Trapped (5 page)

The door opened onto a covered concrete patio, which was the only reason the door could be opened at all. But the snow had blown across the concrete, where kids would stand waiting for the late buses in the nice weather. It had started to drift against the wall where they’d lean and, if they were feeling brave, smoke. So the snow was maybe a foot deep against the
door. Beyond that, at the edge of the concrete, there was a four-foot wall of white. It glowed dimly in the light streaming through the glass double doors.

One more kick and the door opened wide enough for him to slide through. Gossell paused and, blink-and-you-missed-it, crossed himself: spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch. Then he shouldered his way through. The wind slammed the door shut behind him, spraying a little fan of snow across the hallway. Pete, Jason, Julie, Krista, and I stood by the doors as Gossell made his way across the concrete.

We watched as he clambered up the wall of snow. He was kind of nimble for an old guy. Like I said, he was an assistant football coach, so I’m sure he’d been a player back in the day. He reached the top and took a step forward. He took another and sank down up to his waist. I thought he might turn around, but he kept pushing forward into the dark and the snow. He took a few more forced steps, his feet moving unseen under the snow and his upper body leaning forward into it, and then we lost sight of him.

“You really think it was a flasher or something like that?” said Krista as we returned to our spots against the wall. I think she was talking to Pete, but he was heading off toward the men’s room at the end of the hall, so I took the opportunity to answer.

“I guess it could be,” I said.

“But why would it go off and on like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and that was the end of my latest attempt at conversation with Krista. It was quiet for a few
seconds. Some of us took a seat and the others kept standing. My jacket was still warm from the hours I’d already spent sitting on it.

“Can you see him out there?” said Julie.

“I think I can,” said Jason, his nose pressed against the cold glass. “Over there, sort of in the middle of the lawn. See how there’s movement?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

“Maybe they just, like, brushed it with their hand,” said Jason.

“Brushed what?” said Julie.

“The button,” he said, “for the flasher. Like they were reaching for the radio and hit the button for the siren-flasher thing.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I could see that,” said Julie.

Les let out some air, blowing a dismissive little
tiisss
through his teeth. When he spoke, you could hear the smugness in his voice.

“That’s no flasher, no volunteer firefighter,” he said. “That red light? It was a flare. For the road, only there is no road right now. That guy up there is as screwed as we are. More.”

It was quiet for a few seconds as we turned the idea over in our heads. Then Pete made a
kapow
sound and a hand gesture like he was shooting himself in the head. He knew Les was right. We all did.

“Why didn’t you say something before Gossell went out there?” said Julie.

“Why should I?” said Les. “It’s his life.”

It was, and that was the problem. I don’t think it was really Les’s fault. I mean, I don’t think any of us thought that people would actually die in this storm. We’d been through lots of them, and it’d never happened to anyone we knew. We’d have to change that thinking, though. When we did, we’d all start to think the same thing: that maybe Les had killed a man.

For now, we still had hope. We went back to staring into the darkness.

“Can anyone see him?” asked Krista.

No one could. The headlights burned for a little while longer, and then they didn’t. It had been a while since we’d first seen them, and it was tough to say whether they’d faded out over time or had gone out suddenly. It had seemed like they were getting stronger for a while, but that was probably just because it was getting darker around them. They were gone now, in any case. We thought that was as bad as it could get.

And then the power went out.

A half dozen swears crackled down the line where we were sitting, F-bombs going off like fireworks. And then, one by one, cell phone screens popped on and hovered in the darkness like oversized electronic fireflies.

“Check it out,” said Pete as he activated his flashlight app. Faces faded in and out of view as he swung his phone in a wide semicircle.

“Ow,” said Julie after looking directly at it. “Jerk!”

He swung the beam back toward her and they exchanged small, nervous laughs. When he turned it off, the hallway was dark again.

