The Chickadee Girl

Now What?

"If you can eat through a situation, you can survive it. An appetite means you'll live, Isa."

Isa heard it as though her brother Malcolm had actually spoken it into her ear. She breathed, unslumped, and stood. Decisions must be made. She squared her shoulders. Food.

A light, fresh breeze played through the treetops in the courtyard. She scanned for movement, for any hint of life, but all was still. The cafeteria door was unlocked, and as she pushed inside, she took in the room as though she had never seen it before, genuinely floored by its expansive emptiness.

A flag from every student's home nation hung from the sloped ceiling, and the wooden tables were heavy and dark – imposing and scrubbed spotless. She ran her fingers over the smoothly waxed surface of the table nearest the door, where the faculty often sat at lunch time. 

After only the barest of hesitations, Isa swept into the back kitchen, bypassed the buffet, and tried the handle on the enormous fridge in the kitchen. It opened immediately, to reveal not the shelves she was expecting, but an entire cold pantry. Boxes were stacked one upon another, and several crates overflowing with produce sat on the floor. Cartons of eggs, whole bars of bright orange cheddar, and family-sized cans of apple and orange juice lined one side of the wall. What appeared to be enormous bags of skim and 2% milk were carefully arranged in red crates, waiting to be loaded into the dispenser in the main room.

She went to work – rooted out eggs, cheese and a couple of the cool, rubbery mushrooms from the basket on the floor. She rinsed the mushrooms. She located a frying pan and some olive oil in the kitchen, and, after briefly considering the immense industrial stove, placed the frying pan on a hot plate in the corner. She broke the eggs, and whisked them up in a mug. Sliced cheese and mushrooms with the first knife she laid her hand on in the immense cutlery drawer. The omelette cooked slowly, but it cooked. She took it out into the dining room, and then wondered why she had: she was more alone there, occupying the only chair at a table that was regularly laid for twenty. On any other crisp September morning, there would have been a fire warming the far end of the room, with the earliest students always commandeering the tables closest to it. This morning, the hearth was dark and clean-swept. 

She ate her omelette while crouched Gollum-like against a wall in the kitchen. "Eggses." she whispered to no one in particular, and then felt ridiculous.

So she was full, but what to do now? Absently, she washed her dish and the frying pan, considering options. First, she decided, she must be absolutely sure that she was truly alone on campus, and that this was no elaborate prank, conceived and executed by... whom? Someone with unimaginable motivations, surely. She had already established that there was no one in the classroom block, chapel, day student common room or faculty offices, but this left a large area still un-searched. She catalogued it in her mind: the student residences, including her own, the faculty residences, the gym and theatre. The boathouse. The infirmary. She opened her book bag, tore one of the end pages from An Anthology for Intermediate French, and dug a marker out from the depths of the dusty, pencil shaving littered cosmetic bag that was currently serving as her pencil case. She sketched out a crude map of the campus on the torn paper, and brooded over it for a moment, the silence around her oppressive. A fly buzzed at the end of the long table, flitting around in search of a sticky, un-wiped patch of table. 

First, she went home. Now that she knew she was alone, she wondered how she hadn't noticed before, so absolute was the silence. A humming noise behind the dining hall caught her attention as she passed: it was the immense industrial water heater. She'd never noticed the hum before.

Peyman Hall was one of the two more modern residence halls, the sort of cinderblock, white walled, institutional looking place that brought to mind a regional medical clinic. In contrast, the three older residence halls were striking brick buildings, and full of character - turrets and winding staircases and thick carpets. But Peyman was decidedly unlovely inside and out, and was therefore always conspicuously absent from the school's marketing materials. Like Isa herself, Peyman Hall didn't photograph well. Still, somehow, over the course of two years, this ugly, thickset pile of cement and hormones had become a sort of home. Cass had helped with that transition. The two had been thrown together (much to their initial shared dismay) during their grade ten year, but had elected to stay together on the two opportunities they'd since had to separate. And there was Cass's tightly-made bed, minus her painted toes peeking cheekily out from under the sheet that was always pulled up over her face as she slept. The room seemed to yawn emptiness at Isa as she stood in the doorway, and she longed to hear her friend's voice, to hear anyone's voice.

