Student Body (Nightmare Hall) Read online

  But we tried, anyway. The water was in gallon jugs. We ripped the caps off and splashed it wildly, one bottle after another. Nat and I tackled the large bush, while Hoop and Eli tried desperately to swing their jugs upward, high enough to dampen the pine tree ahead of us. Bay did the same with the pine tree to our left.

  It was hopeless. Even as, screaming crazily, we raced about with our pitifully ineffective jugs, the flames in the pine tree jumped like scampering squirrels to the tree beside it, which immediately exploded into an inferno. Flames lit up the sky.

  Embers from the bush had already leaped sideways into a larger bush beside it, and Nat and I were out of water. The jugs were empty.

  The wind didn’t help. It roared around us, whipping the flames into a frenzy, yanking them from treetop to treetop, from bush to bush, darting every few minutes or so back down to our fire to scoop up even more red-hot embers and toss them into the woods.

  When the sky above us was red with fire and the heat was becoming intense, Bay ran back to Nat and me, waving his empty jug and shouting, “We’ve got to get out of here!” He gestured toward the ring of bushes beside us, completely engulfed in flames now and the pine trees in front of us, roaring a protest as the fire swallowed them up. “If we don’t leave now, we’ll be trapped in here. Don’t leave your jugs behind! Don’t leave anything behind. There can’t be any sign that we were here! Hurry up!”

  Later, it would strike me how amazing it was that even as we stood there, sweating and panic-stricken, our very lives threatened, Bay had the presence of mind to think about the peril of leaving evidence behind. This, I told myself when I did think of it, is why everyone trusts Bay. Because he thinks of everything.

  And later still, I would change my mind. I would think that if we hadn’t trusted Bay in the first place, none of it would have happened. But that was unfair. We all went to the park. We all watched and helped as the campfire was built. And we all relaxed after a while and closed our eyes.

  When no one moved in response to Bay’s order, he shouted, “We can’t be found here! Even if we’re not killed, they’ll know we did it! We’ve got to get out of here right now!”

  Snapping out of our shock and fear, we grabbed our stuff and ran.

  Chapter 2

  I REMEMBER ONLY TWO things about that race through the woods. I remember the sound of the flames exploding above us as they leaped from treetop to treetop, and I remember trying desperately to keep my footing as I ran. The ground was dry, but covered with pine needles and every bit as slippery as mud. Nat, running ahead of me, was wearing smooth-soled flats, and having a terrible time remaining upright. She kept clutching at tree limbs and bushes to maintain her balance, and that was slowing her down. Eli, seeing her struggle, raced past me and grabbed her elbow to propel her along the path.

  I don’t remember anything else. Sometimes I think of it as a movie I’m watching: six good friends who, only minutes before, had been having a wonderful time, now tearing through the dense, dark woods, their only light the orange-red glow of the flames racing to catch up with them. Someone is sobbing … the tall, thin girl wearing a short skirt and sweater so unsuitable for running through the woods? Someone else is shouting in a deep, authoritative voice. It’s the tall, good-looking boy, telling everyone to “hurry up, hurry up, I think I hear sirens already. If they catch us …” That boy’s the hero, I think as I watch my movie. He sounds like one. Looks like one, too, and he’s giving the orders.

  So who is the heroine, I wonder. There’s always a heroine. I know it’s not the small girl in jeans and a red sweater and sneakers, the girl with long, dark hair flying around her terrified face, because I know that’s me, and I’m not a heroine. And I don’t think it’s the girl who’s slipping and sliding all over the place, because she’s wearing the wrong kind of shoes for a needle-strewn path in the woods. A heroine wouldn’t be wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

  Maybe it’s the beautiful girl with hair that is smooth in spite of the horrendous wind and the heat and the frantic dash along the rough, winding path. A true movie heroine wouldn’t let her hair get messed up, so maybe it’s her. But she’s crying. Not crying in an attractive, tears-sliding-gently-down-the-cheeks crying, Hollywood-style, but crying in huge, loud gulps. Her mouth is open and her nose is running. So maybe she’s not the heroine. Maybe there isn’t one in this movie.

