Student Body (Nightmare Hall) (3 page)

One of us was missing.

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

B
AY 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, but 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.

Mindy looked out the back window of the station wagon and said in a shaky voice, “I’ll never find him in all that mess. Maybe I should just go straight back to the sorority house and call from there.”

It was clear to all of us that she was suddenly afraid of what she’d learn if she went to the door and asked for Hoop. We were, too.

It was Eli who drew the line. “You are
going
up there, Mindy,” he said evenly, “and you are going to find out if Hoop is inside.”

While she was gone, we all held our breath.

She was back a few minutes later, and she was smiling. “He’s there,” she cried triumphantly as she climbed back into the car. “I told you he would be. Wow, we came so close to blowing everything, and all the time he was right here, safe. I could strangle him, though, for worrying us like that.”

Eli swivelled around to face her. “You saw Hoop? Talked to him?”

“Well, no, I didn’t. I didn’t actually
see
him. It was a madhouse in there. But I talked to Boomer, and he said he was sure he’d seen Hoop just a few minutes ago. And just to be sure, I checked with some other guys and they all said of course Hoop was there, why wouldn’t he be?”

Although Eli shook his head, the rest of us agreed that Boomer, a football player we all liked and trusted, would never have said that Hoop was there if he wasn’t. Then someone, Nat, I think, said she was really exhausted and could Bay please take us back to the dorm now, and Bay said that if Eli was still worried, he could always call the frat house and talk to Hoop himself, when he got back to his dorm.

We drove away from Sigma house.

I wondered, as we pulled away from the curb, what we would have done if Hoop
hadn’t
been there. We couldn’t have gone back to the park by then. Because the sirens had stopped. That meant the fire trucks and the police and heaven only knew who else … reporters? were already at the park.

So
we
certainly couldn’t be.

We
couldn’t.
Might as well just drive into town, walk into the police station, find a cell, step inside, and swing the door shut.

Besides, Hoop was okay.

He was in the frat house, just as Mindy had said he would be.

Y
OU’D HAVE THOUGHT THAT
we’d have been jabbering like crazy with relief as we drove away from the frat house.

But no one said a word. Because even with Hoop safe at the Sigma house, there was still the fire. We could see it now, off in the distance, turning the late night sky into a bizarre orange sunset.

I wondered how long it would take the Sigma party-goers on the lawn to notice, and what they would think when they did. If they guessed that it was a fire, they’d pile into their cars and race to the scene, creating a mess on the highway as they rubbernecked.

Why was I even thinking of that now? I had other problems.

To cover up the awkward, painful silence, Bay switched on the car radio. But instead of music, which would have helped, we heard an announcer’s voice saying,
“Repeat, this is a bulletin, just in. We have received word that a major fire is raging at this moment at the state park, in the area just west of Salem University. All citizens are being warned away from that area, and roadblocks are being set up by the state police. No casualties have been reported at this time, and word from the fire marshal is that none are expected, as the park was believed empty of visitors at the time the fire began. We will provide additional details on this late-breaking story as we receive them.”

No one commented on the news story, and our miserable silence deepened.

I was never so glad to get out of a car in my life. None of us even said good night or our usual “see you tomorrow” or mentioned any weekend plans.

All I wanted, personally, was to get away from everyone, all of them, as fast as possible. I figured they probably felt pretty much the same way. I wanted the night to be over. I wanted to go to bed and to sleep and wake up on Saturday morning believing that none of it had happened. We hadn’t gone to the park, hadn’t built a campfire, the embers hadn’t been tossed into the woods by the wind, and the state park was as peaceful and pretty as it had ever been.

But I knew it wasn’t going to be like that when I awoke on Saturday morning. No nightmare, this. All of it was real.