from Rundelania, No. 5
The Detector
By Jacob Yaple
The line wound around the outside of the high school building, teachers and students waiting for their turn. I shivered and eased my book-filled backpack from one shoulder to the other. I was freezing my balls off out here. I was wearing all-cotton sweat pants, Velcro-fastened sneakers, a sweater, and a nylon jacket with a plastic zipper. The backpack was made of tough nylon cloth, also with plastic zippers. I had no coins in my pockets, and no paper clips, staples or metal three-ring binders in my backpack. I wanted to make absolutely sure that I would not set off the detector.
The metal detector had been installed last weekend and today was its first day of operation. No matter that we were a peaceful rural high school with no history of violence or shootings; zero tolerance rules dictated that security must be tightened to the breaking point for everybody.
Waiting in line was even more boring and uncomfortable because we had to leave our phones at home. Principal Bitterman had banned all electronic devices as part of his War on Cyberbullying. Security guards and anonymous tipsters had forced actual, physical bullies underground. I kind of agreed with the phone ban—I could concentrate better in class now—but it was hell compulsively answering all the missed texts and posts at the end of the day.
At the front of the line, an alarm sounded. I was too short to see over the people in front of me, so I peered around them to see what the trouble was. I could just barely see a hint of purple hair at the entrance to the school. Karole Dodd. Her piercings must have set it off. I knew her; I ate lunch every day with her and my other friend Stu Mapleton. I liked her, but I had decided it was better to have a girl as a friend than to go out with her. I’d been rejected by so many other girls, it was a relief to just hang out and avoid all the pressure.
The line started moving again. I wondered how the guards had handled Karole’s piercings. Probably just noted it in a log and let her through anyway. She could be smuggling in a bazooka and they wouldn’t stop her. Sometimes I thought that so-called “security measures” only existed to appease public hysteria and did zilch to prevent violence.
The detector beeped again. This time it was old Miss Bates holding up the line. Standing straight and thin as an iron rod and topped off with matching iron gray hair, Miss Bates was very quick on the draw with her detention slips. If Principal Bitterman ever made good on his threat to arm the teachers, Miss Bates would probably use her gun as a disciplinary tool. You’d get one warning shot over your head and the next bullet would go in your ass.
Next up was Coach Matthews. Like a lot of aging athletes, his muscles were slowly turning to fat and he was going bald from an overdose of testosterone. He lived vicariously through his football team. He loved to scream, “Crush ‘em, team!” and, “Gut ‘em and hang ‘em out to dry!” from the sidelines of every game. His pep talks were legendary for their violent, gung-ho imagery.
Amazingly, even Coach Matthews set off the detector. You’d think the teachers would be prepared for this kind of thing. He patted all his pockets before finally handing over the metal whistle which was hanging on a lanyard around his neck. Even then, he still set the detector off. Finally the security guards waved him through anyway. I guess they were still adjusting the thing’s accuracy. That didn’t do anything for my peace of mind, though.
As I edged nearer and nearer to the main entrance and the detector, the worse I felt. My palms were sweaty, and I could feel my face getting red. My mind kept returning to the reasons we had installed a metal detector in the first place. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Shooters. I found myself going over the similarities between the massacres and my current situation. Often, shooters would chain shut all the doors in a building except one, and kill anybody coming out of that door. They called it a “slaughter chute,” as if the students and teachers were cattle. Now we were being driven through a single door again; the other entrances were locked so that you had to pass the detector to get in.
The student in front of me passed through the metal detector. It remained silent. With a sigh of relief, he headed into the school. I was next. I looked up at the detector. It looked like a stand-alone door frame with a red light on top. A security guard stood next to it. “Name?” he asked, a clipboard at the ready.
“Greg Stuckey,” I said. The metal detector suddenly looked like a guillotine to me. Irrationally, I wondered if a blade would slam down when I tried to go through it, cutting me in half.
“Come on through, kid,” the security guard said. “We don’t have all day.”
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, and, with my mind full of violent imagery, stepped through the metal detector.
The detector shrieked. The red light flashed brightly. Jerkily I turned around.
“Go back and try it again, kid,” the guard said. “Remember to put any metal items on this tray.”
Standing in starting position in front of the detector again, I emptied my pockets of lint balls and searched my backpack for metal, any metal. There was nothing. I went through again and the alarm went off again. The security guard shrugged. “Go on in, kid,” he said. “You’re too shrimpy to make trouble, anyway.”
I couldn’t figure it out. Something had to have set off the metal detector. I had an idea what that something was, but I would have to wait until lunchtime to see whether my friends thought I was crazy.
“You’re crazy,” Stu Mapleton said, and took a big bite of his sandwich. Pieces of it dribbled down his double chin and onto his round belly. We were sitting at our usual table in the cafeteria, near the exit in case we had to run from a shooter.
“Who’s crazy?” asked Karole Dodd, arriving with a full tray.
“Greg here,” Stu said, waving at me with the remains of his sandwich. “Get this—he thinks the metal detector can also detect violent thoughts.” He took a gulp of soda. “That’s paranoid thinking, Greg. You don’t want the school shrink putting you on Prozac, do you?”
“I think it’s possible,” Karole protested. “It’s just like Mr. Zero Tolerance to try to brainwash everybody.”
“Mr. Zero Tolerance? You mean Principal Bitterman?” I said.
“Whatever. I just think it’s suspicious that he’s on a three-week vacation while all of this is going on.”
“He probably needed the break,” Stu pointed out. “The guy must have an ulcer the size of the Grand Canyon.”
“It doesn’t have to be deliberate,” I said. “Maybe this detector just happens to detect violent thoughts. Maybe it’s so finely tuned it’s receiving brainwave patterns.”
Stu snorted. “Ridiculous. There’s not a shred of scientific evidence for ESP. There’s no proof that brainwaves can travel any further than the inside of the human skull.”
“But maybe the detector reads body language or something, some kind of physical clue to emotions,” I said. “They have airport scanners that can see through clothing, don’t they?”
“All right, all right,” Stu said. “There are three possibilities here: either the detector is malfunctioning, or Greg had metal on him without his knowledge, or,”–Stu sighed heavily—“the detector can read violent thoughts. Here’s what I propose we do. For the next week, the three of us will make sure not to carry anything metal, and deliberately think violent thoughts when we go through the detector. If the detector doesn’t go off every single time, then I will be proved correct.” Stu folded his arms over his enormous gut. “It’s the only scientific thing to do.”
Karole laughed. “Why is everything a science project with you?” she said. “You forgot one thing, Genius. Me! I’ll set off the detector anyway because of all my rings!”
Stu and I looked at her. She had eyebrow rings, a nose ring, lip rings and probably a few rings we couldn’t see.
“No big deal,” she said. “I’ll just take out the rings. But if they stay out too long, the holes will heal up and I’ll have to redo all the piercings. Good thing I like pain.”
The bell rang and we stood up to leave. “Remember,” Stu said. “Tomorrow morning, we begin the experiment.”...continued at Rundelania