"Hey, breaking out of school can't be a crime, can it?"

"I don't know about you, but I couldn't pick that lock. And I'm not keen to climb the fence, either. I am small and fragile."

"We could probably break the lock, but that's definitely a crime. Whether leaving school grounds is itself a crime depends on the specific legal definition of truancy."

She puts her hands in her hoodie pocket and tries not to do anything that'll make the internal screaming worse; it's getting less polite by the minute, and in a few more she won't be able to hear herself think.

"Let's just circle the perimeter and see if we can find a janitor or something."

"Sure."

"I mean, morally speaking it shouldn't be a crime to leave school after they accidentally locked us in. Actually I bet you could argue that somebody here is committing false imprisonment, although you might have trouble pinning them down for it since the person who left us here and the people who locked the doors aren't going to be the same."

"The law isn't concerned with morality."

There are no janitors. There is, however, a gap in the perimeter - someone's already taken some wire cutters to the fence, and now it's possible to move from school grounds to the construction site immediately adjacent to school grounds.

"Oh good! We get to benefit from someone else's crimes!"

"...Yeah, I think this might actually be our best prospect of making contact with the outside world."

Aaaaaaaaaaaa she has to make decisions, she doesn't want to make decisions, someone is going to get crushed under a pile of bricks, probably Merry because everyone likes Merry, and then the rest of them are going to be tried for manslaughter, and they're going to be standing in a courtroom and someone is going to ask her why she didn't do the obvious thing, and she doesn't know what the obvious thing is right now but when she's standing in court it'll seem super mind-numbingly obvious, and it's going to be so obvious that they're going to end up trying her for third-degree murder -

"Possibly."

"What are they even building back there?"

"Oh, they aren't. It was going to be a fancy apartment building and then somebody ran out of money or something and now it's the foundations of a fancy apartment building with dirt piled on top and weeds growing in it."

"I guess that explains why we never see anybody actually constructing."

Maybe there are not any lurking piles of bricks, then. There are probably rusty nails or something, but maybe Merry can survive tetanus. 

On the other hand, it's not too late to give up and try sleeping in the French classroom! 

Except then she'd have to tell everyone where she was going, and they'd look at her funny, and she'd have to explain her reasoning, and worst-case they'd think she was right and they'd all end up sleeping in the French classroom, and then they don't have an alarm so people would just find them like that in the morning, and then she'd never get the stains out of her honor.

Maybe if she mentally recites psalm twenty-three or something. Maybe they'll find a payphone before she runs out of psalm.

"As long as we don't touch anything," she mutters, and then ducks through the hole in the fence.

Merry and his brother follow, slipping easily through the gap.

Nick has a little more trouble, on account of he's so unreasonably tall, but he manages.

The construction site seems minimally hazardous, actually. There's big piles of dirt and small piles of dirt and some stacks of pipes all bound securely together, and it's pretty easy to find a clear flat path with good enough visibility to avoid the small rocks and drifts of windblown leaves.

Cool, cool, cool. This is strictly better than having to be tried for murder. Now if they can just make it out of the construction site, they can look around, and someone else will figure out which building is most likely to have a phone in it, and she will not have to make any more decisions and can get on with being lectured by her parents about her general irresponsibility.

She follows the path.

Merry traipses cheerfully along beside her, hands in his pockets, and encounters absolutely zero rusty nails.

Lucky takes a little more care with his footing, and lags a little behind, but also seems pretty chill about their twilit abandoned construction site adventure.

Nick trails quietly along at the rear of the group. It's hard to tell what if anything he is thinking, and surprisingly easy to forget he's even there.

The last faint glow of sunset fades from the horizon, and a handful of stars struggle to make their presence known in the light-polluted sky.

And then—

That blue-white streak in the sky is too quick and bright, and moving too erratically, to be a commercial aircraft. And meteors aren't generally known to take evasive maneuvers.

She stops walking and stares.

Probably someone's misbehaving model aircraft, or - ?

Merry stops too, and follows her gaze, squinting into the sky.

"...thaaaat's not an airplane," he says, concerned yet intrigued.

"What do you mean, what's not a—oh. Ohhh. Wow."

Nick doesn't say anything at all, but he stops with the rest of them.