by Holly Hook
We stepped through the archway and past a couple of vending machines. There were more posters of supernovas and galaxies on the walls here in an effort to make this place seem like less of a prison. It didn't do much good. The narrow windows let in sunlight and they were on either side of us. I still felt like I was trapped in a big metal box in a barren wasteland. They could have at least put the collider near civilization.
“Okay, class,” Mrs. Taney said. “Hurry. Group One boards the elevator." She leaned over and whispered something to Mr. Ellis. He was frowning.
Then I saw.
The closed metal doors, just as sterile as the rest of the building. There was a sign above it that read CAPACITY: 10.
I would come to hate that number.
“This looks like fun!” David said, pushing forward.
Disappointment washed through me. We would be going down separately.
“Come on,” Alana said. She winked. You don't want to miss being in an elevator with David, do you? I could practically read the look in her eyes.
The thought of standing there, packed in close with him was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Mrs. Taney rolled her eyes as David stood there, jumping up and down like an excited little kid. I laughed. So did everyone else. At least he was doing something to calm my nerves.
Mr. Ellis pushed the button to open the door. "We don't have much time," he said. "Please board." He stood aside to let people on. Eric and a couple of girls from the art classes got on--and one of them was Christina, who had a thing about hating almost everyone. I wasn't sure how they'd gotten into this field trip. Tony got on next with his girlfriend Mina. David hesitated, then followed, leaving room for four more. I waited for either Mrs. Taney or Mr. Ellis to get on, but they remained and waited for us. A Goth girl got on and stood against the side of the elevator. Jerome followed her, hands stuffed in the pockets of his huge jeans. They dragged on the floor and almost got caught on the crack between the elevator and the floor. It was getting packed in there.
The elevator wasn't super small, but it wasn't huge. People stood just a foot from each other. It was the same size as Mom's dying room. The size of a large closet, and with a metal cage. Beyond the cage was a ladder that led down to the depths. This was an open pit.
Alana grabbed my arm. “You've got to be in the first group,” she said. “It'll get the ride over with for you.”
“I. Don't. Like. Tight. Spaces.” I whispered, shocked that I'd dared to admit it.
“Oh.” Alana frowned. “I'm sorry, Laney. I had no idea. I didn't know you were bothered by that.” She lowered her brows in confusion. “You did okay in that haunted house three years ago when we were walking through that fake swamp.”
I remembered the foam pads pushing against us, simulating swamp muck while a guy in a mask yelled at us to get out of his marsh. It hadn't bothered me at the time, but that was before...
"Who else wants to be in the first group?" Mrs. Taney asked. "Someone. Time's ticking."
“You're right,” I said to Alana, thinking of David and pushing through. “I'll feel better once it's over.” The collider would be in a wide open space, right? It would have to be. The elevator would be the worst part. And I didn't have to pee that bad. Some people were headed for a small bathroom near the archway.
I stepped over the threshold, holding my breath. The elevator moved a tiny bit and I almost scrambled back off. Alana followed.
“Alana! Laney!” David shouted, grinning. “Ready for the fun?”
“Sure,” I said.
David's hands were shaking. He crammed them into his jeans pocket.
He was nervous. The glee was a mask. Maybe we were more of a trio than I thought.
Alana poked me in the shoulder and smiled. I felt better.
“Okay,” Mrs. Taney said as the elevator doors started to close. "There will be a guide at the bottom to take the ten of you through the tour. I'm not sure how we'll do this in two groups."
There was that number again. Ten.
The doors closed all the way with a click.
I gulped.
"I'm right here," Alana said.
I couldn't run out. It would take a lot of time to go to the bottom unless this was one of those super fast elevators they put in towers.
Minutes and minutes and minutes, maybe.
Alana grabbed my arm. "Just close your eyes," she whispered. "You should have said something before you brought in your permission slip."
"I didn't know it would be like this." I'd wanted to have fun not being in school today. The air heated with everyone's bodies.
I missed those narrow windows already.
"I know," I told her as the elevator started to drop and the stone rose around us. I didn't close my eyes.
The rock was packed and striated like you'd expect in a desert. The colors were almost pretty in the dim light that shined above us. The elevator slowly descended with a hum and the stone rose around us. We were sinking. Going down into the ground. This was almost shaped like a grave...
"I can't do this," I hissed.
"You're doing it now," Alana said. "Why didn't you tell me you had trouble with closed spaces?"
"It's nothing," I lied. I didn't want to drag her into those moments. The tight room...the smell...the timing...
I held my breath.
Ten seconds.
Exhaled.
I held it again. The stone became less colorful and turned to a sad, deep gray. It was more packed down here.
Twenty-one seconds.
I breathed out.
"You're doing well," David said to me.
We faced each other as people around us muttered and stayed mostly silent. Maybe we weren't the only ones nervous about heading hundreds of feet underground. It made me feel a little better but this was an enclosed space. If the elevator stopped and got stuck...
I wouldn't think about that.
Twenty-four seconds. I breathed out and took another breath. The air was cool and stale now If we did stop, we would be sitting here for a while. The light remained strong overhead. One of the art girls pulled out her phone and tried to snap a picture, but she looked at it, confused.
