Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (7 page)

There was another week when I read to him nothing but Louis Sachar’s
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
. They were crazy fun and Sacher wrote lots of them. Also, the books were these little paperbacks that were very easy to lift.

My mom was the communications director for the plant. (You’d think someone who was in charge of communications and her daughter, an aspiring writer, would be better at communicating. In hindsight, we both just sucked, which is too bad.)

That meant my parents were—and this was a pun that was used to describe them in an article in the
Burlington Free Press
years before the accident—“Vermont’s power couple.” The article was very nice. It didn’t say anything snarky about nuclear power. A few months later, tritium was found in a groundwater monitoring well at a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which suggested there was a leak at that plant somewhere. The newspaper interviewed my mom again, and this time the paper wasn’t so kind. My mom was annoyed that she even had to talk about it because the New Hampshire
plant was three and a half hours away from Cape Abenaki and she had nothing to do with it. But it was the same kind of boiling water reactor as Abenaki and built about the same time, and so I guess it made sense to ask her about it.

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. That’s probably more than you need to know. All you really need to know is that it’s radioactive.

Obviously I made some bad choices. I’m still here, however, so I made some okay ones, too. But leaving the dining hall at the college when I did? That was bad. I get it. Looking back, trying to get back to Reddington and find my parents and Maggie was the chain reaction that started everything. It’s that whole butterfly effect. If I had just stayed where I was and waited like everybody else, I have to believe that social services would have found someplace for me. Or one of my friends’ families who wasn’t homeless would have taken me in. People blamed my dad but no one was going to blame me, right?

Yes and no. There were a lot of people who wanted nothing to do with me. I wasn’t radioactive, but I might as well have been. Look at the way that girl at the shelter treated me when she began to figure out who I might be. Look at what I overheard at the staging area. Look at what happened at that convenience store on my way into Burlington.

But none of that matters now because I did leave the dining hall that day. Like I said, I was on the verge of hysteria all morning and early afternoon. What finally pushed me over the edge? Around one o’clock, one of the news sites said there had been an explosion at Cape Abenaki. Another said there had been two. Both reported that there were fatalities, perhaps as many as seventeen, which they said was an indication of the size of the explosion—or explosions—because no one had been killed when a reactor had blown up at Fukushima. And, of course, everyone was talking
meltdown. Everyone—in the news and in the cafeteria—was talking about plumes of radioactive fallout and the rain and the direction of the wind. And so I realized there was a chance that my mom and dad were injured or possibly dead—and a lot of folks in the cafeteria probably knew this but hadn’t figured out how to tell me. I mean, seriously? Was no teacher willing to man up and break the news? Were none of my friends—not even Ethan or Lisa—willing to drop the bomb? I get it, I really do. They were all worried that they were now homeless. Or at least a lot of them were. And they were all worried about their own loved ones. Their moms, their dads, their dogs. Who knew how bad it really was, despite what Mr. Brodard had said in chemistry? People panic.

And, just so you don’t think that I’m some kind of whack-job paranoid, I don’t believe there was a conspiracy not to tell me my parents might be dead. I think, to be honest, everyone figured someone else would tell me. I’m sure Ethan and Lisa figured that one of the teachers would tell me—one of the “people in authority.” In my mind, I can almost see Mr. Adams, who worked with Ms. Francis in the guidance department, whispering with my English teacher, Ms. Gagne, beside the water fountain against the brick wall. I can almost hear Mr. Adams saying, “You know her best. I’ll come with you. But you know her best.” Ms. Gagne was only about ten or twelve years older than me and liked me to call her Cecile. She worried about my behavioral issues and my underachieving, but I think she figured I’d pull myself together and be fine in the end. Maybe she thought I was a good writer. Maybe not. Maybe she thought I was a good writer but eventually I’d just put my head in the oven and there was nothing she could do. Anyway, I think a lot about that moment in the cafeteria. Maybe, if they did speak, it was more like Ms. Gagne saying, “Yes, I’ll tell her. Let me just take a minute to figure out how to break the news.” Then one minute became ten, and then ten became an hour, and then I knew. I knew.

