Code Red

Code Red


Our teacher is standing as soon as the school-wide intercom clicks off. “Okay, you heard the announcement,” he says. “Hop to it.”

It is a light comment, so we do not think much of the situation. Drills happen, after all. Granted, they usually come during fifth period and with warnings a week ahead so teachers have a chance to go over procedures, but sometimes even high school administrations like to pretend they are sneaky.

The rules are simple. Lock the doors, close the blinds, turn off the lights. Make a wall of desks in the middle of the room to hide behind, without talking in more than a whisper. Stay towards the back of the room, away from the windows, and do not make a sound. This is what you will do when someone or something dangerous comes on campus. Welcome to a Code Red in San Jose, California.

This is a mixed class: seniors, juniors, and one sophomore. The other seniors and I settle in the back of the room, casually assuming that our imagined superiority exempts us from stacking desks and chairs. We get a few dirty looks from our younger classmates, but neither they nor the teacher, who looks distracted, say anything about it. Instead, it is Casey that corrects us.

Casey is probably the best out of all of us. Casey is intent on the task that has been set before us. Casey is probably doing more work than the juniors and sophomore combined. Naturally, I get up and help.

I am a follower, but never more so than when in Casey’s presence. This is a two year old game I have been playing in my head, ever since I moved here and we have been in a class together. It is a seesaw of plying for attention and deep mortification. I am building a barricade in the middle of a darkened classroom; Casey smiles at me when I start helping and I have no idea what that means.

Building the barricade is simple: half of the desks go in a line and the other half are stacked on top of those. The chairs are jammed in awkwardly on their sides to give this construction the illusion of impenetrability, and wherever there are big gaps we lean a backpack against it. The difficult part is doing this silently. It is simple enough that no one feels they should have to coordinate so everyone is quietly doing their own thing, and occasionally there is the loud clash of people two different chairs being pushed into the same space.

A few other seniors halfheartedly join in, but by now there is not much left to do. The class sits in the back corner of the classroom and the teacher breaks out his emergency candy stash and we start telling ghost stories – this is what a creative writing class does during a Code Red.

But the rule is that everyone has to go. That makes me nervous. It does not help that Casey is, by chance, sitting right next to me. Or not by chance, because I have been keeping close without really thinking about it. As soon as I realize this, I turn red and try to hide my face by sitting with my knees up, looking down, just in case someone might notice in the darkness.

The drill is dragging on and on. After an inspection of every classroom the entire school has to be evacuated and that always takes forever, but I wish it would hurry up and end. I feel so awkward sitting here. My entire body is blushing, I must be giving off heat waves of embarrassment. Uncomfortable things like this keep happening because I cannot make up my mind: I like to daydream but I am too scared to say anything. I would trip over the words, I would look and sound like a fool, I would never again be able to show my face in this one class we have together. I do not think about this all the time, just on bad days when I feel like my head is going to explode and I am sitting too close, too close to Casey.

We go around the circle telling stories, and each one sounds better than anything I can think of. I am not a good speaker, I am awful at telling stories off the top of my head, and I am expected to go after Casey, whose stories are always perfect even in first draft. Casey can always tell stories and joke easily with other people, and is perpetually smiling and laughing. I fidget and play with my bracelet, only aware of a frantic pounding in my chest and a pained inner voice saying, ‘What do I do? I have to come up with something!’ The classroom is a dark cave, lit by the screens of a few open cell phones; I feel as if I am deep inside the earth, smothered so much that the people near me cannot hear the distressed clamoring in my mind.

“Hey.” Casey taps me on the shoulder. “It’s your turn.” There is a faint smile on Casey’s face, and a questioning. Has there been too long of a pause while they expected me to speak and I was not paying attention? Or was I wrong, and my thoughts are loud enough to be sensed?

It takes me a few seconds to find my voice. “I can’t think of anything,” I say weakly. “Maybe you should skip me.” Really, I am trying to act normal, and since this is how I usually act this is what my timidity is taken for. Some of my classmates like my work and think this is only modesty or a symptom of being bored with the ‘campfire’ activity, but none of that is right.

“You have to go,” one of my classmates says. “Everybody has to say something.” Normally it would be the teacher encouraging me, but he is silent. Maybe he is just tired of trying to get me to come out of my shell, which would be a relief. Casey smiles encouragingly at me. It is not meant as a demand, as the encouragement of the others is, but is patient. It makes me feel like I have the right to sink into the carpet and be allowed to come back out at my own leisure.

