by Kit Reed
Working with only the light from a pencil flash, he walked the walls until he found the secret staircase: the emergency exit, which is his emergency entrance, had been Sheetrocked and painted over. In seconds, he pried off the Sheetrock and then, using safecracking tools that happen to be his own from high school, he opens it. The stairs! By his reckoning, to get to HS1X, he will have to go up almost a hundred flights. What remains of the night before the prom will spin out unbroken for Harry Klein. Gnawing on a Power Bar, Agent Betsy’s partner and, he hopes, upcoming life-partner, takes a deep breath and begins his climb.
All this coming and going, Doc Glazer thinks crossly, removing the Sheetrock some fool just dropped on the skylight to his place. It might look like a Dumpster to you, but by God it is his home. All this coming and going has turned it into a hellhole. When am I, a simple hermit, going to get any peace? When Doc could no longer shave his age and get away with it, hard-hearted Irving Wardlaw let the old English teacher go. The fool hired Bruce Brill, but survival is triumph; witness Doc. As it turns out, younger does not always mean better. Young Brill’s stupidity started this whole riot thing, which serves Irv Wardlaw right.
And Doc is here to tell you that being let go doesn’t mean you have to let go. When Howard Glazer cleaned out his desk after the farewell party last year and took the faculty elevator down for the last time, he contrived to ride down alone, which means that somewhere en route Doc managed to stop the nonstop elevator and climb on top of one of his less important cartons to get himself and the things he cared about out of the ceiling hatch. He pried open the doors on a storage floor and put his stuff through the opening, one box at a time. It took him six weeks to work himself and his stuff down to One which was important because Doc spied for long enough to find out that kids came and went down here, and then he spied long enough to learn where the kids’ secret exit is located, because he likes to go out for an evening walk, although he’s so jealous of his spot on the ground floor that he never leaves the grounds. In the months since, he’s turned this Dumpster into a showplace, raiding the upper floors as needed for supplies.
Now there are so many people milling in the plaza outside that he can’t slip out for his constitutional. He misses the fresh air. Worse, the combination of the mothers’ thumping on the facade and the mayor’s amplified SURRENDER message is so loud that he can’t sleep and the mothers rock the building just enough so he can’t rest, either. Worst of all, the ground floor is full of rabble: that pesky custodian, who tramped around all week collecting things instead of setting the incinerator on autostoke, which means the chute is jammed and the whole place is beginning to smell.
Doc can’t be sure but he thinks there’s a mother loose in here somewhere, and now this.
Sighing, he does what any good scholar does when presented with a problem. As he’s alone here, he can’t call a committee meeting about it, so Howard Glazer does the next best thing. He pulls out the books he has on riots and begins. When in doubt, he always says, research.
In the woodworking shop, Jane Brill is damn glad she isn’t really in labor. She used the razor blade Agent Betsy gave her to slit the gallon water bottle by her chair so she could scare the crap out of Dolph and the rest of Johnny’s gang by screeching, “My water broke!” You bet it cleared the room. The seven of them streamed out the door with their funky hair on end, and it won’t matter what this Johnny says to them, no way are they coming back. For the first time, she’s alone in the shop. Working quickly, she uses Agent Betsy’s razor blade to free her other hand and with enormous difficulty, because she’s in the ninth month and rather close to the end, does the necessary contortions so she can saw through the duct tape securing her feet.
Where the hell is Bruce, now that she needs him? What was he thinking when he tried to turn this kid Johnny into a surrogate son? This seventeen-year-old is plenty smart, witness his diatribe when they broke into her house, she particularly admired his choice of the words “assaholic pedant,” and the imitation of Bruce in high mentor mode was dead on. Hell, he’s probably smart enough to run this place, which means the last thing Johnny Slater wants to do is sit down and learn a thousand new words for the SATs, a test about memory tricks and test-taking skills, not smarts. But that isn’t really what pissed him off. What pissed him off was Bruce running at him with the Titania wig and one of his gushy speeches about how in Shakespeare’s day, all the girl parts went to the smartest and best-looking young men. What probably toppled the kid was the smarmy smile Bruce gets whenever he talks about “the bard.” Jane knows kids have an astoundingly low threshold when it comes to sentimental crap.
