4. Jordyn
JORDYN
The fire alarm is a blade that slices through the air and into my bones. My feet pound against the pavement, but I’m moving through water, thick and resistant. Kids clot together in frightened groups, a sea of small, tear-stained faces. Not one of them is his.
“He’s supposed to be with Mrs. Gable’s class!” a lunch aide shouts over the din, her voice tinny and distant.
I spot a green cardigan near the lawn. Mrs. Gable. I shove past a parent holding a whimpering kindergartener, my apology lost in the shriek of the alarm. Her back is to me, her arms wrapped tight around her own waist.
“Where is he?” My voice comes out ragged, torn from my throat. I grab her arm, and she flinches, turning a pale, shocked face toward me. “Brody. Where is he?”
“Jordyn, we need everyone to stay calm.” Her words are rote, a script she’s memorized for a drill, not for the real thing. Her eyes dart over my shoulder, back toward the lines of children. “We’re getting a headcount. Just stay behind the line.”
“He’s not on the line!” The words rip out of me, hot and sharp. "The alarm. You know what that does. He wouldn't just follow."
She stares at me, her expression blank with a fear that isn’t about the fire. It’s the fear of a problem she can't solve. Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. Useless. They’re all useless.
I spin away from her, my own name a frantic pulse in my ears. “Brody!” I scream it, but the alarm swallows the sound whole. My eyes scan every small figure, every shape, every shadow. I push through a knot of teachers huddled over a clipboard.
“Ma’am, please, you need to step back.” A man in a fluorescent yellow vest puts a hand on my arm.
I wrench away from his touch. “My son is missing.”
“We have procedures in place. Everything is under control.”
His calm tone is gasoline on a flame. Nothing is under control.
My world has splintered into a million sharp pieces, and the only one that matters is gone.
The crowd is a current, pulling me away from the building, pushing me back into the neat, orderly lines of procedure and calm voices.
I fight against it, a desperate swimmer thrashing toward a shore that isn't there. Every face I see that isn't his is a fresh stab of panic. My chest constricts, a band of iron drawn tight around my lungs. Breathing is a conscious, painful effort. If he isn’t out here, then he’s in there.
The thought hits me like a physical blow. He’s in there, alone with the noise.
The man in the fluorescent vest steps in front of me again, blocking my view of the brick building. He holds his hands up, palms out, a gesture meant to placate a spooked animal.
“Ma’am, listen to me. It’s overwhelming, I get it. But nine times out of ten, the child just gets mixed in with another group. We’re doing a headcount right now.”
His voice is a deep, reasonable drone, sandpaper against my raw nerves. I shake my head, a sharp, violent motion before he even finishes his sentence. The words are like a puff of smoke, meaningless. They float past me.
“He’s not in another group.”
“You don’t know that. In all the confusion?—”
“No.” My voice is flat, a stone skipping across the surface of my panic. “You don’t know him. He doesn’t get ‘mixed in.’ He finds a corner. A closet. He makes the world small.”
I see it as clearly as if I am standing beside him. My son, curled into a ball, hands covering his ears, his body rigid against the sonic assault. He would never run into the open, into the arms of more chaos. He would retreat. He would hide.
Principal Albright steps forward. “Jordyn, the fire department is here. They’ll do a sweep of the building. Please, just wait with the other parents.”
They talk about him like he is a hypothetical problem, a box to be checked on a list. They use logic.
Procedures. But my son’s brain is not procedural.
Their calm is a betrayal. Every second they spend talking, explaining, soothing, is a second he is trapped in that screaming building.
A chasm opens between what they assume and what I know in my very marrow.
Their ignorance feels like a weapon pointed at my son.
I look from the principal’s placating face to the vest-wearing man’s stern expression. They are barriers. Obstacles.
My eyes fix on the double doors of the main entrance, fifty yards away. The only thing that matters. My focus narrows until the crowd, the noise, the useless adults all blur into a single, unimportant smudge. Only the school remains.
A new siren joins the chorus, a deep, rising howl that climbs over the shriek of the school alarm.
It grows louder, closer, until it feels like it's coming from inside my own skull.
The wail of the fire truck layers over the cries of children and the frantic, useless shouts of teachers.
The sounds stack on top of each other, building a solid wall of noise.
It presses in, a physical weight against my eardrums, my chest, my skin.
My shoulder blades twitch. My hands clench at my sides, fighting an instinct to fly up and clamp over my own ears.