“Um…” I try desperately to think of a way out, but all I can come up with is a partial escape: in my binder I have the seventh draft of a poem that is not good but is not awful. “Can I read off of something?”

There is a general acquiescence. I wave my hands in a ‘just a second’ kind of way and crawl over to the barricade, where backpacks have been positioned here and there to shut off most of the gaps. I grab mine but it slips from my nervous hands and hits the carpet with a thud. Blushing, I unzip the larger compartment – for a second I think I hear the door rattling and think hopefully that it is finally our turn to file out of the room with our hands on our heads, but when I look up the door is not opening – and tear the sheet out of my binder. The ripping sound is the loudest thing in the room, and that makes me turn even redder. I feel like this poem will not be good enough. I feel like I am going to hate it by the end of today. They, especially Casey, will listen to it and wonder what I am doing in this class.

I leave my backpack on the floor and crawl back to the group. “It doesn’t have a title yet,” I say apprehensively. “It’s kind of a poem.” I take a deep breath. A junior rolls a penlight across the floor to me and it turns on in my hand with a loud click. Staring only at the paper, I read without looking up or taking too much time to breathe. It is best, I have learned, to think about these things as little as possible before plunging ahead. The more time I give myself to think, the more I freeze up on the inside.

He was a quiet little boy; shy. He made a friend, a playmate, and followed all her rules,
but she wanted him to break them, so she stopped playing with him.

He was a sad little boy; he missed his friend.
But she had left something behind: a dolly.

He was a hopeful little boy; Maybe she would realize she had forgotten something and come back.
It was the kind of dolly that cried and wetted and could be fed, and it never stopped.

He was a tired little boy; the dolly kept him awake nights. The batteries wouldn’t wear down.
He tried patting it and changing it and feeding it, but it wouldn’t stop.

He was an angry little boy. Why had she left this annoying toy with him?
But then he asked himself, why didn’t he just take out the batteries and make it stop?

He was a determined little boy. He got a screwdriver from Daddy’s toolbox
and looked and looked, but he couldn’t find the screws and it wouldn’t stop.

He was a furious little boy. He got the scissors from Mommy’s desk and cut up all the dolly’s clothes.
He stabbed the dolly to pieces, and then it finally stopped.

He was a peaceful little boy.
The noise, wetting, and feeding, were finally over.

He was a surprised little boy when he saw the grime on his hands,
the inky stuff that had spilled out of the dolly and stained the carpet.

He was a quiet little boy, and sat alone for a long time on a time-out,
for the dolly was not a dolly, nor he a little boy.

I am no good at speaking in a whisper, so I gradually get louder and louder until I finish at an almost normal volume. The sound of my voice brushes against the sleeping lights overhead, the lists of workshop groups on the abandoned whiteboard, the silent wall between us and the door. Strangely, I have the attention of all. When I finish, the first response is the indifferent shifting of light through the leaves of the tree outside the window, casting slight patterns on the closed blinds.

“Wow,” Casey says after a moment. “That last line was really creepy. Awesome.”

Everyone else agrees, and I find myself beaming as well as blushing. Now I feel a slightly better kind of jittery, though I still wish that everyone’s attention was not focused on me. But Casey liked my poem! Casey, who has read every book I have never heard of, seen every movie I have never seen, and is full of stories about all the interesting things I spend my time wondering at, actually liked my poem!

Over the noise we are making, something slams loudly against the door and we all freeze. The teacher half stands up, then sinks back down, and we are all suddenly very aware that this is not a normal drill day and that there is supposed to be a call from the office asking in code if everyone is in the room safely. But no one has called yet.

The one sophomore in the class is the one who says out loud what we all are thinking: “Oh my god… it really is a Code Red. It isn’t a drill…”

Everyone wants her to be quiet, partially because we do not want to hear it and partially because she has said it at a wail that could easily be audible from the outside. I drop my poem as if it has caught fire and burned me. The penlight falls to the floor and, with a thud-click, goes dark.

There is another bang at the door, and another, and another. It is the sound of someone throwing their entire weight against it. Everyone, including me, edges back at the sound of each heavy thump. We are a white-faced crowd pressing against the wall, hoping it will open up and let us out, only I am pressing against Casey’s shoulder more than the wall. I grab onto Casey’s arm because I am afraid and Casey is closest. I barely notice that we are shaking against each other in fear. The person on the other side of the door is yelling things that I cannot make out but sound dangerous.

