“Ehhhh, Ehhhh Ehhhh,” the fire alarm blared, startling me out of my nap… I mean, calculus worksheet. Another vape was about to be confiscated. Another soldier down.
“Imagine if there was actually a fire,” my desk partner giggled. “Nobody would even do anything.”
I rolled my eyes. “How stupid,” I thought. “There could never be a fire in Southern California.”
In my time at Pali, I had witnessed hundreds of fire alarms, all resulting in interrogations in the Dean’s Office, which has recently stepped up its disciplinary measures.
“They said it would be fine if I just admitted to my addiction,” said one poor, sad, child after being abducted by one of Pali’s deans: “When the deans informed me that I would even be rejected from SMC, something inside me just snapped… I saw the light, I realized I needed help, and I’ve completely recovered. Now please excuse me, I need to… use the toilet.”
For some reason, despite the deans’ success in reforming vapers rather than simply punishing them, fire alarms on campus continued to blare during my classes.
Suddenly, I got a whiff of vape. “What flavor could that be?” I wondered. Possibilities flooded my mind: “Blueberry Mojito? Strawberry Shortcake? Marshmallow?
“It smells like… campfire,” I concluded. “Perhaps actual fire? What an unusual vape flavor. You’ve outdone yourself, Vaporesso.”
Then, something unexpected happened. One treasured ASB member’s voice filled my classroom via loudspeaker: “Everyone, like, actually evacuate. It’s probably not just people vaping. Probably.”
Suddenly it was clear to me: Not only would waves await us, but so would Region 69 Firefighters.
“This is… inexplicable,” Pali principal Dr. Pamela Magee lamented over the PCHS emergency broadcast system. “I’m still wrapping my head around it. A fire alarm… and… a fire? Those just shouldn’t be linked.”
I stumbled out of class, less in shock about the existence of a fire than the fire alarm being the harbinger of it. I wondered what had caught fire. Could it have been the wooden desks? The flammable, shiny head polish left behind by Dr. Lee?
I glanced into the parking lot and spotted a group of stoners quickly hiding their blunts.
“Why can’t the people vaping in the bathroom be more like the refined, dignified stoners?” I wondered. “Why smoke under fire alarms in bathrooms when you can smoke in the fresh air and gaslight members of Pali’s five-foot-tall unarmed security force at the same time?”
Heading to the football field, I saw the source of the fire: someone had disposed of a cigarette in the recycling bin.
“How disgusting,” I thought. “Don’t they know that cigarettes are supposed to go in the trash can?”
As I reached the football field, I looked behind me to my peers just beginning to exit their classrooms and listened to their exuberant cheers thanking the vaper who allowed them to take a break from their dreary classroom lives and breathe in Pali’s fresh, smoky air.
Clad in stylish orange safety vests, ASB members, Pali’s emergency task force of 15-year-olds, were just beginning to arrive on scene to save the day.
Those valiant student representatives made me realize that Pali’s inhabitants would be OK: Our seriousness when it came to approaching potential emergencies would save everyone on campus.
