just a second. I'll be right back. Just hold the door open, I'll be right back."
"Make it quick," I said.
I watched as Scott ran back into the classroom, went to the teacher's desk, and looked around inside of the drawer as though he were looking for something and didn't find what he was looking for. I then watched as he looked under the desk and around the desk, where he found a large piece of construction paper.
Scott started walking back towards the door, folding up the construction paper. When he got to the door, he continued to fold the piece of construction paper into a think but small triangle, about an inch thick.
"Why'd you do that?" I asked.
I watched as Scott stuck the paper in between the latch so the door wouldn't lock.
"So the door won't lock," he said answering my question.
"Why? That's stupid if you're planning on coming back. I'm not planning on coming back. If you want to come back later, leave me out of it."
Scott nodded, "I'm not planning on coming back," he said.
"Well then why leave the door unlocked?" I asked.
"Just in case," he replied.
"Just in case of what?"
"Never mind," Scott said.
"OK, whatever," I said.
We then headed back around to the other side of the campus, to where we left the loose window panes and put them all back into place.
After that, Scott and I walked back to his house.
I had no idea why we did that. I had no idea why Scott got so angry. I had no idea why Scott damaged the property in there.
One thing I was certain about however, was that Scott's apparent interest to see me set a pile of leaves on fire was only a ruse to get me onto the school campus with him.
Why he picked that classroom I didn't know. I didn't know what actually was going on.
-- Edited by The Phantom on Tuesday 6th of July 2010 02:27:33 PM
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"Sometimes when you open your mind to the impossible, you discover the truth." Walter from Fringe.
