A/N: This was written for a situational writing prompt of two enemies being stuck in an elevator. I thought about going with Lola and Traci (or is it Tracey) for about five seconds, but I liked this idea better. I would say it is set sometime toward the end of the first season.
Stuck
Stairs or elevator? The ever important question that greets many a mall patron. The stairs were just at the end of the walk way, but the elevator was right there, and oh, look, the doors were even open. The girl hurried for the silver rectangles as they began to slide toward one another.
"Hold the elevator!" The bags she carried at her sighed banged into her thigh as she jogged.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she made it in just before the panels shut with a hiss. Turning, she prepared to thank the person already in the elevator, but instead, she growled, "You."
"Oh, no, I don't think so," the other girl said and began pushing the "open door" button on the side panel. Nothing happened. So she pushed it again, and again, and again. Belatedly, she noticed that the little room on the pulley system was already moving, and then, it began to shudder. With a clank and a crunch, the box ground to a halt. They were no longer headed for the first floor.
"What did you do?" groaned the blond who had raced through the doors at the last minute.
"I don't know Truscott, maybe it couldn't handle your extra weight!"
"There is no way I am going to be stuck in here with you, Palumbo!" Lilly Truscott began to bang on the doors in front of her, then she remembered the walls of the elevator were glass. The two girls glared at one another, then turned for the back wall at the same time.
"Help!" Joanie Palumbo yelled as her fist pounded on what must have been shatter proof glass. "Get me out of here! I'm stuck with this loser!"
Lilly put the flat of her palm against the glass before she began to kick the bottom panel fiercely, shouting that she was trapped with a crazy person who needed to be institutionalized for her own protection.
The elevator shuddered again, just slightly, but it was enough to make both of the teenagers freeze.
"You're going to make it crash! Stop hitting everything!" Lilly snapped at her archenemy since the second grade.
"Me? You're the one who just kicked the whole thing out of alignment!" Joanie shot back, but she put her hands on her hips and quit yelling.
The glass elevator was unfortunately, stopped halfway between the first and second stories of the mall.
"Oh, no."
The first person to notice the elevator frozen on its descent was a brunette with her hair pulled over her shoulder in a braid. She broke out her cell phone, and set her bags down on the bench just below the glass wall of said elevator.
"Oliver. Why isn't Lilly with you? I thought you guys were looking at that surfing store? What do you mean you split up? Why would you do that? She's stuck in the elevator with Joanie!" Miley Stewart's accent was much more pronounced when she was frustrated, and right now, she was wondering how long it would take for Lilly to kill the other girl, so Oliver was having a little trouble understanding the rapid fire southern twang over the cell phone's line.
Oliver ran up behind her moments later and began laughing when he saw his best friend suspended above them, glaring at the girl who had cut the string on her favorite kite when she was seven years old, and then reinforced the hatred again by popping her balloon.
"How long do you think they'll be in there?" A smile crossed his face when Joanie said something to Lilly and the blond shifted as though she was going to tackle her, but she just managed to restrain herself. He sighed in mock disappointment.
"This isn't funny. She'll kill her! I don't want her to be charged with murder!"
"I think it would be justifiable homicide actually," Oliver retorted. "We are talking about Lilly, right?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure Lilly would win." Miley rolled her eyes and said, "I'm going to find help. Call Lilly. Don't let her strangle Joanie."
"Wait! Miley, look." Oliver grabbed her arm and pointed. "They're barely moving around. Do you think…" He did not finish the sentence when he saw Joanie freeze half way through her walk back to the doors.
"Like I said, getting help, now." Miley sprinted for the customer service desk at the end of the corridor. A small crowd was beginning to gather below the enclosure.
Oliver watched as Lilly slumped against one side of the elevator and Joanie the other. They both made their way into a seated position, Joanie pushing the emergency button on the panel near the doors, again, and again, and again. Lilly's face said she was going to lose it at any moment.
***
"Don't you think maybe you should stop doing that? You pushing buttons is what got us here in the first place!" Lilly sniped from her seat in one corner of the small square.
"No, what got us here was you getting in!" Joanie called back to her from the opposite corner. She pushed the button a few more times, glaring at Lilly the whole time, but she gave up when the bell refused to ring and no voice came over the emergency intercom system.
Lilly opened her mouth to form a response, but found herself having to answer her cell phone instead.
"I know I'm supposed to be meeting you guys at the smoothie place, but I'm kind of-"
"Oh, is that your loser of a boyfriend?" Joanie asked from her corner.
"Stuck in an elevator?" Oliver asked her at the same time.
"Shut up!" Lilly aimed the yell at Joanie and Oliver had to pull the phone away from his ear for a second. "How did you…"
"Lilly, it has see through walls. Look to the right. Oh, wait, my right. Your left." She did as she was told and he waved at her from the floor below.
"Oh, it is your loser boyfriend," Joanie said snidely when she looked to see just what Lilly was focusing on.
"Not my boyfriend," Lilly snapped, just as Oliver reflexively stated, "not my girlfriend" on the other end of the line. "You do know Joanie can't hear you, right?" She asked him.
"Oh, yeah. Knee jerk reaction, sorry," Oliver commented. "So," he added in an obviously fake cheerful tone, "how are things?"
"I'm trapped in a glass prison cell with evil incarnate. How do you think things are?" The glare she had been aiming at Joanie was now turned on him, and the boy found himself extremely glad he was not in the elevator with her. He had enough bruises from frequent arguments and pinching as it was.
Joanie rolled her eyes and tried pushing the button again. Still no luck.
