Trapped (13 page)

We pawed through the fresh supplies. It was just Krista, Elijah, Les, and me in the room. Four days ago, I would’ve said this was the weirdest collection of students you could imagine. What did any of us have in common?

Krista was one of the school’s few truly hot girls. What were there, maybe a dozen, total? She was a freshman but she could talk to the juniors and seniors like she was one of them. I’d seen her do it. She could go anywhere in the school. She could talk to whoever she wanted and she could ignore whoever she wanted. Being good-looking, it was like a passport to anywhere, and she was the only one of us who had one.

As for Elijah, like I said, most people associated him with the goth kids, but he wasn’t really part of that scene. I used to just think he was spooky, but the truth is, I’d never really had to think about him all that much. All I knew was how he looked, where he hung out, and things like that. And when he was one of hundreds of kids I was passing in the hallways five days a week, that seemed like all I needed to know. The popular kids called him names or just ignored him.

No one called Les names. Not to his face. All I knew about him was that he was always getting in trouble. If there was such a thing as permanent detention, he’d have it, and there were all these rumors of sealed juvenile records and things like that.

And me, I was a kid who sometimes wore a basketball jersey to class. I was a sophomore with an outside shot at starting. In a year, I might be one of those guys who could go anywhere, talk to anyone. Or I might not. Like I said before, I didn’t really hang out with a lot of other jocks. I doubt Krista, Elijah, or Les knew that, though. If you’d asked them four days ago who I was, they probably would’ve said, “That basketball player.”

Now we were sitting here talking about everything except the noise we’d just heard, and it didn’t seem like such an odd group anymore. Krista and I had talked a bunch of times now. And if she was more popular or thought she was better than us, she hadn’t acted like it.

Elijah was actually pretty funny. He still didn’t talk much, but he was always thinking, and I’ve got to say: What’s so bad about that? And if he was a little negative about our chances in here, who’s to say he wasn’t right?

Les was the biggest surprise. He’d been fine. He was the first one of us to realize that Elijah wasn’t the freak people said he was, and he really hadn’t caused any trouble to anyone else. It was pretty clear to me now that it wasn’t the other kids he had a problem with. It was the adults: all of the rules and late bells and all that crap.

I’d always sort of been afraid of him, because of his reputation and how he looked, but I’d never actually heard of him getting into a fight. He skipped class and broke things, and I was there when he showed up for gym in work boots. It was always things like that: one-fingered salutes to the school. I don’t know what he had going on in his life that made him resent
authority so much, but I knew that some people did. And I knew that it didn’t really apply in here now.

As for me, I sort of wondered. If you asked these three about me now, what would they say? Would they say “He’s friends with Jason and Pete” or “He’s on my bus” or something like that? I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be “He plays basketball.” I’d settle for “He’s OK.”

I looked over at the window. Frost had formed along the edges and was sort of inching its way toward the middle.

“Earth to space cadet,” someone said.

I turned back toward the group. It was Krista. She was looking right at me.

Maybe half an hour later, Pete and Julie came back with more food. Really, there wasn’t a lot of variety to be found in the caf. They’d found rolls instead of bread, chocolate chip cookies instead of fake Oreos, strawberry jelly instead of grape. They did have one surprise though.

“Hot dogs!” said Pete, holding up a frozen block of plastic-wrapped wieners. “We can cook them right over the fire bucket.”

Julie rooted through her backpack and produced a few forks. “We can use these as skewers,” she said.

It was a little lame. I mean, what were we supposed to do, cook them one at a time while we were in there taking a dump? Still, it had been days since we’d had hot food, and just the idea of it was making my mouth water. You could see the dogs were still good. They were sealed in plastic and the ice was just beginning to drip off the corners. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure that kind of Grade D, every-preservative-known-to-man meat needed to be refrigerated. It wasn’t that many steps up from a Slim Jim.

Anyway, the thought of cooked food was pretty exciting. Krista put her hands up in the air and shouted, “Cookout!”

I don’t know if it was the noise or if it was just going to happen anyway, but right at that moment there was an enormous sound. It wasn’t a slow rumble like before; it was a sharp, fast
BAM!
like someone had fired a cannon thirty yards away. I closed my eyes and ducked my head, just out of pure instinct. As I did, I felt a shock wave shoot up through my feet. It felt like a one-second earthquake.

“What the – ?” I said.

“Whoa!” said someone else, and a third person just screamed. I’d say it was one of the girls, but honestly, I think it might’ve been Pete.

I opened my eyes and got my bearings. The sound had come from out in the hallway. You know how you can just sort of tell which direction a sound is coming from? It was like that, but we felt it too. It had been so loud that we heard it in our ears and felt it in our bones.

We stampeded out into the hallway. I followed along, even though it seemed like maybe we were running the wrong way. Why run toward the disaster? As soon as I got out there, I could see that something was wrong.

