Trapped (4 page)

We sat there staring out the windows for rides that we weren’t sure were coming. There was a pay phone at the end of the hall, just outside the gym, but when I walked over to it right after I arrived, everyone else told me not to bother. It was like this collective murmur: “Lines’r-down-don’t-bother-yeah-right.”

Right after that, Gossell said, “Might as well take out those cell phones and i-things. I know half of you have one hidden somewhere, and you can consider this hallway your detention anyway.”

He was right: just about half. Pete and Jason had theirs; the girls had one iPhone between them (it turned out to be Krista’s, but they seemed to have joint custody); and Elijah had an old
flip-open, “clamshell” type phone. But mine was sitting on my dresser at home, and Les didn’t seem to have anything, either.

Of course, having them was one thing, and using them was another. People tried to call for a while, but then Pete said that texts had a better shot because they were “smaller.” I wasn’t sure about the science behind that, but I knew you could keep trying to resend a text until it went through.

“If anyone gets through, let me know,” Gossell said after a few frustrated attempts of his own. Then he added, not really to anyone in particular, “I volunteered down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. There was no service for weeks. Same thing after …”

His voice trailed off and I didn’t catch the last word. Some other big disaster, I figured. We’d done a whole thing on Hurricane Katrina in social studies back in junior high: the government response, the cleanup, and all of that. Our social studies teacher at North Cambria was kind of an old hippie, though. It was harder to picture Gossell down there doing that “Rebuild for a Brighter Future” stuff, but, I don’t know, maybe he was really religious or something.

Pete was playing a video game and flipping over every time he got killed to check on those same sad, stranded texts. Jason alternated between trying to call and staring out into the snow in the direction his dad would be coming from.

After a while, the dialing and texting trailed off. Everyone basically got the point, turned their ringtones up to max volume, and waited. We were all really keyed up, and there was a weird sense of competition. You could see it in people’s eyes, in their
quick little side-glances. Would Jason’s dad get here in his truck before Krista’s mom got here in her Subaru? Would either of them get here before whatever was coming to pick up Elijah, a hearse maybe? And would anyone end up giving Les a ride?

I was feeling it too. It’s not like I had anything against the others, but I didn’t want to be left behind. It was sort of good to know that Jason, Pete, and I were all waiting for the same guy, because it meant that I wouldn’t be the last one here.

I guess that feeling of not being alone was important to everyone. We had the whole hallway to wait in, and we probably could’ve strayed a lot farther than that. Gossell was supervising us, but he didn’t give the impression of caring much. He had his own problems, I guess. We probably could’ve gone back to the shop, for all he cared, but we didn’t. No one went anywhere. We waited in a cluster of warm bodies, just off to the side of the main door.

Sometimes we talked, but it was quiet in the hall and the sound sort of echoed. It made you a little self-conscious. Like, I said a few dumb things to Pete — I was talking just to talk, you know? — but everyone could hear it. They were probably thinking “Well, that was a dumb thing to say” or “Who cares?” And they weren’t wrong. You could whisper, but that just called more attention to it. That’s when people couldn’t help but listen.

So the talk would flare up and die down, flare up and die down, but nothing much got said and the quiet spells in between got longer and longer. We just sat and waited, looking out the
windows for our opportunity to get out, looking out at these rolling waves of snow.

The hallway shot straight out behind the main building, with the locker rooms along the back wall and then the gym at the far end. The side facing out was safety glass, floor to ceiling. It looked onto the main road, where it cut off from Route 7, headed down, and leveled out before winding around the front of the building. That made watching easy, at least at first. Most of us hunkered down against the wall, either sitting on our coats or using them as pillows between the wall and the backs of our heads.

As the snow climbed higher against the glass, we had to adjust our positions, sitting up straighter and occasionally craning our necks for a better look. Every once in a while, someone would get up and walk over to the window.

