Trapped (10 page)

The snow was brushing against the window in big, fat flakes, and we all bedded down and called it a night. We pushed some of the extra desks and chairs up against the walls to make some space to lie down. There’d been five wool blankets in the nurse’s office, all folded into neat squares by the little doctor’s office bed along the wall. The girls were sharing one. No one said much about it, just like no one said anything when Les and Elijah took two blankets and went back to the room on the other side of the hall.

Normally, anything even hinting at gayness would’ve been an endless source of jokes and abuse. Not now, though. We were homesick and cold and as bad as we had it, we knew others had it worse. I mean, there’s no way all those buses made it to the end of their routes, for one thing. How’d you like to be stuck on a bus, buried up to its roof, on some little hillside road?

There was no way any of us guys were sharing a blanket, though. Jason agreed to go without tonight. He kept his jacket on and borrowed Pete’s coat to put around his legs. Then he
wrapped himself in about five of the sheets we’d also found in the nurse’s office, along with the blankets, aspirin, bandages, and rubbing alcohol, which you could use for zits. Anyway, he said he’d be fine with the sheets.

I said, “Thanks,” and he said, “Screw you, Weems.” It was just our way of saying good night, I guess.

A Shinedown song came on. I sort of wanted to hear it, but someone got up and clicked off the radio, and that was fine too. Batteries.

Cell phone screens blinked on and then mostly right back off. We were starting to understand that it was something, you know, structural at this point, like all those dead spots on the radio dial. Pete played Alien Apokillypse for a while, but his battery was almost gone now. Some of the others had their earbuds in, but I couldn’t hear whatever it was they were listening to. It was quiet, except for gusts of wind rattling the windows. An hour later, I was still awake. My side was sore from the tile floor, so I turned over. I didn’t hear anyone else moving.

Then I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time, probably not since I was a little boy. I prayed. I prayed for myself. I prayed for my mom. I prayed for all of us.

I guess maybe I felt a little self-conscious about it. I didn’t get up and kneel or anything. I just curled up tight in the scratchy wool and whispered. Jason must’ve heard me, though. He was only a few feet away and he started to do the same thing. It’s funny: It was probably the ten thousandth time I’d heard Jason say “Jesus,” but it was the first time I’d heard him mean it.

Some people might have a problem with this. I mean, half of
them would be like, Prayer in a public school! We’re not supposed to do that. Then the other half would think it was some sort of a deathbed conversion or whatever you want to call it. It’s like, Oh, sure,
now
you’re religious. Where was that on about fifty-one of the last fifty-two Sundays? And I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m not talking about our motives or our convictions or our lack of them. I’m just saying what happened. We prayed. We prayed for clear skies.

The first thing I felt when I woke up Thursday morning was the cold. It’s not that I was cold so much as that I knew it was cold around me. Have you ever left your window open overnight or anything like that and woken up with your room way too cold? It’s weird because it actually makes it more comfortable to be curled up under the covers. Just knowing it’s cold out there makes it feel better to be warm.

So there was some of that going on, but there’s only so comfortable you’re going to be after spending the night on a hard tile floor. And it wasn’t a little cold in here. It wasn’t leaving-your-window-open-in-April cold. It was wicked cold. The air was a sharp slap against the side of my face, waking me up, telling me that the last of the heat had drained away overnight.

I reached out from under the blanket and touched my cheek. My monster zit was bigger now, more tender, a little hill of sore flesh and pus pushing up through the side of my face. And there was one other thing bothering me: It might not sound like much, but I hadn’t been online for like two solid days, and it was starting to freak me out.

The last time was Tuesday morning, before school, and that was just to answer some e-mails, respond to some comments, and play a few games: just the morning maintenance stuff. By
now, I’d have a ton of e-mails and comments and posts. Everyone would be checking in, seeing if I was OK, and stuff like that. Plus, my energy counter would be completely topped off in Mafia Wars — if I didn’t use it, it wouldn’t refill, which was just a huge waste — and my ship would be fixed by now in Scurvvy Piratez. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I guess when you’re trying not to think too much about the big, real stuff, the little virtual stuff has to carry the load.

I heard a noise and looked over: Jason was picking through his stuff. He’d found one glove and was looking for the other. He hadn’t seen me yet. I looked out the window. I guess I’d sort of been avoiding that, too. Pale gray light filtered in through the falling snow. You don’t know that it’s been snowing all night, I told myself. You’re just making that assumption. But somehow I did know.

I remembered something that Andy had said on the radio late last night. “These things blow themselves out. They always have.”

Of course, his voice was hoarse and he still hadn’t had any good news to pass on when he said it, but I still found that kind of comforting.

I looked to the back of the room. I couldn’t see Krista. The girls had pushed their backpacks and extra stuff into a little wall back there, like sandbags in a flood. I couldn’t see them behind it, but I was pretty sure I heard whispering coming from that direction. They were awake but not up.

