29 Students Remaining
I’m going to throw up. I can feel the nausea churning in my stomach, the acid rising in the back of my throat. A buzzing drones in my ears, like there’s a fly trapped in the space between my skull and my brain, bouncing from one to the other, trying to get out.
What the hell just happened? What did I see?
Diego and Keira were on that elevator. I heard them screaming as it fell.
And now they’re gone.
It’s a simulation, I tell myself desperately. It’s like the escape room—they’re going to come back. They have to come back.
I stare down the dark shaft, holding my breath, waiting. But no one appears.
The platform I’m standing on suddenly jerks, startling me enough that I grasp for the metal cage surrounding it. I imagine cables going slack, the platform plummeting, that darkness below flying toward me as Zo and I scream.
But the platform eases downward slowly, eventually lowering us to the floor, where Frank is waiting. “Congratulations!” he says. “You two were the first to make it to the top. Excellent work.”
“What happened?” I choke out. “Where did they go?”
“Are they okay?” a boy behind me asks. His name is Jacob, small kid, big glasses. He looks at Frank as his platform reaches the floor, but his eyes keep jerking back to the elevator shaft, like they’re magnetized. “Keira Langley and Diego Martinez were on that platform!”
The only things I know about Keira are that she’s blond and athletic. It surprises me a little that she partnered with Diego, who I’d spoken to a few times when he was hanging out with Mando and Rani. Diego was funny, and a little nerdy.
Is funny, I correct in my head. He didn’t just disappear down that shaft. He’s going to come back.
But with every passing second, that feels so much less likely.
Everyone around me is shouting and talking over one another:
“Are they okay?”
“I heard screaming!”
“Where are they?”
Frank holds up his hands. “All right, everyone, everything’s fine. Not to worry. Keira and Diego failed their test, so they were taken downstairs to discuss their options.” He says this carefully, with a faint smile. “They’re perfectly fine.”
Frank’s eyes shift from side to side, like he can’t bring himself to look at any of us directly.
He’s lying, I realize. This hits me in the stomach, so awful and big that I can’t breathe. He’s obviously lying to us!
It’s the first domino in a line, sending more realizations tumbling down after it: This isn’t like the escape room at all, this wasn’t a simulation, Diego and Keira really fell. They aren’t coming back.
And the big one: Something is wrong. Something is really, really wrong.
“That platform wasn’t lowered, it dropped!” Zo says, her voice trembling.
Frank ignores her. “Your Calculus end-of-module test has concluded, and I’m happy to say that the rest of you have passed. Congratulations.” Frank’s expression is so calm it’s eerie. “Your tablets will inform you of your exact grade later today.”
Everyone stares, disbelieving, as he herds us to the door. “In the meantime, you’re all dismissed—”
I don’t know what to do. I’m numb with shock and fear. My legs seem to move on their own, falling in line behind the other students, filing out the door.
But as I walk past Frank, I see that, though he’s smiling, his eyes keep flicking back to the elevator shaft where Keira and Diego disappeared. Almost like he’s waiting for them to come back, too.
All anyone can talk about over lunch is what happened to Diego and Keira.
The students from Calculus huddle together at a table in the middle of the cafeteria, leaning close to one another and talking in low voices:
“Frank said they weren’t hurt.”
“You can’t actually believe him—”
“They must’ve been sent home, like the others.”
“You didn’t see the way that platform dropped!”
I’m listening but not talking. Instead, I have my tablet out and I’m scanning the updated class roster for Keira Langley and Diego Martinez’s names. They’re both already gone.
A cold chill works its way down my spine.
I read the list again, hesitating as I move from Matthew Lamb to Daniel Lewis.
It was like someone deleted the two names the moment they disappeared down that shaft.
And if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t seen what really happened, I’d have assumed they’d failed their test and been asked to leave.
Just like the nineteen other students who are no longer here.
“How many other students has this happened to?” I say finally, looking up. The rest of our table falls quiet, everyone staring back at me.
“What do you mean?” Zo asks. But she’s chewing nervously on her lip. I think she knows what I mean—she just needs me to say it.
“Twenty-one kids have left school since the semester started,” I say. “That’s almost half the class.” I look around the table. “Have any of you seen anything like this in one of your other classes?”
They glance at one another, then slowly shake their heads.
“Sometimes students don’t come back after their tests,” Nick Roberts says. “But we figured they were just sent home.”