So yeah, when you come right down to it this whole mess in High Rise High is Bruce’s fault.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether you want your baby, which Bruce is trying to name Hamnet—whether you want your baby growing up under the influence of a chuckleheaded jerk. Oh yes she is angry, and she isn’t just mad at Johnny or Dolph or Fred and the others who brought her here and taped her to the chair with only the briefest of pit stops and few chances to lie down. She is stark boiling pissed off at idealistic, boyish and well-meaning but careless, blundering Bruce.
It’s a good thing she can’t hear the gloppy things he’s saying about her on Global TV right now.
Instead she’s busy standing up, a project that takes more time than it ought to, and stretching her aching muscles one by one. When she finishes with the case of Devil Dogs Johnny’s gang brought upstairs to pass the time in here, she’s going to chug the quart of Gatorade they left behind and stretch out somewhere. She needs time for the blood to make its way back to her head so she can come up with a plan.
How odd. It’s the morning of prom day and Trinket and Johnny are having a fight. Maybe it’s excitement, maybe it’s the mayor’s ultimatum and the fact that time is getting short. They’ve been at it for so long that she forgets what started it; the kid part of her thinks something she said made Johnny jealous, in spite of the arrested development she’s old enough that clearly, even in the most constricted life, he can’t be her first. The mature Agent Betsy is reflecting on the causes of arrested development and the fact that when you let two children, even two children who love each other very much, play together long enough, they get tired and start to fight.
“Go to hell,” she says.
“No,” he says, “you go to hell and while you’re at it lose the hair, it looks like shit.”
She ought to find the way down the stairs/chute/elevator, however the kids get out, and exit the building and let what happens happen, it would serve him right. At the same time she can’t write Johnny off, she thinks, regarding him from a great emotional distance while Trinket rips off the tinsel Scrunchy and, weeping, says, “Fine, and you can damn well find a new bug to take to the damn prom.”
When she settles this riot thing and the attack squad comes in, she’ll do everything she possibly can to cut a nice deal for the kid, but by hell she came in here to settle this riot thing and she is going to end it no matter what. On second thought, maybe she should throw a rope over the rafters in the indoor track and watch Johnny and all his sadistic buddies swing. OK he just grabbed her by the green ponytail and threw her in a corner, yelling, “Fine, I will.”
She shouts, “So much for you, asshole,” but she is thinking: now I’ll never get to wear my dress.
“Asshole your own asshole,” he barks and stamps out of the music room which is empty just now because the girls are in the teachers’ bathroom, trying on dress after dress. The Trinket part of her is sobbing angrily, but in there so deep that he can’t guess, Agent Betsy is thinking: Fine.
Perhaps you have forgotten about the mayor. Fair enough, it’s not like he’s doing anything to end the occupation here.
He’s busy polishing his image as he prepares to give his primetime Prom Night ultimatum for international Webcast as well as worldwide TV satellite relay so that even the most private geeks happily mousing in the sch
ool’s ruined computer labs will have to acknowledge that something’s going on, never mind that the server is down and every kid who tries to connect is pounding on a blank screen. If you must know, Mayor Timothy a.k.a. Timid Tim Patton is grooming himself for a run for the Senate en route to the White House, and this is his first big step on the long road to DC.
Up Harry climbs, exhausted by now but driven by the need to resolve the situation—not so he will be a hero, but because he hates any kind of waste and millions of dollars and hundreds of kids are being wasted here. That and he’s afraid Agent Betsy is in danger. Four days and not a sign! Of course he’s been climbing the gigantic baffle the stairwell makes and therefore out of radio contact with the gov for the last twenty-four hours, and since he’s the governor’s man, his is the only information Harry trusts. He has to emerge into the school proper before he can run a sound test and there, he has to be careful because if they spot him, the kids will know at once that his fingernail-sized radio is government issue. Better keep it silenced, he thinks, and hope Betsy’s faring forward and together they can put the lid on this riot at the Tinsel Prom. He has a few tactical weapons in his pack; he also has a plan.
