Another unnamed character chapter.
The teacher considers ignoring the fire alarm, which she’s sure is false – apparently kids just pull them for fun all the time? Fire alarms are actually pretty serious business. The disruption they cause to the school is minor compared to that of dragging a fire truck out to deal with it. But she doesn’t want anyone to see her ignoring it and setting a bad example.
the hallways are already filling with students. Teachers try their best to keep them organized, but this is a high school; the organized lines of elementary school fire drills are long gone, having been replaced by the brazen hormonal zigzags of kids whose bodies are too big for their own good.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t pack highschoolers into your building as if they’re sardines if you want them to be organized. There often isn’t exactly room to get out in an organized fashion. Furthermore, the reason those little kids are kept in neat lines is because little kids are morons while high school kids can be relied on to find the door on their own.
Also just…what? There’s just something creepy about thinking the kids are too big for their own good.
As she heads out, she sees some policemen and realizes something weird is up, because they must have arrived before the alarm.
The last time there were policemen in the school, someone called in a clapper threat. The school was evacuated, and no one knew why until after the fact. Turns out, there was no clapper—the school was never in danger of being blown up. It was just some kid pulling a practical joke. Still, clapper threats are always taken seriously, because you never know when the threat might be real.
So basically clapper=bomb scare? Still waiting for the explanation for all this.
Also really – is this what the author thinks of kids? That they’re constantly pulling fire alarms and calling in fake bomb scares? This isn’t normal now, why would kids be causing so much more trouble in a world where they can be killed for doing that?
She peeks into a room on her way to make sure no one’s hanging back, despite that not being a very reasonable concern given the alarms tend to be really unpleasant to listen to. It’s not even cold out, which is really the only reason someone would want to hang out inside despite the alarm going off. And she hears a baby crying.
At first she thinks it might be coming from the student mother nursery, but the nursery is way down the hall.
So, sounds like no one actually bothers to remove the babies in the event of a fire. Also, the nursery isn’t kept apart from everything else for some terrible reason.
this time it sounds oddly muffled, and angrier. She knows that sound. Someone’s trying to cover the baby’s mouth to keep it from crying. These teen mothers always do that when they have their babies where they don’t belong. They never seem to realize it only makes the baby cry louder.
Okay, first, it does so work, I did it. Second, the real concern with something like that is not that it’s stupid and makes the baby cry more, it’s the whole risk of smothering thing if you’re trying to keep the baby completely quiet as opposed to just cutting the volume.
With that in mind, wouldn’t this have been a more interesting chapter if we were seeing it from the kids’ point of view and they were thinking about balancing the merits of their own survival against suffocating a baby? Not really that much better, admittedly, since they don’t seem to realize they could just leave the baby at the school and it’d be fine and they’re also demonstrating here they’re too stupid to use the fire drill as cover to escape.
It’s the boy who speaks.
“If you turn us in, we’ll die.”
She wasn’t planning to turn them in! They’re the idiots acting suspicious instead of going with the herd and then taking off.
Please what? the teacher thinks. Please break the law? Please put myself and the school at risk? But, no, that’s not it at all. What he’s really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it’s so easy to forget that’s what they are.
…I really don’t get this passage. She starts off bitching about it, then goes back on her claims and says it’s reasonable.
Also once again, not clear how the law always knows if you help unwinds and that you knew you were doing so. Helping them out isn’t breaking the law as long as she doesn’t do anything illegal along the way, because she can always deny she knew anything was wrong.
So she explains the obvious: hiding means they’ll be found when the police sweep the building, leaving with the other students means they’ll be unnoticed.
She will help them. Whoever they are, she will do her best to get them to safety. What kind of example would she be setting if she didn’t?
I guess…?
But this is the second random adult that has been willing to get in trouble over this. So far, the only people to actually help the police was Connor’s dad. (Even the principal here was calling the police in response to another kid coming in and saying he’d been kidnapped by them.) We are two for two for random sympathetic strangers.
And someone who feels like this about these kids shouldn’t have that whole bit about “please put myself at risk?” That bit reads like it’s just a cheap fakeout.
Next chapter is Risa’s. She knows Lev did it, and she’s not certain about the teacher.
She blames herself for not seeing through Lev’s sham. How could she have been so naive to think he was truly on their side?
Yeah, the whole kidnapping and forcing him to join you should’ve been a tipoff.
The teacher takes the baby and leads them off, but they’ve still got to pass the police.
he looks toward Risa, and his eyes lock on her. Risa knows she’s just given herself away. Should she turn and race back into the school? Where’s Connor now? Is he behind her, in front of her?
She has no idea. She’s completely alone.
And then salvation arrives in a most unlikely form.
Alexis takes that moment to pop up and say that “People pull the alarms all the time,” because this book is not going to ever stop the “kids today” bullshit. The policeman forgets Risa immediately and decides to interrogate Alexis, and this time, Risa doesn’t go on about how terrible Alexis is. Good.
The teacher starts to lead them to her car, but then Lev is shouting them to stop and running toward them.
Alexis still stands with the policeman at the school’s side entrance. From where she stands she can easily see Risa, and she points Risa out to the cop.
Also I guess the moment of Alexis not being vilified is over.
What they need is a fresh commotion. Something even worse than a fire alarm.
…
“Start clapping!”
So…
both of them applauding as if they were at a concert cheering for their favorite band.
And beside them, a student drops his backpack and stares at them in utter horror.
“Clappers!” he screams.
In an instant the word is out.
ClappersClappersClappers . . .
It echoes in the kids around them. In an instant it reaches critical mass, and the entire crowd is in lull-blown panic.
“Clappers!” everyone screams, and the crowd becomes a stampede. Kids bolt, but no one is sure where to go. All they know is that they must get away from the school as quickly as possible.
Risa and Connor continue to clap, their hands red from the force of their duet of applause.
This is so fucking stupid.
Okay, so apparently clappers take their name from the fact they clap as…warning? celebration? Whatever, they do. But the stampede is idiotic. The kids should be running away from the clapping kids. If they’d clapped quickly and set people off with the sound, then blended back in, sure. But they’ve clapping the whole time, so people should very quickly figure out where the sound’s coming from and be trying to get away from that.
Anyway, the mass of kids makes the police lose them (having finally stopped clapping), but somehow the teacher can identify them easily and move through the mob like a fish, so she hops in, drops off the baby, and tells them to head to an antique shop.
“We’re not clappers,” is all Risa can think to say.
“I know you’re not. Good luck.”
There’s no time to thank her.
But there is time to explain they’re not clappers? Book, you are so shitty at conveying actual tension.
So anyway, now they’re away from the school and can go to the shop for whatever’s there.
Next chapter is Lev, currently being literally trampled while he emos about how Connor and Risa don’t like him anymore. He’s fine physically when it’s over – A knee of his jeans is torn. He tastes blood—he must have bitten his tongue. and that’s it, no cracked ribs or anything. Fucking book.
He sees the police are baffled and walking back and forth aimlessly, despite the fact that what happened wasn’t particularly confusing – someone started clapping, the kdis ran. Any adult should know to go herd the kids back, and people actually trained to deal with things like this should be doing better.
But Lev sees it’s his chance to get away himself, so he heads off while emoing about how he’s mad his pastor took away his purpose and mad he betrayed the other kids and mad God’s making his life suck.
Lev is very boring when he isn’t being certain about stuff.