It was another cold night outside the high school. Where the wheezy quiet of the wind should have been dominant there instead chipped snow and ice under shovels. The grinding sough from the senior students' work acted as a backdrop for their flagging endeavor. Powdery snow sifted from their scoops and glittered in the air tantalizingly. Many a student stood about looking at their work, coming in and out of focus.

The school had been cocooned in snow for over a week. When the plows battered the daunting drifts and mountains of ice they guaranteed a way into the building. Every morning, however, the town found its institution engulfed once again with no way to gain ground. There was no new snowfall to take blame for it.

The outcome had been enthusiastically anticipated by the students, of course. Their hard night's work paid off every time without repercussion. During the day when the adults set to taking apart the barricade the kids found themselves endowed with unfamiliar spare time. In those first days of man-made vacation they celebrated openly all over the fields.

They were beginning to feel the strain, though. While Janet couldn't claim to represent the whole of them, she knew she wasn't the only one who was actually losing sleep over their foolproof plan. She didn't mind staying up through the night to flip snow from the street to the sidewalk. It was in her body to jive with energy in the dark hours, and being among her peers in this way was rejuvenating. Following the secret operations of her class was an entertaining and rewarding activity.

It was a gradual change, but Janet realized that her days and nights were trading places the longer she kept up with supplying snow days. During the night she worked. In the beginning she was able to spend the days reaping the benefits, but soon she was sleeping the days away altogether, only to wake and bury the school again. Some interviewing revealed that the same result was befalling the other seniors as well.

When Leonard, one of the leading forces in the students' effort, approached the stretch of sidewalk that Janet was servicing that night, she decided that it was time to voice her concerns.

Leonard was a silent-stepping black slab of authority among the huffing, grunting nofaces that shuffled around him in their parkas. He was in only a wind breaker, the zipper dangling in a daring way to allow the cold air free reign over him. His forehead was iced in sweat after having relocated a good many shards of frozen sludge with the edge of his heavy metal shovel. Janet could hardly find the means to approach him. Ever attentive to the progress of the school's incapacitation, Leonard noticed that Janet had stopped working.

"Why did you stop?" he asked. Janet passed a look over him and settled on Marie, who had paused to watch. Her friend wasn't offering any backup yet. No one else had caught on to the minor disturbance, for which Janet appreciated. That everyone was so diligent at their task worried her, too. Perhaps she was wrong about the state of their affairs. With the full attention of Leonard on her, though, she had to go through with her original intention. Speaking over the furry rim of her coat's hood was enough challenge.

"This doesn't end," she said. Leonard waited for some elaboration. As the steam of her words fogged up her glasses Janet found she didn't know how to express her fears. To her relief Marie picked up the flimsy line of her suggestion, her voice carrying the hint of comprehension, even agreement.

"When we first started doing this it was so we could spend the day goofing off, right?"

Leonard confirmed the assumption.

"Well I don't know about you, but I can hardly stay awake anymore in the daytime to even have breakfast."

A murmur consumed the crunch of shoveled snow as the kids nearest to Janet and Marie caught word of their conversation. They too had been feeling the effects of lost sleep. Sensing a threat to the school's immersement in frost, Leonard hoisted his authority up and brandished it in line with his shovel.

"Enough standing around, we need to get this place under white. Or do you want to have wasted a whole night just to go to school tomorrow?"

"It's a wasted night anyway if we can't enjoy the snow day," someone behind them countered.

"We're all tired," Janet said, feeling lightheaded from representing the whole class with confidence, "this isn't working anymore."

The argument grew in volume. Where the scraping and shifting of the shovels had robbed the night of its quiet now aired the flailing voices of the teenagers' debate. All progress was put to a standstill, paralyzed by doubt and distracted by complaints and commands.

So involved was the discussion that nobody noticed Marie's brother meandering along the street towards their base of operations. He would have gone on past the entire congregation, but the path of his somnambulism lead him across a discarded shovel lying half on the street. The fall jarred him enough into waking and howling for the pain of the broken up ice against his body, unprotected by the thin fabric of his pajamas. Marie recognized her brother's voice immediately and went to him.

The young weeping child was quieted and the unruly discussion had died down, but their shouting had disrupted the relative quiet of the neighborhood. Lights began blinking down the street where a line of residential housing stood. An angry yell came from one house, small in its distance: "Who's making all that noise out there?"

It broke the spell over the senior class that had been holding them captive for so many days. Not another word was said. The banging of shovels hitting the sidewalk and ice racketed across the school front over the smacking of boots against the packed snow that the kids had succeeded in planting. A few panicky squeaks followed behind them. With the kids gone the area was silent once again, if a bit more cluttered.

The next morning Janet's mother knocked on her daughter's door a few times before walking in. Janet had not been using her alarm clock for many days now. She looked at her mother from the caressing nest of her blankets with dry eyes, all of the muscles in her arms and thighs aching with every minor adjustment. They held each other's gaze for a few seconds before her mother said, "School is cancelled today." Another moment had the woman leaving to go into the kitchen and prepare some breakfast.

Janet's eyes closed and scrunched tightly, hot from exhaustion. She had a feel for where the window was by the red glow that seeped in through her eyelids. The shade was halfway up, letting all of the sunlight in to tingle in her face and burn the wall. Fumbling a hand across the window frame she managed to pull it down the whole way, then she rolled over. With the soft touch of her blanket over her head Janet settled down into the mattress. If it was a snow day, she wanted nothing at all to do with it.

She knew that there would be school tomorrow now that the secret had been exposed. While it hadn't been voted on, there was no question that the snow days were numbered down to one. What had happened with all of the shovels, Janet didn't know. She was glad that none of them were hers.

The idea of going back to school still weighed unevenly on her. In a perverse turn of events it would be a relief to return to her normal schedule. There would be no more sneaking into the night and contending with a runny nose against the cold to lift snow. In fact, spring was supposedly just around the corner. Yet at the same time she couldn't help dreading the morrow. Going back to school meant dealing with homework, submitting to the power of teachers, and worse yet, waking up in the morning.

An emptiness filled her head in the blissful oblivion between sleep and wakefulness while a last thought lingered on the outskirts of her consciousness. Snow days would no longer be a viable option, but the pond in front of the school had a nasty habit of swelling and causing flooding damage to the school when the rain was bad enough. What with spring being so close, the rains would be arriving on the scene in no time. One or two cancellations were normal in coping with the faulty plumbing system... And with a little help from some extra hands, it was safe to say that there would be many more rainy days this year than ever before.