Treasure

It was just before ten in the morning and we were in the S formation across the middle of the football field when, on the first note of "76 Trombones," the unmistakable squawk exploded from my clarinet. Split reed. Nothing to do but make the long walk back to the field house and get a new one from my case. I swore, broke ranks, trudged toward the squat building that sat fifty yards behind the end zone. I was sweaty and thirsty by the time I reached it—it was September, still summer, really—and I gathered my hair in one hand and bent down for a quick slurp from the drinking fountain. It was one of those awful fountains, the kind where the water trickles feebly from the hole, and I had to touch my lips to the spout to get a half-decent mouthful.

I heard it then, heard it while thinking about all the lips and tongues that had touched this fountain before mine. I heard the roar and turned my head without lifting my mouth from the cool metal. I did not see the plane. I saw, instead, the thirty-two-minus-one members of the Somerville Senior High marching band lift their eyes to the sky, gaze together as with one astonished face at something I could not see, would never see (though I would say I had, and not even the people who marched beside me would remember otherwise), the friends of my youth in the shape of an S, some with instruments still at their mouths, frozen in what would surely be the most historically significant moment of their lives, all a part now of the unfolding future, linked forever with those on the plane simply by being the last to see them—or perhaps even be seen by them, a giant S with one slice missing—as they fell.

We spent three hours in lockdown, the entire student body, nearly three hundred teenagers bolted inside our red brick and mortar, dropped only these pathetic morsels of information from the loudspeakers: there had been a plane crash; no one from the school was hurt; we would be notified with further information as it became available. But there was more, much more, that the loudspeakers were not letting on. There had to be, because why would a plane crash force the school into lockdown? And what further information could possibly become available? By midmorning rumors were swirling; the general consensus was that the plane had been carrying lethal chemicals and that the town had been poisoned, that our families were dying in their homes and cars and offices and it was only a matter of time before the toxic gases slithered into our classrooms. By noon half the kids in school were in tears—some blubbered openly, but most cried only the misting, bewildered tears that crept back even as we blinked them away. There has been a plane crash. No one from the school is hurt. You will be notified with further information as it becomes available. Later we learned that some boys tried to escape out a basement window, that a distraught girl had kicked out the glass door of the principal's office, that one teacher pushed another. The complex system of high-school social hierarchy collapsed into a chaotic heap of cliques and types; we were at once unified in panic but each isolated in our own unique dread. No one knew how to behave. We got lost in hallways we'd traveled for four years, forgot our locker combinations, looked searchingly into the faces of unfamiliar friends.

And then, just as it seemed we were about to lose our grip, forever, on the world we knew, our parents arrived. In truth they had been arriving all morning, but they had not been allowed onto the school grounds until now, and so as we looked out the windows it seemed as if they...