Free Trapped by Michael Northrop Page B

occurring to me right then, and I guess I was sort of staring at him. He saw me, shrugged his shoulders, and put a look on his face, like, “What? Stop being such a freak.”
    I let out a little laugh, because I really was being a freak. He smiled and shook his head, and I knew that none of that stuff—about leapfrogging and B+ grades — had exactly occurred to him.And I knew Jason, so I knew that even if it had, he was still my friend.
    Les was already kneeling down in front of the big double doors that led into the caf. “Here it is,” he said.
    He had his finger on a little circle on the bottom corner of the right-hand door. From the way it was catching the dim light, you could see it was unpainted metal. He put his finger on the center and made a little turning motion, showing where the key would go.
    “Gimme the stuff,” he said, and you could see it caught Jason a little off guard. He made this gesture, pulling the hammer and bolt in closer to his body, like, “Mine.”
    Les stood up, a good two inches taller than Jason. They didn’t look like friends anymore. Jason did some little calculation in his head and handed over the tools. I made eye contact with Jason and he gave me a slight shrug like, “Why not?” I’d been thinking the same thing. Let Les do all the breaking: the shop window, the cafeteria door. Then we can sell him out if we get in trouble for it.
    Les was kneeling down and hunched forward on the floor again, and we shifted around so that we could see what he was doing. He put the tip of the metal bolt up against the cylinder of the lock with his left hand, turned his body to allow his right hand some room, and then swung the hammer in a little underhand arc.
    BANG!
    The tip of the bolt pushed the cylinder maybe a quarter of an inch in.
    BANG!
    Half an inch.
    One more swing: The bolt went all the way in, the cylinder disappeared, and Les slammed his hand between the hammer and the door.
    BANG-POP! “OW!”
    He stood up, shaking his hand. I truly believe that if anyone had laughed at him right then, he would have driven that bolt straight into their skull. We just stood there as he swore. I looked over at Krista, and she was literally holding her breath.
    Once Les had gotten it out of his system, he handed the tools back to Jason. He did it in sort of a here-take-this way that I didn’t care for much. Then he turned back around and pushed on the double doors. They swung open easily.
    Normally, we went through those doors in a long, slow line, but today we all pushed our way in at once. We were hungry, and the prospect of food was exciting, like Christmas morning and Thanksgiving dinner combined.
    And there was something else too, another little thrill. I remember thinking, Well, that’s that. We’ve done it now. We’ve smashed something, broken in. We might say that Les did it, but it was all of us. He was our device, just like the hammer was his. I remember thinking, We can do anything here now. This place is ours, until someone comes to take it back, someone old and angry.

FOURTEEN
    I’ll say this about the folks who run the cafeteria: Old blue-haired ladies they may be, but they know how to buy in bulk.
    It gave me a weird thrill to hop over the counter. How many days had I spent slowly sliding my tray along that railing, waiting for the globs of pseudo-food and then sliding it all up to the register to pay? Jason, Les, and I hopped over the little flat surface next to that register, between the end of the railing and the wall. We were like the people hopping subway turnstiles in the movies.
    Pete reached down and flicked a latch; then he lifted the counter up and back. “Uh, guys?” he said. “It opens.” He walked through, followed by the girls and Elijah. Pete was missing the point: I’d flip the thing back down, just so I could hop it again on the way out.
    Once we were back in the kitchen area, we started knocking around in the cupboards. The light was a little better back