Authors: Michael Northrop
Trapped
MICHAEL NORTHROP
TRAPPED
SCHOLASTIC PRESS | NEW YORK
For my mom, Sally Ongley Northrop,
who always let us play in the snow
a little too long, which is to say,
just the right amount.
We were the last seven kids waiting around to get picked up from Tattawa Regional High School. It sounds like an everyday thing, but this wasn’t an ordinary day. It was one of those bull’s-eyes in history, one of those points where everything comes together, where, if you were at that place at that time, you were part of something big. It meant that we weren’t going to get picked up, not on that day and maybe not ever.
It was the day the blizzard started, and it didn’t stop for nearly a week. No one had seen anything like it. It was a natural disaster in the way that earthquakes and tidal waves are natural disasters. It wasn’t a storm; it was whatever comes after that.
The power lines came down, and the airports closed. The snow was so strong that it seemed to hit the ground in drifts. The roads shut down completely. The plows ground to a halt and stranded themselves, overmatched up front and the snow behind already too deep for them to back up. Really, if you want one quick indicator of what kind of storm it was: Drivers froze in their snowplows.
People hunkered down in their homes. They were used to doing that in this part of New England, but in the past it had always been for six hours, or twelve, or maybe a day at most. This was different, and it required a different kind of waiting. You can hear the details in a thousand coffee shops, at the back table where the locals hang out.
I’ll just tell you, though. The nor’easter moved up the coast and stalled, but instead of weakening, it got stronger. From what I heard, it just kind of got wedged there, in between a huge cold front coming down and a massive warm front moving up, scooping up moisture over the Atlantic and dropping it as snow back on land. They still show the picture on TV sometimes: a giant white pinwheel spanning three states.
Inside the homes and shelters, people waited and watched and counted and recounted their canned food. They all asked themselves the same question: How much longer can this last? But they asked it day after day, in lamplight and then candlelight
and then in darkness and creeping cold. But that was later on. At the beginning, it was just us, looking out the window and watching the snow fall.
Mr. Gossell stayed with us. He was a gruff guy, a history teacher and assistant football coach. Your school probably has one of those. He sort of carried himself like he was in the army and, I don’t know, maybe he had been. He was the last teacher left, but when he shouldered the door open and headed out to get help, well, that was the last we saw of him. We added his name to the list of people we were waiting for.
We imagined headlights cutting through the snow, there to battle the roads and take us home. The driver would throw open the passenger-side door. “Climb aboard,” he’d shout. “Hop in! We’ll get ya home!”
But we weren’t going anywhere. The headlights didn’t show. Mr. Gossell, Jason’s dad, Krista’s mom, whoever it was we were waiting for, they had nothing to do with us anymore. No one did. It was just the seven of us, the seven of us and the endless snow.
It began falling in the morning. I noticed it at the start of second period, biology, but I guess it could’ve started at the end of first period. Snow isn’t really bound by a class schedule. There wasn’t much to it at first, and it’d been snowing a lot that month, so I didn’t give it much thought. It was those small flakes, like grains of sugar. By third period, the flakes had fattened up and gotten serious, and people were starting to talk about it.
“Think they’ll let us out early?” Pete said as we gathered our stuff and headed for Spanish.
I looked out the window and sized it up. It was really coming down and there was already an inch or two on the sill.
“Could be,” I said. “Is it supposed to be a big one?”
“Supposed to be huge: ‘Winter Storm Warning,'” he said. “Where you been?”
“School, practice, homework, whatever. Excuse me for not watching the frickin’ Weather Channel.”
“Yeah, well, you might want to check it out sometime,” he said. “Then you wouldn’t be wearing Chucks in a nor’easter.”
I looked down at my sneakers. “Well, if it’s as big as all that, they’ll probably let us go.”
“I hope you’re right, Weems,” he said.
My name is Scotty Weems. I prefer Scotty, but most people, even my friends, call me Weems. I guess it’s easy to say, and maybe some people think it’s funny. It doesn’t bother me that much. I’m just glad that Snotty Streams never really caught on as a nickname.
