The Chaos of Standing Still by Jessica Brody (10)

Tackled in the End Zone

As soon as the large bank of information screens are in sight, I race toward them. Xander is close behind me, trying to keep up. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” he’s calling after me. “I swear I thought you were right behind me when I ran out of the train.” I don’t respond. I haven’t spoken a word to him since we left the airport office, and I don’t intend to start now.

My eyes drink in the data like a thirsty desert traveler, swallowing each flight number and then plunging back in for more.

My heart climbs into the metal vise that’s been waiting patiently in my chest and straps itself in, surrendering to its fate.

Canceled.

How can they just cancel a flight? I bought a ticket. I paid them money—or rather my father did—and that creates a binding agreement. I give you money, you take me somewhere. Somewhere far away from here. Somewhere that feels as safe as one could possibly feel on the first anniversary of her best friend’s death.

“Death!?” Lottie screeches into my ear. “I’m DEAD?”

I ignore her. I don’t have time for her comedy routine right now. I have to find a place to hide. To retreat inside myself. To disappear. But how do you disappear in a place like this?

Of all the locations I ever imagined spending New Year’s Day, a busy, crowded airport full of people, like spectators at a gladiator match just waiting to watch me break apart, was not one of them.

Who gets hit by a drunk driver on New Year’s Day? That’s supposed to be the safe day! The end zone at the end of a long stretch of dangerous, enemy infested territory, where no one can tackle you anymore.

They all tell us. They drill it into our heads. They demand promises from us. No driving on New Year’s Eve. That’s when the dangerous monsters are out. That’s when people get hurt. That’s when teenagers lose their lives.

No one warns you about the morning after, though. No one thinks the danger is still lurking then.

But Lottie was always different. She was always an exception to the rule. I guess it’s fitting that her death be an exception too.

I glance desperately around me, looking for a private corner or an empty space, but they’ve all been filled. These people—these stranded passengers—they’re like a plague. A virus. They keep multiplying and spreading and filling in all the little gaps and crevices, consuming every available space until there’s nothing left. Until this entire airport is just one giant red blob of disease.

Any system, if left unattended or isolated, will eventually result in chaos.

And I’m here trapped in the middle of it.

Three intrusive beeps blast over the intercom system, catching everyone’s attention. Everyone around me stops whatever they’re doing and stares up at the ceiling. As if they’re waiting their next directive from a higher power.

“Attention, all passengers. Attention, all passengers. This is Claudia Beecher, operations manager of the airport.”

I grimace. Not her again.

“This is an important announcement for all passengers and airline and airport employees. The FAA has ordered that, due to severe weather conditions, all flights out of Denver be grounded. As soon as it is safe to fly again, airlines will be rebooking passengers on alternate flights. While we realize this is not ideal, it is our job to make sure you are as comfortable as possible. The airlines are doing everything they can to issue hotel vouchers to passengers. Please check with your airline’s customer service desk to obtain one. For those of you who remain in the terminal, blankets, pillows, and water will be distributed in all gate lounges. Meal vouchers will be provided by your airline for use at any participating airport restaurant. Restaurants will remain open late to accommodate everyone. We ask that you kindly remain calm and courteous to one another. As soon as we have additional information about the weather conditions, we will make a subsequent announcement. Thank you for your attention.”

I can’t feel my fingers. I can’t feel my toes. Has the blizzard broken through the windows? Am I already frozen?

“Looks like we’re both trapped here for a while,” Xander says, and I startle. I forgot he was behind me. But the sudden reminder sends a hot lava river of anger coursing through me.

“And whose fault is that?” I snap, whipping around to face him.

He flinches. “Um, what?”

“This is your fault. This is all your fault!”

Xander looks like I’ve just slapped him. “Wait. WHAT? How could a snowstorm possibly be my fault?”

“Because you—” I hesitate, feeling frustrated. My rational side is a muffled, kidnapped prisoner in the back of my mind, screaming through a gag, trying to tell me that the flight cancelation has nothing to do with him. But my irrational side—the one that landed me in a weekly session with Dr. Judy, the one I didn’t even know I had until my best friend’s brains got splattered across a flashing clock—rules me with an iron fist. It pilots me. And it knows if I just search hard enough, I’ll find a way for the pieces to interlock. I’ll find a way to blame him for everything.