In fact, he has a costume.
Once he reaches HRH1 he intends to put on his disguise and do his best to blend in with the panting rowdies and their ditsy girlfriends heading for the prom. Although he’s too far north of thirty to make it stick Harry has studied the language, so that’s not a problem, and he’s devised the perfect costume, which he did by picking up on the Tinsel theme, which is, basically, silver everything. To make things simple, Harry decided to stay with the clothes he has on—plaid shirt, jeans, hiking boots, hell, he’ll pass—and concentrate on the mask. For his arrival at the prom, he has chosen an antique. It is riding on his hip right now: a C-3PO mask that’s so old it has turned silver, remember Star Wars? You may not, but rest easy, Harry Klein does. He’s in touch with the zeitgeist. He knows kids, and he knows what they like.
Now, why this prom is so important. The prom is important because no matter where you started out in life or how far you’ve come since the big night, if you spent four years in an American public high school, you are formed by the way it came down at your prom. Nobody ever gets over it, and one way or another, you will try to get it back—or compensate for how bad it was for the rest of your life. You think you’re a grownup, you think you’re fine, but it doesn’t matter what you’ve done to yourself between your prom night and now, any more than it matters what you have accomplished; you can lose the weight/tighten the abs and build the pecs/fix the hair/get the lift/have electrolysis/make the fortune, but in the beginning there was that problem with the prom and no matter how fast you’ve run, we know, and we know you know, that you are the same person.
Even if it was good your prom wasn’t good enough. They never are. Even if you go with the hottest kid in the school, even if your hair is perfect, it’s built in. It’s supposed to be the happiest night of your life, which means no prom can be as good as you want. All that, you think, and this is all I get?
More likely, it was bad.
Either way, look back and be humbled by the prom you didn’t make, the date you didn’t get, the chance you missed because you went with the wrong person, or the existential question: why, when you went with the right person and everything went right, you came home feeling so empty and flat.
Mind you, this is not necessarily a bad thing. For the rest of our lives, people like us jump higher, try harder.
Well, Agent Betsy isn’t going to get it back. Instead, she thinks, dressing for the prom again and getting ready to go without a date—again—if she can’t get it back, she thinks …
She will get even.
In the best stories about high school, it all comes down at the prom.
In that ideal world we invent when we make stories, the prison riot and siege at High Rise High would end in the only possible way: at the prom.
It would end in the indoor track a.k.a. ballroom with all the kid factions and sympathizers present and the key outsiders—the mayor’s agent and the governor’s agent and the Gulf War vet and the pregnant woman and poor little McShy of the busted Stradivarius working their way through the littered halls or up through the bowels of the school for a gorgeous conflation, and at the height of the excitement probably—when Johnny crowns the wrong girl prom queen (my man and my best friend: the rat went with Evie!), when Johnny puts the Mylar crown on Evie Jones, the five valiant outsiders would burst into the ballroom followed by a thousand seething moms led upstairs by a cranky Doc Slater, and said mothers would shame their kids into submission while the mayor and the governor come in through the shattered skylight to declare amnesty and pin hastily engraved medals on Agent Betsy and Harry Klein who would, OK, who would kiss, take that Johnny Slater, while Jane Brill fingered Johnny as her kidnapper and the tardy SWAT team read him his rights and dragged him away.
But remember, even when it goes well your high school prom is never what you thought it was going to be, so don’t be surprised.
This one isn’t either.
Every high school prom is a symphony of near misses. Maybe it’s only the difference between the dress you thought you bought and the way it really looks on you, or the hopes you had for the peach tuxedo you rented with matching shirt and cummerbund, which looked pretty stupid when the cops were taking your particulars after you lost control and crunched it nose and front wheels halfway up the Whites’ humongous forsythia; or your near miss may be something bigger, but only slightly bigger because these things never get as big as our hopes. The way proms like this one end is less likely to be a function of old scores settled and dramatic deflowerings and true love and moonbeams and wrongs righted than it is simple fatigue: the relieved sigh as you finally drop her off at her house (she was cute, but she was shrill) or take off your shoes (it was like kissing a cardboard Tom Cruise cutout on a lobby card), which have begun to bite; we all have dreams about the big moments in our lives but trust me, they are only expectations. When it comes right down to it, most things in life as we know it aren’t resolved in fireworks or car crashes or explosions, instead they happen simply or accidentally or capriciously; they are settled out of fatigue or ennui or sheer boredom, so the real outcome, the true and final outcome of the stand at High Rise High?