Anyway, I’m an athlete, so I made peace with my last name a long time ago. Since I was a little kid in T-ball, I heard it shouted every time I did something right and every time I screwed up, too. These days it’s on the back of my basketball jersey. I like to think that someday people will be chanting it from the bleachers: “Weems! Weems! Weems!” Chanting fans make any name sound good.
Anyway, that’s me. I’ll be sort of like your guide through all of this. Some of the others might’ve seen things differently, and some of them might’ve told it better, but you don’t get to pick. You don’t because, for one thing, not all of us made it.
It was a Tuesday, and before the sky started falling the main thing on my radar was the start of hoops season. The first game was supposed to be that night, home against Canterbridge. So when Pete said “Think they’ll let us out early?” what I heard was “Think they’ll cancel the game?” So we had different feelings on the subject right from the get-go.
Pete Dubois was one of my best friends, him and Jason Gillispie. The three of us were pretty tight. Pete was just, like, a normal kid. It was sort of his role. It might sound strange, being known for what you aren’t, but Pete wasn’t a jock or a Future Farmer of America or a student council member, and he wasn’t super hip or incredibly smart. He was just a normal sophomore. He listened to standard-issue rock music and wore whatever clothes he’d been given for Christmas or his birthday. You needed some kids like that, otherwise all you had were competing factions of freaks, all dressed in outfits that amounted to uniforms and trying to play their music louder than yours.
So for Pete, early dismissal just meant more time at home, playing video games and eating pizza rolls. For me, it meant not collecting the payoff for all those hours of practice I’d put in over the off-season, all those jump shots I’d taken in the gym
and out in the driveway and at the courts down behind the library. It meant time for the other shooting guards to catch up, to keep their minutes, or to take some of mine.
“They’re going to cancel the game,” I said to Pete. “That’s for sure.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Pete. “Bummer.”
Pete didn’t shoot hoops, not on the team anyway. Neither did Jason. They were the same friends I’d always had, the neighborhood kids I’d ridden bikes with in the cemetery when we were like nine. Our moms sent us there because it was better to ride around where everyone else was dead than out on the road where the traffic would kill you.
I guess it’s kind of weird to still have the same friends as when you were a little kid. It’s not like you’re expected to move on by high school, but you’re definitely allowed. And most jocks run in packs, you know? But I was a sophomore on varsity, so I was kind of an outsider on the team anyway. There were only a few of us, and I wasn’t a star like Kyle or buried deep on the bench like Joey.
So I was an outside shooter and just kind of outside in general. I didn’t need to hang out with my teammates, though. Those guys would like me just fine when I was a starter, and that was my goal for this season. As for my real friends — Pete, Jason, and maybe Eric on his good days — I didn’t have to prove anything to them. I didn’t have to shoot 40 percent from downtown for them; I didn’t have to shoot at all.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Pete as we settled into our seats
across the aisle from each other in Spanish. “This better not get in the way of the dance on Friday, ‘cause I am going to get me some.”
“Yeah, some of your own right hand afterwards,” I said, because you can’t concede a point like that.
“No way, man,” he said, and he wanted to say something more, something about how Marissa was going to be there and had I already forgotten that he’d gotten his hands up her shirt just last week? And if he did ask that, I would say, “How could I, as many times as you’ve reminded all of us about it since then?” But the bell rang and cut him off.
“Hola,
class,” said Ms. Chaney in her signature fractured Spanish.
“Hola,
Señora Chaney,” said the girls, mostly, some of them burying their noses deeper by rolling their r’s.
I looked over at Pete, and he gave me that look, opening his eyes wide and shrugging his shoulders forward as if to say, “You know what I mean?” I did, but that dance would never happen. Looking back on all of this, I shiver a little, thinking of what took its place. Images creep in: black smoke and blue skin.
But again, I’m getting ahead of myself, way ahead. You haven’t even met everybody yet. We caught up with Jason after class. Everyone was talking about the snow. It was coming down in rolling sheets by then, like white curtains blowing in the wind. But Jason wanted to talk about his ridiculous
Flammenwerfer,
which was kind of like his pet project.
