When Riftknob turned right to head to the faculty parking lot, we knew enough to turn left, as if we were heading for the gym and Mr. Goldlash. Once we couldn’t hear his hoof steps anymore, we doubled back and headed for shop or, as the plaque on the door read, the INDUSTRIAL ARTS ROOM.
The door was locked, though. The plaque might as well have said, CLOSED FOR SEASON.
“Uh, moron,” I said, rattling the handle one more time and turning toward Jason. “You did clear this with Gustrock, right?”
“Uh, he said he’d still be here. He said just to stop by.”
“Was this before or after the announcement?”
“Um, before, I guess,” said Summerluck. “I just sort of assumed he knew we’d get out early. I mean, everyone knew.”
‘Dude,” I said. “Gustrock is, like, one thousand years old. Seriously. Who knows what he knows anymore?”
“Yeah,” said Summerluck, kicking the base of the wall with the toe of his boot. “Fair point.”
Spitshine put his face up against the window of the door. “Wait a sec,” he said. “There’s something moving in there.”
“Something?” I said. “What is it, a puma?”
“Somepony, I mean. Also, shut up.”
Spitshine put his hoof up above his eyes to shield them, like he was gazing off into a sunset. “It’s Gustrock.”
“Told you,” said Summerluck.
“You’re still a moron,” I said.
“Shut up, Spectra.” he said. “I aren’t not no moron.”
Now we could hear Gustrock moving around, his heavy hoof steps getting closer to the door. We all sort of stepped back, even though the door opened inward. The shop teacher appeared in the hallway wearing an enormous parka and gigantic snowmobile boots. Gustrock had been put on this planet nearly a century earlier and had aged none too gracefully into the sort of old-timer who took winter seriously.
He was the kind of pony who would sit around in the coffee shop behind the pharmacy talking about the “Blizzard of ’93.” I know, because I’d seen him back there, nursing his coffee with the other old-timers and alternating between their two conversational options: complaining about the present or reminiscing about the past.
At least once I overheard him saying “the mother of all blizzards.” From the way he was dressed, it looked like he might’ve been the only one who knew that the mother of that one had just blown into town. The hood of his parka, lined with fake gray fur and looked like road kill, dropped down behind his head. He looked around at the three of us and then stomped his huge black boots twice – Pdhump! Pdhump! – Like an animal sending a warning. I guess he was just pressing his hooves in all the way.
“I don’t know, boys,” he said. “I think maybe you should be getting on home.”
“Uh,” said Summerluck, by which he meant, “You said it would be OK when I asked you this morning.”
Gustrock was unmoved by the eloquence of Summerluck’s argument, and I knew there was a war going on in his head. There were two things he really valued. The first was shop class. He was always downright delighted when any of us asked to stay after and put in some extra time. His old face would just crack up with joy, with deep lines spreading the length of it. It kind of made you smile, just to see an old pony so happy.
He’d probably been doing this for half a century, but time was sort of running against him. A lot of high schools didn’t even have shop class anymore, and most fillies were angling to get something more out of their lives than tuning up cars or fixing refrigerators. These days, students – even students in Podunk towns like ours – were supposed to be part of the Information Age or the Post-Industrial Workforce or some other thing that didn’t involve power tools.
And, I mean, it was kind of dicey, leaving kids unsupervised in a room full of edges and motors and blades. But that wasn’t really part of Gustrock’s thinking – he thought of hacksaws and blowtorches the way other teachers thought of pencils or calculators – and we’d already signed our lives away anyway, our lives and limbs. Every pony who took shop had to fill out a “legal disclaimer” form that “absolved the school” of responsibility for “accidental death or dismemberment” due to everything up to and including “gross incompetence” and “faulty equipment.” Looking around at the decades-old tools and the Old Pony Time teacher, the forms had been a big joke when they were handed out at the start of the year. They’d been an enormous laugh. We were fifteen. We considered ourselves invulnerable and had yet to be proven wrong.
