“Catch you later, dude.”
Julian started yelling as we walked away, calling us morons and scumbags and begging us to open the door, but his pleas had dwindled away to nothing long before we reached the parking lot. We tried to laugh about it in the car, congratulating ourselves on the genius prank we’d just pulled, but our hearts weren’t really in it. I was about to say we should go back and let him out, but Troy spoke first.
“He can breathe in there, right? He’s not gonna suffocate or anything?”
“There are vents in the side,” I said. “I checked.”
“Can you imagine how bad it smells?” Troy asked. “Could you actually die from that?”
“He’ll be fine,” Wade said. “People will be walking their dogs at like six in the morning. They’ll let him out.”
“That’s five hours from now,” I said.
“Don’t feel sorry for that fucker,” Wade said. “He’s lucky he’s not in the hospital.”
*
I went home and got into bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep. All I could think about was Julian Spitzer, trapped in that gnarly box, far from anyone who could help him. I wondered if his parents had realized he was gone, if they were maybe calling the phone that Wade had left in the grass.
I couldn’t take it. Around five that morning I got out of bed and rode my bike over to the park. It had seemed so sinister the night before, a creepy place where anything could happen. But it was beautiful in the early morning, with the sun coming up and birds chirping like crazy. I could see houses through the trees, not nearly as far away as they’d seemed in the dark.
I was relieved to find the Port-A-John empty, the tape seal broken. Maybe Julian had only been in there for a little while before someone came along, or he figured out a way to free himself. Maybe I’d stayed up all night worrying about nothing.
We had a few bad days after that, wondering if he’d told anyone what we’d done, his parents or maybe the cops or even just his friends. We weren’t sure if it was a crime to tape someone inside a portable toilet, but it was the kind of prank you could get in pretty bad trouble for, a serious lapse in judgment you wouldn’t want to have to explain to your parents or coaches, or to a college admissions officer.
But nothing happened. We never heard a word about it.
That was the summer before our senior year. When we got back to school in September, Julian Spitzer was mysteriously absent. Some people said he’d dropped out, others that he’d transferred to private school. I was just glad he was gone, so I didn’t have to see him or think about him. By the time we graduated, I’d pretty much erased him from my memory, which was why it was such an unpleasant shock to hear my mother mention his name that afternoon, dropping it so casually into the conversation, asking if it rang a bell.
*
You know how sometimes, if you try not to think about something, you become that much more aware of it? That’s how it was with me and that girl in the library. I kept trying to concentrate on my book—the melting glaciers and rising sea levels—and she kept chewing away, making this crackly gum-and-saliva noise that went right through me.
Jesus Christ, I thought. Can you even hear yourself?
It was actually a relief when the protesters arrived. There were maybe twenty of them, and they entered the library like a tour group, huddled together near the main entrance, whispering and looking around. Some of the kids at my table were already rolling their eyes and shaking their heads.
“Not again,” moaned the chewing machine.
“Every friggin’ night,” said the kid with the eraser.
The protesters organized themselves in single file, stretching all the way down the center aisle. The girl closest to my table had blue hair and black lipstick. She glanced nervously at the Muslim girl next to her, who just had the headscarf, not the facemask. They lifted their arms.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
It was kind of lame that first time, like only half the group got the memo, and not all of them read it at the same time.
“He was a thug!” somebody shouted from one of the tables.
The blue-haired girl and her Muslim friend raised their arms higher and chanted with more conviction.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
I’d heard about these Michael Brown protests—they were supposedly happening all over campus—but this was the first one I’d actually seen. A lot of people were complaining about them, saying that it was really disrespectful, the way the protesters barged into classrooms and harassed the fans at sporting events. But it was kind of cool to have them invade the library like this, filling that quiet space with their chant, which became louder and more confident the more they repeated it.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
The line was moving now, new faces filing past me in a slow parade. To my amazement, one of them was waving at me. It took me a second to recognize Amber, from the Autism Awareness Network, and by then she’d broken from the line and was heading straight for my table.
“Dude!” she said in this jubilant voice, like I’d come back from the dead. “Where have you been? We missed you last meeting.”
“Too much work,” I said, holding up my book so she could see I was reading about climate change.
Even though she was out of formation, she raised her hands and shouted along with the others, begging the invisible cops not to shoot. She was wearing sweats and a hoodie, and I noticed again how strong she looked, with those linebacker shoulders, and how pretty she was, blond hair and blue eyes and farm-girl freckles, her cheeks all flushed with excitement.
“It’s terrible what happened in Ferguson,” she told me. “This shit’s gotta stop.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. The more I heard about Michael Brown the more confused I got. Was he minding his business or had he robbed a store? Was he surrendering or trying to grab the cop’s gun? I’d heard different people say different things, and didn’t know what to believe.
“It’s fucked up,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
Amber smiled, like I’d passed some kind of test. She held out her hand, like she was asking me to dance.
“Come on,” she said. “We need your voice.”
*
I was shy at first, and worried about my backpack, which I’d left at the table.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
“Come on!” Amber told me. “Say it like you mean it!”
Some people heckled us, but others got up from their seats and joined the conga line as we moved through the library. We marched past the circulation desk and snaked through the stacks to the Computer Commons.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
It got easier the more I did it, and a lot more fun. Some people were swaying and others started raising the roof. For a little while Amber and I were holding hands, our arms aloft like we’d just won a medal.