  They race along the path, the small group trying to escape the terrible roar of the flames chasing them. They stumble a lot on the uneven surface, and the girl in the sweater and skirt would have fallen repeatedly if the tall, thin boy with long, dark brown hair wasn’t gripping her elbow so tightly. His lips are clamped together tightly, his gray eyes grim, but he doesn’t let go of her elbow.

  The faster they run, the faster the flames seem to leap from tree to tree, the dry branches exploding instantly. The sound seems to be coming closer and closer to the runners.

  And now another sound, the shrill scream of sirens, is louder.

  The boy who might be the hero because he shouts with such authority, curses at the sirens and commands again. “Hurry up! We’ve got to get out of here before those fire trucks arrive.”

  I watch the movie playing out in my mind, see the flames spreading in a semicircle directly behind the cast, and know that they’re not going to make it. No way are they going to outrun those leaping, racing flames about to engulf them.

  But we did.

  Thanks to Bay urging us on, never letting us stop for a second to take a breath. We got to the car while the sirens were still a safe distance away.

  “We can’t go back the way we came,” Bay said grimly as we all threw ourselves into the Bus. Nat and Mindy, exhausted, tumbled in over the open tailgate, lying, gasping, on the platform created by the small third seat being down. We had put the seat down to create a level space for our cooler full of drinks, which Bay had snatched up before we raced away from the fire. The cooler had his name on the inside of the lid. “Evidence,” he would have called it.

  Eli and I slid into the front seat. He was breathing so heavily, I was afraid he was going to pass out.

  “If we go back to school the way we came, we’ll run into those sirens,” Bay continued. “Fire trucks, maybe, but the cops could be right behind them. They’ll see us. We’ll have to go the long way around.”

  None of us said anything. We couldn’t speak. We were so out of breath that it would be long minutes before any of us could say a word. It didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have known what to say, anyway. We were all in shock. The knowledge of what we’d done hadn’t sunk in yet. We weren’t acting out of thought, we were acting out of instinct.

  Awareness would come later, and with it, pain and regret and horror like none of us had ever known before.

  Bay threw the car into reverse, whipped the wheel around, and raced out of the parking lot. I turned my head just once. My stomach rolled over when I saw nothing behind us but a thick wall of flames gobbling up the park. The woods seemed to be bathed in orange light.

  In the backseat, Mindy wailed, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? They’re going to find out we did it, and we’re all going to go to jail!”

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Bay said in a strained voice I didn’t recognize. “It was the wind.”

  “Which,” Eli reminded him, “is exactly why the rangers imposed a burning ban.”

  “If you say ‘I told you so,’” Bay said from between clenched teeth, “I’ll stop the car right now and push you out myself.”

  “Sorry,” Eli said. “I guess we should just be grateful we all got out alive.”

  And that was when Natasha pulled herself to a sitting position. That was when she looked into the backseat. That was when she said in an odd, anxious voice, “Where’s Hoop?”

  The three of us in the front seat swivelled.

  Hoop was not sitting in the backseat.

  But he should have been. He was supposed to be there, gasping for breath like
the rest of us, sweaty and scared, his hair windblown.

  Only he wasn’t. The backseat was empty. The rest of us stared, refusing to believe the horrible fact that was beginning to dawn on us.

  One of us was missing.

  One of us hadn’t made it out of the fire.

  Chapter 3

  BAY STARED AT THE empty backseat for so long, the car veered off the road onto the shoulder, scattering pebbles everywhere. He cursed, whipped his head to the front, and clutched the wheel tightly as he wrestled the Bus back onto the highway.

  But Eli and I were still staring at the backseat, where there was no Hoop.

