Student Body (Nightmare Hall) Read online

  But I must have dozed off, after all, because I never did hear the timer go off. I just all of a sudden became conscious that the sound of that timer steadily ticking away the minutes had ended.

  I opened my eyes.

  The tanning lights were still on.

  But the timer was at zero. Ten minutes, at least, had passed. I wasn’t wearing a watch and couldn’t be sure just how much time had passed, but my skin was beginning to feel hot and dry.

  I couldn’t sit up because of the closed lid. But the attendant had carefully explained to us how to turn the lid lever sideways to push it open.

  I was getting very warm. Beads of sweat dampened my bangs.

  I reached up, turned the lever, pushed on the lid to open it.

  Nothing happened.

  The lid didn’t open.

  I pushed again, harder this time. Sweat beaded my upper lip.

  The lid remained in place.

  I used both hands, pushing with all of my strength. I put my back muscles to work, my shoulders, pushing, pushing, grunting with the effort, pushing, pushing …

  The lid refused to open.

  Now, I could feel my skin burning. Remembering Mindy’s warning, I knew how important it was that I get free of the tanning capsule.

  But I couldn’t.

  I was trapped.

  Chapter 7

  WHILE I CONTINUED PUSHING with all my might, I tried to control my panic enough to remember what the attendant had told us about the failsafe controls located inside the capsule. A button, she’d said. There was supposed to be a small, red button I could push to set off an alarm if something went wrong. Something had definitely gone wrong. Where was that button?

  There! There it was sitting right in the middle of the lid.

  I stabbed it.

  And waited.

  Nothing happened. No one yanked the lid open and set me free.

  My skin felt as if I were being roasted over a campfire, like the hot dogs from the night before.

  I jabbed the button again, and at the same time, I yelled. At the top of my lungs. And once I started yelling, I couldn’t stop. I screamed for Mindy, for Bay, for Eli, for Nat. I even yelled Hoop’s name, forgetting.

  My screams bounced around uselessly inside the capsule, and no one came.

  The tanning lights were supposed to go off when the timer did. That’s what the attendant had told us would happen. Then she had said that if they didn’t, an alarm would go off and she would hear it, and if that didn’t happen, we could push the red button ourselves to summon help.

  Not only had my alarm not gone off, neither had my tanning “rays.” I couldn’t tell what color my skin was under their pinkish glow, but I had a sinking feeling from the way my face and arms felt, that I was already lobster-red, just as Nat had predicted. My skin felt potato-chip crisp, as if every last bit of moisture had been sucked from it. And my face was beginning to hurt.

  Breathing hard, I gave up on the lid and lay back down in the capsule. My head ached, and my skin felt as if it were too small for my body, as if it might split at any second and I’d explode like the hot dog Nat had left on her stick too long last night.

  Eventually, I knew, my friends, free of their own capsules, would realize that I wasn’t with them. They would come, then, to set me free.

  But what would my skin look like by then? I’d been told the same horror stories about sun damage that the rest of my generation had. I’d stopped lying out in the backyard during the summer three years earlier. I didn’t want to look ninety years old when I was only sixty, and I didn’t want skin cancer, and I especially didn’t want ugly, oozing blisters, which was what a friend of mine in high school had had when she’d fallen asleep at the beach. What a disgusting mess she’d been for weeks afterward.

  I did not want that.

  Spurred on by the image of my friend’s blistered, oozing back and shoulders, I lifted my legs and flung them at the lid, kicking with as much force as I could muster. The skin on my thighs felt so dry and stiff, I half-expected to hear ripping sounds as I kicked out.

  The lid didn’t fly open, as I’d hoped. And I heard nothing from outside. Nothing.

  So I kicked again, harder this time. The capsule shook with the force of the blow. But what good did that do me? Even if my silver prison had shaken so visibly on its metal legs, no one would have seen it. Each capsule was hidden behind a black velvet curtain.