“Because the train!” I try again. “And your stupid game! I don’t even like surfing! She wanted me to go surfing, and I said no! I said NO! But then you had to pressure me into it. You and Lottie! You both think you’re so damn clever. And then you just left. You just left me! And the police! Airport police! And handcuffs! And fake citrus chain-smoking! And it’s all your fault.”

I realize I’m no longer making sense. I’m like a slot machine that never pays out. My reels keep spinning, trying to match up three pictures in a row, trying to find words that string together into a coherent sentence, but I just keep losing.

Always losing.

Xander blinks rapidly, undoubtedly thinking I’m crazy.

Well, good, it’s about time he knew the real me. It’s about time I stopped pretending to be someone else. Because, look where that got me. Arrested by the airport police.

“Hold on,” Xander says, raising his hands in the air. “Back up. Who’s Lottie?”

My hand flies to my mouth. The movement is instinctual. A knee-jerk reaction. I want to take it all back, suck it back in, press rewind. But it’s too late. It’s out there. She’s out there, hanging between us like an acid-filled water balloon that no one can catch. It’s about to explode everywhere. Burn through our skin. Singe a hole right through the floor beneath our feet.

I quickly weigh my options. There aren’t many. I choose the obvious one.

I run.

“Tell me about January first, 10:05 a.m.,” Dr. Judy said at our last session before I left to visit my father in Atlanta. It had been a little over nine months since my sessions with her had started, and by now we’d adopted a relaxed rhythm. A functional coexistence. She was like a tennis pro, serving up easy shots, and I was the student, recognizing the balls’ trajectory and speed and lobbing them back without much effort.

I’d learned just how much I had to say to appease her and just how little I could get away with.

I shrugged and fingered my phone case. “It’s when Lottie died.”

She nodded, tapping her pen against her bottom lip. “It’s coming up soon.”

“Yes.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Sad,” I tell her, confident it’s the right answer. Then, for good measure, I add, “Angry.”

“At Lottie?”

“At the guy who killed her.”

“What about Lottie?”

“What about Lottie?”

“Are you angry at her, too?” Dr. Judy asked, planting her shovel in to the dirt and giving it a firm stomp with her foot.

“It’s not Lottie’s fault the guy was plastered at ten in the morning and got behind the wheel of a car with faulty brakes,” I said.

Dr. Judy’s sessions were the only time my rational side was allowed to come out. Ungagged, released from the closet, paraded around for the world to see. Like the well kept prisoner in a ransom video. See? Alive and well. We’re even feeding her.

Dr. Judy teetered her head from side to side, reminding me of one of those bobble head dolls. I was afraid she was going to challenge me. She did that sometimes. She poked and prodded at Rational Ryn, making certain that she was real. That she wasn’t just a blow-up doll full of hot air. But, to my relief, instead she asked, “Do you have any plans for the day?”

“Yeah,” I replied snarkily. “I’m going to drive to the mall and wait in the middle of the intersection for a drunk driver to hit me, too.”

Dr. Judy gave me a blank stare, waiting for me to take the joke back. I bowed my head apologetically. “No, I don’t have any plans.”

I didn’t tell her about my intention to sit in my room with the lights off and the shades drawn, counting the seconds until the day was over. That wasn’t Rational Ryn behavior. Rational Ryn would visit Lottie’s grave site, bring flowers, dab at her eyes with a white hankie. Rational Ryn would erect a marble bench in the park with Lottie’s name inscribed into the stone.

Rational Ryn would cry.

“What I meant was, how do you intend to manage that day?”

“Manage?” I repeated skeptically. It sounded so cold and clinical. A word that belonged in a corporate board meeting. A word Lottie would have hated. Especially if she knew it was being used in reference to her.

“Yes,” Dr. Judy replied. “I think we should talk about your management plans. If you come up with a coping strategy ahead of time, you’re much more likely to avoid unwanted . . . episodes.”

She let that word hang in the air. Knowing it needed no other explanation. We both knew what she meant. We both knew the episode she was talking about. It had happened a few months ago. At school. If it had happened anywhere else, I might have been able to avoid telling her. But teachers talk to principals and principals talk to parents and parents talk to therapists.

Then therapists ask why you locked yourself in a supply closet for two hours because of a number of a clock.

