Trapped (2 page)

The next class started, and I think it’s fair to say no one was in the mood for geometry. I don’t even think Mr. Peragrino was, and as near as anyone could tell, he lived for that stuff. He gave us a pop quiz anyway. He had it printed up already, and I guess he felt like it was as good a way to wait for the announcement as any.

As soon as we all had our heads bent down over the quiz, cell phones started going off. Not ringing, of course. Cell phones weren’t allowed at Tattawa, and they were kind of not kidding
about that. The first time you were caught, you got a warning, and after that you took “the suspension bridge.” That meant detention the second time, a longer detention the third time, and then suspension.

I was more concerned about indirect proofs at the moment, but the room was quiet and every now and then you could hear a cell vibrating in someone’s backpack, like a big, fist-sized bug trying to get out. Kids would cough or scrutch their chairs back to cover it up, but let’s be honest — if you’re smart enough to teach indirect proofs, you’re smart enough to figure that out.

Peragrino didn’t move, though, didn’t even say anything. He should’ve been adding names to the list left and right, but I think he understood: Parents were getting worried, wondering if their little angels (Ha!) were coming home soon. And, I mean, isn’t that what cell phones were for, like, originally, before all the apps and web surfing and rapping ringtones? When I was a little kid, I had a dinky round cell phone with one button so that I could call my mom or she could call me. It had some embarrassing name, like Doodlebug, but it really should’ve been called Leash.

Finally, fifteen minutes and four-and-a-half questions later, not counting one that I skipped, the loudspeaker crackled to life with the official word. “May I have your attention for an announcement, please? This is your principal speaking,” it began. I don’t know why. I mean, we obviously knew it was Throckmarten, and he obviously had our attention. “Due to worsening conditions, school will be dismissed at one o’clock
this afternoon. All athletic and extracurricular activities have been canceled. All buses leave at one fifteen. Thank you.”

Pete leaned across the aisle and high-fived a kid named John, who everyone called Drumstick. Of course, Drumstick was going home at one fifteen, and Pete would be stuck here with Jason and me till four or so.

Drumstick turned to high-five me. At first, I was going to leave him hanging. I mean, my game had just been canceled. I hesitated maybe half a beat and then reached out and slapped his hand anyway. When it came right down to it, it wasn’t about my game or whether I’d be on the first bus out. We were forced to go to high school, stuck in here and marched around like livestock. Anytime they had to let us loose, it was sort of like a victory, you know? We knew it didn’t amount to much, but we broke off little bits of freedom, and we high-fived when we did.

The kids whose phones had gone off before took the opportunity to stick their hands deep down into their backpacks and bags to switch them off. They didn’t really need to: The lines were already getting swamped and the service getting worse with the weather, but none of us realized that yet. I didn’t have to worry about it, in any case: I didn’t have mine with me. I’d already had my warning this marking period, and detention was not an option for me because it meant missing practice.

“Alright, cool it,” said Mr. Peragrino. “This class is not over yet.”

And that was true enough. It seemed a little unfair that we
would have to finish this quiz after all — I really had no clue about question three — but after that, all we had was lunch, so we were basically done. I mean, the way it was coming down now, they probably would’ve sent us home on the spot, except I think they were legally obligated to feed us before throwing us out into the snow.

Since it would turn out to be my last real meal for quite a while — if you can call the school lunches at Tattawa a real meal — I guess I should’ve been grateful. I actually remember little things about that lunch, like how the whole cafeteria had a bursting-through-the-roof sort of energy to it. It was louder than usual and people were moving between the tables, talking and laughing.

I remember the snow, drifting sideways into half crescents in the windowpanes, and I remember that I didn’t eat my corn. I don’t know if I took a bite and thought it was a little too soggy or if I just remembered that it had been soggy the last time, but I left it there on my tray.

As dumb as this sounds, that bothered me for days. I mean, soggy or not, it was decent corn prepared by people who were at least borderline professionals. It was definitely a whole lot better than what I’d end up eating soon enough, and I’d just thrown it away. I still remember the little flash of yellow as I pushed the tray onto the conveyor belt that took it into the back of the kitchen, where the giant, hissing dishwashing machines were. Whoever thought you could be haunted by corn niblets?

After lunch, Pete, Jason, and I sat on the floor of the hallway outside the library and watched the buses roll slowly into the
storm. The hallway had these big, tall safety glass windows. Sitting there, looking forward, it provided a pretty amazing view of the snow outside.

Mr. Trever, the assistant principal, hustled by and stopped short. He was a big black dude, which I only mention because, generally speaking, this area had about as much color as this snowstorm. “What are you guys still doing here?” he said.

We had to sort of crane our necks to look up at him. “Jason’s dad is picking us up,” I said. “He’s got the 4x4.”