The lines that brought power to the school from a substation a mile away had come down. They were lying somewhere in the snow, hissing and kicking or just dead and buried. The power
lines around here were thick and even ran underground in places. I guess the power company figured that was cheaper than replacing them after every blizzard or ice storm. Of course, not all blizzards were created equal, and I wasn’t surprised that this one had brought them down. I was surprised it had taken this long. I think we’d all been waiting for it.

“What just happened?” asked Julie, though it was pretty obvious. She wasn’t dumb; she was just talking so she wouldn’t feel alone in the dark. Most of the others joined in, but not me, not right away. I needed to think about this, figure out what it meant.

This was real isolation now. They wouldn’t even be able to see the school from the road, to see the lights on and realize that people were stuck here. Gossell would know where we were, but a man could get turned around easily in the dark in a storm like this.

And this was absolute darkness: walk-into-walls, trip-over-furniture darkness. I couldn’t even see the big white face of the clock above the drinking fountain. The little electric hum it had been giving off this whole time had gone quiet. Its hands had stopped short in their slow crawl toward seven o’clock. As far as it was concerned, time was standing still.

It was winter now, and at this hour it would’ve been dark anyway. And on a totally overcast day like this, there wouldn’t be any last rays leaking over the horizon. I’ve heard that in the big cities it never really gets totally dark like this, because of all the headlights and streetlights and all of that, but we weren’t
in a city. We weren’t even near one. Our power was out and we couldn’t even keep one set of headlights lit and above snow level. We were in the boondocks, the sticks, the butt-end of nowhere.

It seemed like I should still be able to see the snow. I mean it was white, as white as a thing could be. But there was no light for it to catch now, and it was invisible beyond the black sheets of safety glass. It was still falling, though. You could just sort of sense it out there.

You know how sometimes you can tell that it’s gray and rainy outside, even if you’re not near a window? You know how you can just feel it somehow and it sucks the energy right out of you? That’s what this was like, except it wasn’t rain and it wasn’t draining as much as suffocating. It was like being slowly buried by something quiet and heavy. It was like a cold hand reaching out for your neck in the dark.

All I could see was the double image of the cell phone screens, floating along the wall and then reflected back from the hallway glass, as if our phantom doubles were sitting and facing us three feet away. They flicked on and off, but after a while, they were mostly off.

Then there was nothing left to do but sit there on my coat, thinking dark thoughts. I guess I was sort of wallowing in it, but then I snapped back into the conversation going on around me, because Krista said something that I hadn’t thought of.

“What about the heat?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Will it stay on?” she said.

“I think, like, the flame or whatever keeps burning,” I said. “Like on a gas stove. I mean, it’s probably lit electronically. It’s not like there’s some dude down there with a match. But once it’s going I think it keeps going.”

“But it doesn’t keep going, like, constantly, does it?” said Krista.

“Yeah,” said Julie. “Doesn’t it go on and off?”

I thought about what I knew about furnaces, or maybe it was a boiler? Not much. It seemed like the sort of thing people used to know about. I thought about the furnace at my house, how on cold days you could hear it click on. How it would sort of hum to life and a few seconds later the warm air would start rising up through the vents and you might put your hand there, feel the warmth, and be glad to be inside. And then I thought about how it would click off a little while later, once the thermostat said its work was done.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“Well, will it start up again the next time it shuts off? With the power out, I mean?”

“Is it on now?” someone else said. I wasn’t sure who.

“Is anyone near, like, a vent or anything?”

No one was.

“I don’t think it will,” said Jason. His dad worked on houses for a living.

“You don’t think what?” said Krista. “That it will start back up again?”

She was talking to Jason now. Even in the dark, you could
sort of hear which way she was facing. I don’t think she knew about his dad, but she probably heard the confidence in his voice. It was the sound of someone speaking from experience rather than someone just thinking out loud. And I’m sure that Jason did know more about it than me. He was my friend, but it still sort of stung to be cut out of the conversation like that. I pictured Krista’s face, her eyes open wide in the dark, her soft body leaning against the hard wall.

