Joy kept singing as if nothing had happened. In fact, she hadn’t even noticed a change. She preferred to sing with her eyes closed, and had had this piece memorized for years. There was something very spiritual about feeling the music flow over and fill the air, and she didn’t want anything, including the cramped space and fading blue carpet of the practice room, to get in the way. The song had just turned minor, her favorite section of the whole piece. Todd had told her it was so beautiful it was eerie, what was exactly her intention.
Sabrina grabbed onto the faux granite countertop in the public restroom, her heart beating a bit too quickly. She wasn’t exactly afraid of the dark, but she was afraid of those things that might come out of it. She was also afraid of not being able to get back to the stage. She worried about the show not going on. She wondered what could have possibly gone wrong and how she was going to fix this problem. First, she had to find her way out of this dark bathroom.
She inched towards what she hoped was the door when a sound stopped her dead in her tracks. It took her about thirty seconds to be able to breathe again. She heard a voice, a high female soprano, and for that moment, she felt as if she’d been transported into a real-live horror movie. She never admitted it, but horror movies really frightened her. She couldn’t just tell herself it wasn’t real; it was as if her rational mind just disconnected from the rest of her.
Scottie wandered down the dark hallway, the dim light of his cell phone lighting his path. He was looking at his feet, to be sure he was keeping his footing, and never even noticed Cedar until he ran right into her. His phone fell from his hand and Cedar’s boot came down on it, smashing it into pieces. She screamed, not having expected to see another person in the dark hallway. He shouted loudly as well and scrambled for his phone, but it was too late.
Scottie was only a freshman, but what he lacked in age, he made up for in confidence and sheer impulsivity. He was from Texas, where “Go big or go home” was more than just a saying – it was a way of life. So, when the three boys came together with an initial plan, Scottie wanted to make sure it was done right. They couldn’t just flip the circuit breaker – they had to do something that wasn’t quite so easy to reverse. The show must not go on.
The prank had been Mike’s idea – a senior from Nor Cal who had been dropped from the theater program the year before for not taking it seriously. He was certainly taking this seriously. He knew that ruining tonight’s show would make for a perfect scheme of revenge, especially since this was in the only show in the school’s history that was only showing for one night. The easiest way to ruin it was to cut the power and the backup power generators to the building. For this plan, he enlisted two boys from his fraternity to help him – Peter, a kid whose parents forced him to choose Pepperdine over MIT and could rewire a computer in ten minutes flat, and Scottie, a boy with enough cockiness for the whole frat, twice over. It was a flawless plan, you know, except that it wasn’t. Not quite.
What the boys didn’t understand were the unforeseen consequences of cutting the backup generator’s power. Everyone found their way out of the auditorium and besides a lot of screaming and frustration from the cast, there weren’t any problems. Electricians were called, and would be out to fix whatever was wrong, but not soon enough. Classes weren’t meeting the following day; they had scheduled an off-campus faculty conference appropriately on the day after Halloween to allow students a day to recuperate, even if it would never be admitted out loud. It was a flawless plan, except for the fact that all the doors in the music building were locked, both inside and out, and could only be opened when the security system was online. It was connected to the backup generator. Five students were trapped inside a building where they shouldn’t have been in the first place, inside a building where no one would know to look for them.
Sorry for the tardiness, I have a lot of good ideas, I'm just having a real problem with the "appropriate, and.... attempt to make sense" guidelines.
ReplyDeleteI'd really like to see someone experience an event that makes them reconsider their life long hatred for pie. And an unforeseen but not life threatening food allergy would be cool, too. Those aren't necessarily related.
Maybe those guidelines don't apply to people with holes in their heads, if that helps.
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