turn it off.

We were in a giant church, in a small classroom on maybe the sixth floor of the educational building. It was night. There were cardboard boxes and bedsheets everywhere. You told me to start boarding up the door and the walls with the cardboard and to cover the windows with the sheets. You said that they were coming for us.

I was stressed out because the boxes were everywhere. I was overwhelmed with the task of organizing the boxes such that we could walk around, then flattening them and using them to cover the walls. I grabbed a purple jersey sheet and started on the window. First I turned it horizontally, then thought that maybe I would fold it in half and nail it up top-to-bottom. You said it had to be horizontal. We argued about it, as if we had time to argue. Finally you told me to just do whatever. I put the corner of the sheet to the corner of the window frame and used a nail to hold it in place. But I was nervous or stressed or just plain freaking out and as I hit the nail, the sheet dropped somehow, with a couple of lavender threads dangling from my nail.

It was then that I saw the rocks coming at us, and I screamed. Two the size of golf balls, and one more like a cantaloupe coming right at me as I stood on a chair next to the window. Down below in the streetlight-lit courtyard, I saw them, twenty people we knew and liked and trusted, armed with rocks. Kelly, Dave, Big Mike, some dorky kid whose name I'd never caught, and a dozen others, all looking for us. Big Mike looked like he was carrying a ragged corner chunk of a building, like he'd ransacked a demolition site. They started yelling.

It was sort of like a bad movie about street violence, with them making one-liners at your expense one at a time, then the rest of them laughing. You were fake laughing along, and I followed suit, figuring we were supposed to play it off, act like we hadn't just been nailing up wimpy household materials to protect us from them. I knew it was a ritual, but I didn't understand it. I didn't understand how we'd been having a beer with all these people a couple of nights ago, and now they were trying to stone us.

I saw you slip out the window - we'd boarded up the door - and climb down to them. They stopped yelling to watch you. You walked with your head down and your hands in your pockets, to the left of the group. You passed them, walking into the darkness behind. Then they looked at me.

"Turn it off!" The light, they wanted me to turn off the light. I didn't know why. I looked at you, but you just kept walking, not looking back to give me any sort of hint on what I had to do.

"Turn it off!" Why? Would they do something to me? Would they do something to you? Why wouldn't you look back?

"Turn it off!" I was scared to do it, and I was scared not to do it. Soon I wouldn't be able to see you at all.

"Turn it off!"