“Yeah,” said Jason. “I think it’s pretty much done without power. I mean, it’s not electric heat, but it needs electricity for other stuff.”

I couldn’t tell if Jason didn’t know what that other stuff was — if he was just thinking out loud like me — or if he did, but didn’t want to sit there explaining it to the rest of us. I tried to think what he might be talking about: switches, fans, pumps? I had no idea. It made me think of some big, old factory somewhere, like the kind of place where kids lost their fingers during the Industrial Revolution.

“Well, OK,” said Pete. “So it won’t relight. Can’t we keep it from, like, clicking off in the first place?”

“You mean, like, the thermostat?” said Julie. “Like at home?”

“Yeah,” said Pete. “Couldn’t we, like, open a window next to it? The heat would keep going then, right? Does anyone know where a thermostat is?”

No one did. At least no one said so. I realized that we hadn’t heard anything from Les for a while. I wasn’t even sure he was still over there. I hadn’t heard Elijah either, but I wasn’t too concerned about where he was.

“Wait,” said Pete. He said that a lot. “We can use my flashlight app to find one.”

It seemed like a good idea to me. Find a thermostat and keep it cold. Of course, it wasn’t.

“Won’t matter,” said Jason.

“Why not?” three of us said at once.

“Hello?” he said. It felt a little unnecessary.

“Yeah?” we said.

“The thermostats are electric.”

“What does that mean?” said Julie, and then she got it. “Oh.”

No power, no heat.

“Well,” said Pete. “We are really and truly screwed.”

I tried to think of something to add, but I couldn’t even do that. I felt angry and helpless and stranded, all at the same time. And then I heard a laugh. It was soft and sort of under-the-breath, but someone was definitely laughing. At first, I thought it was Les and I was going to tell him to shut his face. He can’t punch what he can’t see, right? But then I realized it was Elijah, and that just creeped me out.

A few seconds later, Les joined in.

How long could we be stuck here? That was the question now. How long, like, conceivably? We had no power, no lights, and the heat was already leaking out of the building through a thousand cracks and seams and windows.

“It’s only for one night,” said Julie.

“Tops,” said Pete. “The snow could’ve stopped already.”

“We’ve got jackets,” said Krista.

The talk continued along those lines. The tone was: It’s not so bad. The tone was: This too shall pass. The tone was: Forced. It was like listening to your mom trying to cheer you up when you knew she didn’t really believe what she was saying.

Still, we were going through the motions. If you just started listening now, you might think that we were talking about an overnight camping trip, and a coed one at that. The more we
talked, the more we sort of talked ourselves into it. It wasn’t so bad.

I mean, there was obviously not going to be school tomorrow, so it’s not like people would be piling off the buses and tripping over our cold, sleeping bodies. We’d just wait for the storm to taper off, go home, warm up, and spend the day on our couches with blankets and cups of hot chocolate. It’d be a great story: “The Night I Had to Sleep on the Floor of My High School.”

“Where do they keep the gym mats?” said Krista, and she said it sort of suggestively, like she was suddenly in the middle of a game of Truth or Dare. I felt my pulse rev a little. I mean, it was dark in here; who knew what might happen?

You know what it’s like, right? When your hormones are driving the bus and your brain’s sitting somewhere in the back, near the wheel hump? It’s not a rational state, which is why I was probably the only one who wasn’t completely thrilled when the emergency lights clicked on above us.

It had been maybe half an hour since the power had gone out. I guess the emergency lights were on a delay, so they wouldn’t come on every time the power dipped or a fuse was blown. I was sort of surprised the school had them at all. Wasn’t this place supposed to be empty at night?

The emergency light above us looked sort of like a big legless crab stuck on the wall. It was basically a tan square, not much bigger than a lunch box. Two bulbs stuck out of the top on little metal stalks. The bulbs were curved like little headlights and pointed out in opposite directions at forty-five-degree angles.