“Or maybe they dropped out,” Jada Brooks adds. “Classes here are really hard.”
“Have any of you ever talked to someone who was asked to leave?” I want to know. “Maybe when they were packing up their dorm? Or if you caught them right after class?”
No one says a word. After a few beats of quiet, Jada clears her throat. “They always just…disappear.”
Rani’s voice suddenly cuts through the cafeteria. “Oye, Lia!”
I wave back at him and start packing up my things. “If any of you see anything else that seems weird, let me know,” I tell the others. They nod, still looking shell-shocked. Nick’s peeling the label off his bottle of water, eyes glazed. Zo gives me a half-hearted wave but doesn’t glance up.
I pull my bag over my shoulder and hurry over to Rani. “C’mon,” I say, jerking my head toward the door. “Let’s take a walk.”
A sharp breeze cuts through the square once we step outside. Leaves crunch beneath our shoes. I wrap my arms around myself to keep out the cold.
“What happened in Calculus?” Rani wants to know. He walks close enough that I can smell the faint trace of smoke and lilies in his hair. “Like five people have stopped me to ask if I was there.”
I quietly tell him about Diego and Keira. “But the professor kept insisting they were fine,” I finish, “and that we shouldn’t worry.”
Rani has a scab on his elbow. He touches it gingerly while we walk, like he’s trying to see whether it’ll bleed. I wait a beat for him to respond to what I just said, and when he doesn’t look up, I stop walking. “Well? Don’t you think that’s messed up?”
Rani shrugs. He stares at something just over my left shoulder, almost like he doesn’t want to look at me directly. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe a little?”
“A little?” I stare at him. “Rani, it was like he was trying to convince us we didn’t really see what we all know we saw.”
“I just think you’re jumping to conclusions. Maybe your professor was telling the truth, and after they failed the test, they were…taken somewhere to discuss their options.”
“They fell down an elevator shaft!” My voice is quiet, but it must come out harsher than I meant, because Rani’s eyes widen and snap back to mine.
When he speaks again, his voice is carefully measured. “All I’m trying to say is you don’t really know what happened. The teachers keep saying the tests are calibrated to make sure no one gets hurt. So, maybe there’s something you don’t—”
“Rani, I was there—”
“Yeah, I know.” Rani sighs and drags a hand back through his hair.
He’s quiet. Then: “You know I was on my fourth house in two years before I got here?” he asks me, in a different tone of voice.
“After my mom died, CPS kept bouncing me around to what’s left of my family.
The only problem is that none of them actually want a teenager living with them, and eventually, they get tired of me and send me to the next person, and the cycle starts all over again.
I can’t go back to that, Lia. I have to make this place work. You get me?”
I clench my teeth together to keep myself from saying something I might regret.
It’s not like I’m not sympathetic. If anyone understands how much it sucks to go from one family that doesn’t want you to another family that doesn’t want you, it’s me.
And believe me, I get the impulse to bury my head in the sand and pretend nothing weird is happening here.
There’s a full-ride scholarship and guaranteed admission to my dream college on the line if I make it to the end of the year.
There’s a part of me that wishes I were capable of pretending I didn’t see what I know I saw.
But Rani wasn’t there. He didn’t hear those two students screaming as they fell. If he had, I don’t believe he could stand there and tell me to just ignore it. There’s something weird going on here.
We reach the place where the sidewalk forks.
The Innovator dorm is just ahead, half hidden beneath a sprawling oak tree.
Glancing at the tree reminds me of my dream, and heat rises in my cheeks as inappropriate thoughts fill my head.
Fireflies. Dandelion. Peppermint. I clench my jaw and push the thoughts away.
Rani studies me for a moment, his expression unreadable. “Listen…if you ever need to get away or, I don’t know, talk to someone, I’m around. Just say the word.”
His voice is low, almost hesitant, and it lingers in the space between us. But any chance that I was going to call on Rani for anything died the moment he told me to ignore what happened to Keira and Diego.
“Yeah, whatever,” I mutter, ignoring the flash of hurt on Rani’s face as I turn and hurry into my dorm.
I can’t sleep that night. I can’t stop replaying the moment that elevator plummeted, the sound of those kids screaming, the look on Frank’s face when we asked him where they’d gone. Rani’s less-than-optimal response when I told him what I saw.