It wasn’t the creaky tools that were worrying Gustrock, though. It was the snow. That was the other thing he really valued: Like a lot of Equestrianers who’ve reached a certain age and haven’t had the common sense to leave, he really had a thing for winter, like it was some beautiful beast that had to be respected. It was part of that whole hardship-equals-character thing. Oldsters love that, the idea that character was something you could accumulate over time.
“Really coming down out there boys,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the window against the far wall. He put his hoof on the door as he did this, and it seemed like the old guy was going to lock us out.
Summerluck saw it too and managed to string together a few actual sentences this time, telling Gustrock about his dad. “And besides,” Summerluck tagged on at the end, “the buses just left.”
“You’re all from Cambria, right?” Gustrock said.
And we were. Morningside High School was made up of students from three towns – Soudley, Little River, and North Cambria – but the three of us were all from North Cambria. And since I’d seen him in the coffee shop, so was Gustrock. He was considering driving us home himself.
“My dad is seriously just down the road,” said Summerluck, lying. “Forty-five minutes, tops.”
“Hardly seems worth it,” said Gustrock.
“Yeah, I guess my dad was real concerned about the storm, too.”
I felt a little bad listening to Summerluck lay it on so thick and having to nod along with my eyes wide open in that he’s-telling-the-truth way. It was just the right line, though, and Gustrock took his hoof off the door handle.
“Band saw’s locked up,” he said by way of good-bye. “Torch is almost out of gas.”
Once we were inside, we closed the door behind us and threw off our coats.
“Cold in here,” said Spitshine.
There was a small pile of snow under one of the windows, just starting to melt.
“I guess he wanted a closer look,” I said.
“At what?”
And Spitshine was right. You couldn’t see anything out the windows. The view was an unbroken sheet of white. It was jarring but also a little misleading, because these windows were in the back of the school, and the school was built on a sort of hillside. The back of the gym was off to our right, but on this side of the school, the ground just fell away, down to where the playing fields were and the river beyond that. So standing here and looking out these windows, we were really just looking at open sky and some hills off in the distance. Except that we couldn’t see those hills anymore. It was like the snow had erased them, or buried them. All that was left was a softly shifting whiteness.
“Man,” said Summerluck. “Look at that.”
Look at it? I thought. We’re frickin stuck in it. I knew right then that we’d made a mistake. It’s like sometimes you’re so intent on talking your way in that you don’t really think about whether or not you want to be there.
“Maybe your dad should come a little early?” I said to Summerluck.
He looked back toward the door, as if Gustrock might still be hanging around watching us. Then he dug down into his backpack and pulled out his cell. “Probably,” he said, “but I can’t get through.”
“Not at all?” I said.
He glanced at the screen again, barely looking, just confirming what he already knew. He shrugged. “I had, like, one bar earlier, but I don’t think they get jack-squat out there, and now I don’t have anything. At all. Like zero-point-zero bars.”
“What about you?” I said to Spitshine
He looked back at the door too.
“Would you two stop that? Gustrock left like a rocket. He probably ran right out of those boots.”
Spitshine took his phone out. It was more for video games, and the screen flashed on with a little burst of colors.
“Nah,” he said. “No bars for the phone, and I can never get online out here anyway. Text I sent home, like, an hour ago is still sitting here waiting for a signal.”
“Man,” I said, looking out the window. This high school was always one-bar wonderland, and even a light rain made it worse. I thought about the hoof-ful of phones going off in geometry, but it was definitely coming down much heavier now. “Guess it’s the snow?”
“Or everyone trying to call at once,” said Summerluck.
“Or both,” said Spitshine.
“That blows,” I said. It was like an unintentional joke, but I don’t think anypony noticed. We all just stood there looking out the window. The snow couldn’t possibly keep up like this, I thought. No way, right? And there wasn’t much we could do about it now. I mean, it’s like, raise your hoof if you’re God, right? Summerluck’s dad would be here in a few hours. Or he wouldn’t. Nothing else to do; time to work on a crappy go-kart.