BREAKING NEWS: Group of Freshman Dress up as the 7-9 escalator for Halloween Subtitle: Get walked all over on in the traditional Freshman fashion

In the early hours of October 31, a frosty breeze blew through the seventh floor of our beloved school building. Lights flickered, the dying leaves of potted plants twitched, and escalators emitted high-pitched groans. If any brave soul walked down that unholy hall, they would have felt a thousand silent eyes on their back.

There was not a decibel of sound to be heard in the eerie hall. Until.. ACHOO!

One of the escalator steps sneezed.

Yes, you read that right. The escalator sneezed. And upon closer examination, it became clear that the escalator wasn’t an escalator at all. The place that previously housed giant, buzzing, metal contractions that was designed (unsuccessfully) to save students’ feet was now replaced by 47 little freshmen assembled on top of one another in perfect stairlike formation. 47 heads bowed down, 94 ears listening carefully for the first wave of students to arrive, 188 limbs shaking from the unfamiliar strain of physical activity. (Apparently, square dancing does not prepare one for these situations.) 

They remained stacked there while 47 other freshmen, each with a step of the real escalator in hand, ran down the East staircase. They were sprinting down, praying to Freshmen Gods of sweaty gym clothes and half-floor hangouts that they wouldn’t get caught—when Principal Yu suddenly met them halfway up the steps to the fifth floor. The freshmen stopped and stared. Principal Yu stopped and stared harder. They all shared a collective blink. 

“Is there a new PE class for freshmen, or—”

Not one of the frozen freshmen volunteered any information.

“Ok, then,” he said. “Just nothing illegal, ok? I don’t want the police to come… they might not take kindly to my collection of BTS toenail clippings.”

“Ok, Principal Yu.”

“Good luck with the toenails, Principal Yu.”

The freshmen slowly backed away, never breaking eye contact with their concerned principal. They reached the gym locker rooms and quickly stuffed the escalator pieces into their respective lockers. 

Upstairs, the human staircase was surprisingly still assembled, but even more astonishingly, no one seemed to notice they were stepping on freshmen’s backs instead of the usual yellow-striped steel. No one even blinked when they saw it wasn’t ascending, swallowing “steps” into the abyss. In fact, they probably would’ve been more surprised and investigated further if it wasn’t broken. 

If not for one small miscalculation, the freshmen would still be there to this day (they collectively decided that being walked on was a better life than trying to get into college. So many crying seniors had ascended their steps.) It was ninth period and no one had noticed anything yet. There was a small group of freshies adorned in their cultural attire of moist gym clothes unsuspectingly climbing up the steps forged by their peers, moaning about the new unit their PE teacher started. As soon as the words “FitnessGram” left their lips, one of the steps let out an audible sob. A tear dropped onto another step. A third began to tremble uncontrollably in anguish. The structural integrity of the entire structure was compromised, and it all came tumbling down.

Thankfully, no one was injured from the fall, though an admin collected all of the Fallen 47’s PE teachers and told them to assign an extra PACER test as punishment. All of the freshmen were banned from submitting pictures of their great creation to the costume contest, though there is a petition to give them first place on Change.org. The other freshmen who disassembled the real escalator did not escape with as little punishment, however. They are prohibited from ever touching the lovely cold metal of an escalator ever again and are limited to just the staircases for the rest of their Stuyvesant lives. 

If you see a sweaty freshman running for their lives up a staircase, simply smile and clap them on the back. After all, who would’ve known that freshmen would be holding the weight of the student body on their shoulders? Literally.