Here’s how I found out. A girl named Dina Ramsey whose mom was a technician at the plant asked to borrow my phone. She
said hers was out of power and her charger was in her backpack at school. So I handed her mine, even though I only had, like, 10 percent power left. (I had, as a matter of fact, gotten a warning that I was down to 10 percent power a few minutes before Dina came over to me. Power figures a lot in my story, doesn’t it?) But then I saw her talking on her phone—not my phone. And I knew it was her phone because she had one of those cases with plastic studs that were silver and gold. My case was straight-up black. I watched her for a while, figuring at first that she must have had a little bit of juice left after all, and some call had come in and she’d taken it. Not a big deal. But it was one freaking long conversation. After she hung up, she said something to a kid named Katina and then made another call—on her phone. That’s when it clicked that something was up. She’d been talking with a bunch of kids and Mr. Adams before she had come over to me to get my phone. Why did she need to walk over to me to get mine? There were like five other phones right there with her. And hers sure seemed to have beaucoup battery left.

So, I went over to her and asked if she was done with my phone. I said I wanted to try my parents again. She said she had one more call. But she knew something; she looked seriously stricken. (Yes, I learned that word from the Dickinson poem.) I stood there and waited like a totally passive-aggressive asshole for her to dial someone—anyone—and for, like, thirty seconds she just stood there, fighting back tears. The file cards behind her eyes were flipping as she tried to think of someone to call, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She froze. And, meanwhile, I could feel everyone was watching me. Everyone.

That’s how I knew.

And then Ms. Gagne started walking over to me.

So I grabbed my phone from Dina’s hand, turned around, and ran like a madwoman out of the cafeteria, down the corridor, and then outside into the rain. I heard them yelling for me to stop, to come back, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I wanted my mom. I wanted my dad. I wanted my dog.

I divide my life after the meltdown into two parts: B.C. and A.C. B.C. is “Before Cameron.” A.C., obviously, is after.

That’s totally simplifying things, of course. I mean, I had a whole life—sixteen years—before the meltdown at Cape Abenaki. And all of that, technically, was B.C.

But you get my point.

I guess right now I’m telling you the B.C. part of my story.

One day in the fall after the meltdown, Andrea and I were chilling on a bench on Church Street in Burlington. The night before, we had taken the bus to the University Mall, because it’s right by the highway and there are all these exits with gas stations and motels. It’s where the truckers gas up. So we’d gone there and hooked up with these two really sketchy, kind of disgusting truckers from Montreal. They were in their forties, and they actually listened to that embarrassing
Playboy
porn on the Sirius in their truck. But it didn’t take very long.

(God, here’s a weird little news flash for you: I was a virgin when Reactor One exploded. True story. So, maybe we should file “Emily Shepard’s First Time and Sexual Awakening” under Yet One More Grotesque Nuclear Mutation. I mean, it’s probably true I wouldn’t be a virgin by now anyway, but with any luck the first time I had sex it would have been with some boy my age whose biggest issue would be—and here is more therapist-speak—“learned behavior.” By that I mean learned porn. If I’ve figured out anything the last few years, it’s this: everything boys and young men know about sex, they got from Internet porn, which means they have seriously unrealistic expectations. And girls my age? Sometimes they do freaky shit because they’re simply afraid to say
no. They want to be cool. They want to be liked. Yup, for a girl who they say has, like, zero self-esteem, I know my stuff.)

Church Street is made of bricks, and it’s an outdoor mall smack in the middle of the downtown. Pedestrians only—no cars. Burlington is so crunchy that the bricks have capitals and cities and countries carved into them, including places that were seriously communist when the mall was designed. It was a Wednesday, and it was an Indian summer kind of day. (I know “Indian summer” isn’t perfectly PC, but it works. It’s two words and they say exactly what I want.) We were both wearing these blue-and-yellow rugby shirts we’d lifted from PacSun. They weren’t as nice as the ones at Abercrombie, but it’s much more difficult to shoplift there. You’d think with the way Abercrombie blares their music it would be easy to steal from them, because the kids who work there must be deaf and stunned from the noise. Think lab rats, maybe. Also, it’s much darker inside an Abercrombie than inside a PacSun. But Abercrombie always has a lot more staff and the people at PacSun are way more “whatever.”

There were lots of leaf peepers strolling up and down the middle of the street, and most of them were somewhere between the age of seventy-five and embalmed. Everyone had said the tourists wouldn’t come that autumn because of Cape Abenaki, and I imagine a lot did stay away. But mostly they just stayed away from the Northeast Kingdom. Plenty still came to Lake Champlain and the western slopes of the Green Mountains. I mean, Burlington must have been sixty or sixty-five miles from the edge of the Exclusion Zone. And southern Vermont was nowhere near it. By the fall, Burlington’s biggest issue was dealing with the last of the walkers and the last of the refugee tent camps. But most were gone and most of the people in them had found homes somewhere. Most of us had settled in somewhere. So, by that Wednesday, I was just a regular old homeless kid who occasionally fucked truckers from Montreal.