1. The Federal Government was fully aware of the mayor’s threats and dispatched local police to arrest him as his unilaterally set deadline neared. There is a full investigation being made of the city’s nuclear arsenal, which turns out to be fuller than any state or federal authorities imagined. The mayor himself has been interned and certain irregularities in the matter of the building of High Rise High are under investigation.
2. The prom went just fine, or about the way proms usually do, in spite of the no adult faculty around to supervise. Remember, the riots began a week ago and nobody’s slept in a real bed since so everybody arrived excited, but staggering with exhaustion. Eventually everybody at the prom just got tired of dancing and getting high and they straggled home to bed to crash or to the quiet neo-Olmsted park floor of the building to sleep on the artificial beach, or they drifted back into the corners they’d staked out in the library and the computer lab, in the sentimental wish to spend one last night in the camps they had set up at the beginning of the high school revolution, when they had such hopes. Right now not one of the kids who rioted and took over HRH could tell you what they’d hoped to gain.
3. Emerging in the last minutes of the dance, i.e. at the moment when Dolph, designated standin for Principal Wardlaw, was crowning Johnny Slater prom king, Jane Brill slipped out from behind the bandstand and made a terrified Chunk Mackenzie show her to the single functioning elevator. Stampeding him with a touch of the end-stage breathing she’d learned at Lamaze, you know, the kind you’re supposed to use when you bear down at the end? she pressed the button and rode down alone, and …
4. at the bottom the mothers milling on the gr
ound floor parted like the Red Sea—she’s a mother, like us—so Doctor Howard Glazer, HRH (retired), could lead the nice lady to the kids’ secret exit (it was behind the incinerator!), open the hatch and usher her outside, so that from the front you saw double doors in the foundation opening and a small, angry, very pregnant woman marching out, spreading her arms to the fresh air. If you were glued to your television or your computer screen like the rest of us you may have seen the Marine lieutenant in charge mutter into the little woman’s ear and if you did, you saw her bark a response that made him flinch. Our microphones didn’t pick up what either said but apparently the lieutenant offered to take her to her husband, he was worried about her, and that’s what set her off.
“Aha,” the mayor said from the police van, where the Chief was keeping track on his Watchman while he dealt with the city’s most important prisoner. “I was right. They’re giving in!”
“Bullshit,” the kids would have said, if any of the kids had been awake to see it. They’d partied till they puked and then some. “We’re going the hell to bed.”
They were bored of the riot anyway.
Which means that in the principal’s office, Irving Wardlaw wakes up to daylight and the awareness that the riot is over. The prom is over. The music’s stopped and with it, the relentless thump of the bass speakers that vibrated on every floor. So has the thud of a thousand teenagers jumping up and down. The smell of weed has dissipated and the laughter’s died. They are gone. The first to wake, he studies his embattled colleagues. The sleeping McShy’s fingers are moving on his bony chest as though he’s still playing his ruined violin, while Beverly Flan sleeps with her fat mouth pursed in the face she makes when she tries to teach freshmen how to pronounce le. Smiling, Dykstra and Marva Liu sleep in each other’s arms. It’s Sunday morning, which means they have the day off. He needs to decide whether to keep the staff in the office here, along with the teacher hostages sleeping in the gym, so he’ll have a skeleton staff in place when classes start on Monday morning, or whether to cancel graduation so he can give them next week off to recover and take the rest of the summer off. Maybe the latter, he thinks, looking at the broken glass in his office door with a sigh. It’s going to take at least that long to get this place cleaned up. But then. He feels that little ripple of excitement that comes every time he thinks the word September. Then we’ll have our second wind by the time school starts in the fall.