Trapped (7 page)

The snow gophers never showed, so a few hours later, we made our way toward the cafeteria. Jason was carrying a hammer and some sort of metal bolt, and Les still had his hat on his hand, like a boxing glove, from when he’d punched it through the window.

Those two had been down to the shop, and Pete had walked through the halls to get to the second-floor bathroom, but the rest of us weren’t prepared for how dark the school was away from the glass hallway. It was daytime now, and it seemed like it should be light. But away from the glass hallway the windows were mostly covered, literally buried in snow, and the emergency lights were out now. In most places it was darker now than it had been the night before.

It was a little better in the hallway leading to the cafeteria. Big windows looking out on the courtyard let in some light at the top. It also seemed a little warmer.

“I think we’re over the furnace,” said Jason.

Pete went over to a vent and put his hand to it. “Yeah,” he said. “Something.”

We crowded around like it was an exhibit at a zoo: the North American speckled heating vent. A faint current of lukewarm air was lazily drifting out. It wasn’t much, but when you put your hand up to it and held it there, you could definitely feel it. I put both hands up and then pressed my palms against my face. It felt good.

“Like the last gasp of a dying animal,” said Jason. And right then I realized why I’d been such a jerk to him: He had leapfrogged me. Definitely. Before yesterday, I’d been a step or two ahead of him. More popular, smarter, better athlete. But now, in this shut-down school, he’d taken the lead. All the things that people sort of held against him were advantages now.

His dad worked some construction and was really maybe a step or two above a handyman, but he’d also taught Jason more about buildings than any of us would ever know. And Jason’s fatigue pants and sniper rifle T-shirt and that little whiff of violence hanging around him might have seemed a little ridiculous with late bells and assistant principals around. But now, lights out and on our own, it didn’t seem ridiculous at all.

And what was I, a good basketball player? A streaky shooter with decent range? A B+ student, more or less? Now, that seemed ridiculous. So all of this was occurring to me right then, and I guess I was sort of staring at him. He saw me, shrugged his shoulders, and put a look on his face, like, “What? Stop being such a freak.”

I let out a little laugh, because I really was being a freak. He smiled and shook his head, and I knew that none of that stuff—about leapfrogging and B+ grades — had exactly occurred to him.
And I knew Jason, so I knew that even if it had, he was still my friend.

Les was already kneeling down in front of the big double doors that led into the caf. “Here it is,” he said.

He had his finger on a little circle on the bottom corner of the right-hand door. From the way it was catching the dim light, you could see it was unpainted metal. He put his finger on the center and made a little turning motion, showing where the key would go.

“Gimme the stuff,” he said, and you could see it caught Jason a little off guard. He made this gesture, pulling the hammer and bolt in closer to his body, like, “Mine.”

Les stood up, a good two inches taller than Jason. They didn’t look like friends anymore. Jason did some little calculation in his head and handed over the tools. I made eye contact with Jason and he gave me a slight shrug like, “Why not?” I’d been thinking the same thing. Let Les do all the breaking: the shop window, the cafeteria door. Then we can sell him out if we get in trouble for it.

Les was kneeling down and hunched forward on the floor again, and we shifted around so that we could see what he was doing. He put the tip of the metal bolt up against the cylinder of the lock with his left hand, turned his body to allow his right hand some room, and then swung the hammer in a little underhand arc.

BANG!

The tip of the bolt pushed the cylinder maybe a quarter of an inch in.

BANG!

Half an inch.

One more swing: The bolt went all the way in, the cylinder disappeared, and Les slammed his hand between the hammer and the door.

BANG-POP! “OW!”

He stood up, shaking his hand. I truly believe that if anyone had laughed at him right then, he would have driven that bolt straight into their skull. We just stood there as he swore. I looked over at Krista, and she was literally holding her breath.

