Unbeknownst to Cal High students, their lives were changed forever when they stepped on campus this year.
Even the extra gates being added around campus could not outmatch the horror of one of the new changes: the portables had vanished.
In an instant, hundreds of students faced one of the most life-shattering events that could happen to a person. What we held dear, our old and trusty portables, were no longer with us.
A few students like myself were left wondering what exactly happened to them.
I took it upon myself to figure out the distressing reasons behind this crime, especially since my peers were struggling to face this harsh reality.
Senior Naman Rudakshi spoke of how utterly irrelevant their disappearance was to him. This was merely a facade, of course. I could tell he was shaken to his core.
“I have a fond memory of getting tackled [at the portables],” sophomore Benny Lopez said, almost wistfully.
I walked the halls contemplating this confounding mystery day after day. Nights filled with Red Bull and nail-biting were constant.
Until suddenly the most likely suspect struck me. Alien cows had abducted the portables. This had to be the case. There was no other logical answer.
There may be no evidence to support this. Still and without a doubt, I believed the cows were planning on transforming Cal’s campus into one gigantic spaceship.
Others believed differently.
“[The portables] definitely left,’ sophomore Tyler Hazelwood said. “They just got up and left.”
Hazelwood expanded by theorizing that the portables had grown one-inch tall chicken legs, specifically.
I needed someone who could provide me with solid answers. And who better would that be than Principal Demetrius Ball himself?
Seeking Ball out, he informed me of the portables true uses. They were primarily used for special education, AP testing, and were the office of the school’s equity liaison, Trisha Gonzales-Waters. But with Gonzales-Waters’ no longer on campus, the portables had one less use.
No wonder those portables just up and left. They felt unneeded and underappreciated.
But the mystery behind their disappearance grew even more confounding
Sophomore Aahaan Nath happened to encounter something out of the ordinary during his PE class last year: a mound of dirt lying within the portables.
“What if there’s dead bodies in there?” Nath said.
Needless to say, he didn’t dawdle at the scene.
Something terrible happened here. My gut was twisting up in pain out of pure fear.
Or maybe it’s because I drank four cartons of milk while being lactose intolerant, but that must not be the case.
According to my calculations, the portables went missing in July. So far no one has been able to specify if they had witnessed anything shady partaking at the basketball courts where the portables used to reside during this time.
This is probably because of the fact that most students do not visit campus as their ideal vacationing site.
Come to think of it, though, anything concerning the portables was not common knowledge. Staff members and students alike were left in the dark.
“I think they just demolished the portables themselves,” senior Ava Mattei said.
If I didn’t look closely, I may have never noticed the stank of foul play that wreaked from every pore of this horrid disappearance.
But most students who look longingly there now will see two huge piles of dirt and a tractor chilling where the portables once stood.
All this led me to believe that a larger power was at play.
“We have a facilities department that’s at our district office,” Ball said, “They are in charge of all facilities, so, buildings and grounds and maintenance.”
Ah ha!
The ghastly clarity of his words hit me like a truck on steroids hits a giraffe. Could the government be involved?
Unlikely, no government in their right mind would care about its public education system. Deciding to drop the matter of government interference altogether, the most viable proposed theory was that they had grown legs and left on their own accord.
This idea thrummed a sad chord in my heart, making me think of all the wonderful memories the portables created. The feeling of the wind whistling past the portables, sitting on their deserted ramps… ah, the good times.
Others were not as nostalgic.
“What the hell is a portable?” Rudrakshi asked.
