Reece
Thursday
At 10:45 a.m., Reece was walking behind two girls on the way out of math class, about to hand a test back to Mr. Webb, when the math teacher put his arm out to stop anyone from leaving.
They’d all heard it: the crackle of the intercom, followed by a storm of heavy footfalls in the hallway. A door slammed. A girl shrieked.
“Get back to your seats,” Mr. Webb said, before he pulled the door shut. “Procedures,” he barked. Two steps forward, two steps back, sheaf of tests still in his hand. “Lockdown. You know what to do.”
But they didn’t remember, not at first.
“Blinds,” Mr. Webb called out to Tory, a girl who was standing in the back corner of the room, but she didn’t move. The school had just replaced the blinds in all the rooms the previous fall, switching from old metal blinds to a solid blackout fabric.
A different student called out, “Locks, lights, out of sight.”
Mr. Webb shut off the lights. Now it was dim, with only traces of brightness seeping in from around the windows and doors, as if they were about to watch a movie.
“Everyone down below window level.” Still they froze, a third of the class seated at desks and two-thirds standing, backpacks in hands, still fighting the urge to head toward the door. He shouted again. “Down, and I mean all the way. Down and quiet!”
From the hallway, more feet could be heard. Through a vertical slot-shaped window in the door, they saw a gym teacher and a security guard run past. Reece took out his phone, and the action sparked a flurry of imitation as everyone in the room with a phone sent and pulled up texts, took photos and started taking videos, though nothing was happening yet.
“No cell phones,” Mr. Webb said.
Reece glanced at his teacher’s face to see if he would enforce the rule. He wouldn’t.
Good call, Mr. Webb. Who wanted to be the guy who cut people off from getting safety information or sending a final goodbye?
Five minutes. Ten.
“Hey, Mr. Webb.”
He didn’t answer.
In the drills, there had been a constant stream of PA system announcements. This seemed like a false alarm, but even so, there should be more information. Panic mellowed into suspense, edging toward skepticism.
Guys who had shrunk back into the corners duck-walked toward the center of the room to talk with friends, slapping each other on the back, teasing each other about how they’d looked when they first heard the footsteps and the shriek. Girls who had willingly flattened to the ground under desks without complaint now scooted into cross-legged sitting positions. They started to take selfies and braid each other’s hair. Grooming, Reece thought. We’re all just a bunch of nervous primates.
Again, Reece looked at Mr. Webb, who was sitting on the floor with his legs extended in front of him. He still held the stack of papers in his hands, crunching them without noticing, their edges bent between his sweaty fingers.
Reece would feel much better if Mr. Webb didn’t look so worried. Maybe “worried” wasn’t the right word. He looked heartsick, like someone who couldn’t believe this moment was finally happening, that his life had brought him to this: sitting in a dim room, waiting, and not because of a tornado, but because it now seemed normal to assume that someone might be running around with the intention to kill.
A bullhorn in the hallway squawked, and a girl in the class screamed, then covered her mouth with her hands, giggling maniacally. A public announcement echoed down the hallway, “Stay in position. Police are on campus. Stay in your classrooms. Do not open the doors.”
Reece closed his eyes and tried to conjure the dream images again, if only to reassure himself none of this had anything to do with what he had seen.
Another half-hour passed. Kids began to complain about needing to use the bathroom and wanting to eat lunch. Mr. Webb took a brief call. Finally, they proceeded in single file down the hall and outside, where they waited in the cold autumn air, leaning against the brick wall, under the pool sign, while police continued to do a sweep of the building.
Reece closed his eyes and smelled the chlorine wafting from the heavy double doors they’d exited. Nope. That smell wasn’t familiar, just as this location wasn’t. None of it triggered the déjà-vu feeling.
Gerald leaned into Reece’s shoulder to whisper, “I just heard Kale’s name.”
“What?”
“They were looking for him. Caleb. He left school early. They found a note.”
“Where?” They didn’t even have lockers anymore. Too dangerous. First, they’d zip-tied them shut, then removed them altogether, replacing them with sports trophy display shelving.
Another guy next to them overheard. “We’re fucking freezing out here because of a note?”
Gerald said, “Someone thought he had a bomb or something. A freshman told the police.”
“Naw,” a senior next to them said. “Bomb scare would have meant evacuating the building, not keeping us holed up inside.”
“Unless it was in his car,” Gerald said. “Then they’d keep us in here.”
Reece said, “Caleb doesn’t have a car.”
“Anyway. He’s a suspect.”
“I think you mean ‘person of interest,’” Reece said. “But I doubt he’s even that.”
As soon as Reece had heard Caleb’s name, he’d thought of them all crammed into his car last night. He remembered Raj bad-mouthing Caleb and Justin claiming he’d seen Caleb get rides from Vorst. He remembered his own good intention to confront Caleb tactfully—to at least ask about that strange Rockets’ rehearsal that had been captured on video. Instead, when Caleb skipped practice, Reece started asking around. That had been a mistake. The rumor mill was starting up again and . . . well, now this.
The facts were few. Caleb had left school early—that was the most solid one. Reece hadn’t ever seen Caleb start a fight. Mostly, he walked away from them. He wasn’t a conflict-seeker. He was an avoider. Even when he claimed to do something aggressive, like keying a car, it was all in his head.
“Come on,” Reece said. “Give the guy a break.”
Gerald said, “A break? I’m going to break his legs for making me stand out here all day in the freezing cold.”
