Read Online Trapped by Michael Northrop - Free Book Online Page B

the phones were dead, the school was losing heat, and it was still snowing. Apart from that, everything was great.
    “I’ve got to take a leak,” Jason was saying.
    “Well, hurry up,” said Pete. “I’ve got to drop one.”
    The ground rules had been established last night. One person in the bathroom at a time, in order to avoid pissing on each other’s feet or brushing against something you shouldn’t.
    “There’s only so fast I can drain it in the dark,” said Jason.
    “I’m serious, man,” said Pete. “I’m turtling.”
    I laughed, just because that’s such a nasty word. Turtling: when the turd starts poking its head out. And if you’re thinking that’s not the kind of thing Pete would say around Julie, you’re right. The girls were in their own little group. We were clustered together loosely, in groups of ones, twos, and threes. No teachers, no classes, but the cliques remained. We were in little groups drifting inside a larger one. We were like the organs in an amoeba, like the mitochondria, which are the “sites of energy production through ATP.” I was fairly sure we wouldn’t be having that biology test on Friday.
    Krista and Julie were down by the drinking fountain. One of them had a toothbrush and toothpaste and they were taking turns with it. I didn’t know a single guy who would bring a toothbrush to school, but chicks were different. I ran my finger along my teeth to see if I still had any Oreo bits in there.
    Les was on his own, acting like he didn’t care that none of his delinquent buddies were here. All I could say to that was, Thank the Lord. Les on his own was bad news, but he’d been sort of OK so far. There were three of us, all sophomore guys, all friends. We were a natural group and we outnumbered him, but even then, we gave him his space and laughed at the few lame jokes he made.
    Elijah was on his own too, but then he always was. He was hanging out at the far edge of things, like Pluto on those maps of the solar system: just watching, not even really a planet. He was always watching like that, like there was something sort of amusing going on. He was doing it now. Maybe there was something funny about all this, but I didn’t see it.
    “Oh, man …” said Pete.
    “Just go to the second floor,” I said. There were bathrooms on either end of the second floor in the main building. And since they were on either end of the floor, they had windows. “At least you’ll be able to see to wipe.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Good idea.”
    He waddled toward the end of the hall, and I walked over to the drinking fountain to see if I could score some toothpaste. “Proper dental hygiene” was honestly the least of my problems, but it seemed like one I could do something about. Just a dab of their Aquafresh on my fingertip and a few seconds at the fountain …
    Then we’d have to move on to the bigger problem, the one we hadn’t talked much about yet. I couldn’t ignore it now, though. I felt hollow, almost a little sick. My body was telling me it was time to eat. My stomach had been growling for as long as I’d been up. We’d missed dinner last night and now we were missing breakfast. We’d need food soon. There were seven of us. We’d need a lot of it.

TWELVE
    No need to overthink things. If you’re looking for food in a high school, there’s one place to go.
    “It’s got to be locked,” Julie was saying. “This whole place is locked up tight.”
    “It’ll be, like, double locked,” said Pete. “Those big double doors and then the door to the kitchen.”
    “Dude, we could just hop the counter,” said Jason.
    “OK, but we still have to get through those honkin’ metal doors,” said Pete.
    “Which ones?”
    “You know, where we go in. Where the line is.”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “We could break the glass in the little windows.”
    Les perked up, looked over.
    “I don’t think it works like that, like on TV,” said Jason. “There’s no door handle on those