“I’m not going to have another episode,” I assured her, even though the words felt swollen and misshapen in my mouth. It was amazing how good at lying I’d become in the past eleven months. How accustomed I’d grown to those misshapen words.

“So seeing 10:05 on the clock doesn’t bother you anymore?”

I felt my throat start to sting. I swallowed incessantly until the heat cooled. And when I was certain that my voice wouldn’t break, I said, “No. It doesn’t bother me.”

I can hear footsteps behind me but I don’t slow. I can’t be sure those footsteps aren’t just my imagination. Lottie’s ghost chasing after me through this crowded, claustrophobic airport.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lottie slides into my head. “I don’t have to chase you. I go where you go.”

Don’t remind me, I think, and she responds with a gasp followed by offended silence.

“Ryn!” a voice calls from somewhere in my wake. It’s Xander. He’s following me. But I still don’t slow or turn around. I need air. I need space. I. Need. To. Get. Out.

I pass the airport office and avert my gaze, praying that Chain-Smoking Burnt Citrus Claudia won’t exit the doors just as I run by.

She doesn’t.

I do, however, pass the kissing couple from the train. They’re riding one of the moving walkways, and they’re back to yelling at each other. I don’t linger long enough to catch what the fight is about this time.

I sail by a lone TSA agent sitting at a desk, practically falling asleep into his hand. On my left is a sheet of glass that separates me from a security checkpoint, which means I’m leaving the supposed “secure” part of the airport and entering the wild frontier. Where no one is safe.

I keep running. Down a long sloping walkway until I’m in the main terminal. It’s big and open and bright. The ceilings are so high, I have to crane my neck to see the top. They rise into tall peaks, giving me the illusion of being trapped inside a snowcapped mountain.

I have the option to go left or right. I pause and swing my gaze in both directions. There are people out here, too. So many people. Always people.

Where are they all coming from?

Don’t they realize I need to be alone?

“So now you run,” Xander says, coming to a stop next to me. He rests his hands on his knees, panting. “And here I thought I was in shape.” He pivots his head and looks up at me. “Where was all this running when I told you to run?”

Ignoring him, I turn my head to the right and stand on my tiptoes in an attempt to peer over the sea of heads. I can just barely make out a door in the distance. It appears to be leading to the outside. Away from one storm and into another. I sprint toward it. Somewhere behind me Xander groans.

I dodge people and bags and children. I nearly slip on a slick spot on the tile floor. Before long, I reach a small, heated vestibule.

That’s when I screech to a halt.

The only thing that stands between me and the outside now is a clear glass door marked with the numbers 612. It glides open with a whoosh, as if to say, “Go ahead, Ryn. No one is holding you back. No one is keeping you here like the prisoner you think you are.”

Everything hits me at once. The cold, the snow, the wind. They slap me violently in the face, like I’m an unruly, fainting damsel in an old black-and-white movie. Smack, smack, smack!

My skin burns. My eyes try to adjust. I can’t even see five feet in front of me. The blizzard is too thick. It’s a wall. A wall of moving, breathing snow. The wind is so loud, it boxes my ears.

A second later the door slides shut, like it’s given up on me. I can hear it laughing in my face. “And you thought you were so brave.”

Then someone is beside me. I don’t have to look over to know it’s Xander. I’ve started to recognize his energy. The way it affects me. Riling me up and calming me down at the same time.

His presence triggers the door again, and it opens majestically, giving me a second shot.

Go, I urge myself. You can do it. It’s just a little snow.

But that’s the thing. It’s not just a little snow. It’s never just a little snow. It’s never a small storm. It’s always a fucking tempest. A total whiteout. Where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Where every step might be the one that takes you right over the edge of a cliff.

Another gust of wind rises up, blowing a bucket of frozen flurries into my face. I instinctively jump back and then glance down to see my shoes are covered in a fine, white powder.

The door closes again.

“Uh,” Xander says, taking two giant steps away. “What are we doing?”

“We’re not doing anything,” I say impatiently. “I’m going out there.”

I’m not sure whom I’m trying to convince more. Me or him. But it appears both of us need convincing.

“Uh,” he says again. “Why?”

“Because it’s just something I have to do.”

“Freeze to death?”