Reece bummed two cigarettes from a girl who was pacing up and down the edge of the curb like a tightrope walker. He gave one to Gerald. The teachers were standing too close to light up, but he turned his back to them, faced the wall, and put the cigarette in his mouth, unlit. Just for the feel and the flavor. Shit, he really was an addict now. If he didn’t stop soon . . .
“When’s the last time anyone saw him?” Gerald asked.
“I think it’s all fine,” Reece said. “He’s fine. We’re fine. End of story.”
“How do you know?”
Reece checked his gut again: no tickles, no whispers. This wasn’t the day or the place. He just knew.
The principal got on the bullhorn. “I understand it’s chilly, but you’re going to have to be patient. We’ll let you know the day’s schedule as soon as we have permission to open the building again.”
No one had sorted out how to deal with the lost lunch period or whether after-school activities would be canceled. The rehearsal for Friday’s halftime show was probably not happening. Weeks ago, Reece had thought this performance would be the best thing the Rockets had ever done. Now it would be the worst, especially with the new choreography they’d been forced to sub in, thanks to Caleb’s no-shows.
Backing out completely was an option, and Reece played out how that would go, sitting through the first half of the football game knowing the Rockets had given up.
It felt like shit.
“Anyone got anything to eat?” Gerald asked, but no one answered. “Beef jerky in anyone’s pocket? Piece of gum?”
Every student had turned to his or her own phone, his or her own thoughts, like they were in the security line at an airport, but worse, because the line wasn’t moving.
Reece knew a lot of people who had gone on college tours in the spring or summer. He’d ambled through one college fair, taking home more pencils and bouncy balls than catalogs. What did he want to do with his life? He’d decided, based on the disappointment of not getting to transfer to his preferred arts school, that it was too late to take dance seriously. He wasn’t a national-caliber dancer. But he wasn’t exactly old, either. Whatever his personal best was, he hadn’t reached it.
Maybe that was the source of his compulsive searching: because his life felt like it didn’t have meaning. No, forget that. Meaning you could find later. He just needed movement and a temporary direction. But he wasn’t going to find it doing random Internet searches or reading about Annie Oakley, interesting as that may have been.
Reece thought of Mr. Webb sitting on the floor with legs splayed, looking heartbroken, as if he expected a shooter to explode into the room, ending it for all of them.
He thought of Sergei Polunin saying, “I like imperfections in the world.” Reece could think of a lot he wanted to change in his past, but maybe everything that had happened so far would lead him to something more interesting, less predictable. A sideways path to some kind of success he couldn’t even imagine yet.
So maybe their Rockets performance wouldn’t be great. And maybe Reece would end up at some less competitive arts college and at best, become a big fish in a small pond. Maybe he wouldn’t go to college. Hell, maybe he wouldn’t be a big fish anywhere. But if he’d died today—if many of them had—what would his regrets be?
He hadn’t looked for summer dance intensives. He hadn’t looked for a job as an instructor, teaching kids after school. He hadn’t borrowed the car to go to Minneapolis for the weekend when good dance and theater acts came to town. Okay, all that was attributable in the last year to depression, but he hadn’t always been depressed. At the ripe age of fifteen, he’d scoffed at an invitation to apply for youth representative on the town arts council, even if it meant he might have a say in things like grant making and inviting performers to visit, because he’d assumed that any dancer or singer or painter who would come to their little town’s summer jubilee arts week couldn’t possibly have any talent. What an arrogant shit!
Reece folded his unlit cigarette in half and pushed it deep into his pocket.
My body is a temple. He took out his phone and texted the phrase to Ruth, because she was nuts herself and he could tell her anything. Remind me, would you?
Gerald whispered to Reece, “I’m tempted to cut out of here and go to my car. Mental health day. We barely have two periods left.”
Reece said, “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do that.” In the distance, at the main exits from the massive parking lots, a half-dozen cop cars were lined up with a news van behind them. “Don’t you have stuff in your car you wouldn’t want a cop to see if they decided to pull you over and open your glove box?”
“Good point.”
The principal’s voice boomed again. “Show’s over. Let’s get back to work now, people.”
“She’s saying that like we asked to be standing out here,” Gerald complained. He scrolled on his phone. “Why does Kale have to be such an asshole? My balls are freezing.”
A girl, the one who’d been picking at the bottom of her shoe, said, “I don’t want to hear you say the word ‘freezing’ one more time, and I don’t want to hear about your balls. My mom’s going to see this on the news and she’s going to lose it.”
Reece narrowed his eyes against the autumn wind and pushed his hands farther into his pockets. From afar, he would have looked just like the other seniors standing next to him, impatient and indignant. But inside, he felt different.
As they shuffled single-file toward the doors, he pretended to be annoyed and uncomfortable, because that’s how his friends were acting, and for good reason. But he couldn’t deny it. For no reason at all, he felt invigorated—so suddenly buoyed that instead of passing through the doors, he took over door duty from the shivering kid who was holding one side open.
“My turn. Got it.”
Reece took another moment to gaze around the parking lot and beyond in search of a sign or symbol, but nothing appeared. He kept holding the door. He couldn’t get enough of the cold, clean air or the view beyond: football field, the encircling track, and behind all that, the dark tangle of green spruces and the clusters of aspens blazing yellow against a bright blue autumn sky.
“Pointless day,” Gerald said, ducking into the building.
“The worst,” Reece agreed, smiling.
Something had happened or just barely not happened, leaving him feeling oddly at peace and inexplicably refreshed.