The
Flammenwerfer
was a go-kart, or was going to be. Jason was attempting to piece it together in shop class. He’d spent the entire marking period working on it, and if it didn’t work, he was straight-up going to fail. Plus, he insisted it was going to be sweet. If he finished it, if it worked, if, if, if.
“Come on, guys. We’ll have the place to ourselves,” he was saying.
He meant that we could screw around with the power tools and maybe mess around with some of the stuff the other kids had brought in for their own projects.
Flammenwerfer
was the German word for
flamethrower.
I only knew that because Jason told me. I didn’t speak German; I was having enough trouble with Spanish. But he’d told me, and everyone else he knew, and more than once. Now, when you think German weapons, you think World War II. You think the Big One and all those movies you’ve seen. That tells you something about Jason, not that he’s a Nazi or anything, but that he’s always been kind of fascinated with wars and military stuff.
Now, obsessed with army guys is one thing at age ten — I mean, we all were — but at fifteen? It’s maybe a little bit of a warning sign, you know? Jason kind of freaked some people out, not the kids as much as some of the teachers. Truth is, he’d probably freak me out a little too, if I hadn’t known him since we were really little.
Case in point: He was wearing a long-sleeve blue T-shirt that said, “Long distance, the next best thing to being there.” It was
an old phone company slogan, I think, but the picture on the shirt was of a sniper’s rifle.
“Can’t do it, man,” I told him. “I’ve got a game tonight.”
No one responded for a second or two, and they managed not to laugh or roll their eyes, but I knew what they were thinking. “Maybe,” I added. I was surprised how defensive I sounded, and I guess that was enough to get a reply.
“No way that’s gonna happen,” said Jason, flicking his hand toward the window and the snow outside. Without even looking out there I knew he was right, but it still kind of ticked me off, that hand flick. It seemed like he was just dismissing it. It’s the first game of the season, I was thinking. You can’t just wave it off like you’re shooing away a fly.
“Come on, guys,” said Jason. “It’s almost done. I’ll be able to test the engine again soon.”
“Yeah,” said Pete, “and then you just have to figure out some new way to keep that engine hooked up to the frickin’ wheels. If it even works.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa … What is this negativity?” said Jason, sort of fake-offended. “Not if, when. When it works.”
“When it explodes, more like,” I said.
“Well,” said Jason, breaking into a smile, “at least that’ll be cool to watch.”
“Yeah, I don’t need all these fingers anyway,” I said.
We were just joking around at this point, and that meant, basically, that we were going to do it. We couldn’t bust on him and then leave him hanging. It’s hard to explain why not — I guess because that would be one thing too many. We all
knew we were probably going to stay after and help him, but there were still some logistics to work out, some possible defenses.
“I don’t think so, man,” I said. “If it’s early dismissal, there won’t be any late buses.”
“Nah, it’s cool. My dad’ll pick us up. He’s got the truck — four-wheel drive, you know? — and he’s working like two miles from here today, just across the river in Canton.”
The high school was kind of out in the middle of nowhere, on a big tract of what used to be farmland. That’s kind of a big deal, and I’ll get back to it later. For now, all you need to know is that two miles away was about as close as anyone was liable to be.
“I don’t want to be here all night,” said Pete.
“They knock off at like four, at the latest.”
“Yeah,” I said, just going through the motions of resistance at this point, “but will shop even be open? Holloway’ll be gone just like everyone else.”
“Are you kidding, man? He loves it when anyone stays after.”
That was true. The old man enjoyed any sign that people were taking an interest in his class. Jason paused and then said, “Lock up when you leave,” in a pretty good imitation of Holloway’s voice.
I looked over at Pete. He shrugged. As lame as Jason’s junker of a would-be go-kart was, it wasn’t like Pete and I had a ton of exciting projects of our own to work on. My game wasn’t going to happen, and it was just another Tuesday for Pete.
“Alright,” I said at last, “but let’s at least wait for the announcements.”
We knew they were coming: Game canceled would probably be first, then early dismissal. A speaker hung on the wall above our heads in the hallway. But it stayed silent for now, and we had to bust our butts to get to class.