Student Body (Nightmare Hall) (6 page)

It turned out to be not such a lousy idea. Away from campus, away from the medical center, away from any reminders of our friend, Hoop Sinclair, we were able to pretend, for a little while, that we’d forgotten about the fire. We teased Mindy about her tendency to waffle for half an hour between a bright red lipstick and another only half a shade lighter. We played pinball in the arcade, and if Bay was slightly off his game, we pretended that was only because he was hungry. To keep pretending, we actually went to the food court and ordered pizza, which lay on our paper plates uneaten while we talked about absolutely nothing.

I was the one who suggested that we all go into the tanning salon with Mindy, who went every week to refresh her glow.” I made it sound as if it could be fun. Mindy was delighted that we were going to join her, something none of us had ever done before. But the truth was, I was afraid that if we left her alone, she’d start spouting her misery to someone in the salon. Maybe tanning salons were like beauty salons, where customers poured out their life secrets like shampoo from an open bottle.

The minute I was inside, though, I regretted my decision. The tanning machines were lidded capsules, self-contained silver boxes on legs, each in a small cubicle with a long, black curtain as a door for privacy. You had to climb inside and close the lid to get your tan.

The capsules were like coffins.

“I’m not getting inside one of those,” Nat declared as Mindy made arrangements for all of us at the desk. “Forget it. I’m claustrophobic. Besides, a tan is nothing more than skin damage. Why would I deliberately damage my own skin?”

Eli shuddered, clearly thinking of Hoop’s skin under those white bandages. But he said, “We won’t be in them that long. Ten minutes, tops. Just keeping Mindy company. How much damage can you get in ten minutes, doctor?”

But Nat was adamant. “Too much. I’ll just sit out there in the lobby and read outdated fashion magazines. Don’t complain to me if you overdo and end up looking like lobsters. You’ll get no sympathy from me.” She turned and retreated to the lobby.

The attendant explained to the rest of us the safety features of the tanning machines, how this latch worked and that little gizmo flipped sideways, and then she showed us how the controls worked. When she thought we had it all down pat, she gave us clean, white wraparound towels to wear, and left us, each with our own separate cubicle and silver-lidded box.

“Watch the timers,” Mindy warned us before getting into her own tanning machine. “Especially you, Tory. You’re so fair-skinned. Don’t fall asleep or anything, or you’ll be sorry.”

I had no intention of falling asleep inside the silver coffin, even though a nap would have felt good. I was very, very tired.

I drew the curtain on my booth, undressed, and, wrapped in my towel, climbed into my capsule. I set the timer carefully for only ten minutes, just long enough to take away my guilty pallor. Then I closed the lid and my eyes, and warned myself not to doze off. Even if I did, the timer would buzz when the ten minutes were up, waking me.

There was a dim, rosy glow inside the box, and I found it soothing. The surface I was lying on was firm, but not uncomfortable, and I felt my skin warming gently under the lights. A tan in March might be nice, after all, I decided. I’d look good with a nice, healthy glow. Maybe the fatigued, guilty look would go away and I’d look vibrant and very much alive. And innocent.

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.

W
HILE 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.”