She tried the payphone in the front stairwell and was once more greeted by silence and static as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. 

Out of Order.....Contact technical support.....Out of Order......

She'd thrown this very receiver at the wall last year, after her mother had announced that she and Isa's father wouldn't be back from abroad until after Christmas. Isa, her mother pronounced, would "have to stay put at school over the holidays, or find a friend to tag along with". But tagging along with someone else's family for Christmas wasn't a thing. People didn't do that. Where had her parents been that month? Shanghai? Taipei? She couldn't even recall now, though at the time she'd resolved to hold it against them forever.

She stood listening hopefully to the silence on the phone for a moment, and then hung up the receiver and sunk down onto the second step. Think logically, she begged herself. The world makes sense, even when it doesn't. What kind of circumstances would lead an entire campus of people to silently vanish, too suddenly even to leave a note? There had been no alarm in the night, she knew that. She and Cass had often slept through thunderstorms, but the noise made by the building's fire bell was so shattering that it didn't so much wake you up as rip you flailing from sleep's embrace. No smell of gas (and even in that case, why would she have been left behind?). No signs of violence or panic either. No bodies on the ground. And, logically, the notion of an elaborate prank didn't actually make any sense either. What would be the purpose of such a prank, which would have needed to be endorsed, planned and carried out not just by the entire student body, but by the school staff and administration? She could come up with nothing, even when she gave her imagination the freest of reins.

She rose again, and strode down the hallway to her friend Daphne's room. She pushed the door halfway open and then paused to knock, simply because it felt so invasive to totally ignore the custom. There was no answer, of course. Daphne's 8x8 cell, one of the only single rooms on campus, was a study in musical geekishness. The walls were papered with posters of classical musicians, interspersed with the sort of New Yorker cartoons that would appeal only to someone who understood (and might debate) the virtues of Mahler versus Shostakovich. Isa was not one of those people.

 The room felt somehow breathless, as though Daphne had just slipped out to class, and her bedroom was silently, ruminatively anticipating her return. Her uniform from the day before was folded at the end of her bed, and her adjustable reading lamp was bent at an angle, a mammoth history textbook open on her desk. The musicians on the walls waited in silence, as though expecting the imminent entrance of their conductor. But there was no sign of the girl from Chicago, the "horrible American" that Cass publicly teased without mercy, but secretly adored in a way that Isa suspected went well past friendship.

Back out in the hallway, Isa proceeded down towards the far side of the building, at intervals opening and then shutting doors after glancing into the rooms beyond. It felt intrusive, but not as intrusive as actually entering the rooms. Daphne was a friend; Kate Caldwell (room next to the showers) would have purpled with rage at the mere suggestion that Isa had been in her room unobserved. Allison Vandermark, (two doors up from the laundry room) would have fainted dead away with horror, and upon regaining consciousness, would have spread a rumor that Isa was secretly a hermaphrodite.

That said, if either of those girls had walked in Peyman Hall's front door at that moment, Isa would happily have kissed them, their disgust be damned.

The door to the laundry room at the end of the hallway was locked, but within a few minutes, she'd scanned every other room on the hall, and confirmed that each one was missing the living, breathing being that ought to occupy it. And not only they themselves, but any sign at all that indicated that they had recently left in a hurry. There were no open or hastily emptied drawers, no half-drunk mugs of tea, or snacks abandoned mid-bite. When Isa later worked up the courage to look into some of the closets, uniforms and off-campus clothing were neatly hung inside each, as was acceptable to the housemaster. 

No, if her eyes were to be believed, the truth was this: the night before, every single young woman in the house had risen as one, made their way down the darkened hallway, and silently departed.