Once Les had gotten it out of his system, he handed the tools back to Jason. He did it in sort of a here-take-this way that I didn’t care for much. Then he turned back around and pushed on the double doors. They swung open easily.

Normally, we went through those doors in a long, slow line, but today we all pushed our way in at once. We were hungry, and the prospect of food was exciting, like Christmas morning and Thanksgiving dinner combined.

And there was something else too, another little thrill. I remember thinking, Well, that’s that. We’ve done it now. We’ve smashed something, broken in. We might say that Les did it, but it was all of us. He was our device, just like the hammer was his. I remember thinking, We can do anything here now. This place is ours, until someone comes to take it back, someone old and angry.

I’ll say this about the folks who run the cafeteria: Old blue-haired ladies they may be, but they know how to buy in bulk.

It gave me a weird thrill to hop over the counter. How many days had I spent slowly sliding my tray along that railing, waiting for the globs of pseudo-food and then sliding it all up to the register to pay? Jason, Les, and I hopped over the little flat surface next to that register, between the end of the railing and the wall. We were like the people hopping subway turnstiles in the movies.

Pete reached down and flicked a latch; then he lifted the counter up and back. “Uh, guys?” he said. “It opens.” He walked through, followed by the girls and Elijah. Pete was missing the point: I’d flip the thing back down, just so I could hop it again on the way out.

Once we were back in the kitchen area, we started knocking around in the cupboards. The light was a little better back here. The big windows at the back were tall enough that their tops still weren’t buried. In fact, everything in here was sort of larger than life. It was like a giant’s kitchen. The windows were huge and the cupboards were big metal squares located under countertops
that ran almost the entire length of the walls. They had those long metal handles, the ones where you pull on the narrow end and the doors pop open, almost like they’re vacuum-sealed.

I was trying to think where I’d seen handles like that before, and then I remembered. Those were the kind of handles they had in the coroner’s office on crime shows. You know, for the little compartments where they kept the bodies. In fact, the metal doors under the counter looked like those metal doors. I guess they served the same purpose: keeping things preserved.

“It’s people!” I said, popping one open.

The others laughed, and then they laughed louder when I pulled out an enormous can of peaches. It was probably like two gallons of canned peaches and it was really heavy. “The brain!” I said as I thunked it down on the counter.

“What is that?” said Jason.

“'Peaches in Syrup,'” I said, reading the label.

“Oh, man, I love those!” said Jason.

I laughed, but it turned out he wasn’t joking. He really liked canned peaches.

It took us forever to find a can opener, and when we did, we felt like morons. It had been right in front of us the whole time. It wasn’t like the little openers we had at home; it was this big crank-wheel thing bolted to the corner of the countertop. You put the can under it and then swung the handle around. We’d just figured this out, and Jason was maneuvering the can into position when Julie found the refrigerator. It was a walk-in, as big as a small room.

“Check it out,” she said, and we all swung around to look.

She popped the big handle and pulled open the heavy door. It was pitch-dark in there, but we all knew what it was. Les walked in and came back out with a white plastic bucket. He put it down and popped the top: peanut butter.

“Sweet,” he said, and we all gathered round and looked at it like we’d never seen the stuff before. He stuck his thumb in, scooped some out, and licked it off.

“Gross!” said Julie.

“Just don’t stick it back in there,” I said. I said it with a little laugh, because 1) it was an obvious that’s-what-she-said line and 2) if Les thought it was an order, he’d cram his whole hand in there. As it was, he just glanced over at me and went back into the dark mouth of the refrigerator. We heard him knocking around back in there, and when he came back out, he had two long plastic sleeves under his arm. It seemed weird to keep sliced bread in the refrigerator, but I guess when you buy it by the ton, it keeps longer that way.

Pete took his turn in the fridge next. It took him forever to find the jelly, even with his “flashlight,” but eventually he returned with a huge jar of it. The label was white with big black text that read
ARTIFICIAL GRAPE JELLY PRODUCT
. It looked like something from the military, totally generic.