"Umm… did you find anything interesting in that store?" He tried again.
"Yeah, I got some new eyeliner… and Miley told you to distract me, didn't she? Where is Miley?" Lilly peered over the crowd that had gathered, but she failed to find the brunette in the pink tee shirt.
"She went to go find someone to get you guys out of the elevator."
"Put him on speaker," Joanie grumbled as she pushed the button again.
"He's my friend. Call your own people to talk to. Oh, that's right, you don't have any!"
Instead of responding, Joanie hit the button on the panel with her fist instead of her finger, and the two girls heard a creaking noise come from above them.
"See what you did?" Lilly yelled before hurling the small bag at her side that contained a chunk of wax for her surfboard in the other girl's direction. Joanie ducked her head and it bounced off the glass at her back. The walls around them shuddered again.
"Are you trying to get us killed?" Joanie yelled back. "Oken, tell her to stop throwing things!"
Oliver again had to bring the phone away from his ear, and the people around him were beginning to look at him almost as much as they were the two girls in the elevator.
"Lilly!" He yelled into the phone to get her attention. She winced on the other side of the glass.
"What?" she hissed into the mouthpiece.
"Why does Joanie think you throwing something could get her killed? Not that you don't have a good arm…" Oliver trailed off, not wanting to make her more angry with him.
"The elevator is kind of…moving." Lilly told him uncertainly.
"Gee, ya' think?" Joanie remarked sarcastically. Lilly groaned and hit the speaker button on her phone, holding it out in front of her. "Every time we move, the elevator moves," Joanie called to him. Well, that kind of explained why Lilly had not taken any flying leaps at her yet.
"It doesn't look like it's moving from down here." Oliver was now at the receiving end of two glares.
"It is!" They both snapped at him.
"Oh, look," he chuckled, "You guys agreed on something." Neither of them said a word, but Oliver could tell Lilly was trying not to start laughing at the absurdity of the situation now. Mission accomplished. Joanie was safe from being strangled for at least a few more minutes. The rapid approach of footsteps from behind told him Miley was back. "You want to talk to them?" He asked Miley. She gave him a confused look, so he explained, "Lilly has me on speaker, and now I think they both want to kill me instead of each other." There was a security guard and what looked like a maintenance worker with her. She held out her hand for the phone.
"I said I didn't want her to be charged with murder, so you make her more mad?"
"At me, not at Joanie." Oliver shrugged as if it made perfect sense. "She's not actually going to kill me."
Miley rolled her eyes and put the phone to her ear. "Lilly?" she asked uncertainly.
"And Joanie," cut in the voice that did not belong to her best friend.
"The maintenance guy is taking a look at the elevator now. He said it probably just got off the track or something." Miley pointed out the guy in the coveralls that was making his way toward the elevator.
"I told you it was your weight," Joanie said offhand.
"It was all of your button pushing," Lilly responded shortly.
"Buttons don't knock an elevator off its track!"
"What are you, some kind of expert? You weigh more than I do!"
"Ugh. You don't know that!"
"Oh, please"
Miley groaned and said, "if you two don't stop that, I'm giving you back to Oliver."
"Fine!" Both girls yelled.
Miley pulled the phone away from her ear and shoved it back in Oliver's face. "You deal with her."
"Which one?"
"I don't care!" Miley snapped. She crossed her arms and waited for the whole thing to be over.
"What'd you do to Miley?" Oliver asked his phone.
"Nothing." It was just Joanie this time. Lilly was trying to see what the maintenance worker was doing, but he had made his way to the front of the elevator where the doors would have opened, and she could not see him anymore.
"How come all the buttons aren't lit up anymore?" Joanie asked Oliver suddenly.
"What?" Lilly and Oliver responded together.
Oliver saw Lilly turn to Joanie. She was pointing at the panel of buttons on the wall. Normally they would be lit up, the selected one turning a different color once you pushed it, but there were no lights. Lilly glanced up at the ceiling in the glass box and saw that the light above them was off as well.
"Maybe… he had to reset the power to it?" Lilly asked hopefully.
"Don't elevators fall when there's no power?" Joanie asked. Her eyes were wide.
Lilly cut the speaker off and brought the phone up next to her head. "If I break any bones, Oken, I am blaming you for the rest of your life," she hissed into his ear.
"How is this my fault? Everything that goes wrong is not my fault." Oliver's voice was rising and the people around him were again turning to look.
"If you hadn't wanted to go look at video games, I wouldn't be in here," she told him fiercely.
"You wanted to look at make-up," Oliver shot back. "I don't need any make-up!"
Lilly made some sort of growling noise and then disconnected. Oliver shook his head and put his phone back in his pocket.
"She hung up on me," he said to Miley.
Miley gave him a look, clearly informing him without actually having to say the words that this was all his fault.
"They started it," he told Miley before turning back to watch the show in the elevator.
More than half an hour later, after the spectators saw a few more shopping bags fly across the elevator, as well as a lot of pointed fingers and red faces, without either of the girls actually moving toward one another, the elevator was firmly on the ground.
Joanie was out of there faster than anyone could even check to make sure she was alright.
"This isn't over Palumbo," Lilly called to her rapidly disappearing form. Joanie made a rude hand gesture over her shoulder and kept going.
"Maybe I should have tried calling back," Oliver whispered to Miley.
She ignored Oliver to ask if Lilly was alright.
"Fine." Her response was short before her eyes alighted on her two friends. "I'm starving. You guys want ice cream? That was the longest forty-five minutes of my life."