Trapped (6 page)

The emergency light was out when I woke up. I was lying so that, when I blinked my eyes open for the first time that morning, I was looking right at it. Was it on a timer, or was it out of batteries already, after just one night? That seemed a little unlikely. Wouldn’t the batteries be made to last longer than that? Then again, how old were those batteries?

I looked away from the walls and over toward the windows. It took me a few moments to process what I was seeing. Weak light was streaming in through the top of the glass, running the length of the hallway, maybe eight feet up. At first, my groggy brain thought that must be how the hallway was built, windows at the top, like a basement. Then I remembered that it was a glass hallway, top to bottom. What I was looking at was eight feet of snow, but my brain didn’t want to believe it.

The ceiling was probably ten feet high, so what’s that, two feet of glass not blotted out by snow? The snow looked black,
except near the top, where a little light seeped down to turn it a soft gray. Imagine that: black snow. I knew it wasn’t, that it was something about the dim, uneven light in the hallway.

I sat up and looked at it for a while. It was like how you can’t see out the window into the darkness at night, but anyone out there can see in, if that makes any sense. Anyway, whatever, it was an optical effect: eight feet of black snow topped by a two-foot band of morning light so dim that my eyes didn’t even need to adjust to it. It was bizarre and kind of overwhelming. I felt like I was being buried alive.

I could only see two things in the space above the snow. The first was the dim morning light. I’ve already told you about that. The second was the snow, still falling.

It didn’t look like it was falling as hard as yesterday, so maybe it was tapering off. I was in no mood to get my hopes up, though. I’d gone to sleep sure this would all be over when I woke up, but it had obviously been going gangbusters during the night. I looked at the gap, watched the snow come down, and tried to calculate how long it would be until it was all the way up to the top, until no light would get in. I felt my chest tighten and looked away.

I sat up straighter and got my bearings. It was colder now. I exhaled in a low, steady stream, but I couldn’t see my breath, so it wasn’t that cold. I’d been sleeping for hours in my jacket, hat, and gloves, so parts of me were actually pretty warm. My hands were sweating; I’d never slept with gloves on before. I took them off now and felt the cool air curl into my wet palms. It felt good and distracted me from the tightness in my back and the bruised
feeling in my left hip. I’d been sleeping on my side on the floor and now I shifted my weight to figure out what hurt and what didn’t.

I looked around, rubbing the left side of my face to try to get some of the feeling back. The others looked like they were still sleeping. They were curled up or sprawled out on either side of me. The light was still too dim to see colors well, but I could see their shapes. Jason was on his side, drooling into his hand. Pete was wearing his ridiculous hat and had a little smile on his face, dreaming of someplace other than here. Les was farther down, spread-eagled on his back like he was making a snow angel. His chest was rising and falling, rising and falling. We were lucky: no heavy snorers.

I looked over to my left, where the girls were. They were curled up, facing each other like bookends. My eyes swept over Julie and fell on Krista. She was wearing her sweatshirt and jacket but had taken off her hat and placed it under her head so that it was in between the side of her face and the cold tile floor. Her mouth was open just a little, and I could see her nostrils flare in and out as she breathed. She was curled forward with her knees pulled halfway up so that the line of her back and legs formed the shape of an S. I looked at the line of her
S
and then I looked at the line of her, well, anyway, that’s when I realized Elijah was watching me.

He was watching me watch her. I don’t know if I sensed him looking, the way they say you can feel it if someone’s staring at you, or if I just did the math and realized I hadn’t seen him yet. He was sitting up against the far wall, where the hallway L-ed
down toward the double doors. He didn’t bother to look down when I looked up at him. Why should he? He’d caught me looking, not the other way around.

We sat there looking at each other. It wasn’t a staredown, exactly, at least it didn’t feel like one. Elijah had this thousand-yard stare thing. He might be looking at you, he might be looking through you. It was tough to tell. Neither of us spoke, and then he raised his right hand to his head and made a plucking motion, as if he was picking something out of his hair. He dropped his hand down to the side and made a motion as if he was letting something go.

I didn’t understand at first: There was nothing in his hair and nothing in his hand. Then I raised my right hand to the same spot and, sure enough, the empty Oreos wrapper was stuck to my head. I plucked it off and stuck it in my pocket. The empty foil crinkled as I crushed it down. It wasn’t loud but I guess it was enough. I heard movement behind me. Jason sat up and that caused Pete to turn over onto his other side, still chasing that dream.

I nodded to Jason but he didn’t see me yet. He was staring at the snow wall. The light coming in through the top was stronger now, and it was brighter in the hallway. The wall wasn’t black anymore, it was gray against the glass. I thought back, had it ever really been black?

I turned back toward Elijah, but he was gone. I guess he had wandered down toward the doors. With the snow so deep, I could no longer see around the corner of the glass hallway. But I hadn’t heard him go. My head swam for a second. I wasn’t sure I trusted
my eyes right now. I stood up, just to get the blood flowing, to wake up a little. My knees cracked but it felt good to be up, closer to the light coming in.

“Hey,” whispered Jason.