But there is still an element of disbelief. Something inside of me is still insisting that nothing is going to happen. Dangerous people coming onto school campuses only happens in other places that you have never been to and probably never heard of before, and you read about it in the paper and think, ‘Hmm, that’s awful,’ and then go back to your breakfast. This is some sort of addition to the drill, put in to get the students to take it seriously. During the drill at the beginning of the school year there were a few classes that did not even build a barricade, or were too loud, or forgot to turn the lights off, and they had to do the drill over again on a Saturday.

‘No one,’ my brain is telling me, ‘is going to get into this room. If there’s anything out there to worry about, we’re safe because we’re inside.’

There is a loud noise that I cannot place, and behind the closed blinds the window crumples inward. Casey gasps and hides behind me, one ear near the back of my skull. I can understand; I would not want to see this either. I would shut my eyes if I could, but I watch, transfixed, as the blinds are moved out the way, clumsily torn down. Someone is getting into the room, filling it with the sounds of cursing and threats and crunching glass. It is funny, I think distantly, because if it had been five minutes later we would have all been out to brunch recess and this Code Red would be unnecessary.

A strange feeling starts to struggle in my chest. It reminds me of how I felt before I moved here, when I was saying goodbye to my old friends. I had gone up to each of them, given them a hug, and, in a brief moment of clarity, of not being afraid to speak my mind, I told them all the things I had ever felt about them: all the good things that I would remember them for, but also all the resentment I had held against them for knowing how to move through life better than me and for not helping when I was left alone without quite knowing where to go. For once I had been completely honest, and afterwards I was at peace with the thought of moving away and not coming back. It does not surprise me that I associate honesty in myself with the slippery feeling of letting go of something.

The man coming into the room is yelling about these kids, these kids who always come onto his lawn during lunchtime from our open campus and eat there and leave their trash there and are always so loud, so loud! He has told them to go away, has complained to the school, but they always come back, always different individuals but the same kids.

As he is ranting at us, waving a gun and telling his story in angry bits and pieces, I am sitting here feeling very cold, thinking, ‘Danger! This is danger, this is what it feels like to look right at it.’ He is old; his hair is graying and he walks with a limp. The gun shakes in his hand but his finger is ready at the trigger. What he is saying seems like nothing, but still he is here with bulging eyes that show a terrifying blankness; it is only in his speaking voice, in the moment, that he experiences his own thoughts. I see this and it is suddenly easy for me to believe that something terrible might happen. There is no real target here so it could be to anyone; it could even be to me.

I nudge Casey with this realization in my mind. The feeling in my chest is struggling so hard I might burst. Casey pulls away from my hair, and for the first time I meet the eyes I have been shying away from for two years. This seesaw, this ‘Casey is smiling at me because we feel the same things’ and ‘Casey is smiling at me just because I’m helping’, ‘My poem won’t be any good’ and ‘Casey likes my poem!’ – I am tired of it. I have wanted, and not wanted, to get off of the seesaw for a long time. I did not know how. I have never done anything like this before. I was afraid of what would not, or would, happen. But in this moment I feel differently. Without any conscious decision or anxiety of waiting for the right time, I think I can do this. I think I can be honest. “I…” I whisper.

The man advances across the room. Our teacher is frozen and does nothing to protect us. The only light to see the incredulous or terrified faces of my classmates in this dimness comes from the broken window, where the blinds are now in a crumpled pile on the floor. Outside the tree is waving. There are some of its fallen leaves on the carpet, bathed in a rectangle of startling light.

“I…”

The barricade shudders when the still-yelling intruder pushes against it. He pushes again at a particular desk and when it falls it takes a large portion of the pretend wall with it. Some of our classmates shriek and everyone shrinks back to avoid the falling desks and chairs and backpacks that are too far away to hit them. My own backpack is buried.

“I…”

Something angry is spat into the air. The gun is waved insistently. Next to me Casey’s hand is curled in upon itself, pressed against the floor for support. Cupped there is a sweaty unawareness of all that is going on outside this dark cave, at the mouth of which lies broken glass and fallen leaves.

“I… have a crush on you.” I exhale.

The man with the gun pulls the trigger; there is the loud sound of a bullet being fired into the ceiling and then the tension in his finger eases, spent with that last effort.

Everyone in the room is still. No one quite knows what to do, what is going on. This is the end of the Code Red.