Parker’s eyes finally adjusted to the light. He stared into a large room that had been hidden behind a secret wall in an elaborate maze of tunnels. Standing in front of him, almost filling the room, were a bunch of kids that seemed to be the same age as Parker.

“What is going on here? Who are all of you people?” Parker asked, not caring if he offended anyone. All of the kids just stared back at him. He was looking into the crowd waiting for someone to answer. Amongst the crowd, Parker saw girls and boys, short and tall, but who all looked his age.

A girl walked up to him, “We’re here to go to school, isn’t that what you’re here to do?”

Parker felt slightly relieved that he was at least there for the same reason as these other kids. “Yeah, my parents dropped me off hours ago. I’ve been wandering around these tunnels since then.”

She looked like she understood exactly what he was saying. “We all were the same way. All ten of us. And now you make eleven.”

“So what do we do now?” Someone in the group asked.

No one answered for several moments as they looked around at the four walls that surrounded them. It didn’t look like there was any way out of the room. Everyone started looking around to see if there was a secret door or something that seemed like a way out.

“Should we just go back the way we came from?” A smaller boy with brown hair asked. It sounded like he was slightly nervous but maybe that was because of their situation.

“I don’t even remember which way we came from,” someone else said. Everyone pointed to different walls as to which could’ve been the entrance but that just made things worse.

Parker looked around at everyone else for a moment instead of trying to figure out where the exit was. They just looked like a herd of sheep not sure what to do with themselves. He wondered if they were simply making it harder than it should be to find the exit.

Someone in the group gasped and everyone’s heads turned toward the sound. “Where’s Gerald?” A taller, skinny boy asked. “He was right here a minute ago.” He gestured to a spot right next to him.

No one responded to him. Whether it was because they didn’t know what happened to him or because they didn’t know who Gerald was, Parker wasn’t sure. He walked toward the boy who asked and was about to comfort him.

As he made his way to the boy he noticed something small on the wall. It was a little triangle with a line through it. He stepped closed to it slowly, keeping his eye on it and ignoring everything around him. So focused, he didn’t even notice the arrival of a new person. The wall had gone up and gone down so fast that no one thought to step out of it.

“What’s your name?” Parker heard someone ask from behind him but it didn’t take his attention away from the mark. It looked like the thing he traced on the wall that let him in to where he was now. After a moment, he realized that everyone had stopped what they were doing and were introducing themselves to the new girl that had walked in. She was average sized and her hair was red, but from the look on her face, Parker wasn’t sure he wanted to get to know her so he turned his attention back to the mark.

He reached his hand up to trace the mark with his finger, like he had out in the tunnel. When his finger touched the mark, it disappeared through the wall. His eyes went wide as he stared at his finger that looked like it had been chopped off. His heart started to race and he tried to get everyone’s attention but any words that came to mind seemed to just turn to mush. “Uh… guys…” he was finally able to spit out.

A few of the people from the group turned to see what he was trying to say and they saw something that made them gasp in unison. Parker was now arm deep through the wall.

“Oh my God!” a smaller girl with long blonde hair that hung to the middle of her back shouted. Parker turned his head to see who had shouted and his eyes locked onto the girl who spoke to him right when he arrived. Surprised with everything that was going on he hadn’t really noticed how pretty she was. Her eyes were a piercing blue. It almost felt like they could see into him and read his thoughts and feelings.

After a moment, he peeled his eyes away from her and put his attention back on the matter at hand. He stepped forward and his whole body disappeared through the wall. The room he stepped into was dark but he could hear something moving around close by. “Hello…?” Parker asked feebly.

“Hello?” a boy’s voice responded from the dark.

Parker could make out the silhouette of someone standing close by. “Are you Gerald?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

Parker could hear the panic in his voice and he couldn’t blame him. It felt like his own heart was going to beat out of his chest. What had happened to the two of them? Where had everyone else gone? He couldn’t stop asking himself questions long enough to answer any of them.

After a few moment of quiet, another person stepped into the darkness. “Hello?” a girl’s voice asked from behind him. “Anyone there?”

“Yeah,” Parker answered. “Gerald and I are.”

The girl let out a breath of the relief. “Oh good! Sam was super worried about him.”

“Who are you?” Parker asked, still unable to see much of anything in the dark. He thought after a little his eyes would adjust to the dark and he’d be able to see more but had no such luck.

“I’m Alexis,” the girl said in a voice much happier than Parker thought was possible in such a situation. “Give me a minute, I’m going to tell everyone else it’s safe.”

There was another long moment of silence before one-by-one, the group started to make their way into the darkness. Parker didn’t know, but something about having everyone there, made the darkness a bit more bearable.

“So what now?” a voice Parker didn’t recognize asked.

“Now, you wait!” another new voice shouted gleefully.