“Hey,” I whispered, turning toward him.

He looked out at the snow pressed against the glass, literally tons of it. Then he looked back at me and made the same shoot-me-now gesture as Pete had the night before, but he made it with both hands. Then he dropped his thumbs, shooting himself in both temples.

Good morning to you too.

The snow was a dull white against the glass by the time Pete woke up. The girls were next and then Les. Elijah drifted back into the fold, and there we were, just like last night, seven kids on our own, hanging out in a little cluster.

“All dressed up and nowhere to go,” said Jason.

We were still bundled up in the extra clothes we’d worn to sleep. I walked over to my backpack and put my hat in it. It wasn’t that cold yet, maybe fifty-five, and I wanted to have something in reserve. My backpack was against the wall where we’d slept, and now that we were up, we’d all drifted away from that area. I guess we were keeping it separate. It was the “bedroom.” Now we were all standing in the “living room” closer to the main doors. I walked back to the group thinking we’d need a new “house” soon.

People were walking up to the glass and standing next to it. They were trying to measure its height based on their own.
Best guess: a little over eight feet. I didn’t have the heart to tell them it had been a little under eight feet half an hour ago. It wouldn’t be long before there was no space for light to come in at all.

Everyone with a phone tried it. When they got nothing, they stood up against the glass and raised their phones above snow level; Krista had to stand on tiptoes. There was absolutely no signal now. In one sense, it was just more of the same, but in another sense it was kind of shocking. It was morning now. It seemed like things should be reset, rebooted. What we didn’t know, what we had no way of knowing at the time, was that something had happened overnight. Up on the mountain — at the height of the storm, in every sense — the cell tower had been knocked out.

We just sort of stood around for a while. No one was really sure what to do, apart from swear and kick the wall. At first, the morning got brighter as the sun climbed higher behind the heavy clouds, but then it started getting darker again as the gap at the top of the windows continued to fill with snow. I think we all knew we’d need to move to another part of the school. The light seemed weird and unreal, but everything else seemed strangely clear to me. We were on our own, and we were going to be that way for a while. Gossell hadn’t come back. He’d found shelter or, well, he hadn’t. The power was out, the phones were dead, the school was losing heat, and it was still snowing. Apart from that, everything was great.

“I’ve got to take a leak,” Jason was saying.

“Well, hurry up,” said Pete. “I’ve got to drop one.”

The ground rules had been established last night. One person in the bathroom at a time, in order to avoid pissing on each other’s feet or brushing against something you shouldn’t.

“There’s only so fast I can drain it in the dark,” said Jason.

“I’m serious, man,” said Pete. “I’m turtling.”

I laughed, just because that’s such a nasty word. Turtling: when the turd starts poking its head out. And if you’re thinking that’s not the kind of thing Pete would say around Julie, you’re right. The girls were in their own little group. We were clustered together loosely, in groups of ones, twos, and threes. No teachers, no classes, but the cliques remained. We were in little groups drifting inside a larger one. We were like the organs in an amoeba, like the mitochondria, which are the “sites of energy production through ATP.” I was fairly sure we wouldn’t be having that biology test on Friday.

Krista and Julie were down by the drinking fountain. One of them had a toothbrush and toothpaste and they were taking turns with it. I didn’t know a single guy who would bring a toothbrush to school, but chicks were different. I ran my finger along my teeth to see if I still had any Oreo bits in there.

Les was on his own, acting like he didn’t care that none of his delinquent buddies were here. All I could say to that was, Thank the Lord. Les on his own was bad news, but he’d been sort of OK so far. There were three of us, all sophomore guys, all friends. We were a natural group and we outnumbered him, but even then, we gave him his space and laughed at the few lame jokes he made.

Elijah was on his own too, but then he always was. He was hanging out at the far edge of things, like Pluto on those maps of the solar system: just watching, not even really a planet. He was always watching like that, like there was something sort of amusing going on. He was doing it now. Maybe there was something funny about all this, but I didn’t see it.

“Oh, man …” said Pete.

“Just go to the second floor,” I said. There were bathrooms on either end of the second floor in the main building. And since they were on either end of the floor, they had windows. “At least you’ll be able to see to wipe.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Good idea.”

He waddled toward the end of the hall, and I walked over to the drinking fountain to see if I could score some toothpaste. “Proper dental hygiene” was honestly the least of my problems, but it seemed like one I could do something about. Just a dab of their Aquafresh on my fingertip and a few seconds at the fountain …

Then we’d have to move on to the bigger problem, the one we hadn’t talked much about yet. I couldn’t ignore it now, though. I felt hollow, almost a little sick. My body was telling me it was time to eat. My stomach had been growling for as long as I’d been up. We’d missed dinner last night and now we were missing breakfast. We’d need food soon. There were seven of us. We’d need a lot of it.

No need to overthink things. If you’re looking for food in a high school, there’s one place to go.

“It’s got to be locked,” Julie was saying. “This whole place is locked up tight.”

“It’ll be, like, double locked,” said Pete. “Those big double doors and then the door to the kitchen.”

“Dude, we could just hop the counter,” said Jason.