At first, I thought that maybe the floor was tilted, but I looked down and it was fine. I looked back up and realized that it was the end of the hall that was out of whack. The line connecting the ceiling to the wall above the girls’ bathroom was wrong. It was no longer level, no longer a neat horizontal line. Now the border between the ceiling and wall ran in a downward slope toward the back stairwell, as if the whole thing was getting ready to slide out of the building.

The door frame had been pushed out of shape beneath it. It had gone from a rectangle to a polygon and had knocked the door off its bottom hinge. The gap between the door
and its frame had been filled by snow. There was a solid wall of snow behind the door and a tail of snow pushing into the hall.

I tried to process it all, standing there in the dim light. I was like a camera, developing a picture without understanding it. The image floated in my head like a dream. The angles were all wrong … and why was there snow in the hallway? None of it made any sense.

“What happened to the door?” said Les, his voice rising.

“Don’t shout!” Elijah hissed in a loud whisper. And then I understood.

“The roof collapsed,” I said, and that shut everyone up.

The roof had collapsed. Not all of it, or we would’ve been buried and crushed. But some of it had. The part over the far end of the second floor had come crashing down under the weight of the snow. I think the floor under it might’ve collapsed too. We were all in a little cluster in the middle of the hallway, looking at the damage.

I looked again at the little tendril of snow pushing out into the hallway. It looked like an animal to me, like something trying to get to us. If this had happened a few days ago, that snow would be starting to melt by now. But it had gotten so cold in here, the snow probably felt right at home.

I took a step back and looked straight up. Everyone else did the same. We craned our necks to look at the ceiling directly above us. It could just come down, right now, and squash us like half a dozen very cold bugs.

Jason came huffing back up the stairs. He’d heard the collapse all the way down in the shop. He knew what it was immediately.

“This is not good,” he said.

He said it quietly.

Jason took a few steps toward the end of the hallway, but that was as close as any of us were willing to go. After that, we went back to the room and began talking about it in quick, low voices.

“If it was because I shouted, why did it happen so far away?”

“Maybe we just got lucky.”

“Yeah, for how long?”

No one had any answers, and eventually we got around to eating. I wasn’t all that hungry, and I don’t think anyone else was either. But there was a new batch of food in front of us, so we dug in. I even had seconds of the chocolate chip cookies. They were crumbly and cold but good. Right about then, it seemed like any meal could be our last.

Jason went across the hall to check on the fire bucket and came back chomping on a hot dog, no bun required. One and two at a time, we all did the same. I ate mine straight off the fork, and for the minute or so that I was chewing, I really did feel better. I guess it was a childhood thing. I used to eat hot dogs all the time back then.

But a hot dog apiece doesn’t last long, and after we’d licked our fingers clean we were left sitting there in our little room again. The snow was coming
down, the roof was coming down, it was all coming down. The whole time we’d been here, we’d thought: At least we’ve got this big, old school. When the snow buried the first floor, we moved to the second. When the heat and water went out, we built a little fire and melted snow.

But now, I mean, what could we do? This big, old school was a little too old and weak in the joints. We thought it would save us, but now it looked like it might be what killed us. I thought about the girls’ bathroom, stuffed with sharp, busted wood and packed with snow. What if someone had been in there? Or what if it had been this room? Would we have been crushed, frozen, suffocated? Whatever the flavor, we wouldn’t be alive.

We’d turned the radio off to talk, but Pete turned it back on now. Andy hadn’t been on all day. It was some new guy, and he didn’t seem to know anything new or to play as much music. It still gave us something to listen to, something else to think about. But I couldn’t help but notice that the light on the dial was almost out.

When Jason saw that he said, “Turn it off.”

No one did, so he got up and did it himself.

“Well,” he said, “now that I’m up.” And he touched the tip of his hat and left the room.

“Where does he keep going?” said Julie.

It was up to me to explain his go-kart turned snow-kart, that it had been a shop project at first.

“You mean there are like motors and stuff here?”

“Yeah,” said Les sarcastically. “It’s called shop class.”

“I know about that, but I thought you, like, read about that stuff in books. Like in the other classes. I didn’t realize there were really tools in the school.”

“Are you kidding me?” said Pete. “The school’s full of ‘em.”

And that was a funny line, but no one laughed.

“Do you think it might really work?” Julie said to me after a few minutes of silence.

I hadn’t really thought about it much. The radio had said to stay put, and that’s what I’d assumed we’d do. Now, though, this didn’t necessarily seem like the best place to be. One of the houses up on the slope seemed to be doing OK. It looked like maybe someone had been clearing snow away from the second floor windows, and there was smoke curling out of its chimney again. Maybe if we brought some food up there?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it might. You definitely couldn’t get more than one person on it, though.”

Could it make seven trips, back and forth? Even one trip seemed to be pushing it.

“I’m going to go check it out,” said Les.

After he left, it was quiet for a while. Pete got up to use the can in the bucket room, and right after he did, Julie left the room too.

“Uh, not my business,” said Elijah, “but those two don’t do
everything
together, do they?”