That’s what I meant by the crab thing — it looked like a cockeyed creature looking both ways at once, making sure the coast was clear. My mind kept going that way, constructing a little story: Then it saw seven humans below it and just froze, its back against the wall. I shook it off and refocused before I did something truly lame, like give the thing a pet name.

The light coming out was surprisingly strong. I mean, it’s sort of amazing the thing worked at all. It must’ve been a long time since it’d been on. It’s like how people leave flashlights in drawers and forget about them. Then when they finally need them, the batteries are dead. Instead, crisp white light cut through the darkness of the hallway, fading as it went.

“And there was light!” said Jason, and small laughs filled the hallway. Things were funny again. The school was still functioning, and everything was going to be fine. Or maybe that’s too much to read into two beams of light, but the mood had definitely changed. It was less forced, more real. We could see each other again. We could see the outlines of our coats and backpacks, like dark puddles on the floor.

There were a few more jokes. Julie told Pete he looked a lot better with the lights out, and they both laughed. Those two sort of knew each other. And then our new optimism led us to the next topic: What else could we do to improve our situation for the night?

“We should go to our lockers,” said Krista.

I was vaguely aware that there were emergency lights scattered throughout the school. I tried to remember where I’d seen them, like if there was one near my locker, but they were the
sort of things you didn’t pay attention to most of the time. I stood up and looked through the glass of the hallway. It was a bad angle, but I pressed my forehead to the cold glass, and I could see some windows along the side of the main building, lit now and just visible through the falling snow.

“I’d like to get my sweatshirt,” said Julie.

That kind of brought the topic back to the heat. Was it colder already? It felt like maybe it was. After that, going back to the lockers was an easy sell.

And you might be thinking, Who needs to sell it? If anyone wanted to go back to their lockers, they could just go, right? With Gossell still somewhere out in the storm, there were no teachers to tell us what to do. And all that’s true, but for whatever reason it sort of seemed important that we all agreed on these first moves we made. I don’t know if it was because of the situation — emergency lights made it an official emergency, right? — or because we were used to being told what to do here or because we were just scared. All I know is that we took our sweet time getting going.

Even once we started making our way toward the lockers, we basically stuck together. I mean, we strung the line out enough so that it wasn’t obvious, but no one, not even Les, was ever really out of earshot. It helped that we were all sophomores and freshmen, so our lockers were in the same area. I guess it made sense that we’d be the last ones here. Juniors and seniors wouldn’t get stuck waiting for rides. They had their own cars, or friends who did.

Anyway, underclassmen had their lockers in the same few hallways. The upperclassmen called it Losers’ Alley. That stung at first, but you learned pretty quickly that it was better to hang out among your own than to drift into the juniors’ and seniors’ territory.

“We’ll meet back here, OK?” said Krista as the girls headed down the left hallway where the freshmen had their lockers. Of course we would — they were the only girls here. In the half-lit hallway, her voice hit me like a splash of warm water.

We all went to our lockers to forage. The emergency lights were pretty far apart. There was basically one per hallway. On the trip over, things had come in and out of view as we walked. Things would get brighter as we approached the lights in the center of the straightaways, and more and more shadowy as we approached the corners. Pete was up front the whole time, blazing away with his flashlight app. It really was pretty bright, but it seemed puny in the dark patches. It wasn’t a real flashlight; it was like a toy. I was still kind of jealous, though.

I was lucky once we reached the lockers: Mine was just a few feet to the side of the emergency light. Not that I really needed it to open the lock. How many times had I spun my combination this year? It was like a reflex by now. Still, the light helped me identify my locker number and rummage through the contents. My locker was a mess. I thought about asking Pete if I could borrow his phone, and then I thought about asking Jason, because he was closer, and just the normal glow from the screen would be enough.

I didn’t. To be totally honest, I was a little embarrassed about not having my own phone with me. I thought about it sitting there on my dresser, where I’d left it. I felt like a butt-kissing, capital-L Loser.