I shake my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

And he wouldn’t. How could he? He grew up in a perfect life. With perfect parents who knew exactly what to do when something went wrong. Although I highly doubt anything ever went wrong for him.

I take another step forward. The doors respond, yawning open for a third time. I swear this time, I hear them asking with a sigh, “You again? Look, are you going to leave or not?”

I take a deep breath, puffing up my chest like armor. I hold up my hand to cover my face from the barrage of snow that lashes out at me.

“I’d just like to say for the record that this is a terrible idea.”

I shut my eyes and try to block Xander’s voice from my mind.

“I’d have to agree,” Lottie chimes in. “This isn’t your brightest moment, Ryn.”

“Stop!” I mean this for Lottie, but fortunately Xander falls quiet too.

I shiver and zip my measly sweatshirt up to my chin, pulling the hood around my ears and tugging on the cord. My phone is still clutched in my hand. I glance down at the time: 7:49 p.m.

Less than fifteen hours to go.

I’m doing this.

I’m doing this.

I’m doing this.

I shove my phone into the pocket of my sweatshirt and take one step closer to the eye of the storm.

Dr. Judy stared at me in silence, waiting for me to speak. I swiped on my phone and checked the messaging app.

One unread message.

Satisfied, I looked at the clock. We had only six minutes left. Six minutes and then I wouldn’t have to do this again for two whole weeks. Even though I’d gotten used to the idea of being in therapy, it still didn’t mean I liked going.

On the other hand I knew I was spending the next two weeks with my father and his new wife, and for a brief moment I couldn’t decide which was worse.

“What about drawing?” Dr. Judy asked, shattering our mutually agreed upon silence.

I squinted at her. “What about it?”

“Art can be very therapeutic. Some people find that it helps them with the grieving process. Helps them pay homage to what they lost. Musicians write songs, authors write books, poets write poetry—”

“I don’t draw anymore.” I cut her off before she had a chance to finish. I knew exactly where this conversation was heading, and I wasn’t going with it. There were vague answers I was willing to give to appease her. There were topics I was willing to skirt around for the sake of pretenses, but this wasn’t one of them.

“And why is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I just grew out of it.” I tried to convey an air of nonchalance in hopes that she would see this as a nonissue and move on.

But in this room, nothing was a nonissue. Everything was worth talking about. “And when do you think you ‘grew out of it’?” she challenged, putting a strange emphasis on my words. Like she was testing their validity.

I didn’t want to think about this. I hadn’t thought about this in nearly nine months. But her questions were drilling holes in the brick wall I’d built up around those dark memories. Those first few nights at the very beginning. When I drove myself crazy. When I sat in my bedroom until daybreak trying to capture her. Trying to draw her the way I remembered her. Trying, and trying, and trying, and failing.

Until I was surrounded by images of Lottie’s disfigured face.

Until I was drowning in a pool of black ink.

I shrugged, careful to keep my expression neutral. “I don’t remember, really. My passion for it just sort of fizzled out. It happens.”

Dr. Judy watched me with vigilant eyes. I’d learned she had two kinds of stares. The pitying one and the one that called “bullshit!” This was the latter.

“Why do you think that is?” she asked.

I swallowed.

Because she’s not deformed.

Because her eyes don’t droop like that.

Because there’s no point in drawing something that doesn’t look real.

“I just don’t enjoy it anymore,” I said, looking down at the phone clasped between my cold, talentless fingers.

Because she’s beautiful.

And I used to be able to draw beautiful things.

But my hands stopped working.

“Okay,” Dr. Judy said, surprising me somewhat. I didn’t think she was going to let the subject go so easily. But she clicked her pen with an air of finality. “Since I’m not going to see you for the next two weeks, I have a little experiment I’d like you to try while you’re away.”

“What’s that?” I mumbled, disinterested.

“Do you know what a silver lining is?”

“I know what a Silver Linings Playbook is.”

She didn’t look amused. She rarely did.

I sighed. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

I shrugged and checked my messaging app again. “It’s like something good that can be found in something bad.”

I didn’t have to be an astrophysicist to know where she was going with this.

She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off. “There are no silver linings to Lottie’s death.”

She seemed to rethink her previous statement. “What if you’re wrong?”

