Editing Afterschool Activities (section)

==Writefaggotry==
The circles under Sarah's eyes were definitely noticeable as she glanced at the reflective cabinet over the sink in the teachers' work room in the light from the digital clock on the counter. It was blinking 00:00, which she was pretty sure clocks weren’t meant to do, but at this point she was too tired to care much. She really hoped this instant coffee stuff would do the trick. Steph had said her dad used it to pull long nights when he was working on a contract, but none of the other girls had ever tried the stuff. Since Sarah knew her way around the workroom she had volunteered to go make some cups and bring them back. She had been worried that they might get in trouble for taking the teachers' mugs, but ever since Mr. Stevens had gone to look for the circuit breaker they hadn't seen a single adult, so she figured she'd take the risk.

Once she had filled up the mugs from the tap, Sarah grabbed the plastic container and tried to read how long she was supposed to microwave them for. The text on the container swam before her tired eyes. She couldn't tell if that was a 3 or an 8, so she threw them all in the microwave and punched in 5 minutes, hoping it would do the job. The drone of the microwave was practically a lullaby to her weary mind, so she began pacing a circle around the folding table in the center of the room to stay alert.

If it weren't for her circuit taking her near the door, she never would have heard the shuffling from up the hallway. Sarah froze, trying to figure out if her ears had been tricking her or not. Her first instinct was to call out. Maybe one of the other girls had gotten tired of trying the janitor's endless ring of keys on that door and had come to help her. But... that noise didn't sound like the loafers the girls wore. It sounded more like... scratching. Like nails on the tile. The noise moved slowly up the hallway outside the door. In an instant all the fears of the darkness that Sarah had been holding at bay came crashing down onto her, and she frantically searched the room for some escape. Of course, the teachers’ workroom was in the interior of the building, so there were no windows and only the one door in and out. But… there! The closet in the corner was big enough for her to hide in, and she dove for it even as the scratching outside drew even with the door. She wriggled inside and tried to pull the closet doors closed behind her, but there were no handles on the inside so she was forced to leave the small crack for her fingers to squeeze through. The noises outside the door had stopped, and for a minute Sarah thought her tired mind must have imagined it. Then the tapping began.

A slow, rhythmic click upon the door, as though something hard was tapping against it. Then Sarah realized her mistake. The door was closed, but the latch didn’t quite align with the doorframe, and so it hadn’t popped out when she had closed the door. And now, as something on the other side prodded the door, it slowly began to swing open into the room. Sarah held her breath as something shifted in the hallway, her eye glued to the crack in the closet doors. Then the room went black.

For a moment Sarah panicked again, reliving the moment earlier when the world had gone dark. Then she realized what had happened. The 5 minutes she had set the microwave for had run out, and the microwave backlight which she had been unconsciously relying upon had gone with it. Now that the room was plunged into total darkness, she could no longer see the door, or the source of the sounds that had frightened her. But the sounds continued. The tapping had stopped when the door opened, only to be replaced by the slow scratching sound as the source of the noise moved into the teachers’ work room.

Sarah's heart pounded in her chest as the thing moved towards the now-dark microwave. Once it reached the counter there was a long period of silence, and her imagination filled with images of it slowly turning to scan the room. The sounds began again, and she couldn’t tell if it moved towards the tables in the room’s centre or the couch along the wall. Then a new sound sprung up, a sliding noise, punctuated by clunks. A whimper escaped Sarah’s lips when she realized the source: the thing was dragging an… arm? A hand? It was sliding something along the cabinet doors that lined the wall on her side of the room, the clunks signalling when it hit a gap between doors. If it continued along the wall, it would come to her closet. Each clunk rang louder in her mind as it moved closer to her hiding place.

But the moment never came. Unable to tell precisely how close the thing was, the noises suddenly ceased. Listening hard, Sarah could hear… nothing. She waited, but no noise at all came from the dark room. The sliding noise had stopped, but so had the scratching sounds that she had come to associate with movement. Still… she couldn’t bring herself to open the door and check. The thought that the thing was out there, something was in the darkness… Sarah slumped against the back wall of the closet, quivering from fear.

Twenty minutes later, when she still had not returned with the promised coffee, the other girls came looking for Sarah. Opening the closet, their emergency flashlight beam fell upon her form, curled in the corner, sound asleep. They glanced at each other with grim looks. Just like the others, she wouldn’t be waking up. And from the look of the coffee container upturned in the room’s sink, they would need to find another way to stay awake.