I didn’t doubt it for a second.
The breakneck pace of those early days of school made me realize succeeding at Gardner would be a lot harder than succeeding at my old high school. I had an astonishing amount of work to do in every single one of my classes, and I was already wondering whether taking Chinese rather than sticking with Spanish was a mistake. I’d been half kidding about walking around with flash cards initially, but now I was deathly serious—I brought them everywhere and reviewed them constantly.
The good news was that my teachers were all pretty great. They might have ended up at Gardner because they’d made mistakes or bad choices or were too stubborn to leave when things got bad, but that meant we had teachers with interesting backgrounds who were committed to making sure the students who cared got the best possible education. Sure, that meant a ton of work, but that had already turned into weekly study dates with Hunter, so I couldn’t complain.
The bad news was that I had no idea how I was going to do academically, which meant I was going to have to build up my résumé with more than just classes. Which meant I didn’t have the option of ignoring that note. I needed to join a club of some kind, and I didn’t care what it was.
Except I’d run out of time to figure out where to go. I’d planned to come straight home from services and dinner Friday night and get to work, but I was exhausted from a week of studying, and I fell asleep before I could even start to plan my research. I’d have to find the place on Saturday.
I hoped there was time.
I started early, bringing my journal and a pen to the dining hall, where I drank cup after cup of sweet, milky tea and worked through the options. The safest place on campus depended on what kind of bad thing might be happening, and given that we were at a school, I immediately went back to thinking about shootings. But the safest place in a school shooting was relative, and there wasn’t always time to get picky—the note’s phrasing indicated there was a specific place to go, so the event probably was something that came with some notice. Could it be a biohazard, in which case I’d be looking for a nurse’s office? That wouldn’t necessarily be safe; it would just be obvious, which didn’t seem right. We had to be looking for someplace that was completely blocked off from physical harm of any kind.
I tried to imagine the worst possible thing, which made me think bomb. And the safest place to be in the event of a bomb was a bomb shelter. There had to be one on campus, but where? Gardner was big, the size of a small college, between dorms and faculty housing and academic halls and the gym. I wasn’t going to be able to guess where a bomb shelter might be.
I decided I’d had more than enough tea and went back to my room to get out my laptop. The new student information packet had nothing about bomb shelters on campus, though it did provide evacuation instructions in the event of fires or other catastrophes. Not super helpful. I’d have to find it myself. If there was a shelter somewhere on campus, it had to be in a basement, right? I hadn’t been at Gardner long enough to do much exploring, so first I had to figure out which building was most likely to have a basement. I was up for the challenge.
I made a map of the buildings as best as I could remember them in my notebook and then decided to start in the place I’d identified as the best option: the gym. It was gigantic, with multiple basketball courts and a swimming pool, not to mention the fitness center and the indoor track. With all that space taken up already it seemed like you’d need to go underground for storage, I figured.
The sound of basketballs echoing off lacquered wooden floors assaulted my ears the moment I opened the massive front door of the athletic building. I’d thought maybe it would be relatively quiet because it was the weekend and the weather outside was shockingly warm for mid-September, but the practice courts were filled with students playing weekend pickup games. Maybe I’d just underestimated people’s love of basketball.
I walked past the practice courts and turned a corridor to pass athletic department offices, my flip-flops flipping and flopping on the concrete floor, though there was no one working on a Saturday to hear me. I tested every unmarked door I could find in the hopes there would be some secret basement entrance, but it wasn’t until I reached a stairwell that I realized I’d made things harder than necessary. Though ostensibly the stairs only went up, there was a door, painted the same gray as the cement blocks that made up the wall of the stairwell, right where one might expect a set of stairs leading down to be. Even the handle was painted gray; the door almost blended right into the wall, which was clearly the intention of whoever painted it. I was sure it would be locked, but it wasn’t.
The stairs did lead down into a basement, as I’d expected, but the basement was really just another set of offices that were no longer in use. Long fluorescent lights flickered over a dropped ceiling, with those white tiles that looked like they had holes punched into them at random. I wandered the halls looking for some sort of room that might function as a shelter, but I saw nothing but offices and bathrooms that hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time. There was some evidence other students knew the basement existed; I saw condom wrappers and empty beer cans in one of the bathroom trash bins, and all of a sudden I felt how alone I was, hanging out in this basement by myself.
When I got back to the staircase, though, I noticed another gray door, again where a down staircase would be. And when that door, too, was unlocked, I had a feeling I might be onto something.
There were more stairs this time, or maybe it just felt as if there were because there wasn’t as much light. I stepped into a hallway with the same cement brick walls as the staircase, the same concrete flooring as the main floor, though it was scuffed and dirty with years of use and little cleaning, as far as I could tell. Gone were the ceiling tiles and flickering fluorescent lights, replaced with lightbulbs trapped behind what looked like little steel cages and set at intervals along the narrow walls. I’d found some sort of hallway. No—it wasn’t a hallway; it was a tunnel.
This had to be the place. But the lights were dim and the tunnel seemed to head in both directions and I had no idea which way to go. I didn’t want to get lost, but I hadn’t exactly brought breadcrumbs with me, so I decided to go right and then keep going right any time I had to make a choice.
After about fifteen minutes of taking right turn after right turn and seeing nothing but hallways only occasionally interrupted by a storage closet or yet another door leading to more stairs, I decided it was time to change my strategy. I started going upstairs every so often, popping my head aboveground like some sort of gopher, orienting myself to where I was on campus. It quickly became clear the tunnels tracked the buildings, serving as an underground means of getting around campus. There was no way a school with the foresight to maintain these tunnels didn’t have a bomb shelter, or several, but I wasn’t going to find it wandering around aimlessly like this.
Instead, I made my way back to the dining hall to get a sandwich, then went to my room to check the campus map. If the tunnels went everywhere on campus, then a shelter would probably be closest to where people lived. And not just any people—important people. Most likely it was under one of the administration buildings, or the Gardner president’s house.
I felt so sure I’d solved the problem I was tempted to take my chances and show up right at midnight, but it wasn’t in my nature. Instead, I headed back underground. It was almost anticlimactic to find, just under the president’s house, the black-and-yellow sign indicating the presence of a fallout shelter. It was the only distinguishing feature drawing my eye to yet another gray door blended into yet another cement-block wall, but it was enough.