As 14 years old kids, Maria and Sophia were attending the event practise at the school for the school's special function. The enchanting evening was filled with the sounds of guitar, of the drums being beaten by those small confident hands, of the thin voice of young angels practising the songs, of the delicate feet of little dancers tapping against the ground, of the loud virtuous voices enacting out some characters in a play...of all kinds of contribution from the superstars of the future. Maria and Sophia were not absent in this list. These blooming buds were going to dance on the song selected by their favourite teacher.
All these event practices for celebrating the anniversary of the School's Founder, were progressing at a fast pace and only a week was left for the final show. Maria and Sophia were confident of their performance and after a couple of practices that evening, they felt they were perfect at it now and took the liberty to roam around in the time left over. It was still 7 in the evening and thier Cab would come at 9 pm. So, they had plenty of time for galavanting, as you would call it. The main gate of the school stood wide open to welcome anybody inside and walk into the big green field where the busy school students' crowd hummed. So, needless to mention that the everyday's crowd comprised of not only the students and teachers but also outsiders, some good some bad. Among them were also those whose main motive was to chase girls, make friends with them, flirt around or find someone for a serious relationship. You could distinguish such people from their hungry wolf like eyes peeping out and looking at every soul passing by. They stood in groups of 4-5 and you just cannot handle them except for plainly ignoring them and being with your team, with concentration towards your work.
As Maria and Sophia wandered in the diminishing light of the beautiful evening, they felt very thirsty and to their shock, they realised that they have lost their bag containing snacks and the water bottle. The exertion of two rounds of heavy dance practice had dried their throats like that of a desert traveller. They decided to go inside the school premises to drink water from the taps available there, though the buildings looked haunted in the darkness and only two main gates at the extreme opposite ends were opened for entry and exit, rest all being locked. These girls bravely went inside to search for water in the building corridors. As they entered, they took the steps to the first floor and went to the nearest Basin with taps, turned on one of them but alas, there was no water. Instead, there came strange noises of shoes. Someone was climbing the same set of stairs ....
The girls became conscious and alert. Slowly they moved towards the stairs and peeped down to recognize those folks. The buildings were not well lit and that caused inconvenience to these girls in seeing the faces. However, from their movements and thier talks they did not appear to be good guys. They were heading straight towards the floor where these girls were standing. Now, an obvious doubt came in their minds. Were these guys following them? They stood stiff for a moment as this thought ran simultaneously in their minds and they immediately ran across the corridor to reach the next set of steps to go down. The confirmed signs of being chased by those folks showed in the next couple of minutes when these guys also ran in the same direction, following the girls. The girls could hardly believe that something like this can ever happen. They nervously ran down the stairs and reached the ground floor. All around was darkness and the exit gate they reached was locked. What a stroke of bad luck! They hardly had time to analyze which exit gate would be open at this time. As their minds went helter skelter, they started running in a randomly selected direction. The guys were on their heels too, following them determinedly. The girls could hardly understand the intentions of those people but the signals were strongly indicating that definitely these people were not there for anything good. The females could hardly get time to plan out the escape. They had no clue which direction to go in and how to reach the main Exit gate. They landed up reaching the top floor of the building. A select number of gates being open and closed inside the building had created a jig-saw puzzle and solving it in a haste seemed next to impossible. The footsteps were approaching in their direction and it made them numb as there was no way out from there except the same set of stairs that would take them down. They tried to hide behind the pillars closest to the stairs and decided to run down as fast as they could the moment these people reached upstairs and turned in any direction.
They had already started breathing heavily and their hearts were pumping blood randomly. They had to start running at a proper timing otherwise they were into some deep trouble today. Those folks reached the topmost floor and it was quite fortunate for the girls as the boys turned in the opposite direction. But these girls did something really foolish and started running towards the stairs immediately and as a result they came face to face with these guys. Their big eyes bulged out and the heartbeat stopped as they noticed five big notorious looking boys comprising this group. They had good luck again as it took few minutes for those boys to realize that they were face to face with those girls and Maria and Sophia could immediately take advantage of this situation and slip between the crowd to make their way towards the next floor.
As the boys realized what had happened, they immediately changed their directions and ran after the females. Maria and Sophia could hardly understand anything as to what to do because the guys were now following very close to their heels. They almost tumbled down the next set of steps to reach the first floor corridor. They recalled that they were at the same place where they were in the beginning and running down the the set of stairs at the end of the corridor would lead them to the exit/entry gate. So, they immediately changed their direction and headed towards the end of the corridor. The boys did the same. As these girls were reaching the end of the corridor, they saw the girl's and the boy's toilets right across on the way to the other corridor. There was no time to be lost as the end of the corridor was still quite far and the speed of the boys was pretty high and scary. The escape was not guaranteed if they continued running. Maria and Sophia blinked together as they understood that the toilet was the best place to hide and changed their direction. As they headed towards the girl's toilet, Sophia pulled Maria by her hand and ran towards the boy's toilet.
What a move! As both the girls stood locked inside one of the cells of the boy's toilet, Maria looked completely confused and embarrassed. Sophia explained the significance of hiding there and told her that the boys will never in their life guess that the girls are in the boy's toilet. And yes, it did happen. The boy's dared to go inside the girl's toilet and check but on finding that no one was there they headed straight towards the other corridor to hunt for the girls. We are so much guided by the standards set in the society that by default we tend to think in the direction of those standards even in very awkward and challenging situations. Because everybody knows that girl's toilet are meant for the girls and boy's toilet for the boys, the boys automatically followed the standard way of thinking and searched in the girl's toilet but 'uncommon sense is very uncommon' and they could not think out of the box that there could be a slight probablity that the females are hiding in the toilet meant for the males. Hence, the narrow escape for Maria and Sophia who silently came out of the toilet and ran towards the set of stairs on the other end and climbed down to reach the exit gate from where, they were finally out on the open ground field along with the other school mates. They don't know what happened to those boys as they never saw those faces again but they peacefully went back home taking a good lesson from the day's incident and promising themselves to be careful and sensible for the rest of their lives.
Maria and Sophia had a wonderful show on the day of the celebration and they got lot of applauses for the same. They cherish the memories of their beautiful performance till today. All is well that ends well.