  “Nat, he’s not back there with you?” I asked. My voice sounded tinny, as if it were whining through a bad telephone connection.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Mindy, you were with him,” Eli said. His voice sounded as weird as mine. “You were running along the path with him. Didn’t he stay with you? Where is he?” Before Nat could answer, Eli said, “Bay, stop the car! Stop it, now!”

  Bay screeched to a halt on the highway.

  “Mindy?” the three of us said in one voice.

  “I don’t know where he is!” she wailed. “I was so scared! He was behind me in the beginning, and I just thought he was still behind me, I was too scared to turn around and look.”

  No one said anything. We sat in the car in a stunned, sick silence while the sirens nearing the park grew louder.

  “Bay,” Eli said calmly, his voice normal now, “turn the car around. We have to go back.”

  “Sure, sure we do,” Bay agreed hurriedly, nodding. “Hoop must have fallen. That path was slippery. But,” he peered out the windshield, “there isn’t enough room here to turn around. I’ll have to go on up ahead, look for a side road.”

  Eli sat up very straight, one hand on the dashboard. “There’s no time for that,” he protested. “If Hoop fell and he’s in the middle of that fire … Come on, Bay, just back up onto the shoulder and turn around. It’s okay, there’s no traffic coming. We can’t waste time looking for a turnaround now. We’ve got to get back to the park.”

  Still Bay didn’t back up. He just sat there, the engine running, his foot on the brake. I knew he was probably biting on his lower lip, something he always does when he’s concentrating.

  It was Mindy who said what everyone wanted to hear. “Hoop can take care of himself.” She sat up. Her voice was low, almost a whisper, but composed. She sounded like an authority on Hoop, which, of course, she was. “He’s a super athlete, remember? I don’t know how he got separated from us, but he’ll be okay on his own. Really. He will.”

  When no one argued with her, because we wanted to believe what she was saying, her voice gained strength. “Hoop wouldn’t want us to go back there. He wouldn’t want us to risk everything, risk getting thrown out of school, maybe even tossed into jail, when he can take perfectly good care of himself. He’s probably already back at the frat house, waiting for us. He spends a lot of time running in those woods and knows a lot of shortcuts back to school. He must have found one.”

  “If he’d found a shortcut,” Eli said evenly, “he would have taken us with him.”

  “What probably happened,” Mindy persisted, “is that Hoop got separated from us by the smoke and the flames, and by the time he found one of the shortcuts, we were too far ahead of him. And now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I did hear someone yelling behind us. But we were all making so much noise, I didn’t realize it was Hoop. If we’d paid attention and gone with him, we’d all be back on campus by now, too.”

  I could feel Eli wrestling with Mindy’s theory. He wanted to believe her, as we all did.

  Eli didn’t have any family. He was the only one of us who had no one. He was struggling to put himself through school with the help of scholarships and summer jobs and a part-time job in the cafeteria at Devereaux where Nat and I roomed. That’s where I’d met him, and then he had introduced me to Bay and the others.

  We all knew how important college was to Eli. With his brilliant mind, it would be positively obscene for him to miss out on a college education.

  And everything he’d worked so hard and so long for would go straight down the toilet if we went looking for Hoop and got caught in the park now.

  “You really think he found a shortcut?” he asked Mindy, a trace of hope in his voice.

  “Yes,” she said, tentatively at first, then she repeated it with more emphasis. “Yes. I’m sure he did. If he hadn’t, he’d be in the car right now, wouldn’t he?”

  We were all thinking, Unless something happened to him. I waited for someone to say it, but no one did.

  It wasn’t only Bay and Eli who had a lot to lose if we got caught. Mindy had been groomed by her mother since she was two years old to win every beauty pageant that existed. She’d already won several. Some people think that’s silly, but there are girls and mothers like that out there, or the pageants would have died out a long time ago. Mindy’s mother had been Miss Cotton Ball or something like that a million years ago. She was determined that Mindy would not only follow in her footsteps, but end up taking the biggest crown there was, maybe Miss Planet or Miss Deep Space Nine or something. Dance lessons, singing lessons, baton lessons, Miss Totters School of Etiquette for Young Ladies, that had been Mindy’s life when she was growing up. It sounded repulsive to me, but Mindy was used to it. And by now, almost as determined as her mother to take home a houseful of sparkling crowns.