“OK, but we still have to get through those honkin’ metal doors,” said Pete.

“Which ones?”

“You know, where we go in. Where the line is.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“We could break the glass in the little windows.”

Les perked up, looked over.

“I don’t think it works like that, like on TV,” said Jason. “There’s no door handle on those doors, so you can’t punch through the glass and open it. It’s just got those metal plates to push against.”

“Then how do we know it even locks?”

“Dude, have you ever gotten there early? It locks.”

“It locks at the bottom,” said Krista, joining in.

“What?” asked Jason.

“It’s got like a keyhole, one of those round metal disks with a keyhole in the middle, down by the floor.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I was there when they opened up once.”

“We could, like, pick it,” I said, and was sort of sorry I had.

“Pick it? Alright, 007, go ahead,” said Pete, and the others laughed. It was true: I had no idea how to pick a lock.

Julie laughed the loudest, a high-pitched whinny, and that sort of annoyed me. I felt like Pete was just ripping me to impress her. Then again, I’d only started talking to agree with Krista. Being in here with these girls, this could be trouble for us.

“You know what, though,” said Jason. It was like when he knew about the heating, he had the same kind of confidence in his voice. He sounded like a car mechanic about to deliver his assessment: blown radiator, broken timing belt. “I bet we could blow out the cylinder.”

I sort of knew what he meant.

“With what?” I said.

“Something long and metal,” he said. “Like a drill bit and a hammer.”

“Uh, anyone got a drill bit and a hammer?” I said, looking around. It was an easy laugh, and I immediately felt like a jerk for getting it at Jason’s expense. He didn’t care, though. He
wasn’t as thin-skinned as me, or maybe he just wasn’t tripping over himself to impress the girls.

“We could get them,” he said, a little smile forming on his face.

“Yeah,” said Les. “No problem.”

We’d locked the door before leaving shop. We’d turned the little button on the doorknob and swung it closed behind us. But it would be easy to break that window, reach in, and open up. We even had a volunteer. Suddenly, though, I wasn’t so sure. I guess I just got cold feet.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We really want to break in? I mean, we’d be breaking into the shop just so we could break into the cafeteria. That’s like one broken window and one blown-out lock, just so we can go scavenge some truly crappy food. Truly crappy food we won’t even be able to cook.”

That was my big speech, my heroic last stand. It didn’t go over well.

“Yeah,” said Les. “That sounds about right.”

“Dude,” said Jason. “We’ve got to eat.”

“Don’t be such a wuss,” said Les.

I was thinking, Screw you, man, I just don’t want to get kicked off the basketball team, but I didn’t say it. I held it in and assessed the situation. Jason and Les were all for it, Jason because it was his idea and Les because he wanted to break something. But the girls weren’t saying anything. Julie was the swing vote. Krista and Pete would both go along with her, so I sort of turned and started talking in her direction.

“Yeah, we’ve got to eat,” I said. “But we don’t have to eat
right now. I mean, what is it, ten o’clock? It’s not even lunch and we’re going to start busting things up, trying to get at the PB&J?”

“Dude,” said Jason. “I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Yester-frickin'-day. That’s almost twenty-four hours.”

“I’m pretty sure the human body can go twenty-four hours without food,” I said, sounding uncomfortably like a teacher, that same condescending tone. Why was I being such a jerk to Jason this morning?

“Yeah, but why should we? The food is right there. Right there.”

“Let’s just wait a while,” I said. “At least till it really is lunchtime.”

A few people checked the time.

“But what’s the point in waiting if we’re hungry now?” said Jason.

“What if someone comes in the meantime?” said Julie, and I was glad to have her on my side, but I knew she was going to get shredded for that one.

“Ha!” said Jason.

He walked over and banged on the hallway glass; the snow on the other side towered over his head and didn’t even hint at moving.

“Who’s coming, snow gophers? Gonna burrow their way in? Gonna dig us out? We’re on our own for the foreseeable frickin’ future! ”

Les was laughing quietly but hard enough that his face was turning red. “Snow gophers,” he repeated.

Jason and Les, they were like friends all of a sudden. And I knew it was just because they both wanted the same thing, because I was being lame, but they had a few things in common too, aggression, mostly.

“Let’s just wait a few hours,” I said.

“Why?” Jason said. He was on a roll now. He had backup, and it was making him more confident.

“Because,” I said. I needed something to slow him down, so I tried the truth. “Because I don’t want to get kicked off the team, alright? Anything happens in here, it won’t be too hard to figure out who did it. We’ll all get blamed. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying we should at least pretend to hold out a little. We go a day without food, who’s gonna blame us? We start breaking things down first thing in the morning — it’s like we couldn’t wait to do it.”

Jason didn’t say anything for a second.

Sports were pretty big at Tattawa. Most of us played something. Jason actually swung a pretty mean bat. “I just don’t want to get kicked off the team is all,” I said again, and that clinched it.

“Yeah, OK,” he said.

“What time?” said Pete.

“One?” I said.

“Twelve thirty?” said Krista.

“Whatever,” said Jason.

“You’re all a bunch of losers,” said Les.