The first thing you saw was that there were no cars going by. It had been that way since I’d arrived, but it was sort of a fresh wound each time. It’s not like there were ever many cars out on the little dead-end road that led to the high school and a few houses farther on. It’s not like there were ever even all that many up on Route 7, but there were usually, you know, some. Apparently, there’d been a snowplow a little while before Pete, Jason, and I arrived. And there’d been two cars trailing right behind it, riding in its wake, like those little fish that follow sharks.

Not that you’d know a plow had been by, looking out at the uninterrupted field of white that stretched out in front of the school. There should’ve been a little black ribbon cutting
through it, and another one for Route 7 rising up the slope in the distance. But there was no sign of the roads now. There was no way of knowing where they were except memory.

Still, that piece of information told us what to look for. No car was going to be able to bull its way over these roads at this point. One of the big town plows would have to go first. That’s what we were watching for: the dull orange of the plow trucks. That’s what we were listening for: the sound of metal scraping asphalt, the sound of the plow doing its work.

It’s not that it didn’t occur to me that this storm might be too much for even the plows now. It crossed my mind. I’d never seen this much snow fall this fast. But I’d never heard of a snowplow getting stuck in snow either. That was like a fish drowning in water: Snow was its element, what it was made for.

The first hour ticked by, and then the second. The cell phones sat next to people like pet rocks. None of us were exactly in a sunny mood, but Gossell was downright angry. He didn’t say so, but you could see it in the way his jaw was set. His bearded chin was pushed forward and you could almost hear his teeth grinding. Waiting around with us had cost him his own chance to make it home. I didn’t know what kind of car he drove, but it wouldn’t matter much at this point.

Walking over from shop, we’d seen a huge lump of drifted snow in the faculty parking lot. It looked like an igloo, and Jason had made some sort of Eskimo joke. The punch line was, “And then you kick the polar bear in the icehole!” It had seemed funny at the time, but now it occurred to me that it must’ve been Gossell’s car under all that snow. And that was hours ago.

And I know Gossell was thinking that it was a lost cause anyway, that we were waiting around for rides that weren’t coming until the storm let up. Until the plows could make some headway and the snow wasn’t falling faster than it could be cleared. I know he was thinking that because I was starting to think it too. All you had to do was look out the window to catch that drift.

And pretty soon, even that depressing view began to vanish. The light faded early this time of year, even on clear days. I looked at the clock above the drinking fountain. It was around five, but it was already almost dark. It was hard enough to see through the storm during the day, but now it was pretty much impossible.

The light from the hallway projected a few feet out, catching the nearest falling flakes, but beyond that it was just shifting murk. There was too much snow and too little light. We sat along the wall and stared out. Mostly, we were staring at the snow that had climbed halfway up the glass, so we took unofficial shifts, standing and peering out.

We didn’t call them shifts or even talk much about what we were doing, but every few minutes someone would get up and look out. From the outside, it would’ve looked like a gopher poking its head and shoulders aboveground for a quick look. That person would sit down after a while, and a few minutes later, someone else would get up and repeat the process. What else was there to do? You couldn’t see much out there, but what we were looking for glowed. For a while, there was nothing. It was Julie who saw them first.

“Hey,” she said. She was talking to Krista, but loud enough that we could all hear her. “Are those headlights?”

Everyone got up and looked in the direction she was pointing. Gossell came over from his own spot, a little farther down the hallway. They were headlights; it was some kind of truck, high enough to chest its way through the snow or carve a path on top of it on fat, chained tires. It was up on Route 7, creeping slowly but unmistakably down the slope, toward the turnoff to the school. The lights were just visible through the falling snow, like two tiny, low-lying stars.

It’s hard to explain how exciting this was, or even why it was exciting. It was just one truck out on the road but it sort of seemed like, I don’t know, like we were back in touch with the world. Pete tried his phone again, and then Krista tried, and pretty soon, everyone who had one was trying to make a call. Then Pete started talking. Everyone swung around to look.

