Jack lost his grip on the top of the cabinet and started to fall into the crowd of girls below. Suddenly a pair of arms reach down from the ceiling and grab his arms!
Jack looks up and sees a boy! The kid looks to be around 11, making him a muscular black-haired kid. "Will you quit squirming? You have 2 choices boy-o: I drop you in the man-eaters, or you work with me, and I save you from consuming doom!"
Jack screams "Don't drop me please!" Jack stopped squirming and latched one of his feet on the cabinet shelf, to steady himself. He reached his arms up and latched his hands on to the new boy's arms.
"OK you two, get down from there right now!" Jack looked over and saw the anthro fox teacher starting to walk over. Her tail was flicking back and forth in irritation. "You boys are not supposed to be up there in the ceiling! You both need to get down, so we can begin the class-time sessions."
The other boy snarls, "NOT A CHANCE! Not going to let him be girl chow. This boy is under OUR Protection!" The black-haired kid pulled himself deeper into the ceiling and dragged Jack up too.
Jack felt his legs dangling below the ceiling, and his upper body was lying on the ceiling tiles. The ceiling space was big enough to crawl on hands and knees, but not much more, even for Jack, and the other kid kept rubbing his back against the roof space above their heads. Jack tried to pull his legs into the ceiling space, but they were windmilling in mid-air. "Uh, need some help here. Still hanging in the kindergarten room. Can you help me?"
"Part of the initiation is to be able to pull yourself up." The black-haired pre-teen pulled back to give room for Jack. "Keep using those arms, and pulling, and then lift your leg over the edge. One at a time.” He pointed out some rafter supports, and also to a plank lying across some of the crossbeams in the ceiling. “Let your hands use some of the supports as hand-grips, and then try to crawl over to the plank to move away from the opening.”
Jack nodded, and followed the instructions. Soon he was inside the ceiling. Below he could hear the frustrated cries of the girls, and also hear the teacher wrangling the little ones back to the seats to resume class again. The black-haired kid then covered the hole with the ceiling tile making the new ‘floor’ a complete space again. The bigger kid nodded, and pointed to the corner of the room where the door would be below them. The black-haired kid started to crawl along, following a plank-pathway towards a large open space.
“I guess I forgot to introduce myself—I am James, but I go by Shepherd. I am the oldest kid in OUR club. We try to give the boys that have some fight in them a chance to survive, and get out on their own feet! Oh, OUR Club—Overhead, Under Radar Club. The idea is that we hide out away from the vore-powered girls, and try to survive until we can get out of this Montessori school for girls. Anyway, there are only a few rules: Never allow the girls up here. Don’t cause too much noise for the girls or teachers to find us. Finally, if you see a boy trying to escape a girl, and the boy can be reached, we try our best to rescue them, just like we did with helping you.”
Jack looked around and observed the space that Shepherd had led him to. The room looked like an abandoned club room. It was locked and looked like there was a large stack of boards nailed around the door to keep it shut. There were a few bean-bags, and some board-games to play to while away the school days. There was also a library of old, dog-eared text books, and a whiteboard with some scribbles of a previous day’s lessons. There were about a dozen boys in the room, and Jack felt he saw most of them earlier when his mom dropped him off.
“We are only here because our parents get us to chaperone our siblings—some get access because of younger kids, such as you and the K-grade munchers. There are a few exceptions like Adam and his older sister in the 6th grade.” Shepherd ruffled the head of a 5-yr old red-head who was trying to read a picture book. “Most times, the kids are stringy, and we can fit in the ceilings, and the duct-work of the school. So, we can crawl around inside the ceilings, and listen to the subject classes that we need to study. We just try to avoid too many in 1 class roof, to avoid cave-ins.”
“Why has this space never been raided by the girls?”
“This is technically part of the roof, so none of the girls are normally allowed up to this area anyway, and the teachers are preoccupied all day. We head home at the end of the day joining up with girls so the parents have no idea that we are missing classes, as long as we keep showing up for the end of the day.”
*&*&*&*
When the final class bell rang, Shepherd escorted Jack and the others to a ventilation shaft. Shepard warned everyone, including Jack, that the shaft entrance is set so the small girls would be too short to reach the inside ladder entrance, and the older girl students would be too “boy fat” to fit themselves inside the shaft to climb up to the room. They exited along the side wall, away from the school entrance, in a patch of tall bushes, hiding the entrance away from prying eyes.
At the end of the school day, Jack showed up in the driveway, and waited for his sisters to show up at the front door of the school. As little Emma and Nicole stepped outside, Jack slipped behind them and followed them to the van where Mom was waiting.
“Well, you survived the day, Jack. Not so scary right?” Mom asked as everyone loaded into the van.
Jack glared down at Emma as he buckled her car-seat. “NOT a chance. Emma told her class that she didn’t need a chaperone, and they turned cannibal on me! She didn’t even try to eat me herself; she just watched the carnage unfold! I only survived when some boy grabbed me and pulled me into the ceiling!”
Nicole reached over the back seat and grabbed Jack. “You were pulled into the HeartDrop Rafter Rats!? It is the #1 Urban Legend of HeartDrop. No girl has ever been able to eat a boy from the Rafter Rats—the legacy of eating any one, even a sibling, would make you immortal in the halls of HeartDrop forever!” Nicole slapped Emma’s hand away from Jack, and snapped, “Hands off—you only get credit for eating him if it is after 1st bell, and before last school class ends.” Nicole let a little drool drip from her mouth into Jack’s hair. Nicole looked over at mom and announced, “I want to help you cook tonight, Mother. Have to fatten up the family’s newest member to HeartDrop and the Rafter Rats!”
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