A muscle in my jaw jumps. For a single, shattering second, the world dissolves.
The faces, the running kids, the flashing lights—they all blur into a meaningless smear of colour.
All that exists is the noise. It is a living thing, a predator with a thousand different voices, and it is hunting.
"We need you to move back, ma'am." The fluorescent vest is speaking again. His voice is another texture in the assault, a low rumble trying to impose order on a hurricane.
My gaze doesn't waver from the school doors.
The brick building seems silent at first glance, but I know it's not.
Inside, the alarm is a continuous, high-pitched scream, echoing off the cinderblock walls, bouncing down shiny linoleum floors, trapping him.
They think they are fighting a fire. I know I am fighting a sound.
They want to get the kids out. I just need to get the noise to stop.
Every decibel is a fresh wound. Every echo is a nail.
My heart hammers a frantic, useless rhythm against my ribs, just another sound in a world that has become too loud to bear.
The truth isn't a slow dawn. It’s a camera shutter.
Click. A single, perfect, terrible image freezes in my mind.
Brody, not lost among the screaming children, but trapped by the scream itself.
He didn't wander off. He didn't get mixed in with the wrong class. The sound pinned him where he stood. It builds a cage of vibrations around him, and he can’t move. He can’t push through a wall that is invisible to everyone but him.
He is alone, folded into a corner of the geography classroom or wedged behind the smelly gym mats in the storage closet.
Making himself small. Waiting for the world to go quiet.
My body pivots before my brain catches up.
The principal’s hand, reaching for my arm, is a slow-motion gesture in a dream I am no longer part of.
Her mouth moves, forming placating shapes.
The fluorescent vest steps into my path.
They are statues. Obstacles made of flesh and good intentions, and I simply move around them.
There is no thought. There is only the pull, a physical cord tied to my centre, reeling me in toward the brick building. My legs pump, eating up the damp grass. The shouts behind me are water-logged, indistinct. “Ma’am! Stop!” The words are sounds without meaning.
The fire truck, parked askew near the entrance, is a monument of red and chrome.
Its flashing lights paint the school walls in silent, strobing bursts of colour.
Red. White. Red. White. The rhythm is hypnotic, a pulse drawing me forward.
The shrieking alarm from the roof is just a constant pressure now, a part of the air I breathe.
Everything falls away. The crying children, the frantic teachers, the firemen unspooling a fat yellow hose.
They are smudges of colour at the edge of my vision.
My entire world narrows to the set of grey metal doors at the front of the school. The entrance. That is the only thing that is real. That is where I am going. There is no choice left in me. There is only forward.
Hands lock onto my biceps, jerking me back from the threshold of the school doors. The force is absolute, pulling me into a chest plate as hard as concrete. The smell of smoke and sweat fills my lungs.
“Ma’am, you cannot go in there.” The voice is a rumble, close to my ear, meant to be calming but it only ignites me.
I twist, a frantic animal in a trap. My voice shatters, the pieces spilling out, sharp and desperate.
“He’s not lost, he’s trapped! The alarm, it pins him down. He doesn’t run out, he runs in. He finds a small space. Under a desk, in a locker, behind the boiler in the basement—anywhere the sound gets muffled.”
I shove against the unmoving body behind me, my words tumbling over each other, a frantic instruction manual for my son that no one ever reads.
“You can’t just call his name. You have to get low. You have to look in the places no one else would think to look. He’ll be folded up so small you’ll miss him. He won’t make a sound. He can’t. The noise paralyzes him.”
My nails dig into the thick fabric of the firefighter's coat. He holds me fast, his voice a steady stone against the flood of my panic.
“We have a procedure. We will clear the building.”
“Your procedure will fail!” The scream rips from my throat, raw and ragged. “He won’t respond like a typical kid. You have to turn the alarm off. That’s the only way he’ll be able to move.”
My explanation cuts through the wall of sirens and shouts.
It’s no longer just noise. It’s information.
Urgent. Crucial. Near the engine, another firefighter stills his hands on a valve.
He turns his head, his helmet catching the flash of the strobing lights.
His gaze cuts through the chaos and lands on me.
He isn’t watching a frantic parent; his attention is sharp, focused.
He is listening to the cadence of my words, the blueprint of my son’s terror.
For a breath, a single, hollow moment, I see recognition in his posture. He hears. Someone actually hears me.