Full Lockdown

Spider hadn’t needed to use the bathroom; he only wanted time alone in the hallway to stare at the glass display of this year’s sixth-grade bridges made from tongue depressors and Elmer’s glue. Every year for the last eight years, the bridges had failed the test of holding Mr. Garvey’s swirly blue bowling ball, all of them splintering and snapping save but three bridges. Anyone could see this year’s was a sloppy bunch, as if the kids hadn’t even tried. Like they knew it was doomed anyway.

In three years, it would be Spider’s turn, and he was just feeling a tickle of panic, thinking how he needed to research methods and make some mock-ups, when the announcement came in a fuzz of static: a full lockdown, the principal’s voice commanding, You know what to do, people.

Spider did know what to do. They had been preparing for this.

A door latched behind him—Ms. McCree’s room—and he pounded on it until she let him in. All the kindergarteners stared at him as if in a trance, including Luis and Little Rooney from home. Then suddenly everyone was talking, Ms. McCree clapping her hands for their attention. She put her finger to her lips and tried to shush them.

She was nice enough but a total push-over which, in times of crisis, Spider knew was a serious liability. She’d also been his kindergarten teacher, and for a few weeks following his twin brother’s death, she’d put Spider at the front of the line, her bony hand gripping his, as she led them to the cafeteria for lunch.

Now, he ran for the window and tugged on the cord to lower the blinds but they were stuck.

“Please, Spider,” Ms. McCree called. She was trying to pull a pencil from between a girl’s teeth, “Sit down, please. I’ll get to that.”

But he knew she wouldn’t, just as he knew grown-ups never actually stopped bad things from happening.

Right now, nothing was happening: the kids were too loud, the blinds weren’t drawn, the lights were still on. He wasn’t even sure Ms. McCree had re-locked the door.

In a mounting panic, he yanked on the cord, and the blinds came crashing down in a mass of twisted metal. For a sudden moment, it was quiet.

Then Luis shouted, “Spider’s breaking stuff!” and the kids cheered and ran over to inspect the mess.

Ms. McCree was clapping again.

That’s when Spider grabbed Luis and Little Rooney, and together they shoved the hulk of Ms. McCree’s desk to barricade the door. He hit the lights. He looked for any vents that might need closing but it was too loud to think straight.

He climbed onto the desk and screamed, “Everyone shut the fuck up!”

A sudden, delicious silence.

He wanted his voice to sound deeper, more grown up, but it came out pinched and a bit crazed. “Sit down. Shut up. Or we all die.” For effect, he kicked at Ms. McCree’s stack of books which took to the air like broken-winged pigeons.

Later, in Ms. Jackie’s office, she told him he had some explaining to do.

So he tried explaining. What if there had been an active shooter? What if a pack of rabid dogs were roaming the halls? What if there was a bomb?

“It was nothing of the sort,” she said. “It was a drill.”

“But what if?”

“You terrified a bunch of little kids.” She leaned towards him as if to confide a secret. “You seriously flipped out, Spider,” she said softly, then tapped her own forehead. “What’s going on in there? Tell me the truth.”

How was he supposed to tell the truth without seeming crazy? How was he supposed to say that among the kindergarteners, he’d seen his five-year-old self, knowing it was his twin because Frankie always wore red while Spider wore blue—the only way people could tell them apart. And there was Frankie in his red cap, standing beside the time-out chair, his five-year-old face blurring, like locating a star at night: the more you try to see it, the more it disappears.

Wasn’t that the truth, that in time, everything becomes blurry and less real, that our mind tells and retells the stories, whittling them down to nothing but hazy, dream versions?

The real truth was, he could barely recall them outside that day. Two boys, one in blue reaching for something—a dandelion?— the other in red darting over a patch of green, perhaps chasing something. A woman who is their mom somewhere behind them, there but not there.

What he clearly sees is this: the morning sun toasting the inside of the truck, the driver angling his travel mug into a cup holder too small to contain it, the pothole looming ahead which will send the truck bouncing and lurching, the mug toppling to the driver’s feet.

It can’t be stopped. Time can’t rewind. The truck is committed to its trajectory as surely as the past will be lost. Only the present remains constantly, unavoidably here.

(For a quick discussion of what’s happening inside the head and heart of Spider, check out “What’s Going On in “Full Lockdown.”)