The blocks of ice had started to fall from the ceiling, video-game style, 
as we waited for Jack to come home. What had started out as an inspired 
prank had turned into a labor of love; we had opened up the apartment to 
the ten-degree outside, and painstakingly layered the floor of his bedroom 
with packed snow hoisted up from the courtyard below. The room seemed 
barren, and Danny had had the brilliant idea to put ice cubes on his 
ceiling; quadruple-size ice cubes, made carefully from regular ice cubes 
and snow, stuck there with some strange device that he had procured from 
work. The device, however, was not fallible, and every now and then we 
heard a shattering noise from his bedroom, the fake icicles crashing to 
the floor like real ones.

Jack had gone away to see his girlfriend in Chicago for the weekend, and 
so it fell to us, the residents of Winthrop H-23, to ambush him upon his 
return. The pranks the four of us had pulled were legendary already, from 
barricading tutors in to setting off firework displays -- concealed behind 
the backboard and remote-controlled -- during the middle of Ec 10 
lectures, to redirecting Harvard students' personal webpages, at random, 
to personal pages of people with the same first name at other colleges. We 
practiced on ourselves, putting all sorts of objects in strange places  
(socks, computers, the shower, ostensibly normal cans of soda), and 
earlier that term, we had reached the point where no one could leave the 
room for fear of reprisal. Jack was the first one to crack for the 
weekend, and we had all immediately realized that we had to come up with 
something epic. Hence the snowdrifts encircling his desk, and the ice 
cubes on the ceiling.

There was only one problem. Jack wasn't coming home. His flight was 
supposed to get into Logan at 5, bringing him back no later than 6:30, but 
here it was -- seven thirty -- and he wasn't here. We had, of course, 
looked up the flight; perfectly on time, Chicago to Boston shuttle, no ill 
weather today, just the cold acting as a preservative on the already 
plentiful snow, an early blizzard this year, December 12th, and here it 
was the fifteenth and everything was still pristine and cold-snapped in 
the generally inaccessible area behind our room.

We took turns nervously looking at our watches, confirming the fact that 
time was still moving forward at an alarming rate, and grew more and more 
silent as the nervousness filled the room, punctured only by the clinking 
of the ice cubes. Eventually the Lowell bells, a block away, rang eight 
times, ending their trip through Sunday, a serenade followed by thirty-six 
gongs; still no sign of Jack.

Devon was the first to crack, muttering something about a response paper 
and heading into his room. Danny and I sat on the couch, not saying 
anything, together but isolated. Were we worried? Were we confused? Some 
combination of unusual feelings was flooding the room, and we sat there, 
waiting for the other to leave, neither wanting to be the one to admit the 
mistake. Looking back, he probably felt the same way I did: we couldn't 
shake the feeling that somehow, this prank had gone too far. Somehow, fate 
had gotten wind of it, and spirited Jack away somewhere.

We sat there in silence as the night grew on, nine o'clock. The girls 
across the hall came up the stairs; the footsteps were intriguing for just 
a split second before their number became clear, and before their voices 
pierced the cold winter air. Ten o'clock. I flipped the TV to SportsCenter 
and saw some unremarkable highlights, basketball I think. Danny picked up 
a magazine and began cycling through the pages, his grip tighter than 
usual, spacing out behind its plane. 

When we woke up the next morning, it was forty-five degrees and the snow 
had vanished. The water had seeped away somehow (pity the person who lived 
below Jack), and the sun was streaming in through the windows. I glanced 
over into Jack's room, the door still open; no Jack. I nudged Danny, who 
was lying asleep next to me on the couch, and we slumbered over to the 
dining hall, not sure whether this was the waking life or the dreaming 
one. I heaped scrambled eggs on my plate and absent-mindedly ate them, 
wondering what life was going to do next.