As I’m sure you’re all aware (unless you slept through it, in which case, damn your lucky hide), Marlborough recently underwent a rather lengthy lockdown because a couple of numbskulls with weapons decided that a Friday afternoon was the absolute best time to go a’ robbing in Hancock Park.
And while the School was well-prepared for the lockdown—faculty and staff were handing out 2000-calorie emergency rations in hour two and breaking out the porta-pots soon after—I think it’s safe to say that we barely survived those four hours, trapped with our classmates and teachers. That being said, what would happen if we were stuck like gum in hair at School for even longer than four hours… like four days. Or four weeks?
Day 1: There is good-natured laughing and bonding while 12 students look up videos of sassy cats on YouTube. One or two girls reluctantly use the porta-pot to go to the bathroom, and a couple of others munch on 2000-cal bars, repeatedly and unimaginatively comparing them to Regina George’s Kalteen bars in Mean Girls. The room is stuffy, but all is well, because White Chicks is playing on the SMART Board. An announcement sounds through the room. The rampaging Godzilla has teamed up with creatures escaped from Jurassic Park, and the girls will be stuck on campus for at least four more hours. There goes that ragin’ Friday night.
Day 3: The laughing has stopped. Tense eyes dart around the room. As Marlborough girls, they have already consumed all of the 2000-cal bars (oh whatever, let’s just call them Kalteen bars), and the porta-pot buckets are starting to fill up. The teacher stares back at the students, teeth gritting at their high-pitched whines. She wants to gently strangle them on a good day; this is not a good day. Perhaps most shocking of all, the timeless White Chicks has ceased to be funny.
Day 7: Scarves have become protective turbans, Life of Pi-style. The room has divided up into warring clans, indicated by crude, caveman-like markings on uniform skirts: some girls have engraved pictograms of a mop of hair, presumably Justin Bieber’s, and the others have slashed in little pictograms of five similar mops, which one must assume are meant to represent One Direction. The Sharpie highlighters that were once used to obsessively take notes have become war paint applicators. The teacher sits on the floor, rocking back and forth, weeping. “The pencils are sharpening,” she says to herself. “Buzz buzz.”
Day 12: The clans briefly reach a truce: they each get half of the teacher’s body for sustenance. Her possessions—scrunchie, festive Valentine’s Day earrings, chips of nail polish—are divided up equally. It is a day of peace as the clans come together to feast, until one girl chokes on a pelvic bone. There are now 11 girls.
Day 15: Godzilla and the dinosaurs have joined forces with the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. The girls are eating their own leg hair, which they had already not shaved for weeks prior to the lockdown, as per the unspoken Marlborough Way of Life. One tries to drink a can of bug spray she found under the teachers’ desk. There are now ten girls.
Day 22: The clans have once again come together, this time to sacrifice four girls (two from each clan) to the Powers that Be, aka Godzilla and his bros. After the ritual is performed, including the singing of the Quadratic Formula Song and the punching of holes into pieces of paper 27 times, the clans move back to their separate sides of the room. One girl sits down and, in a fit of total lunacy, tries to do her homework. She swiftly dies of mental exertion, at the hands of AP Biology. There are now five girls.
Day 28: The sounds of the raging beasts outside have ceased, thanks in no small part to a geeky little scientist who will become a sensitive stud in the Hollywood film version of these events. The four remaining girls (one died of hallucinations on Day 24, shouting, “I know so many, many boys, and going to Marlborough means I’m popular, mwahahha!”) walk tentatively outside into the sunlight. There is a rather large paw print on Booth Field, and several of the cars in the Third Street Parking Lot appear to have chunks bitten out of them. However, all is well. The girls rejoice and quickly run to Larchmont for crucial Wine and Cheese sandwiches.
