If I could go back in time and stop myself from consuming just (1) piece of media I’d stop myself from watching that first episode of Sherlock because it’s been an entire decade sinceit’s airedand yet every single time I try to plug my phone charger in and miss, my brain is still just like, “Sorry mom and dad, but according to BenDetect CumberSleuth I’m apparently an alcoholic.”
Having gone to this University, and having personally played hide and seek in the Harris Fine Arts Center, I guarantee you that NOBODY finds hiders unless they, too, are familiar with the bowels of the HFAC. Once you get down to the practice-room levels, time stops completely and you could walk up the back stair and end up in 1967. The halls change at least 8 times an hour, there’s no way you’re getting back out the same way you came in. When the lights start going off at 10 the whole bottom 3 floors descend into some subsection of the fey realm. I once hid up on the balcony stage access fire-escape thing of a lower-level theater, and 3 faculty walked by under me and not a one of them noticed the hulking, wheezing asthmatic lurking above them, half dangling off a rickety metal ladder that probably wasn’t supposed to be climbed. A fellow hider friend came and found me, and we sat up there for 30 minutes listening to some distant clicking sound before we realized nobody was actually going to find us. We had no cell service, and no internet to reach anyone. We got lost trying to get back out, and once we resurfaced, everyone else was gone, the building was empty, and we just went home to eat ice cream. Nobody knew where we had disappeared to, and nobody bothered to check if we were there before leaving. For all I know, they just assumed we had been lost to the gaping maw of the HFAC basement and when they saw us at church on Sunday it was probably like they’d seen a ghost. None of us ever mentioned it again.
Basically what I’m saying is Campus Police had no hope of finding them in the first place and probably lost an officer or two if they actually conducted a real search, because nobody except Senior art majors or veteran custodians actually knows how to navigate that building and make it out in the same dimension they entered from. Not at 11pm anyway.
Shaun Tan (born 1974) is an Australian artist, writer, and filmmaker. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honors in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works as an artist and author in Melbourne.
For his career contribution to “children’s and young adult literature in the broadest sense” Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, the biggest prize in children’s literature. Follow Shaun on Instagram @shauncytan
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