We all made it to the basement, that looked like a parking lot, and it felt weird. The entire student body was never in one place at the same time, not even lunch. It felt like someone took a picture of everyone I’d met in school, carefully cut out each one, and stuck them on a vase.
Some sat on the floor, others leaned against the wall and chatted, and some freshmen kicked a ball around. One group managed to find a table and were playing Jenga on it.
This seemed to surprise Romeo.
“Everyone is so calm considering we just had a tornado warning.”
“It’s a common occurrence around here.”
Heading in a little deeper, I saw a space cleanly marked out like artwork from Mondrian. Following that line to the juniors, I found our homeroom class with Mr. Harrison.
“There they are!” Mindy said, waving at me.
I checked in with Mr. Harrison as he took attendance. It seemed we were the last to arrive.
“Why’re you so late?”
“On a date?” Brian butted in to answer for me.
After swearing at him, I answered before Mr. Harrison could tell me to watch my tone.
“We were in the west building with a lot of unsupervised freshmen, so Ms. Sandria asked us to help evacuate them.”
“I seem to see you two together often,” Mr. Harrison made a memo on the attendance sheet while making a slightly suspicious face. “Including an appearance on Nick’s vlog.”
I wondered who might subscribe to his vlog, and lo and behold, Mr. Harrison was a viewer!
“That’s because you asked me to take Romeo on that tour!” I yelled in defense. “It was barely shot yesterday, when’d you even watch it? Did Nick already upload it?”
“Nick does minimal edits but got it up regardless, so I had a late night,” Mr. Harrison rubbed his eyes and faked a yawn, then wrote down something on his clipboard. “There’s no one here to break you two up, so no secret dating,” he said as if he was Brother Lawrence.
“We really met by chance!”
This is seriously frustrating. I looked for Grey for backup since he told me Ms. Sandria was looking for me, only to find him playing table tennis with his football buddies. Lotta help he is.
“Where’s Abigail?” I asked Mr. Harrison, unable to find her anywhere.
“She already left for that fashion class at Glenfield.”
I checked my phone, and there were text messages from Abigail I didn’t see. I tried to send a message asking if she got there alright, but it failed to send. The no service status flickered on and off. I couldn’t tell if it was because I was in the basement or because everybody was on their phones at once in a tight area.
There was one public wifi signal that I was able to connect to with one bar. With only one bar, it merely meant that a wifi signal existed, but wasn’t good for much else. On top of that, every phone in the vicinity was fighting to connect to the wifi signal like it was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I cleanly folded from the fight. My phone kept vibrating as it went in and out of connection, and seeing as it might run out of battery in that state, I turned it off.
After we checked in, Romeo and I headed toward our other classmates. Tim Owen, who had his arms resting on the back of a chair, raised them in welcome.
“Welcome to the R-E-A-L Kansas!” He yelled in announcement. “Romeo, I have just one question! Do you see tornados in England as well?”
“There are some, but it’s rare to see one big enough to be issued a warning,” Romeo leaned on the chair Benjamin was sitting in, and continued: “But being evacuated to a shelter like this is a first for me. Being down here though, it doesn’t really feel like there’s a tornado around.”
“You should be nervous,” Tim responded playfully. “During middle school, after coming up from the basement, our school’s roof was gone.”
“What?”
It seems that the classmates have made up their mind to scare the tornado newbie. One of the students that gathered around Romeo talked about how five years ago, the middle school he was attending disappeared because of a tornado.
Benjamin also added in.
“Thankfully our school even has a basement. My elementary school didn’t have one, so we had to go out into the hall and lie by the walls.”
“The hallway walls? Why?”
“Apparently, the center of a building is the safest, and classrooms are situated toward the outside. Though, when faced with lying down and staring at the tiles for an hour, you start to wish you were in class instead.”
Despite what he says, that’s just not realistic. Kids don’t sit still for an hour. Give it 10 minutes, or something close to that, and there’ll be kicking and complaining.
“Did you also go to the same elementary school as Benjamin?”
Romeo looked at me and asked, to which I just shrugged my shoulders.
“No. The school I went to had a separate shelter in the classroom. It had bulletproof walls and was sturdy enough to withstand a missile attack, so it was safe enough to hide in should a firefight break out.”