Trever considered this for a second, or, more likely, he considered us for a second. We weren’t really troublemakers, but none of us were going to be elected Student of the Year, either. We were sort of right in the middle, discipline-wise. I’m sure that made us the hardest sort of kid for Trever to figure out.

“A four-wheel drive, huh?” he said, still trying to size us up.

“Yeah,” said Jason. “You know, these big buses on these slick roads … Just seems like the truck’s a little safer. Plus, he’s just down the road, working in Canton today.”

I looked over at Jason. He sounded pretty convincing. He was doing this right because everything he said was true, he was just leaving something out. Those were the easiest lies to tell.

Trever didn’t say anything for a second. He was thinking about something, maybe about how the school buses could barely make it up some of the hills around here, even in the best weather.

What Jason was leaving out, of course, was that his dad wasn’t planning on picking us up for another several hours. At this rate, I estimated, that could amount to another foot of snow.
(I wasn’t thinking big enough, of course; it was more like three times that.) But if Jason wasn’t saying, Trever wasn’t asking. In the end, he didn’t let us stay because he trusted us. He let us stay because he drove a two-door Toyota. It was like one step up from a bike, and he wanted to get home sooner rather than later.

“Alright,” he said, “but go wait by the gymnasium with Gossell. He’s in charge of pickups, and they’ll be locking all of these other doors in a few minutes anyway.”

We sat there, our heads tilted up at him.

“Now,” he said, and we climbed to our feet.

When Trever turned right to head to the faculty parking lot, we knew enough to turn left, as if we were heading for the gym and Mr. Gossell. Once we couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore, we doubled back and headed for shop or, as the plaque on the door read, the
INDUSTRIAL ARTS ROOM.

The door was locked, though. The plaque might as well have said,
CLOSED FOR SEASON.

“Uh, moron,” I said, rattling the handle one more time and turning toward Jason. “You did clear this with Holloway, right?”

“Uh, he said he’d still be here. He said just to stop by.”

“Was this before or after the announcement?”

“Um, before, I guess,” said Jason. “I just sort of assumed he knew we’d get out early. I mean, everyone knew.”

“Dude,” I said. “Holloway is, like, one thousand years old. Seriously. Who knows what he knows anymore?”

“Yeah,” said Jason, kicking the base of the wall with the toe of his boot. “Fair point.”

Pete put his face up against the window on the door. “Wait a sec,” he said. “There’s something moving in there.”

“Something?” I said. “What is it, a puma?”

“Someone, I mean. Also, shut up.”

Pete put his hand up above his eyes to shield them, like he was gazing off into a sunset. “It’s Holloway.”

“Told you,” said Jason.

“You’re still a moron,” I said.

“Shut up, Weems,” he said. “I aren’t not no moron.”

Now we could hear Holloway moving around, his heavy footsteps getting closer to the door. We all sort of stepped back, even though the door opened inward. The shop teacher appeared in the hallway wearing an enormous parka and gigantic snowmobile boots. Holloway had been put on this planet nearly a century earlier and had aged none too gracefully into the sort of old-timer who took winter seriously.

He was the kind of guy who would sit around in the coffee shop behind the pharmacy talking about the “Blizzard of ‘93.” I know, because I’d seen him back there, nursing his coffee with
the other old-timers and alternating between their two conversational options: complaining about the present or reminiscing about the past.

At least once I overheard him saying “the mother of all blizzards.” From the way he was dressed, it looked like he might’ve been the only one who knew that the mother of that one had just blown into town. The hood of his parka, lined with fake gray fur and looking like roadkill, drooped down behind his head. He looked around at the three of us and then stomped his huge black boots twice —
Pdhump! Pdhump!
—like an animal sending a warning. I guess he was just pressing his feet in all the way.

“I don’t know, boys,” he said. “I think maybe you should be getting on home.”

“Uh,” said Jason, by which he meant, “You said it would be OK when I asked you this morning.”

Holloway was unmoved by the eloquence of Jason’s argument, and I knew there was a war going on in his head. There were two things he really valued. The first was shop class. He was always downright delighted when any of us asked to stay after and put in some extra time. His old face would just crack open with joy, with deep lines spreading the length of it. It kind of made you smile, just to see an old man so happy.

He’d probably been doing this for half a century, but time was sort of running against him. A lot of high schools didn’t even have shop class anymore, and most kids were angling to
get something more out of their lives than tuning up cars or fixing refrigerators. These days, students — even students in Podunk towns like ours — were supposed to be part of the Information Age or the Post-Industrial Workforce or some other thing that didn’t involve power tools.

