parents to try to force the front doors open. Others watched him approach, wondering why they hadn’t thought to try. Some were forgetting they’d been told about Marisa and knew about the doors. Others had simply stood by, spellbound, just following the crowd.
* * *
Marisa felt the push behind her. Amira did, too, and raised an eyebrow. Moments later they heard a voice shouting into a phone, making demands. “Parents,” Marisa guessed.
Granted, many parents had arrived still on their phones, waiting in a queue to speak to some poor teacher or other—the ones who hadn’t been placed into the preferable role of researching how to meet Marisa’s demands. Because of course the board couldn’t be called upon to do the research themselves; it was nighttime, after all, and they’d been outsourcing research to assistants for decades, had no idea how to research anymore, only how to make decisions.
The remaining unfortunate souls were now cast as customer service reps dealing with angry clientele. And here were their customers now, not just shouting their complaints into the phone, but at the building itself.
“We want our kids,” Dov Nudel’s mom, Sharon, yelled. She was a slight woman, but loud. It was her voice the teachers heard from all the way up in the green room, from the chem lab over the sound of the fire extinguisher they were emptying, from their laps around the halls trying to keep the school together. Those on the phone with some other worried/angry/upset/demanding/pleading parent only had a second to perk their free ear up before their attention was pulled back.
* * *
Ms. Duli, on a conference call with the board, who’d finally gathered together to review the demands, switched over to speakerphone. “Do you hear that?”
A few kilometers away, meeting in a hotel conference room, with their assistants lined up against the back wall typing away on laptops, or fetching drinks from the downstairs bar, the board members tilted their heads closer to the overhead speakers, which had been wired into the call. Ms. Duli let the sound carry over for a good thirty seconds. Meanwhile, something in her pulsed, something she couldn’t quite name. It could have been admiration that Marisa had done all of this, but there was something else, too, some vague ache she couldn’t quite put a finger on yet. She felt young again, for some reason, holding the phone up for the board to hear. It was exciting for this to be happening, and Ms. Duli had a fleeting fantasy that she was Marisa, that she had put all this together.
“What is that, a riot?” one of the board members grumbled.
Ms. Duli put the phone back to her ear. “Parents, sir. A bunch of pissed-off parents.” The board grumbled to each other now, each raised voice trying to rise above the others, creating only a din, as each voice in the room was used to being the loudest voice and did not want to cede that position.
“You might want to start taking this girl seriously,” Ms. Duli said. “Or we’re all going to be here a very long time.”
11
12:32AM
After the parents arrived, the brief, savage attempts to reclaim lock-in night flittered away. The violence aimed at Marisa was put on hold.
A sense of normalcy, maybe, returned, although not a one of them felt things were normal. It was more that suddenly it was clear to the students they were prisoners, hostages who had no voice. Sure, it was all about them. The parents and administrators trying to get them out, Marisa keeping them in. But they were supposed to sit there and shut up and be safe. They were pawns. The only ones with voices were the adults, and Marisa herself.
Though for the time being, it felt like even she was taking a backseat to the adults yelling at each other. One of the parents outside had thought to bring a megaphone, similar to the kind Marisa had used when she gave her initial speech. Jordi Marcos, Sr., had bullyingly procured this megaphone and was now yelling into it, demanding the kids’ release from the administration. He didn’t seem to have a solid grasp on the situation.
So Ms. Duli was forced to ask Marisa for her megaphone so she could respond. As she did, she seemed to notice for the first time the weird positioning of the kids around Marisa, the odd array of objects strewn about. “What happened here?”
Ms. Florgen, who’d been in the foyer when the projectiles began but whose