Student Body (Nightmare Hall) (2 page)

As if he’d read my mind, Bay said suddenly, “There’s never been a forest fire in the park.”

Eli looked up with interest. He’d been silently studying the floorboards ever since we left the convenience store. The only conversation had been coming from the backseat where Hoop was giving Nat and Mindy a play-by-play description of the game. As Hoop continued talking, Eli leaned across me and said to Bay, “How do you know that? That there haven’t been any forest fires in the park?”

“I asked. One of the rangers was tacking up a poster, and I asked him how long it had been since they’d had a fire, and he said they’d never had one. So you can quit worrying, Eli. I know that’s what you’re doing. I can feel it. You’re going to spoil our celebration and make me wish I’d left you back on campus.”

Eli tried. I could almost feel him trying. He sank back against the seat and stretched out his long legs and whistled under his breath, as if he were the most relaxed person in the world.

But a little pulse at his temple was throbbing and the high, perfectly sculpted cheekbones in his thin, narrow face were flushed with red.

I found myself turning my head to glance at Bay, whose eyes were on the road ahead of him. It was so like Bay to insist on the park even though he’d actually talked to a ranger about the burning ban. That ranger had probably added a warning or two of his own. If that conversation had been with any of the rest of us, we would have changed our plans and gone to Johnny’s or Vinnie’s instead.

Why hadn’t Bay? It wasn’t as if he was constantly looking for risky things to do. He’d meant what he said about not screwing up in college. Was it just his unwillingness to change his plans that kept him driving toward the park?

“We could still go dancing,” I said quietly over the sound of Hoop’s triumphant voice from the backseat. “I mean, maybe the park’s closed. Wouldn’t they close it if there really was a fire hazard?”

“No,” Eli said flatly before Bay could answer. “People do a lot of things in the park besides sit around a fire. They hike, they jog, they take the nature trails. Or they just hang out, because it’s a great place to do that. There’s no reason why the park shouldn’t be used as long as everyone obeys the burning ban.”

“Well, thank you for that, Smokey the Bear,” Bay muttered, and expertly whipped the wheel around to take the sharp turn into the park.

We were there.

So why did I suddenly not feel like celebrating? And why did I suddenly wish fiercely that Bay had listened to Eli, turned the Bus around, and driven back to campus?

More important, why didn’t I
say
something? Why didn’t I insist that we go back? Maybe that one time I could have spoken up in a loud, authoritative voice and people would have listened. Maybe it would have made a difference.

Instead, I jumped out of the car with everyone else and carried my bag of groceries into the deepest part of the woods.

And I helped gather wood for the fire.

Then, for two hours we sat around the fire Bay and Hoop had built. I couldn’t help noticing that while they stacked the wood, Eli had busied himself selecting CDs for the portable player Bay had brought. I had to admire Eli’s stubbornness. He wasn’t making an issue of his disapproval. He just wasn’t participating in the building of the fire. I’ve wished many times since then that I’d done something, anything, to say I felt the same way.

If I had, maybe I’d feel better about what happened later.

Eli did join us around the fire though, and even said how good it felt. Late March in the northeast isn’t the tropics. And then there was the wind, whipping our hair around our faces and tugging nastily at our clothes. It was chilly out there in those deep, windblown woods.

We all sat very close together and kept the fire small. True to his word, Bay chased after the tiniest of glowing embers swept up by the wind and tossed into the forest. We cooked our hot dogs, talked about the game, made s’mores with the graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars Eli had bought, and sang to the music on the portable CD player.

And after a while all of us, even Eli, forgot about the posters on campus and the threat of detection and any possible punishment. I rested my head on Bay’s shoulder. Nat, wearing Eli’s denim jacket to protect her expensive hand-knit sweater, lay on the mossy ground, her head propped up on a folded tarp, her eyes closed, lazily snapping her fingers in time to the music playing. Mindy and Hoop were sitting so close together that, in the shadows created by the fire, their blond heads seemed to blend into one. Eli sat off to one side, his back against a tree, his long legs stretched out in front of him. His dark hair, longer than Bay’s, blew around his face, and his eyes were closed.

Content in the triumph of the game, our hunger satisfied, and lulled by the music, the red-and-orange dancing flames, and the company of good friends, we all relaxed.

That was our mistake.

Because I was leaning against Bay’s chest, I couldn’t tell that he, like Eli, had closed his eyes. Nat was lying on her back, staring up at the sky, Mindy and Hoop were looking only at each other, and I’d closed my eyes, too.

So no one saw the ember snatched up by the fierce wind and tossed recklessly into the woods, land in the very heart of a parched, dry pine tree. No one saw the second ember, or the third, or the fourth.

But there had to have been at least that many, because when Eli suddenly cried out and we all looked to see why he’d yelled, we saw fire consuming not just the tall, skinny pine tree to our right, but two more blazes taking hold of a tree directly in front of us and swallowing up a crackling bush to our left.

“The water!” Bay shouted, jumping to his feet, “grab the water bottles!”

As if the bottled water could possibly douse the fire in that tall pine tree, already roaring with flames so high above our heads. We needed a faucet, and we needed a long hose, and we knew it.

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.

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.