Without my phone, I wasn’t exactly sure what time it was;
around nine, if I had to guess. Why not sleep all day? What is there to do here, and what does it matter if we do it or not? I had to take a leak, though, and I wanted to take a good look at this zit, see if maybe it was ready to pop.

A sharp prickling sensation shot up my side as I got to my feet. It wasn’t pain as much as feeling rushing back into the places the floor had crushed numb. The cold pushed in on me too, finding every little crack and bit of exposed skin. I reached down and grabbed my jacket. I saw one gloved hand sticking out from under Jason’s little nest of sheets and coats. From the way it just hung there, I could tell he was already back to sleep.

Now that I was up, I could see Pete. He was lying just past Jason and staring up at the ceiling. I nodded to him, but he was a million miles away. I opened the classroom door as quietly as possible. When I touched the cold metal, I panicked for like half a second. I was thinking, Oh, man, what if my skin freezes to it? It wasn’t nearly that cold, though, and I just pulled it closed behind me. I didn’t have to worry about it clicking shut since we’d blown out the cylinder.

As I was making my way toward the men’s room at the end of the hall, Les was making his way back. Our breath was visible in the air between us. We were like two steam trains heading toward each other on opposite tracks, like one of those word problems in algebra. When we were right next to each other, Les opened his spout and said: “Elijah says we’re going to die in here.”

So those were the first words I heard on our third day in the school.

“What?” I said. It’s weird the effect words can have. These ones had stopped me cold.

“You heard me.”

Fair enough, I had. I looked at him for a second, trying to process it.

“That’s crazy,” I finally managed. “It’s been like two days. Well, two nights. And there’s a ton of food in the caf. Like, literally, a ton.”

“He didn’t say we were going to starve,” said Les, looking at me like I was impossibly dense. “He said we were going to die.”

“It’s still crazy,” I said. And then, because he was still looking at me, and it was early, and I couldn’t think of anything else, I said: “These things blow themselves out. They always have.”

Les seemed to be considering that for a moment, maybe trying to remember where he’d heard it before. Then a little smile crept onto his face. “These things always blow,” he said.

We both gave quick, snorting laughs and then went our separate ways, him back to the room on the other side of the hall and me to the zit-popping chamber. I was beginning to suspect that Les was OK. I just wasn’t sure he should’ve been hanging out with Elijah.

It was even colder in the bathroom and, of course, there was no hot water. I still felt better when I left. I’d squeezed so much white pus out of the side of my face that my fingers had been slick with it. My cheek was bleeding a little but the pressure was gone. I stood in the hallway for a few moments, pressing the toilet paper to the side of my face.

I was thinking about what Les had said: We’re going to die in
here. I’d told him it sounded crazy, and it did, right? A thing like that? But I couldn’t quite get it out of my head.

By the time I got back to the room, everyone was up. Again, why? But I wasn’t one to talk. I’d been the first one on his feet. Anyway, the good thing about everyone being up was that they’d turned on the radio. I was glad for that. It sort of felt like there were more people when the radio was on. Jason was trolling the dial again — left glove on, right glove off — looking for other stations. Hopefully, there’d be something closer to home.

The Emergency Broadcasting Network still hadn’t updated its message, and WKAR still hadn’t dug itself out. A full trip around the dial later, and we were back to Andy. I figured he’d slept at the station, but I was wrong.

“Slept at the Hilton last night, folks,” he was saying. “Not too shabby. Limited power and not much heat, but still not too shabby. A candlelit dinner with myself, the staff, and some very pissed-off business travelers. Very romantic …”

Apparently, the Hilton was connected to the office tower where the radio station was located. “I had to walk through a parking garage, but it’s amazing the lengths I’ll go to for some fresh frozen chicken,” he said. “Even had some wine.”

His voice sounded better and less ragged.

“Y’old dog,” said Jason. We were all jealous. We wanted frozen chicken and hotel beds and limited power. They were basic things, but they were starting to sound like huge luxuries.

“Well, I think I’ve heard enough of this,” said Pete. “I’m going back downstairs, maybe take another pass through the office.”

He tossed a quick look over at Julie, but she wasn’t biting. It was hard to flirt in this kind of cold. We weren’t Eskimos. Anyway, we let him go and started making guesses about how long he’d last before giving up.

“Fifteen minutes,” said Jason.

“Twenty,” said Julie. If she couldn’t go with him, at least she could stick up for him a little. It was nice of her, I guess, but Jason knew Pete better and won the bet. Pete burst back into the room not quite ten minutes later. “It’s pitch-black down there,” he said, smacking his hands together, “and frickin’ freezing!”

Pretty soon, Les and Elijah came in. It was pretty clear that they’d been laughing about something. Elijah looked like a little kid, bundled up in his jacket and sweater, with a smile just fading from his face. He was pale as bone, though, and I still remembered what Les said he’d told him.