  I realized then that the ventilation system wasn’t working any better than the lid latch or the red button. Because the tanning salon wasn’t out to suffocate anyone, there was air in the capsules. At least, there was supposed to be. But my chest hurt and my head ached. Breathing was becoming very difficult.

  This whole capsule had malfunctioned and if I didn’t do something, I was going to be seriously malfunctioning, too.

  I didn’t have a whole lot of choices. Yelling hadn’t worked, kicking at the lid had done no good at all, and it wasn’t as if I could pick up a telephone and call for help.

  I began doing the only thing I could think of … throwing myself against the side of the capsule in an effort to tip it over. Maybe if the capsule crashed to the ground, the impact would force the lid open, like a car door flying open when hit by another car.

  And even if that didn’t happen, if I was successful and the capsule tipped over onto the floor, someone would hear the noise, wouldn’t they?

  I was using every ounce of concentration I had to keep from screaming. Now, I switched that concentration and energy into throwing myself with all my might repeatedly against the side of the capsule.

  I only weigh a hundred and ten pounds. But I was angry and frantic for air, and desperate. After three or four hefty tries, I felt the capsule shaking vigorously. After two more slams against the wall, it tipped slightly. Two more, which hurt my burning skin, and it teetered precariously. I was afraid of what would happen to me in the impact when the capsule hit the ground, but I was a lot more terrified of either suffocating or burning to a crisp. So I kept slamming my body sideways.

  I became completely caught up in my frantic ritual and wasn’t really thinking anymore. Just rolling to one side and then heaving myself back in the other direction to slam against the wall, then repeating the motion over and over again.

  When the capsule finally went over, I wasn’t prepared.

  When it toppled over slowly and heavily and slammed on its side onto the tiled floor, the blow dazed my overheated brain and it took me a few seconds to understand that I had succeeded. Another few to notice that the lid had indeed snapped open and that I was staring straight into the back wall of my cubicle.

  Gasping for breath and shaking my head to clear it, I crawled slowly, painfully, out of the tanning capsule.

  And saw someone’s leg darting through the black curtain.

  Aside from the fact that no one else should have been in my cubicle—because if they had been, why hadn’t they helped me—there was something else about the leg that stunned me. It wasn’t wearing jeans or shorts or a skirt and it wasn’t bare, as if the person it belonged to had been tanning. Instead, it was wrapped, from the bottom of the foot to the top of the knee, which was all I caught a glimpse of, in thick white bandages.

  Like a mummy.

  Those tanning rays must have done something to my brain.

  A minute later, the curtain was pulled aside and Bay stood there, looking down at me in disbelief. His face, I noticed, was nicely bronzed. But then, he’d probably been able to leave his capsule at exactly the right moment. Unlike me.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” he asked. “What happened to your capsule?” Then, “Hey, Tory, you’re red as a beet! What’s going on?”

  Good question.

  I wasn’t crying or sobbing or hysterical when he helped me out of the booth. I cried out once when he touched my beet-red shoulder, but that was all. If I’d been thinking about what had almost happened to me, I probably would have been screaming.

 
; But it wouldn’t be until much, much later that I would start shaking as the impact of what had happened sank in.

  For now, the question still was, Why had I been inside that capsule for so long? What had gone wrong?

  We mulled that over on the way back to campus. The attendant had insisted repeatedly, in a slightly snide tone of voice, that there was no way the alarm wouldn’t have gone off had I actually been locked inside the capsule. She seemed to be saying that I’d only pretended to be locked in.

  As if anyone would do something so stupid.

  To get attention, she hinted.

  Oh, yeah, sure. Wouldn’t we all risk serious burns and horrible pain just to get attention? I may not be the most noticeable person in the world, but I’d have to be seriously insane to choose second-degree burns all over my body as a way of standing out in a crowd.

  “You could have ended up in the hospital!” the attendant said, her upper lip curling slightly as she frantically checked and double-checked all the wiring, the levers, the buttons, on my capsule. “Don’t you realize how dangerous overdoing it can be? If you’ve broken this capsule, you’ll have to pay for it.”

