in a mansion in Los Angeles, waiting for their call, and their hearts broke at the thought that they had left him waiting. Now they found the girl who was his niece, and though she wanted to be elsewhere, six of them gathered around her, like beasts they usually were not. A teacher tried to intercede, but when she went to get help to break up the altercation, the charade hopefuls marched the girl into the library and made her call her uncle. The uncle, though, had better things to do than wait around for a Skype call that hadn’t arrived on time. He didn’t answer.
They threw her phone at the wall. They deserved the charades they’d been promised.
* * *
Some students didn’t know what to do with this stolen freedom. They grumbled as they filed out of the auditorium without their friends, most of whom were still outside. All they had wanted to do was participate in the student cooking competition. The school had brought in various local chefs as judges, but would those judges still be patiently waiting in the cafeteria beyond the locked doors, recently cleaned from the food fight, when all this was over? (No, they would not. The judges were gone already, having slunk away as soon as Master Declan called to say there had been a development.)
Some wandered in and out of classrooms set up for lock-in night, waiting for an activity. The teachers leading them, though, were meeting in the green room trying to figure out how best to proceed. Or they were locked outside the building, yawning and wondering when they’d get to go home.
* * *
Others didn’t take the disruption well. They took to the windows, struggling to find a place that could be opened. They all knew it was pointless, but still, it was hard not to try. Some grabbed chairs, then looked over their shoulders to see if an adult would stop them. When none came by wagging fingers, when their friends egged them on, it felt so obvious this was what they had to do. If there was any way in or out of the building, lock-in night would be back in full. The irony wasn’t lost on them. Shmuli Rogers, the largest of Jordi Marcos’s friends, ended up tossing the first chair. It bounced back uselessly, the glass giving a comical twang as it laughed off Shmuli’s attempt, the chair clattering back at him and forcing him to jump away.
Many students, not quite up for causing mayhem, preferring to wait for permission, settled into their usual nooks and crannies around the school. Muscle memory led them toward their daily meet-up areas in front of so-and-so’s locker, or their lunch spots up on the roof garden.
The bookworms followed the library’s magnetic pull, where they holed up on various beanbags or chairs for the remainder of the night, occasionally stepping out to stretch their legs and take stock of the situation. A few students who’d been hurt in the fray of their peers’ rush out the auditorium went to Nurse Hae, though they knew she’d simply offer a cup of tea and send them on their way.
The basketball team went to the gymnasium, as did those hopeful Amira admirers who still clutched their posters in their hands and wanted to see her take Omar down. (This was the crowd who walked in on Joy midstream, and though embarrassment flushed her face red, no one noticed what she was doing, thanks to Amira’s improvised barrier.)
Pok Tran, a sophomore, was close to having a nervous breakdown, and so he found a comfortable nook in the corner of Mr. Sanchez’s closet and curled up in the dark, away from the noise and the mayhem.
* * *
For some, it was as if nothing had changed, as if the disruption was just a brief and inconvenient pause, nothing more. The Spice Scream Social resumed and, emboldened by the circumstances the way a near-death experience might make people live more freely, seven different students tasted the Carolina Reaper hot sauce. The organizers of the Lock-In Night Escape Room, who’d been giddy the whole night, now rushed around the school, searching for clues on how to get out, sure that Marisa and her cronies were just fellow escape-heads, that this was a mystery they alone could solve.
The couples who’d resisted touch in the auditorium while under teacher surveillance escaped to the roof garden, slinking into the covers of night and blankets to press close together and