"I charged my phone this morning," she said. "It's dead."
"That's weird," Christina said. It needed to stay on. "Mine did, too."
I thought about Josh fighting with his phone and about the sky lighting again. Thinking about that got my mind off this, at least. Well, for a second. The sight of the rock rising around us brought me right back.
I held my breath again.
Fifteen seconds. My heart was racing and my body was screaming for oxygen. There wasn't enough down here. My breaths got shallower. Faster. More irregular. I was going to suffocate. A pressure came down on my chest like several feet of packed earth.
"Laney," Alana said.
She and David packed closer to me. I didn't mind that part. David reached out and he wrapped his hand around mine.
If I had ever thought that I would be holding hands with David when I got up this morning, there was no way I'd get up the bravery to come down here. Or would I? Even though he was shaking, his hand was warm and strong, and gentle at the same time. I knew he was just holding my hand to make me feel better, because he was that kind of guy with the girls, but it didn't stop heat from flooding my features and adding a whole new layer to the breathlessness I was having. Everyone else was facing the door while we stood at the back, just waiting for it to open and let us out of this prison. The stone around us changed strata again. We must be descending through millions and millions of years of history. David might know what they were. He was in all the science clubs. He was the King Nerd if there was such a thing.
At last, after several counts, the elevator's humming slowed. It clicked to a stop, shifted again, and settled like it finally decided it was going to stay put.
And the doors opened.
We were greeted by more brightness. A large, carved stone hallway bigg
er than the elevator stretched in front of us. Huge lights hung down, connected by equally huge wires. We were way underground, all right.
"Here we are," David said, letting go of my hand.
Alana looked at me in wonderment. She'd seen it happen. I stood there as he peeled himself from the cage of the elevator, leaving me there. I wasn't sure how to feel.
David was leaving. He had forgotten all about me in his urge to get off the elevator. I felt a lump forming in my throat. I wasn't going to cry in front of everyone. I had survived the descent. But David's back got further and further away.
I should have known. It might have even been to make him feel better. To cover his own fear.
"You have to tell me about that later," Alana said as we left the cage.
I nodded. I was having a weird day.
We stepped into the hallway, to where a woman in a white lab coat stood at the end. There were wooden doors lining the hallway and past the woman there was another room that had been constructed out of plywood. Computers hummed inside and huge wires snaked across the ceiling. This felt like some mad scientist's underground lair.
It wasn't bad. The elevator had been the worst. This was open and lit, at least. I could breathe down here.
"Come on right this way," the woman in the white coat said. She stuck one arm up and waved us forward into a bigger chamber right ahead. At least she was friendly. There was another low humming sound ahead. Behind us, the doors closed, sealing us down here. I checked to see if there was another way out. I couldn't find anything. The elevator would take us back up.
"I am Dr. Shetlin," the woman said. "I have been working with the Huge Collider for about four years now, ever since we cut the tape on this facility. This used to be an old iron mine, but was abandoned in the eighties when the workers depleted all of the ore. Any questions?"
Tony raised his hand. "Why is this so far underground?"
"Well," Dr. Shetlin said. "The Huge Collider studies particles even smaller than atoms. These particles rain down from the sun and space all the time, so to avoid contaminating our results, we need layers of rock between the Collider and the surface to block out those cosmic rays."
Tony nodded. Dr. Shetlin waved us along past the plywood computer room and into another large, open area.
"What are cosmic rays?" one of the art girls asked.
"Cosmic rays," she said, bounding forward into the large chamber, "are high energy particles that fly through space at almost the speed of light. They can be dangerous if there are a lot of them. Normally, our atmosphere protects us from most of these particles, or otherwise we'd all be walking around with extra limbs and eyes. I haven't had any tour groups like that lately, so it looks like we haven't had any supernovas going off nearby in the recent past."
Some people laughed. At least this scientist had a sense of humor. I had expected a bunch of stiff people with clipboards and maybe a few robots coming along for the trip. Dr. Shetlin was way cooler than Mrs. Taney. I wished she could be our teacher.
We were approaching a huge glass window in the stone that I hadn't noticed before. I had been focusing on her speech rather than the fact that we were farther underground than anyone should be. "The Huge Collider is busy gathering clues about what dark matter could be. Does anyone know what dark matter is?" She turned to face us.
We stopped. Dr. Shetlin was smiling at us. She didn't even wear glasses. The only hint that she was some super smart scientist was that she had her hair tied back in a tight bun, like a woman twenty years older than her would have.
"Precisely," she said. "No one yet knows exactly what dark matter is. One thing the Huge Collider is doing is trying to find clues as to what it could be. There is far more dark matter in the universe than the matter we were used to seeing. It's called dark matter because it's invisible to our eyes." She waved us closer to the glass window. "The collider itself is right under us. If you step forward, you can see the four mile long tube where we smash particles together to discover new ones."