  She could find nothing wrong with the capsule. She also found no sign of malfunction.

  Worse than anything was that I wasn’t even sure my friends believed me.

  “I couldn’t get out,” I repeated when we were in the car. “I tried. I pushed and kicked and shoved, but that lid was not about to move. Something was wrong with it.”

  “You look like a lobster,” Nat said from the backseat. “I told you you would. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

  Exactly what I was asking myself. “I also pushed the alarm button,” I insisted. “Nothing happened.”

  “The attendant checked it,” Bay said. “Couldn’t find anything wrong with it. You sure you’re okay?”

  No, I was definitely not okay. I’d been removed from the hot coals a few minutes too late. My entire body was on fire, and inside, I was shaking. I wondered if I was going to blister.

  And then I thought of Hoop.

  What I was feeling now, he had to be feeling ten thousand times worse.

  “I want to go to the hospital,” I said suddenly.

  “You feel that bad?” Eli asked, alarm in his voice. He’d changed his mind and left his capsule after two minutes, and like Nat, had no tan, although his cheekbones had a nice glow to them. Mindy didn’t have any color, either. She admitted that once inside the booth she’d changed her mind, and just lay there, thinking about Hoop.

  “No, I don’t feel that bad,” I answered Eli. “But I want to see Hoop.”

  “We can’t,” he reminded me. “They won’t let us.”

  “We’re his best friends, Eli,” I said through stiff, stinging lips. I turned to Bay. “Please. Just for a few minutes. Maybe he’s much better.”

  “Tory, I want to see Hoop, too,” Mindy said, leaning over the front seat. “But you really should go to the infirmary and get something for your sunburn.”

  I’d forgotten that Mindy was with us. There went my visit to Hoop. We could not take Mindy to the hospital. The minute she saw that her handsome, athletic boyfriend had become a mummy, she’d freak. She’d probably start shrieking wildly that it was our fault, all our fault.

  We couldn’t risk that.

  “Okay, Mindy’s right,” I said hastily before Bay could turn the car toward the Medical Center. “We wouldn’t be allowed to see Hoop, anyway. Take me to the infirmary instead, please, Bay.”

  I’d go back to see Hoop later, by myself.

  “What do you think happened back there at the salon?” Eli asked me quietly. “I mean, any ideas about why you couldn’t get out of that capsule?”

  “The lid was probably just stuck,” Bay interjected. “The attendant said that happens sometimes. That’s why they have the alarm buttons inside the lid.”

  “It wasn’t stuck,” I disagreed. “I’m not as puny as I look. If it was just stuck, I could have kicked it open. And even if it was stuck, that doesn’t explain why the alarm button didn’t work. Did you see that wire leading from the top of the lid to the button? It looked like it would have been really easy to disconnect it. The ventilation system stopped working, too. I could have suffocated.”

  “Tory!” Nat’s voice. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” I said firmly, “that I don’t think I was accidentally trapped inside that capsule. If the attendant wants to believe it was my own fault because she’s terrified of a lawsuit, let her. But I’m telling you, someone, somehow, trapped me in that thing and disconnected the alarm button on purpose.”

  Once I’d said the words aloud, I realized that I’d believed it from that first, scary moment when the lid wouldn’t open.

  They all fell silent, thinking about what I’d just said.

  I knew how bizarre it sounded. But there were so many switches, so many gizmos, so many levers on that capsule, any one of them could have been tampered with.

  Then I remembered that I’d seen someone darting out of my cubicle.

  “Did any of you guys see someone with a bandaged leg walk by while you were waiting in the lobby?” I asked.

  “A bandaged leg?” Nat thought for a second. “No. Tory, why would someone with a bandaged leg be getting a tan? Wouldn’t they look a little silly when the bandages came off and one leg was tan and one wasn’t? What a question.”