Krista and I laughed.

“That’s nasty!” she said.

But when Pete came back, the first thing he said was, “Where’s Jules?”

“We thought she was with you,” said Elijah, and the rest of us snickered a bit.

“Seriously, where is she?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe she went to check out the snow thing,” said Krista. It seemed like the most likely explanation. I mean, Krista still knew her best.

Pete stood by the door, looking out into the hallway. He was thinking about going after her.

“Geez, man, give her a break!” I said.

He looked over at me and laughed.

“Yeah, I guess there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing,” he said, puffing out his chest and fake flexing his muscles.

He sat down and for a while it wasn’t so bad. Pete was talking about what he was going to do when this was all over, like how he was going to say he was “traumatized” and take a month off from school. “Just TV and video games,” he was saying.

Pete talked really fast when he got excited, and he’d get excited over really dumb things. It was one of his best qualities. Everyone else tries to play it so cool all of the time.

Anyway, Pete was doing most of the talking, but we were chiming in with our own plans. When it was Elijah’s turn to say what he was going to do, he shrugged and said, “Probably go back to the library.”

We busted out laughing. He knew that’s what we all used to think about him, that he was that weird kid in the library, and it was cool of him to bust on himself.

It was hard to stay in too good a mood in here, though. When I realized how loud I was laughing, I stopped mid-breath and looked up at the ceiling. Everyone else stopped too.

“Good one,” I said after a moment.

Things were quiet for a while, and then we started rationalizing.

“There must’ve been a problem with the roof there,” said Krista.

“Yeah,” I said. “Could be. Maybe because of the pipes coming from the restroom and stuff. I mean, they could be frozen by now. Maybe they burst or something? You know how ice is bigger than water? That could’ve caused a problem.”

“Wouldn’t the pipes be under the floor, not over?” said Elijah.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “You know in
Dirty Jobs
and
Verminators
and those type of shows, when they are always crawling around in attics or, like, above the ceiling panels in office buildings?”

“I know
Dirty Jobs,”
said Pete.

“Verminators
is kind of the same thing, but it’s just about exterminators. Anyway, my point is, there are always a bunch of pipes and wires and stuff, and holes where all of that stuff goes between floors. That’s usually where they set the traps.”

“Yeah, so what are you saying, we have rats too?”

“No, no, just that there’s probably all of that stuff here,” I said. “And more because it’s a bigger building. So there are some pipes that freeze and wires passing through holes in the floor, and it’s all old and weak anyway.”

“Your argument is old and weak,” said Pete, smirking. “Probably do have rats, though.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m just saying it could’ve, like, contributed.”

“Well, if it did,” said Krista, “I mean, if that’s what happened, will the boys’ room be next?”

“Could be,” I said. “Or maybe there just won’t be another collapse. It could’ve been a freak thing.”

“Yeah,” said Krista. “It is pretty weird. If you think about it.”

There really wasn’t anything that weird about tons of snow busting through a worn-down, century-old roof. We were just trying to talk ourselves into it. There wasn’t much else to do. We wanted to turn the radio back on, but with only four of us there, it seemed like a bad use of batteries. And, if I’m being honest, I sort of wished Pete and Elijah would leave the room for a while.

Nothing against those guys, I just wanted to be alone with Krista. We were already talking, and I knew I could keep it going if those two left. I thought I might even make a move, try to kiss her. I mean, what was I waiting for? I could die in here. We both could. I could be crushed or suffocated or frozen or D) all of the above, and it would happen fast. It’s not like I’d get the chance to make a move if the roof came down.

But they didn’t leave. I mean, where were they going to go? And it wasn’t so bad, sitting there, talking about
Dirty Jobs
and whether or not the school had rats. And just as I was thinking about some of the craziest dirty jobs I’d seen, like “sewer inspector” and “leech trapper,” Julie came bursting into the room. She was crying, really sobbing, and the front of her jacket was torn
open. Little down feathers flew up when Krista ran over and grabbed her.

I looked over at Pete. His eyes were wide and he was sort of frozen for a second. Then he jumped out of his chair and his blanket fell to the floor. Elijah and I exchanged confused looks.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Krista was saying. “What happened? It’s OK. What happened?” Then she hugged her again, and when she stepped back, Julie started talking.

Her words sounded small and quiet in between her sobs. I was looking at the tear in her jacket — Did that go all the way through? Was she injured? — and listening closely. I still couldn’t make out most of what she was saying to Krista, but I did hear one word: “Les.”

I guess Pete heard it too, because he took off. You idiot, I was thinking, and I meant both of them. I figured I’d been wrong about Les, but Pete was going to get himself beat down or worse. He couldn’t take Les, no chance. It’s like he’d just started running full speed toward a brick wall. I started after him. I wasn’t sure if I was going to try to stop him or to back him up, but I knew I needed to catch him.

Krista grabbed me by the sleeve right before I reached the door. I started to shake her off and turned my head to tell her to let go.

“No,” she said. “No.”