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kids remaining at Tattawa Regional High School on the first day of the worst blizzard in the history of the continental United States.

SEVEN
    We sat there staring out the windows for rides that we weren’t sure were coming. There was a pay phone at the end of the hall, just outside the gym, but when I walked over to it right after I arrived, everyone else told me not to bother. It was like this collective murmur: “Lines’r-down-don’t-bother-yeah-right.”
    Right after that, Gossell said, “Might as well take out those cell phones and i-things. I know half of you have one hidden somewhere, and you can consider this hallway your detention anyway.”
    He was right: just about half. Pete and Jason had theirs; the girls had one iPhone between them (it turned out to be Krista’s, but they seemed to have joint custody); and Elijah had an oldflip-open, “clamshell” type phone. But mine was sitting on my dresser at home, and Les didn’t seem to have anything, either.
    Of course, having them was one thing, and using them was another. People tried to call for a while, but then Pete said that texts had a better shot because they were “smaller.” I wasn’t sure about the science behind that, but I knew you could keep trying to resend a text until it went through.
    “If anyone gets through, let me know,” Gossell said after a few frustrated attempts of his own. Then he added, not really to anyone in particular, “I volunteered down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. There was no service for weeks. Same thing after …”
    His voice trailed off and I didn’t catch the last word. Some other big disaster, I figured. We’d done a whole thing on Hurricane Katrina in social studies back in junior high: the government response, the cleanup, and all of that. Our social studies teacher at North Cambria was kind of an old hippie, though. It was harder to picture Gossell down there doing that “Rebuild for a Brighter Future” stuff, but, I don’t know, maybe he was really religious or something.
    Pete was playing a video game and flipping over every time he got killed to check on those same sad, stranded texts. Jason alternated between trying to call and staring out into the snow in the direction his dad would be coming from.
    After a while, the dialing and texting trailed off. Everyone basically got the point, turned their ringtones up to max volume, and waited. We were all really keyed up, and there was a weird sense of competition. You could see it in people’s eyes, in theirquick little side-glances. Would Jason’s dad get here in his truck before Krista’s mom got here in her Subaru? Would either of them get here before whatever was coming to pick up Elijah, a hearse maybe? And would anyone end up giving Les a ride?
    I was feeling it too. It’s not like I had anything against the others, but I didn’t want to be left behind. It was sort of good to know that Jason, Pete, and I were all waiting for the same guy, because it meant that I wouldn’t be the last one here.
    I guess that feeling of not being alone was important to everyone. We had the whole hallway to wait in, and we probably could’ve strayed a lot farther than that. Gossell was supervising us, but he didn’t give the impression of caring much. He had his own problems, I guess. We probably could’ve gone back to the shop, for all he cared, but we didn’t. No one went anywhere. We waited in a cluster of warm bodies, just off to the side of the main door.
    Sometimes we talked, but it was quiet in the hall and the sound sort of echoed. It made you a little self-conscious. Like, I said a few dumb things to Pete — I was talking just to talk, you know? — but everyone could hear it. They were probably thinking “Well, that was a dumb thing to say” or “Who cares?” And they weren’t wrong. You could whisper, but that just called more attention to it. That’s when people couldn’t help but listen.
    So the talk would flare up and die down, flare