I guess they’d heard the radio and headed across the hall. We had to have it up pretty high so we could still hear it as it faded in and out, and when they played a song, we never really bothered to turn it down.

With all of us in the same room, we had breakfast. We had these little plastic measuring cups we’d found in the kitchen area of the caf. Some of us used them for water and some of us used them as bowls for the peaches or pudding. There weren’t enough cups to have one for each. We also used the same plastic spoons from the night before. Some of us had washed them out in the bathroom and some of us, not naming names, had just licked them clean.

Anyway, that was our breakfast: pudding and/or canned peaches and cold water in a cold room. The chocolate pudding was really thick. You sort of had to melt it with the heat from your mouth before swallowing. It wasn’t bad, though, sort of like very rubbery ice cream.

I ate mine looking out the window. It looked like a cartoon world, everything out of proportion and wrong. The snow was maybe five feet below the window now, so it was, what, two feet below our feet? I wondered when this building had been built, a big stone monster, with ceilings fourteen feet high and a long way down from the second floor. It was a long way on a normal day, I mean. I could lower myself down now if I wanted to.

Farther out, the tops of trees looked like giant, frosted broccoli sprouts. The snow blew across the white field in front of us in little skittering waves. Nothing else moved.

Not much moved in the room either. We sat around bundled up, listening to the radio or talking or both. A few people still had their blankets over their shoulders. They sort of reminded me of those Revolutionary War soldiers in the history books, like: “Chapter 17, Valley Forge: A Test of Will.”

Elijah went back to the room on the other side of the hall. Jason, Pete, and I were just sitting around and talking about random stuff: music, sports, things like that. The girls were too close for us to talk about them. It seemed like maybe they were talking about us, though. They had this way of talking low and close that meant they could be talking about anything, but there’s no way we were going to do that. Lean into each other,
almost touching foreheads, and whisper at 200 miles an hour? Please, we were dudes.

“Going down to the shop,” Jason said after a while.

He stood up as he said it, so I had to tilt my head back to respond: “There light down there?”

“Yeah, it’s like we thought. It’s against that slope. No place for the snow to build up.”

“Cool,” I said.

Pete was no longer listening. His eyes had drifted to the back of the room again.

“Yeah, it’s like sometimes the snow builds up, sort of drifts against the windows. But I just open and close ‘em a few times hard and they clear right off. Still some frost, but the light comes in fine. It’s really cold, but you warm up when you’re working.”

“Cool. How’s the ol’
‘werfer
coming along?”

“Good, good, I’m making a big change. I think you’ll be surprised.”

“I’ll be surprised if it ever works!”

He brought his fist back and did a big, fake windmill windup, like in a cartoon. I bugged out my eyes and raised my hands and made an oh-no-don’t-hit-me expression.

“Maybe I’ll come down, help you out later?”

“Yeah, sure. If I’m not here, I’m there.”

“Cool, cool.”

“You gonna come too, Pete?” Jason said.

Pete swung his head back, not quite fast enough: “Huh?”

“Never mind, Romeo,” Jason said, and he was gone.

About half an hour later, I got up and went back to the bathroom to pick the little scab of dried blood off my zit. It was good to have a mirror for that; you didn’t want to get it going again. I figured I’d put a little more Oxy on there too. With the really big ones, it’s important to kick ‘em while they’re down.

So anyway, I did that and bent down to wash my hands. I turned the faucet knob and nothing came out. At first I thought I’d turned the wrong one. The water had been weak in here earlier, and I figured it was because there was no hot water with the heat and electricity out. But I looked again and saw the little
C
pressed into the metal. I turned it all the way on and still nothing.

“Aw, man,” I said, straightening up and talking to my face in the mirror.

I walked over to the closest urinal and pushed the lever down: nothing. I walked back to the room. Everyone looked over when I came in, just like everyone looked over anytime anyone came in. We were light on entertainment. “One of you girls want to go try the faucets in the girls’ room?” I said while I had their attention.

“Why?” said Krista.

“ ‘Cause there’s no water in the men’s room.”

“Pipes freeze?” said Les, sitting near the radio.

“There could just be no pressure,” said Pete. He was disagreeing just to disagree. You could tell there was some real tension building between those two. I think it had started with their
little showdown outside the nurse’s office, but it might have been before that.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “All I know is that there’s no water, alright? ”

“This sucks!” said Julie, getting to her feet.

Pete made a little move as she approached the door.

“What?” said Les. “You gonna go to the john with her too?”

Pete glared back at him but settled back into his chair.

“Oh, yeah,” I said as she passed me on her way out the door. “I wouldn’t use the toilet if I were you.”

She reappeared a minute later: “Nothing.”

This was bad. People stood up and started pacing and complaining. I guess Elijah heard us, because he reappeared from across the hall. He glided silently into the room with the gray blanket trailing behind him like a cape. He took a seat next to Les and gave him a little look, like, What’s up?

“No water,” said Les, filling him in. “And we can’t flush the toilets.”