“A storm shelter… So cool,” Tim clapped his hands while making a sound of being impressed. “I’m sure Iron Man himself must’ve flown in and built it for you.”
“My school was a designated tornado safety test location for the county,” I answered calmly.
The storm shelter was located in the back of the classroom like a cupboard. There was a house with a tornado drawn on the back wall, so we called the shelter Oz. Access to Oz needed to be easy in the case of an emergency, so it was always open. And, even though the teacher told us to not go in there willy nilly, some students still would and get scolded.
Everytime we went through emergency drills, our teacher would show us the same shelter video, and it was like some kind of Marvel hero movie. As in, even though nothing was left in the path of the tornado, the shelter Oz stood unscathed, like Dorothy’s house. The teacher showed it to us so often it was like brainwashing, and after watching it a couple of times, the kids would instinctively head for Oz whenever the siren came.
While talking about it, Andrew, who went to the same elementary school as me, butted in.
“Hey, now that you mention it, I remember it. There was a tornado drawn on the entrance. It was even written that it could withstand a missile going faster than Mach speed.”
Oz was very small so we had to be packed in close enough that we could see the tags on the shirts of those next to us. It was dark enough to feel like an underground bunker during wartime, and having close to 20 kids in a 10 square foot area with no windows, there was nothing better to create a sense of claustrophobia.
“We were in the same class as Grey in first grade, right?” Andrew snickered. “Do you remember us screaming when we first went into Oz?”
I laughed. “Ah, back then… Who was it, Kaila, that started crying and everyone followed suit?”
“And Grey said he wouldn’t cry, but started the instant we got out.”
“That’s right… I’m saying this because Grey isn’t here right now, but I hated being next to him. He always pulled my hair when we went into Oz.”
“Are you perhaps talking about me right now?”
Grey yelled as he stopped playing table tennis. He’s too good at knowing when he’s being talked about.
“No, just pretend you didn’t hear!” Mindy butted in while looking at Romeo.
“Didn’t you have to go through emergency drills?”
“Tornado drills, no… But we did have fire drills.”
When Romeo said it was his first time experiencing a tornado, it suddenly became tornado storytime. Mindy showed Romeo a Reuters picture of a 6 ton truck flying through the air like a matchbox toy. Uprooted trees were all too common.
Benjamin started reciting tornado safety rules to Romeo, saying that it was something someone coming to the west needed to know. During an emergency, you must stay clear of windows, get under a table if there’s no time, or unplug all electrical cords on the way to the basement in the case of an alarm. And if there isn’t a basement, hiding in a bathtub is the safest place.
“…A bathtub?”
“Yes, bathtub. You have to get in something that’s both heavy and sturdy.”
Benjamin raised his glasses and made a very serious face, while Romeo made a face as if he didn’t know if Benjamin was being serious or joking around. I found it funny, so I let out a laugh.
“It’s true. A bathtub or walk-in closet. It’s tornado protocol we’ve heard since we were kids.”
We had many self-titled tornado experts in our homeroom. When somebody said that when a tornado blows, you have to open the windows to match the pressure. Someone knocked it by saying that the power of a tornado doesn’t care about pressure differences. Rather than bothering with windows, it’s more important to head for a safe place as soon as possible.
They also spoke a lot about what you should do if you encounter a tornado while driving. Tim said to floor it in the opposite direction, but Benjamin said to abandon the car altogether. Due to a tornado’s velocity, it’s best to ditch vehicles in favor of taking shelter.
“Who was the one taking calculus until just now?” Mr. Harrison asked as we discussed all this.
“Me, Andrew, and Kelly.”
“Mrs. Speakman’s finishing up the lesson here.”
Two or three students, including Benjamin, got up with a sad look on their face and walked over to the other side. Amazingly, Mrs. Speakman had a whiteboard down here with which to finish the lesson. “We just need 20 more minutes! You guys don’t want to have an extra class too, right? Sit down!”
Tim, watching the scene, whispered to me:
“No matter where you go, there are always teachers like that.”
“Ones that would still hold class even if the world was ending the next day?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s some amazing passion, I guess.”
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