Trapped by Michael Northrop Page B

where girls learn this stuff. I do know you can’t underestimate the power of a pretty girl’s voice on a teenage boy, no matter how tough he is. Krista was just a freshman, but she’d pretty clearly figured that out already.
    Les sort of half turned toward her.
    “What’s up?” she said.
    He turned the rest of the way.
    “How’s the treasure hunt going?” she continued.
    “We found a radio.”
    At first I assumed it must’ve been Pete who’d said that, but he was still standing there with that same expression on his face. It was Les.
    “Show her, doughboy,” he said. Sometimes people called Pete that because his last name was Dubois. Realizing he wasn’t about to get crushed, Pete unfroze and raised the radio up into the uneven light.
    “It’s got batteries, but the reception’s crap,” Les added.
    “Maybe it’ll be better upstairs,” said Krista. “Where it’s less …”
    “Buried,” I said. It seemed like about time to join the conversation.
    “So whatcha doin’ here?” said Krista.
    “Blankets?” I said. She looked over at me, like: Are you going to be completing my sentences from now on, or can I do that myself? But it didn’t seem like a bad thing.
    “Yeah,” said Les. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
    And that was another sentence that could be taken either way, but I took a chance and said, “I don’t know. I can look pretty dumb….”
    And he laughed, and there was just no meanness in it at all, and all of a sudden I was like, Holy crap. Because I’d just realized something about Les, about the kind of trouble he got into and why. Now I understood how he could share a room with Elijah and not rip that scrawny little dude into scraps.
    I looked over at Krista because she’d already realized this, and I was just like, How? How on earth would you know that? When did you even deal with this guy before? And she looked back at me, and her look just said: Boys are ridiculous.
    For the record, I’ve never denied that.
    “Well, let’s get to it,” she said. “Those lights aren’t getting any brighter.”
    And they weren’t. I wondered how much longer they’d last. Another day, maybe? I guess it depended on when they shut off again. I heard a pop and looked over. Les had knocked the cylinder out of the door lock with one shot.
    I walked over to Pete and fake punched him in the gut. It was one of our ways of saying hello. I was just saying, I’m here, man. He gave me a weak little smile.
    Les pushed the door open and we all filed in. The nurse’s office was a gold mine.

EIGHTEEN
    We’d all pulled chairs into a semicircle around the radio, which was set up on a desk in Gullickson’s room. Even Elijah had joined us for the occasion. Jason was working the dial.
    He’d spent the afternoon working on his go-kart until it got too dark in the shop, I guess. We’d actually sort of waited for him. We didn’t have a lot of events around here, and it seemed a little cruel to leave him out of this one. Plus, a quick look out the window told us there was no hurry.
    The road out front was still buried, with another foot or two on top of what was there before. There was still no movement up on Route 7, and the house on the hill that was closest to us was up to its gutters in snow. I couldn’t see any smoke coming from its chimney like I had before. Maybe it was just too dark, but I didn’t think so.
    More to the point, it was still snowing. Was it harder or softer than before? I just had no idea. It was all starting to look the same to me, and I was already sick of trying to gauge it. It would lighten up for a few minutes and you’d think maybe this was it, you know? And then two minutes after that it was coming down twice as hard. It was almost better not to look.
    The radio was black and boxy, with a telescoping antenna that we’d pulled out all the way. At first, it offered us a wide variety of static, but part of that was because Jason was workingthe dial too fast. At least