The Release

Many students cried out, but most sat in stoic silence, waiting and waiting for someone to tell them what to do. In the back of the room, several teachers stood around the glow of a television. The old newscaster was still talking, his face drawn in a perpetual frown. The crowd spoke intensely, like a wave rolling from the back to the front, and Lucy just stood, planted firm, eyes wandering for a familiar face. She was desperate to see Salem.

But Salem wasn’t there.

Stepping away from the doors and up the first aisle, Lucy meandered. She looked at every face and tried to find a friendly one among them. There was a girl from science class, a boy she used to know in elementary school, a boy in her math class, a girl in yearbook. This one was in band. That one was a cheerleader. She used to talk to those three girls her freshman year at lunchtime—during the year that Salem’s family moved themselves to Texas and she found herself bereft of friendship—but they had all fallen out of touch. Lucy chose to distance herself from the crowd of “fakers,” as she labeled them, brilliantly loyal to your face and the quickest to sell you out to anyone who would listen. Lucy responded to their hurt by eating lunch in her math teacher’s room for two whole months, before, she assumed, that teacher tattled on her and Ethan came and rescued her by dragging her off to eat with his upperclassmen friends. Her entire freshman year was marred with navigating the murky waters of varying degrees of social ostracism. Then Salem’s family decided that they hated Texas and they found their way back to Portland. A move that Lucy credited with saving her life.

Lucy made eye contact with one of her former friends on accident, and as if she had conveyed some social cue that she needed to talk, the girl lurched forward from her seat, stumbling over the back of the chair in front of her.

“Lucy!” the girl screamed and then wrapped her arms around Lucy’s shoulders.

She had forgotten the first girl’s name. Under different circumstances she might have remembered, but her brain was a mess, a total fog. The name slipped away before she could grab ahold. It was Kylee. Or Keeley. Kyra. Kiyah. There it was just hiding in the back of her brain, pushed to the side and momentarily irretrievable. “I am so glad you’re here. I’m so glad to see you. I’m so glad you’re okay.” The other girls stood up from their seats and wandered over, their heads nodding in agreement, eyes wide.

“We saw you walk in. What happened? Were you hiding?”

“I got to school late,” Lucy mumbled and then tried to extricate herself from them by walking backward. She stumbled on a backpack without an owner.

The girls exchanged glances.

“You weren’t locked out?” one whispered conspiratorially. Maddy or Molly, McKenzie. Michaela.

“Found an open door near the cafeteria,” she lied. It was a silly lie. Who cared now about the secret passageway in the pool? Who cared about any of it?

“Wow,” one girl said.

“Unlucky, I guess,” said another. “Been better if you never got inside.”

Everyone paused and then sighed in unison.

“But it’s chaos outside too,” Lucy replied. “Maybe we really are safer here.” She regretted it as soon as it left her mouth because it aligned her with their common enemy—the girls turned on her; all but baring their teeth under throaty growls.

“We’re hostages,” one of the Kylees said.

“They have us locked in this room.”

“My parents must be worried sick, I just want to get home.”

“It’s awful. This is against our rights,” the maybe-McKenzie seethed and glared down at Lucy. “We still have rights.”

Lucy didn’t want to disagree with them, but she didn’t know if she agreed. She didn’t entirely disagree though. Confusion overwhelmed her. But she nodded anyway, mumbling something about just wanting her parents, which sent the trio into a blubbering mess. The middle girl, short, with a sleek dark bob and peacock inspired eye shadow, buried her head into Lucy’s arm, staining her shirt with a thin streak of snot and tears.

“I’ll be right back,” Lucy said, pulling herself away.

She noticed Mrs. Johnston in the back, her arms crossed over her shirt. She was shaking her head at the television and wiping away tears. Briefly, she conversed with an older male teacher, and he leaned a protective arm around her and she collapsed against him. Then, as if she knew she was being watched, the English teacher turned and spotted Lucy.

Lucy took three giant steps toward her teacher, and for the first time since setting foot in the school she began to feel untethered. She watched Mrs. Johnson’s shoulders shake with the heaviness of silent sobs, her legs trembling under her. This adult was falling apart. Her whole face was swollen and puffy from crying; her eyes, normally outlined in the perfect balance of liner and mascara, were now bare, giving her face a thi

Mrs. Johnston stared at Lucy with a lost expression. She didn’t smile warmly or beckon her closer. Instead, she just lifted her hands from her chest and dropped them to her side, letting her arms dangle next to the pockets of her jeans.

And only then did Lucy notice that Mrs. Johnston’s entire shirt was soaked with dark, dried, streaks of someone else’s blood.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Oh my goodness,” Lucy said and she walked forward toward her English teacher. But before she could maneuver herself closer, a burly Health teacher, still wearing a whistle around his stump-like neck, swooped forward with his hands out.

“No students in this area. Back to your row please,” the man said, swollen with self-importance.

With no energy to protest, Lucy turned on her heels and turned her back to Mrs. Johnston, who probably had no memory that Lucy wasn’t even supposed to be at school at all. Pulling her phone from her pocket, Lucy had no new messages. The time broadcast itself in large block numbers at the top of her screen. Their initial domestic flight to the East Coast would be in the air within the hour. Lucy entertained the notion in the back of her mind that su

Lucy watched as their principal Spencer took the stage. He sauntered forward, leading with his forehead, one hand shoved into the pocket of his pants, the other one holding a wireless microphone. A pimply theater tech student assumed command of the follow spotlight and flooded the stage with a bright white light. The principal blinked into the orb and then blew into the mouthpiece of the microphone, a whoosh of sound shrieked across the seats. Like sheep, those standing, chatting, and crying filed into empty rows, all eager to hear the news, to hear the plan.

There wasn’t an ounce of compassion on their leader’s face as he stared down at them with flat eyes, gnawing on the inside of his right cheek.

“Sit down,” he commanded, his mouth close to the microphone. “Find a seat and sit down.” He pointed to the group of sobbing and cuddling kids near the front rows, so engaged in their own dialoguing that they had ignored his initial call to disband. “Get up and sit in a seat. You have sixty-seconds,” he barked at them. When it was clear they had tuned him out, he motioned angrily toward the school’s Resource Officer, a city of Portland policeman, his cop uniform bright and clean and his badge shiny.

The officer nodded and with quick precision, stalked forward and grabbed the closest boy to him by his back collar and tossed him backward like a ragdoll. Then he began to pull each of the students apart by force, throwing them toward seats, stepping around their huddled masses without regard for toes and fingers or long-braided hair. Only then did the kids begin to migrate toward the red cushioned seats, nursing their sore arms where the officer unceremoniously pulled them to their feet. A young girl began to wail and a boy, who had seconds earlier been cradling her, hushed her.