“Should we close the door?” said Julie.

“What’s the hurry?” said Les.

“You know, so stuff doesn’t go bad.”

“It’s not exactly a heat wave out here,” said Pete.

I pushed out some breath but didn’t see it. “It’s warmer than in there,” I said.

“Yeah, OK,” said Pete. “But go bad? Just how long do you think we’re going to be here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s still coming down. Could be another day.”

Understatement of the decade.

Pete shrugged, accepting it as a possibility, but said, “Nothing goes bad in a day.”

“Uh, milk,” I said, lamely. Even as my mouth was moving I wondered how I’d become this lame nanny-man in less than twenty-four hours. I swear I used to be cooler. Earlier, I’d been worried about what would happen when the teachers came back. Now I was worrying about what would happen when they didn’t. The only difference I could see between then and now was that the snow still hadn’t stopped falling.

“Milk,” echoed Jason, letting me off the hook.

I guess I’d always been kind of a worrier, and now I had something real to worry about, something more than whether or not I was going to get a varsity letter.

“Yeah, milk,” said Les, turning and going back into the walk-in.

And so that was our first meal in the school: peanut butter and generic jelly sandwiches, with little half pints of milk, regular or chocolate, and syrupy peaches straight from the can. We ate in the hallway by the semiworking heating vent.

It didn’t make much sense to head back to the glass hallway after our so-called lunch. None of us were in the mood to watch as we got slowly buried, and that made the entire dim-to-dark first floor a severe downer.

“You’ve got to check out the second floor,” said Pete, an expert on the topic since taking a dump up there.

“Do you think the air has cleared?” I joked, but no one else got it.

“It’s light,” he said, “even in the bathrooms.”

“Warm?” asked Julie.

“Hot air rises,” said Elijah. It was sort of surprising to hear from him, and it was like, if even Elijah wants to go, we might as well.

And it was the right move, all around. We could see that it was brighter up there before we even got to the top of the stairwell. It seemed to be a little warmer too. Krista had been completely bundled up, but she unzipped her jacket at the top of the stairs. Part of that might have been from climbing the steps, though. We’d spent the last twenty hours or so mostly just sitting around.

I was fine, though: Coach Kielty made us run stairs all the time, and if it wasn’t stairs, it was laps. The joke was that he was a track coach trapped in a basketball coach’s body. It was the kind of line that was funny on the first lap and not funny at all by the tenth.

We were in the second-floor hallway now. With her jacket open, the light coming through the classroom doors fell on the front of Krista’s sweatshirt, and I could see the curve of her chest underneath. She looked over, and I looked away a little too quick but not quick enough, if that makes any sense.

We could see that it was even brighter in the classrooms, and we were all pretty sick of sitting on the floor in hallways.

“Which one?” said Les, who had reclaimed the tools.

“Gullickson’s?” said Krista. “English?”

It was as good as any, a big room right in the center.

“The windows face right out,” she said.

What she meant was that they faced out on to the parking lot and the road beyond it, so we would be able to see anyone coming. That was good enough for us. Les did his thing, blowing out the cylinder on the lock with one good whack. He was getting better at that.

We all filed in. It was weird, sort of like class was about to start. People picked out desks, dropped their stuff off to the side, and pulled out chairs. Without even thinking about it, Jason, Pete, and I all went straight for the desks we’d sat in during Mr. Gullickson’s English class the year before. We were a little cluster of three smack in the middle of the room.

Krista and Julie sat up front. Les sat in the back. Elijah hovered, considering his options. It was like a conditioned response. We’d been trained: We entered a classroom, and we claimed our seats. Actually, we were double trained, because the other thing people did was check their cell phones. It seemed like they might work: We were higher up now and clear of the drifted snow.

No one got anything, of course, and Pete was having another problem now. “These batteries suck,” he said.

Jason looked over at Pete’s screen and nodded. “What do you expect? You’ve been using it as a flashlight the whole time.”