We all crowded forward. A round chamber went into dim light on the other side of the window. It looked like one of those lava tube caves you saw in National Geographic. The stone tube curved away from us and something that looked like a huge metal snake ran through the bottom. There was a grate walkway next to it and a guy in a yellowish white radiation suit who held a clipboard. He waved to us and we waved back.
"That's Dr. Marson," Dr. Shetlin explained. "He's doing some routine checkups on the tube. He has to wear that suit in case there are any dangerous particles leaking out anywhere. Safety first."
We watched the guy walk off and around the curve. I imagined this tunnel going on for miles. The guy was brave.
"Can this thing open black holes?" David asked.
Dr. Shetlin sighed. "You've been reading all those doom and gloom stories, haven't you? Of course it can't. The reactions that take place in the Collider are no stronger than the ones that take place in the upper atmosphere every day. Believe me when I tell you that you're safe from getting sucked in."
The class laughed again but it wasn't as hard as before. David stayed close while Tony wrapped his arm around Mina's waist. Jerome hung back, hands in his pockets. He looked bored. I couldn't remember if he was in the Science Club or not.
"This way," Dr. Shetlin instructed, waving us towards another set of metal double doors like we were a kindergarten class.
"We're not six," David muttered.
I stared at him. Did we have some telepathy thing going on or something?
"Excuse you," Christina said from behind us.
I turned. She glared at me from behind her glasses, arms crossed over her chest and the smiling cartoon monkey on her shirt.
"Ever learn manners?" I asked. "Or were you raised in a barn?" My efforts to say hi to her were always met with grunts and groans so I didn't bother anymore.
David laughed. Redness rose into her cheeks.
"You're blocking the way," she said.
"I know I am," I said. I stood my ground while the rest of our tour group split and moved around us, Tony and Mina their own unit. "You can't see the way around?"
Her face grew even redder. I wasn't going to let her intimidate me. Life was too short for that.
Sometimes it was very, very short.
We stared each other down for what felt like eons. At last, David got in between us and nodded. "Come on," he said. "We can't hold up the group. We're the last ones standing here." He made a motion like he was herding Christina down the hall and she followed. Alana shot me a look.
It took me a second to realize what it meant. Christina had a crush on David. Most of the girls did, but so far he'd been too good for anyone, going from date to date. Nobody knew why he couldn't just pick a girlfriend. The guy was too busy being in the honor society or something.
Christina finally gave up and brushed past me. I turned and followed everyone else. People were disappearing around the curve and I had to jog to catch up. We were headed into a tunnel that ran along the one that housed the metal tube. Windows showed us the metal snake and even a glimpse of Dr. Marson. David and Alana stayed with me. We were buddies at least for this field trip. Tomorrow could be anything else.
Dr. Shetlin lectured about the Huge Collider for quite some time, giving us the history of it and how many countries had put money into it. We passed window after window that showed us the giant tube and the magnetic sensors that picked up the new particles that were created when others died. She talked about how the computers had to crunch through incredible amounts of data in order to sort out the results, and that it took months for the team to go through them. "The microscopic world is just as immense as space," she told us as we took another turn to follow the collider's tunnel. We passed a door with an exclamation point on it and the radiation symbol. "Scientists are still trying to work out what most of the universe is made out of." She sounded excited, unlike the other tour guides we'd had for our field trips. I remembered the one to the c
ity hall when I was a freshman, two years ago. That had been a yawner.
At last, we reached a door that read RESTRICTED ACCESS and Dr. Shetlin turned to us. "It's time to head back," she said. "Only authorized personnel are allowed past this door, so no one pull an Austin Powers move on me here." A few people laughed. "That's probably a bit dated," Dr. Shetlin said. "The point is, the area beyond this is not protected, so if I let you in, I could get sued. This concludes our tour."
"How long have we been down here?" I asked David.
It was then that I realized that I hadn't been bothered by these tunnels this entire time. It was the enclosed space of the elevator, the one without an exit. Maybe listening to Dr. Shetlin had calmed down my fears. At least in this tunnel there was an exit.
"I think maybe an hour. Or an hour and a half," David said. "After my phone puked, it's gotten hard to tell."
"Your phone puked?" Alana asked.
"What did it eat?" the Goth girl asked.
"I don't know," David said. "Some Taco Bell?"
"Maybe it was that burst of light," I said. "It drained all the phones. I'm sure we'll hear about it on the news." The people still up in the Visitor Center had probably heard something by now. I thought about my phone still on the bus. Maybe that was safe and it was a good thing I'd left it.
We all walked back through the tunnel mostly in silence. At last, after my feet started to ache, Dr. Shetlin led us back to the main room while my mind spun with subatomic particles, bosons, quarks and other strange creatures. And most of all, David. He still hung with Alana and I, even though he had gone very quiet in the last few minutes. He pulled out his phone again and tried to turn it on, all to no avail.
He faced me. "Something's going on here, Laney. I charged this phone this morning. My mother always nags at me to keep it fully charged if I go on a field trip, like something's going to kill us all," he said.
I didn't like the way he said that. Finally, after another glare from Christina, we got back to the main room, the one with the huge window and the plywood computer room. I expected to see the other tour group here, along with Mrs. Taney to make sure everyone was paying attention.
