really. But still he came and sat and kept her company.
Kids who’d before avoided her now found themselves wandering into the basement looking for a hidden escape, either from the building or from their boredom. They found Lolo, and rather than flee, they sat and talked to her.
As lonesome as the lock-in could be, at night especially, hours and hours of no one down there but her, it hadn’t been all that lonely. Though it hadn’t ended yet, she had to remind herself. It was hard to feel that opening the door wasn’t ending it.
“Okay,” she said to Amira, not exactly thinking of whether Amira was lying or whether Marisa’s demands would really have a better chance of being met if Amira ran to somewhere with Wi-Fi. Lolo could only think of what would happen when she let Amira out, closed the door behind her, and would have to wrap the chains back around her body, would have to snap the padlocks shut again. Would she resist the urge to go run and hug Joy and the others? Would she resist the urge to just walk, to feel that simple freedom she’d denied herself all week?
She reached into the secret pocket at her hip and pulled out the key, marveling that she hadn’t felt tempted to use it even once.
* * *
When Amira stepped out into the fresh air, she resisted the urge to close her eyes and hold her hands out, catch raindrops on her tongue, feel the wonder of being alive in the world, with its perfect mix of oxygen and nitrogen, its climate, the smell of trees breathing on her behalf, the mad rush of people within it doing the best they could to live, a lot of it without caring for how it changed others’ lives. She didn’t pause to appreciate the moment: being reborn into the world.
No, Amira just started running. She ran to the school gate, and before the security guard could ask for a pass, she reached for the door and sped out, leaving the guard to wonder how much trouble he would get into if he simply didn’t report the incident.
Amira turned the corner and picked up speed, feeling at once freed and like she was being forced to flee her home. But there was also the unmistakable joy she’d somehow forgotten about. Her knees creaked and her legs burned much earlier than they had since she was very, very young, and she thought to herself, Oh, right. I used to have this.
She could go anywhere, run for miles and miles, do all the things she’d meant to on lock-in night, all the things she’d trained for. She could run home and tell her mom: Look what I can do. Though she didn’t, and she was sure that was another sin her mother would hold against her.
But every step carried her farther away from Marisa, too, from the lock-in, from the Amira that existed at CIS and toward the Amira that had to exist at home. Each time her feet hit the pavement, she felt a jolt of pain, of distance tearing through her. She tensed her jaw and ran harder, down a street she’d never been on before except on a car or bus.
People she passed by—the mechanic in his shop rubbing oil off his fingers with an already-soiled rag, the lady selling fruit on the corner—took in her appearance, identified her as one of the students from the rich school down the street and thought, What now?
In the distance, Amira could see the coffee shop chain’s gawdy sign. There was nothing else to do, she thought, but to push her body to its limits, to run as fast as she could as if it would bring her closer to Marisa, not take her farther way.
* * *
The bell rang again, signifying the start of third period. No one paid it any mind, except the teachers, who wondered how it was still operational with the power out. What mechanism did it use to function, they wondered, and how did it know when to ring, since certainly the clock that kept its time was digital. They stood around in the halls and asked themselves the question, forgetting in the darkened building to herd the students into the classrooms. There’d be time enough for that, they thought.
All they had was time nowadays. They couldn’t access their lesson plans and presentations, anyway, couldn’t print out backup worksheets. The students were in no rush to