the highest authority in any organization isn't the person with the fanciest title. it's not the person officially "in charge". the highest authority is the person with the keys. at a high school, that's a custodian. if the school is big and old enough, maybe it's one particular custodian who's been around long enough to collect keys to weird, forgotten spaces.

that custodian might be schmoozable.

i didn't schmooze berkeley high's head custodian myself, because in high school i had not yet learned to value or enjoy schmoozing. but a friend of my mine was (and still is) a compulsive schmoozer. if he can talk to you, he'll try to befriend you, and if you can offer him anything interesting, he wants it. unusually among schmoozers, he isn't manipulative - he doesn't work angles for personal gain. it's just how his brain works.

this friend somehow encountered the school's head custodian, and started his schtick. to everyone's surprise, it worked, and he offered to share with us the fruits of his spoils: a key. to...the roof? of one of the academic buildings. and one day at lunch, we all trundled up there to see what was locked away with this key forgotten to everybody but a head custodian and one particular persistent teenager.

it was an arcade - the stone columns kind, not the video game kind. the size of maybe two classrooms, open to the sky in the center. pretty neat. it seemed like the kind of space that might have hosted faculty parties or something, way back in the day, before it was forgotten by everyone except a guy forgotten by everyone. reflecting as an adult, it would be fun to learn its real history. at the time, we just went up there to hang out at lunch every couple of weeks, happy to enjoy our secret place, unknown and inaccessible to everybody else at the school, even the people who were putatively in charge of us.

a few months later, we found the perfect use for it. we'd been playing a long-standing game of assassin, where everyone involved has a "target" to "kill," and once you kill your target, you acquire their target as your own, until there's only one player left. we "killed" with simulated means of murder: a plastic disk gun shoots actual bullets, a timer labeled BOMB is a deadly explosive, that sort of thing. some people put flour in plastic baggies to create "grenades;" one guy's experimental attempts to create an "explosive" out of the flash from a disposable camera gave all of us a real-life warning about how dangerous camera capacitors are. (everyone except him, who didn't seem overly concerned when he paralyzed his arm for half an hour by rooting around inside a camera with a screwdriver.)

the rules of the game were: you can't be caught in the act by anyone not playing, you can't get any help from anyone not playing, and you can't kill any innocent bystanders. the last rule's inadvertent precision regarding culpability led to a consistent theme in the fictional death announcements i posted on the game website we set up: assassins would regularly take out their target, alongside "several guilty bystanders."

with a couple dozen people playing, the game lasted a while, but was eventually whittled down to two: a guy named "turtle" (so monikered when we were too young to realize you can just tell people to stop using a nickname you dislike), and me. (i'd been murdered earlier, but my would-be killer enlisted the aid of my non-participating sister to place the bomb that ended me, so i convinced my peers to resurrect me.) rather than tap-dance around each other, making every social interaction indefinitely awkward, we decided to finish things Like Men: a disc gun gunfight at high noon (during lunch) on the roof of the C building, the location of our secret greco-roman hideout. the whole gang showed up. it was great. we did some thirty-paces-and-turn-around imitation of what we thought pistol duels work, we had a dozen spectators, it was the perfect climax to the months we'd spent on all this tomfoolery.

anyway his gun jammed and i won. hooray! i wonder if my friend still has the key to that place.