“Not the whole time,” Pete said, breaking into a quick smile. “I was playing Alien Apokillypse for some of it.”

“Moron,” said Jason, smiling and shaking his head. He pronounced it with a thick hick accent, like
MOE-RONNNN.
It was just this dumb inside joke between the three of us. We got it from a movie.

Pete checked his battery level one last time, made a weird little smirk, then put his phone away.

Then we all bounced up again and went over to the windows. Pete had told us that morning: “You’ve got to check out the second floor.” He meant I had to check out the view, but I’d ignored him. I figured I knew what snow looked like, but I was wrong.

It wasn’t a landscape, it was a snowscape. It just seemed wrong. It looked like the ice planet in
The Empire Strikes Back,
the one where they had that big battle at the beginning. It looked like special effects outside, like a model of the world built to scale and then half covered with spray-on snow. Trees were
buried up to the tops of their trunks. Only their branches were visible, looking like snow-covered shrubs off in the distance. A two-story house up on the mountainside looked like a one-story house with an upstairs window for a front door.

That was the closest house, and it wasn’t all that close. There was a little string of them up there, running along the road. They were maybe a half mile away, but it might as well have been fifty miles. They were up there and we were down here, with a million tons of snow between us.

Off to my left, a little side building was already almost buried. It was only one story, mostly for vo-ag. There’d be no light in that building: no light, no heat, and no reason to be there.

I faced forward again and let my eyes scan the ground in front of the school. The parking lots, the monument, the so-called “Great Lawn,” it was all just flat, featureless snow. Anything could be under there, anything or nothing. And out in front of that, the road was a long, barely visible depression in the snow, like a huge wormhole had collapsed under the surface. You could almost see it filling in as you watched it. Soon, even that would be gone, and there would be no way to tell that there had ever been a road there.

That thought bothered me, the idea that you wouldn’t be able to tell where the road was. I don’t know why, I guess it was just the most obvious sign that we were cut off, isolated, and maybe forgotten.

“Look at that,” said Pete. “You see it?”

“What?”

“The smoke.”

And sure enough, there was a plume of dark gray smoke snaking up from the chimney of the nearest house, the one with the window for a front door.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Lucky bums.”

There were no lights on, but at least they had a reliable source of heat.

“Think Gossell’s in there, throwing another log on the fire?” said Pete.

I pictured him in there, his big coat drying over the back of a chair. “Yeah,” I said. “Old dog.”

The snow was still falling steadily. As I tried to look through the shifting flakes to see if I could see maybe some candles or something in the windows up there, I realized there was something else in the air. Little sounds came through the window now, a thousand tiny clicks and ticks. It was too small to be hail. It was freezing rain mixed in with the snow.

We sat back down, but I could still hear the tiny drops of ice bouncing off the glass when no one was talking. Freezing rain meant it was warmer, but it was sort of a good news/bad news situation. It would leave a nasty crust of ice and heavy snow eight feet up. Like the crunchy topping on my mom’s mac and cheese, I thought.

As soon as the thought entered my mind, I shook it out again. I needed to stop thinking about things like that. Home kept creeping into my head now. I was thinking about my house and worried about my mom, but there was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing I could do about it, and no way to get there, so I tried to put it out of my mind.

“The bathrooms are heaven,” said Julie, returning to her seat. “A little cold on the ol’ butt-cheeks, though!”

I laughed along with the others. It felt good to laugh again.

“Where’s Elijah?” she said, looking around.

“Who cares?” said Pete.

“He’s with Les,” said Krista. “They’re opening another room.”

“Detention?” said Julie. Everyone laughed. Everyone except for Jason, and when I saw he wasn’t, I stopped.

Elijah had considered his seating options in here and chosen none of the above. I didn’t know if Les had come to the same conclusion or if he just wanted to break another door. Either way, this was when we started splitting up.