thanked her for listening and bounded up the stairs to go to class.
Dear ladies, gents and all other Cucumbers here assembled, Your evening’s (ha!) host again. Since the doors haven’t opened yet, I believe I’m still technically your humble Partyer in Chief. I come to you with another request. Before I called on your discretion. Now I call on your voice.
She’s not going to let herself out, it’s true. The doors remain closed. And maybe she deserves our anger for that. But you all saw that ghastly, mangled gam of hers. If she’s willing to stand on that thing, then we don’t stand a chance but to meet her demands. And if we’re not getting out of here until that happens, don’t we want to be on her side? Don’t we want to be on the same team as someone so willing to fight for what they believe is right? When we look back on this ordeal from our deathbeds, if we are lucky enough to have them, how will we feel about fighting her? Or about not fighting with her?
Let’s face it, Cukes, she’s right. We were pissed on lock-in night, and we had reason to be. But that’s far behind us. Enough putzing around, enough mourning.
Fight for Marisa’s demands. Fight for our goddamn beautiful, dying world. That’s all she’s wanted, and all she asks now. She deserves our help. We can sleep in our beds soon and see our loved ones on the outside. If we fight.
Kind regards, Peejay Singh
The whispers were already at a fever pitch.
What could they do to help? The students had felt useless this whole time, mere bystanders caught in the fight between Marisa and the school, the world. Most had signed Marisa’s petitions because they’d been asked to, because Michael and Maya had set up a table and some clipboards on lock-in night, but other than that, what was there for them to do? The question had been rhetorical up until now.
They passed by the list of demands again, as if they hadn’t memorized it days ago. They read the uncrossed items and racked their brains, trying to ignore Marisa’s scowl.
Zaira Jacobson, for one, knew exactly what she could do. Get the press back. She opened up her social media accounts, which had been verified and seen a hundredfold increase in followers as the lone journalistic correspondent inside the building. She wrote: Marisa seriously hurt at CIS. Doors remain closed. She watched the attention grow, the eyeballs turn back toward them.
4
8:50AM
Mr. Gigs sensed something different about his first period class, then remembered the leg. It made sense that the room was full of nervous energy, especially with the reporters intermittently shouting questions from the windows, their voices faint and muffled by the thick glass and the storm, which had picked up in the last hour.
Rather than try to hold his students’ attention, Mr. Gigs put on some music and told them to work on any assignments they had due soon. He turned his own attention to essays his outside-the-building students had already submitted, clicking away every now and then to search for flight prices.
He didn’t care where, he just wanted to go somewhere remote and beautiful and quiet, where nothing would be needed from him other than to read his books and to enjoy sitting uninterrupted for hours at a time.
* * *
In the back row, Celeste fiddled with her phone under her desk. People were whispering to each other, had huddled their desks together in the corners. To Mr. Gigs maybe it looked like they were working on a group project, though he didn’t want to know for sure, so he didn’t ask. Celeste wondered what ideas they were coming up with, wondered if they were even going to help or were just gossiping. She hadn’t been invited into any of these small circles, but now wasn’t the time to think about the exclusion.
Mr. Gigs looked toward the class as if to shush them, but instead reached for his speakers and turned the music up a notch. This gave Celeste the permission she was looking for and she called her dad’s phone. He answered on the third ring.
Her parents had stopped picking up breathlessly when she called, voices fraught with worry. They checked in by phone several times a day, along with their visits to the school to bring her clothes and food. “Hey, baby,” he said. She could hear the shuffle of the metro system in the background as he made