The Phoenices Volume 1 - Expired

Chapter 21 - Aidan

The group of 17 students who weren't at class at all so far that day made their daily appearance for the crappy school lunches, each buying slightly more than they would eat so they would have something to snack on around four when they began to get peckish again. I began heading back to the bathroom, my cheap styrofoam tray almost buckling from the weight of the excess food resting on top of it. I had a sport sized water bottle in my sweatshirt pocket and 3 fruit rollups, along with the muffin that came with my smoothie for later, a large slice of pizza, salad and the smoothie for my actual lunch. I was about to head out the doors of the cafeteria, when I was halted by a staff member, who was standing in front two of the fours exits, and when I turned around to go to the other side, I was met by the same predicament. The entire group began to gather in the middle of the hall, and I stared at the group of like 15 kids at this point, all confused as to how we were going to do this. I glanced around, searching for an exit, when I saw the hallway that led to the entrance of the buffet. I signaled for everyone to sit at a table, and we all gathered at one of the bigger empty tables, leaving me the only one standing.

"So guys, you know that hallway that leads down to the entrance of the thing?" I nodded my head towards it, several of their heads turning to look where I was gesturing to, "Two of us at a time are going to nonchalantly head down that hallway, as if you're getting food and then just keep going at a run until the hallway just before the door, then turn and keeping running. We are gonna meet you back at the dark bathroom." I sent the two kids at the end of the table first, watching them calmly head down the hallway, disappearing from sight for a good three minutes before sending the next few. This continued on until there was only Elizabeth and I sitting at our table, Elizabeth on her phone and I anxiously staring at the hall. The other two had been gone for a few minutes so I decided we should go, reaching out to tap Elizabeth's shoulder, her head snapping up and turning when I tilted my head in the direction of the hallway.

"Okay," she muttered, her eyes drifting back down to her phone as she slowly rose, following me closely as we feigned going back into the servery, sprinting down the hall once we passed it, then turning and running down the next almost slamming directly into another group of students from previous sessions.

"Why are you guys still waiting here?" I asked them, my eyebrows raised, flicking my hands at them to signal they needed to go.

"Well there was a teacher so we decided to wait for a few minutes, see if they would leave," the one I had come to know as Sean Paul answered, glancing over his shoulder and pointing to where I assumed the teacher was previously, just around the corner.

"Get going then, we don't want to get caught from this way," I muttered, placing a hand on each student, gently shoving the freshmen down the hallway towards their destination. We all quickly headed back to our bathroom, which was now outfitted with a large oval of pillows and many layers of blankets, along with lanterns and better lighting that wasn't constantly flickering and giving us headaches. We had begun to organize our plan on how to take action in the last few days, everyone already knew about the issue from the news, we were sort of school wide celebrities, but they didn't know who exactly was going to be affected by it, and I was thinking that if they knew a lot of their friends were going to be affected in one way or another, they would do more about it to help. We had begun to draft an announcement we would have Marissa program to play over the loudspeakers at like the ending of 4th hour, when most people were in class, on the 19th, tomorrow. We had also planned to print lists of all the names of the people who were going to be affected, whether they wanted it or not, because they needed to be protected too. We were all working on our own things, Marissa had copy pasted a list of all the victims into a Google document and Maggie and Heather were working together to organize the students names into a symbol, or maybe just a solid square list, Marissa herself was a closet computer geek, so she was using her previous knowledge to finish up the program we were using, two sophomores and a freshman assisting her in the doc, adjusting stuff they know wouldn't work. Me and the other original three were the runners, filling printers with paper, grabbing food, getting chargers and pens, and when we weren't busy getting in some daily cardio, we were helping the other eight students with the drafting of the posters, announcements, and small biographies about each of the students whose name was listed on the 21st.