In the end, I just pushed my hand around in my dark locker like I was noodling for catfish. I really should clean this thing out, I thought, as I stuck my fingers into a pile of old papers and came back out with a snack-pack of Oreos. When were these from, September? I stuck them deep in my pocket, then looked around to see if anyone had heard the crinkle of the foil wrapper.

Stale or not, this was the only food I had. Really, I had half a mind to scarf the Oreos on the way back, maybe in the shadowy stretches in between lights. But it occurred to me that I might need them for trading. I’m sure some of the others were turning up food too.

I looked over at Les, almost directly across the hall from me, and saw that he had two lockers open. He must’ve spied on his neighbor and memorized his combination. Or maybe he’d just beaten it out of him. He’d already gone through his own locker and had something folded over his right arm. Now he was pushing through the contents of the other locker, looking for treasure.

I turned back to mine and made another quick pass through it. Nothing. I slammed it shut.

We made our way back to the hallway outside the gym. We were like a band of gypsies, with random scavenged items in our arms: sweatshirts, spare shirts, gym clothes. Anything soft and
potentially warm was carried off. Pete had a ski hat with a little pom-pom on top sticking out of the crook of his arm like a limp rabbit.

I remember the morning he’d shown up wearing that thing. We’d ragged him mercilessly about it, and he’d stuck it all the way in the back of his locker. If this storm hadn’t happened, he probably never would’ve taken it out again. Now he was carrying it out in the open, like a prize.

There was no food visible among the prizes, though. Everyone must’ve made the same decision I had and hidden it. Any sharing or trading would be done later, among friends. I guess this was when we started keeping secrets. Everyone was scanning everyone else’s haul, eyes drifting to the side as we passed under a light. Krista had already put her Tattawa Soccer sweatshirt on over her sweater and put her jacket back on over both. It wasn’t really cold enough to need that many layers yet. She wasn’t bundled up against the cold. She was bundled up against the possibility of cold.

We talked off and on for hours back in the little hallway that had become our base for the night. We talked about a lot of things: Gossell (“He’s probably in one of those houses up on the slope, in front of a nice wood fire,” we agreed), the buses we would’ve been on (“Half of them wouldn’t make the hills”), the weathermen on TV (“Hilton Kalish, wrong again … I can’t believe they pay that guy”).

We watched the emergency light for signs that it was dimming and tested the air for any taste of real cold creeping in. We took short sips from the drinking fountain because there were
no emergency lights in the bathrooms. I borrowed Jason’s phone for my first trip to the men’s room, but the faint blue light wasn’t much use. I was a little off target, and I wasn’t the only one. By the time I zipped up — with the phone faceup on the top of the urinal, lighting the metal handle — I knew that place was going to be a slippery, stinking mess before too long.

Back in the hallway, we made nests of whatever we had. The lights held for now. I think we all knew that they ran on batteries and that this little reprieve wouldn’t last long. But not one of us thought that we’d be here another night. The idea seemed totally crazy.

Every once in a while, someone would check a cell phone. The screen popped on in the dim light, and everyone would look over, but there was never anything to report: no service, no messages, no nothing. We just thought the lines were still jammed or the service was still muffled by all the snow.

Then one of us would walk over to the window and look out at the road. Nothing to report there either, just more snow. You could feel the eyes on you when you got up to look out. At first we said things like, “Still coming down,” but after a while, we just said, “Yep.” And sometimes a strong gust of wind would rattle the glass, the storm letting us know it was still out there without anyone having to look.

It was pretty clear by then that no one was coming for us that night. Eventually, there was nothing left to do but close our eyes and drift off. It was a bummer, and the sort of fun, sleepover mood from before had been pretty well washed away. We were
resigned to a full night of hard floors and dark bathrooms, but we all went to sleep thinking that tomorrow would be the day after. We thought it would be the day the plows cleaned up the big storm, life went back to normal, and we went home. We weren’t even close.