“Yeah, we’re here, by the gym, but I think, it looks like, someone’s here to pick us up,” he said. It didn’t look like that at all, but I guess that was the view he had, staring into his knuckles as he held the phone. And then his line must’ve gone dead. “There’s a … Hello? Hey? HELLO?”

“Did you get through,” I started. “Were you talking to someone?”

“I think so,” he said, and then we just went back and forth.

“Your mom? Your dad?”

“Maybe.”

“What? Did you, I mean, did anyone answer?”

“I think so.”

“Did you hear, like, a voice?”

“Not really.”

“What, then?”

“I just thought I heard someone pick up, like that click thing.”

“Like the click when you’re disconnected?”

“No,” he said, and then, “maybe.”

The ones who hadn’t already tuned Pete out tuned him out now, making sad little smirks and turning back to the window.

“And why would you say that someone was here to pick —” I started, but he cut me off.

“Wait!” He was looking at the screen again. “Look at this,” he said, holding it toward me.

I leaned in, but I didn’t understand the layout of the screen.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“The texts,” he said, “they’re gone.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s something.” Now that I’d figured out what I was looking for, I could see that the
UNSENT/PENDING
folder read “0/0.” I pulled back a little. “That’s probably a good sign.”

“Yeah!” he said.

“Unless they just timed out.”

He frowned. They did that sometimes. We turned back to the window, but there was no reason to smile there, either. The headlights had stopped moving. Everyone started speculating out loud about what sort of vehicle they were attached to and why it had stopped. The answer to the second question was pretty obvious, but we were willing to consider any and all alternatives.

Every now and then the lights would blink out, but as quickly as my brain could process the loss, the snowflakes that were lining up to block my view would shift and open, and the lights would be visible again. And then, briefly, there was a flash of red light. A few of us saw it, including Gossell.

“Was that a siren or, what do they call them, a flasher? Like for the police?” said Krista.

“I think those are blue,” said Jason.

“Well, a fire truck, then.”

“That’s no fire truck,” I said. It wasn’t that big.

“It could be something,” said Gossell. “Even a volunteer fireman might have a two-way radio, something we could use.”

Use for what? I thought. Who do you call on a two-way radio? The police, the fire department, people like that: emergency people, rescue people. That’s when I understood what Gossell was thinking, just how bad he thought this was. It was jarring, like running blind into a moving screen on the basketball court.

“I’m going out there,” he said.

It seemed like a bad idea, just way too dangerous. It probably wasn’t more than ten degrees out there. You could feel the cold right through the safety glass. That stuff was thick and insulated, but the cold still nipped out at me every time I pressed my face, or even a fingertip, to the glass. So yeah, ten degrees tops, and dark, with snow falling heavily and drifting into small mountains on the ground.

Going out into all that seemed like a lot of risk for a pretty shaky reward. He was taking one for the team, I’ll give him that.
I felt a little flicker of gratitude, but mostly I just had a bad feeling about it.

He walked back down the hall and picked up his coat. It was a big gray parka, a lot like Holloway’s. I wondered if they issued them to all the teachers at the start of winter, like gym equipment, or if both men had just reached the point where they no longer cared what their jackets looked like and had just gone for the warmest thing they could find. I knew they had Big ‘n’ Tall stores in the city, so maybe they had Cold ‘n’ Old ones too.

He put his hood up and then zipped the jacket all the way until he was peering out through a little tunnel of fake fur. He stomped into his big boots and buckled them up tight. His dress shoes were probably tucked away in the closet of his room, along with the old maps and broken globes and class projects from, like, 1990.

We followed him like a line of ducklings as he headed down the hall. He grabbed the handle of the double door on the right and rammed his shoulder into its metal frame. It barely budged. He pulled back, creating a little space, and rammed his shoulder in again. It was moving now, and he began kicking the bottom of the frame in between his little bull rushes. He was swearing under his breath the whole time, but he was making progress.