And, I mean, it was kind of dicey, leaving kids unsupervised in a room full of edges and motors and blades. But that wasn’t really part of Holloway’s thinking — he thought of hacksaws and blowtorches the way that other teachers thought of pencils or calculators — and we’d already signed our lives away anyway, our lives and our limbs. Every kid who took shop had to fill out a “legal disclaimer” form that “absolved the school” of responsibility for “accidental death or dismemberment” due to everything up to and including “gross incompetence” and “faulty equipment.” Looking around at the decades-old tools and the Old Man Time teacher, the forms had been a big joke when they were handed out at the start of the year. They’d been an enormous laugh. We were fifteen. We considered ourselves invulnerable and had yet to be proven wrong.

It wasn’t the creaky tools that were worrying Holloway, though. It was the snow. That was the other thing he really valued: Like a lot of New Englanders who’ve reached a certain age and haven’t had the common sense to leave, he really had a thing for winter, like it was some beautiful beast that had to be respected. It was part of that whole hardship-equals-character thing. Oldsters loved that, the idea that character was something you could accumulate over time.

“Really coming down out there, boys,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the windows against the far wall. He put his hand on the door as he did this, and it seemed like the old guy was going to lock us out.

Jason saw it too and managed to string together a few actual sentences this time, telling Holloway about his dad and the 4x4. “And besides,” Jason tagged on at the end, “the buses just left.”

“You’re all from Cambria, right?” Holloway said.

And we were. Tattawa Regional High School was made up of students from three towns — Soudley, Little River, and North Cambria — but the three of us were all from North Cambria. And since I’d seen him in the coffee shop, so was Holloway. He was considering driving us home himself.

“My dad is seriously just down the road,” said Jason, “and he’s got to come this way anyhow.”

Holloway looked at him, not impressed.

“Plus, it will only be about half an hour,” said Jason, lying. “Forty-five minutes, tops.”

“Hardly seems worth it,” said Holloway.

“Yeah, I guess my dad was real concerned about the storm, too.”

I felt a little bad listening to Jason lay it on so thick and having to nod along with my eyes wide open in that he’s-telling-the-truth way. It was just the right line, though, and Holloway took his hand off the door handle.

“Band saw’s locked up,” he said by way of good-bye. “Torch is almost out of gas.”

Once we were inside, we closed the door behind us and threw off our coats.

“Cold in here,” said Pete.

There was a small pile of snow under one of the windows, just starting to melt.

“I guess he wanted a closer look,” I said.

“At what?”

And Pete was right. You couldn’t see anything out the windows. The view was an unbroken sheet of white. It was jarring but also a little misleading, because these windows were in the back of the school, and the school was built on a sort of hillside. The back of the gym was off to our right, but on this side of the school, the ground just fell away, down to where the playing fields were and the river beyond that. So standing here and looking out these windows, we were really just looking at open sky and some hills off in the distance. Except that we couldn’t see those hills anymore. It was like the snow had erased them, or buried them. All that was left was a softly shifting whiteness.

“Man,” said Jason. “Look at that.”

Look at it? I thought. We’re frickin’ stuck in it. I knew right then that we’d made a mistake. It’s like sometimes you’re so intent on talking your way in that you don’t really think about whether or not you want to be there.

“Maybe your dad should come a little early?” I said to Jason.

He looked back toward the door, as if Holloway might still be
hanging around watching us. Then he dug down into his pocket and pulled out his cell. “Probably,” he said, “but I can’t get through.”

“Not at all?” I said.

He glanced at the screen again, barely looking, just confirming what he already knew. He shrugged. “I had, like, one bar earlier, but I don’t think they get jack-squat out there, and now I don’t have anything. At all. Like zero-point-zero bars.”

“What about you?” I said to Pete.

He looked back at the door too.

“Would you two stop that? Holloway left like a rocket. He probably ran right out of those boots.”

Pete took his phone out. It was more for video games, and the screen flashed on with a little burst of colors.

“Nah,” he said. “No bars for the phone, and I can never get online out here anyway. Text I sent home, like, an hour ago is still sitting there waiting for a signal.”

“Man,” I said, looking out
the window. This high school was always a one-bar wonderland, and even a light rain made it worse. I thought about the handful of phones going off in geometry, but it was definitely coming down much heavier now. “Guess it’s the snow?”

“Or everyone trying to call at once,” said Jason.

“Or both,” said Pete.

“That blows,” I said. It was like an unintentional joke, but I don’t think anyone noticed. We all just stood there, looking out the window. The snow couldn’t possibly keep up like this, I thought. No way, right? And there wasn’t much we could do about it now. I mean, it’s like, raise your hand if you’re God, right? Jason’s dad would be here in a few hours. Or he wouldn’t. Nothing else to do; time to work on a crappy go-kart.