  Someone who had been expelled from college for starting a forest fire didn’t stand a chance of being elected dogcatcher, much less picked to represent the entire planet as an example of fine, upstanding Young Womanhood.

  Still, Mindy was in love with Hoop. So I figured she really must have been convinced he was safe, or she’d insist that we go back.

  As for Nat, what college meant to her was a chance to become a doctor. Her younger sister, Dorie, had juvenile diabetes. Nat had made up her mind years before to study medicine and help her sister. Of all of us, only Nat was more determined than Bay to succeed in college and go on to the goal she’d had in mind since she was ten.

  Me, I had my own reasons for not wanting to go back. My family had moved from Texas to Rochester, New York, when I was in high school, and I’d been scared to death of attending a huge new school. I was also absolutely certain that I was the ugliest, dullest, fifteen-year-old to ever grace the continent. Why would anyone attractive or popular or smart want to be my friend? So, I sought out in my new school the most unsavory, unattractive, unpopular group I could find.

  I won’t go into the grubby details, except to say that I narrowly escaped being thrown out of school on several occasions, narrowly escaped being tossed out of my own house by my exasperated, disappointed parents, and very narrowly escaped ruining my entire life.

  What turned me around was a car wreck involving four of my friends. Drinking was involved. I wasn’t in the car at the time, because I’d been grounded for the nine-millionth time that year. But one of my friends died.

  It was a very sobering, scary experience.

  I got my act together, and applied to Salem University in upstate New York. The day I was accepted I felt I’d been given a fresh start.

  I loved Salem, loved its beautiful, rolling green lawns, its tall, red brick buildings, loved the sprawling green Commons where on nice days we all lay on blankets studying, talking, joking around. I even liked all of my classes. I was grateful every single day that I hadn’t thrown away my life.

  Being caught near the park now would do that, though. I’d be right back where I was in high school, only this time I didn’t think my parents would be so forgiving. They were thrilled and relieved by my “adjustment” to college, ecstatic about my grades, and liked my new friends, whom they’d met on Parents’ Day.

  I couldn’t imagine calling my folks to say I’d been thrown out of school, or that I was in jail. They had probably anticipated a phone call like that once upon a time, bu
t not now. Their hopes for me were up again, and if I blew those hopes out of the water, I didn’t see how they could ever forgive me.

  We all had our reasons for not wanting to return to the park.

  So we listened to Mindy and let her convince us. We told ourselves that after all, Mindy loved Hoop and would be the last person in the world to abandon him if she thought he wasn’t safe.

  We sat there on the highway in Bay’s old car, hearing the sirens closing in on the park entrance, telling ourselves that our friend, Hoop Sinclair, was already safely back on campus.

  “I think,” Nat said then, “that we should just find a phone and call the frat house and make sure that Hoop is there, safe and sound, okay? There’s probably a phone right up ahead, so if he isn’t at the Sigma house we can turn right around and go back to look for him.”

  We all agreed that her idea made sense. Why turn around and risk running into the police when a simple phone call would tell us what we needed to know? There would be a phone just up ahead, so what kind of time were we talking about? Only a minute or two.

  It was actually five minutes or more before we spotted a highway telephone. By that time one of us, I don’t remember who, pointed out that we were so close to campus now, we might just as well take another minute or two to go the rest of the way and check at the Sigma house in person. Each of us had called there at one time or another, and the house was so chaotic, so unorganized, that it often took many minutes for someone to locate Hoop and send him to the phone. We didn’t want to waste all that time, we told each other.

  So we drove on.

  When we got to the frat house, we found a really raucous party going on in celebration of Salem’s basketball triumph earlier that night. People were clustered on the lawn in front of the big, columned, white house, lights blazed inside, and music blared through the open front door.