“If you think I’m going to try to come up with reasons why Lottie’s death is a good thing, then you’re the crazy one.” I wasn’t even trying to mask the irritation in my tone. I expected to see something flash on her face—some kind of judgment or displeasure or that subtle fascination she’d mastered so well—but her face was as placid as a lake.

“I want you to write down every silver lining that you find,” she instructed.

I started to protest, but she held up a hand to stop me. “It doesn’t have to be about Lottie. It can be about anything. Whenever you find yourself lamenting about something that you perceive to be ‘bad,’ I want you to try and find a silver lining within it and write it down.”

“Is this like homework?”

She ticked her head to the side. “Kind of.”

“Are you going to be checking it when I get back?” I mocked.

“Only if you want to show it to me.”

Which meant I didn’t have to do it.

Which meant I wouldn’t do it.

“Let me ask you something, Ryn,” Dr. Judy began, and for a second I almost feared that I had said that last part aloud. “What have you done to grieve Lottie?”

I didn’t understand the question.

Dr. Judy rephrased. “What steps have you taken to grieve the loss of your best friend?”

“I didn’t realize grief was an active emotion,” I said without thinking. Without properly weighing the consequences. And I immediately regretted it.

Dr. Judy put her pen down. That was never a good sign. It meant whatever I had just said was so groundbreaking, so earth-shattering, that even her little ballpoint seismograph couldn’t accurately capture its epicness.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” she asked.

I glanced at the clock. Two minutes remaining. Dr. Judy was usually very punctual. When that digital clock in the corner hit the hour mark, that was it. Session over. Next patient. But she had, in the past nine months, been known to make exceptions when the subject matter was deemed important enough. And by the way she was looking at me now, her body bent forward, her eyes searching, this felt like it was shaping up to be one of those exceptions.

I knew I had to defuse the situation. Steer her to another track. A track that got me out of here on time.

One minute remaining.

“I just mean,” I began confidently, “I grieve Lottie every day. I don’t really plan out how I’m going to do it, I just do it.”

Dr. Judy sat back in her chair, picked up her pen again, clicked it, and started scribbling. The clock in the corner ticked over. A new hour had begun.

I stood up quickly. The room spun. I clutched my phone to steady myself.

“Well,” I began breezily, “I guess I’ll see you next year.”

Next year.

A debilitating chill racked my entire body.

The next time I’m in this office, Lottie will have been dead for an entire year.

The next time I’m here, I will have made one full rotation around the sun without her.

I gripped my phone tighter, but for some reason, this time, it offered me no stabilization.

I wanted to turn around and scream at Dr. Judy. I wanted to tell her that she was wrong. Always, always wrong.

Grief isn’t an active emotion. It’s not something you do. It’s something that happens to you. It’s 100 percent passive. It’s a tornado that rips your house from the ground, right off its foundation, twisting it around and around, before dropping it haphazardly back down to the earth. Sure, you’re still in the same place, but everything has been destroyed. The windows face the wrong way. The china has fallen from the cabinets and smashed to the floor. The furniture is upside down. And you’re standing in the middle of it all, wondering what happened. Wondering how you’re ever going to put it all back together again.

And now she wants me to be an active part of that? She wants me to open the doors and the windows, too, and welcome the tornado inside with open arms?

I want to say all of this. The words are pounding at my lips. But I don’t want to stay here another second. I don’t want to give her any excuse to prolong this session.

I reach for the door handle, my hand shaking from the storm brewing inside of me.

“Ryn,” Dr. Judy says, just as my fingers wrap around the cool brass.

I take a deep breath and spin around, fighting to keep the emotion from taking over my face. “Yeah?”

“You have to do something,” she says, her voice full of compassion. Her searching eyes no longer searching. “If you don’t control the grief, it will eventually control you.”

I nodded vehemently, like this was the best wisdom I’d ever received in my life.

But really, I was just counting the seconds until I could close the door behind me and lock Rational Ryn on the other side for the next two weeks.

My feet hover at the threshold, my toes just barely behind the invisible line that marks the inside of this airport from the scary, unknown world beyond. My body is blocking the door from closing again. The cold hits me like a million samurai swords slicing at my skin. The snow swirls around me, biting at my ears, my nose, my lips.

How could you just leave me?! I shout into the chaotic, meaningless white void of my mind. How could you do that?