  I’d been upset, almost hysterical when I crawled out of that capsule. How could I be sure of what I’d seen? If anyone had been in that cubicle, bandaged or not, they would have seen that I was in trouble, and let me out.

  So, when Nat said after a minute or two, “Tory? You really think someone locked you in that capsule on purpose?” I did a complete about-face.

  “No, no, of course not,” I said hastily. “That’s a really crazy idea.’ I guess those tanning rays must have melted my brain. I’m sure the attendant was right. I must have pushed the wrong button, turned the wrong lever, whatever. Forget it. Maybe the doctor at the infirmary can give me something for my brain meltdown, too.”

  Relief filled the car. They’d been as repelled as I was by the idea of someone deliberately locking me in that capsule. Didn’t we already have enough to worry about?

  “Mindy,” I said, changing the subject, “we need to fill you in on the story we’re going to tell everyone about last night.” I told her what we’d made up, about Hoop running off in a flash of anger.

  At first, she balked. “That’s like blaming Hoop!” she cried. “It’s like saying it was his temper that put him in the hospital. That’s not true, and it’s not fair.”

  “May I remind you,” I said icily, “that it was your idea not to go back and look for him? That you were the one who insisted that Hoop would be just fine on his own in that fire?”

  Mindy let out a dismayed gasp. So did Nat, and I could feel Eli’s questioning eyes on my face.

  I hated myself.

  But it was true, wasn’t it? Mindy knew Hoop better than any of us, and she had insisted he’d be okay. Well, she’d been wrong, hadn’t she?

  If it crossed my mind that she was probably being tortured by the same exact thought, I ignored it. It was more important now that Mindy go along with the story we’d made up than to worry about her feelings. We couldn’t let her ruin everything.

  “Look, everyone knows that Hoop has a temper,” I said patiently, even though what I really felt like doing was screaming. My skin burned fiercely, I was still upset about having been locked in that capsule, and I wanted all of this horror over Hoop to disappear. I didn’t feel like dealing with Mindy. But if she caved in and told anyone the truth, we were all dead. “No one will question our story, Mindy. People have seen him lose his temper too many times.”

  I’ll never know whether or not my comments changed Mindy’s mind, or if what happened next changed it for her. Because when we arrived back on campus, the place was crawling with cops. There were black-and-whites lined
up outside the administration building, Butler Hall, and a couple of official-looking cars with the state logo on the doors, plus two brown and cream state police cars. Everywhere we looked, there seemed to be people in uniform, on the walkways, on the Commons, going in and out of the dorms.

  Bay drove slowly, as we all stared in apprehension.

  “I thought Twin Falls had a tiny police force,” Nat murmured.

  “They’re not all Twin Falls,” Eli said. “Some are state police, some are campus security, and I think the guys in white shirts and navy blue pants might be arson investigators. It’s a state park, remember? The fire isn’t just a local matter.”

  Mindy groaned, and leaning over the front seat again, said quickly, “Okay, okay, I’ll go with that story.”

  My stiff, aching body went weak with relief.

  The doctor at the infirmary said I wouldn’t blister. She shook her head in disapproval at what she called “youthful vanity,” and warned me away from the tanning salon. As if that was necessary.

  She told me I was “a very lucky young woman,” gave me a tube of salve to apply to the most painful spots, and dismissed me.

  It was Saturday. I hadn’t spent a Saturday night alone since I’d met Eli, and then Bay and the others. But when we separated at Devereaux, no one said a word about doing anything that night, not even Bay. I could have leaned in through the open car window after I got out and said, “See you tonight?” but something wouldn’t let me. The fire had damaged more than the park and Hoop. It had done something to our little group, too. Our easy, trusting attitude toward each other was gone.

  Maybe we were all just too shell-shocked to think about going out and having fun. Whatever the reason, Nat and I got out of the car without saying good-bye. All I said as I left was, “Remember, Mindy, don’t screw this up, okay?”

  She nodded, but she looked hurt.

  “That was kind of mean,” Nat commented as we went inside. “She already promised that she’d go along with the story.”