But there is no response. The snow is too loud. Or I’m too small. Either way, my silent words get lost somewhere in the storm.

I stare into the frenzy of white. I can’t take the pressure. I can’t handle the cold.

I’m a coward.

I’m just as weak and pathetic and inept as Dr. Judy thinks I am.

I’m not cut out for this.

Lottie should have been the one left behind.

I’m the one who should have died.

You got the wrong person!

You took the wrong person!

“How long are we gonna stand here?” Xander asks. “ ’Cause I’m kind of freezing my ass off.”

I wilt, stumbling backward in defeat. The doors close behind me, securing me inside, guarding me from the storm once again.

I collapse into one of the black leather seats in the vestibule and try to breathe. But the snow is still blocking my lungs. It’s frozen inside of me. Keeping the chill in and the air out. I close my eyes tight.

Xander sits beside me. A moment later I feel his hand on my back. His touch sends warm tingles down my spine. I don’t want him to move. And yet he has to.

I can’t feel this warm when it’s that cold outside.

It’s not fair. It’s not allowed.

Nothing can feel good if she’s still gone. How would that ever make sense?

“Is this . . . ?” Xander begins tentatively, as if he’s not sure how to talk to someone like me. A crazy person who runs into snowstorms. Or at least tries to. “Does this have something to do with the unread text message on your phone?”

I jump up, sending Xander’s hand flying into the back of the chair with a smack.

“What are you talking about?”

He looks instantly regretful of the question. “Nothing. I just . . . I saw it when I texted you from your phone. It was from someone named Lottie. And then you used that name at the restaurant before you switched to . . .” He lets that hang. “And then when you were yelling at me a minute ago and I just thought . . . I don’t know.”

I can feel Irrational Ryn whipping herself into a frenzy. Only to be rivaled by the frenzy still banging against the glass door outside. I know once she’s out, she’ll be hard to put back in.

But I’m finding it hard to care anymore.

I suddenly want to let her out. I want to set her free. I’m tired of keeping her in chains.

“You just thought that because your parents are super famous, international bestselling shrinks that you can psychoanalyze everyone you meet?”

Xander falls very quiet. I notice his jaw clench. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I open my mouth again, the bitter, angry words burning the tip of my tongue. But just then, door 612 slides open and a gust of snow and wind comes barreling through the vestibule, stinging my eyes. Two people dressed as giant red marshmallows stomp inside, shaking snow off their massive jackets and boots. One of them tips back the hood of their coat and yells out, “Bingo!”

I instantly recognize him as Jimmy from the restaurant. The other marshmallow unmasks herself. “No way. You are so not winning this.”

It’s Siri.

“Couple on the Verge of a Breakup,” Jimmy announces, pointing directly at us, as if we’re wax statues in a museum.

“You don’t even know what they were saying!” Siri argues.

“I didn’t have to. I could see their body language through the glass. Just look at them.”

“We’re not on the verge of a breakup,” Xander mutters, still refusing to look at me.

I stare incredulously at him. That’s the part he chose to refute? “We’re not a couple,” I correct.

“Could have fooled me,” Siri mumbles.

“Whose side are you on?” I ask so sharply, it causes both of us to startle.

It isn’t until that very moment—seeing my volatility reflected in Siri’s reaction—that I realize how close I am to the edge. How easy it was to just uncork the bottle and let Irrational Ryn fly free. How good it felt in the moment.

But it’s the next moment that’s the problem. It’s this moment. When I feel rash and stupid and out of control.

When I vow to rein it all back in and bury it in the ground, where it belongs.

“You guys are just ruining bingo for everyone today, aren’t you?” Siri says.

Siri and Jimmy walk farther into the vestibule, continuing to stomp snow from their boots. Siri unzips her jacket. I watch her in fascination. She was out there. In the storm. Like it was nothing. Like she was just taking a stroll in the park.

“You went outside?” I ask, focusing on keeping my voice soft and controlled.

Siri lets out a groan. “Yeah. We thought we’d try to get out, but my car is buried under an avalanche, and I just found out from Twitter that they’ve closed Peña.”

“What’s Peña?” I ask.

“It’s the only road that goes to the airport,” Jimmy informs me somberly.

“What does that mean?”

Siri looks at me like I’m extremely dense. “It means no one is getting in or out of this place tonight.”