Sweet (31 page)

“It was unbelievable,” Brayden answered.

“Totally unbelievable,” I agreed.

“I know!”

Jake asked me about a particularly foul welt on my arm from a hailstone.

“It really hurts,” I said.

“You're okay, Dean,” Jake said, and he clapped me on the shoulder. Which also hurt.

Maybe he just got swept up in the good feeling. Or maybe he was trying to take care of me and be a leader. I didn't care if it was a put-on. It was good to feel normal for a moment.

“Hey, Jake,” I said. “Sorry about the puke.”

“Man, don't think another thing about it,” he said.

I tossed him the sweatshirt Alex had gotten for me from the racks out in the Greenway.

“Here,” I said. “I picked it out just for you. It'll go nice with your eyes.”

Jake laughed with a start. I had surprised him.

Brayden laughed, too.

Then our laughter chuckled along until it got completely out of hand, until we were all gulping air, tears in eyes.

It hurt my throat, which was still raw from the smoke, but Jake and Brayden and me, we laughed for a long time.

*   *   *

After we had changed, Mrs. Wooly held a kind of a makeshift assembly.

“It's maybe eight or nine,” she told us. “The Network is still down and I'm a little worried about our friend Josie here. I think she's in shock, so she'll probably come around in a day or two. But it might be something more serious.”

We all looked at Josie, who stared back at us with a weird, detached interest, as if we were people whose faces and names she couldn't quite place.

“Here's what we're going to do,” Mrs. Wooly continued. “I'm going to walk on over to the ER and get some help.”

A chunky little girl named Chloe started to cry.

“I want to go home,” she said. “Take us home! I want my nana!”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wooly told her. “The bus has two flat tires. I can't take you anywhere. I'll be back with help lickety-split.”

Chloe didn't look at all satisfied with this answer, but Mrs. Wooly went on.

“And look here, kids, your parents are going to have to pay the store back for whatever you guys use, so go easy. This ain't Christmas.

“I've decided to put Jake Simonsen in charge. He's the boss until I get back. For now, Sahalia and Alex, I want you to go and help the little kids pick out some good games and puzzles from the Toy Department.”

The little kids cheered, especially Chloe, who made a big show of jumping up and down and clapping her chubby little hands. She seemed a little fickle, emotion-wise. And a little annoying.

Sahalia sighed with irritation and got to her feet.

“Why do I have to do everything?” she complained.

“Because these guys nearly died and you didn't,” Mrs. Wooly snapped.

The grammar school kids went off to the Toy section.

“Look,” Mrs. Wooly told us big kids after they had gone. “The ER's not too far. I can probably walk it in a half hour to an hour. I might get a ride, which would mean I'll be back much quicker. Keep Josie hydrated and every so often ask her what year it is. What's her name? What kind of, I don't know, pop does she like? Cookies. That kind of thing.”

She ran her hand through her wiry gray hair. Her gaze drifted past us, to the entrance to the store and the broken sliding-glass doors.

“And if people come, don't leave here with anyone but your parents. Promise me that. Right now, you guys are my responsibility.

“And—not that I think there is going to be—but if there's any rioting or looting or anything, you guys get all the kids together here in this pizza area, and you just stay together. Big kids on the outside and just stay together. You got me?”

Now I understood why she had sent the younger kids away. She didn't want them to hear about a riot.

“Now, Mrs. Wooly?” Jake said. “What do we do if the people from the store come?” He gestured toward the damaged bus sitting in the midst of the empty shopping carts in the entrance foyer. “They're gonna be pissed.”

“You'll tell them that it was an emergency and the school board will take care of the damages.”

“I can make us lunch if need be,” Astrid said. “I actually know how to run the ovens in the Pizza Shack because I had a job here last summer.”

I knew she'd had a job at Greenway. It had been a summer that involved a lot of superstore browsing for me.

“A hot lunch!” said Mrs. Wooly. “Now you're talking.”

The little kids came back with board games.

Mrs. Wooly got ready to go.

I went to the Office Supply section and picked out an eight-dollar pen and the nicest, most expensive, executive-brand notebook on the shelf. I sat down right there and started writing. I had to get the hailstorm down while it was fresh in my memory.

I've always been a writer. Somehow, just writing something down makes anything that happens seem okay. I sit down to write, all jammed up and stressed out, and by the time I stand up, everything is in the right place again.

I like to write actual longhand, in a spiral notebook. I can't explain it, but I can think on the page in a way I can't do on a tablet. But I know that writing by hand for anything beyond a quick note is weird, seeing as we're all taught to touch-type in kindergarten.

Brayden stopped and watched me for a moment.

“Writing by hand, Geraldine?” he said with scorn. “Real quaint.”

We all lined up to say good-bye to Mrs. Wooly at the entrance to the store. The sky had returned to its normal resting shade of crisp blue clear. Like my mom used to say, “Colorado skies just can't be beat.”

The hail was a foot deep most everywhere. At places where there was an incline, the hail had run off somewhat, depositing itself into huge drifts.

You would think it would have been fun to play in—like the outdoors was a giant ball pit. But the big chunks of hail, they had bumps and lumps and stuff stuck inside them like rocks and twigs. They were sharp and dirty, and no one wanted to go out and play. We stayed in the store.

There were a couple of cars in the parking lot. They looked absurd, all crunched in, like a giant had taken a hammer to them. Mrs. Wooly's bus had sustained a lot less damage.

“If all the cars in town look like that,” Alex said to me, “we're going to be walking home.”

I thought about walking home right then. I could have just waited until Mrs. Wooly left and then went home. But she'd told us to stay and I followed directions, and also, Astrid Heyman was at the Greenway, not at our dull, cookie-cutter house on Wagon Trail Lane.

The names of the streets in our development were all like that. Wagon Gap Trail, Coyote Valley Court, Blizzard Valley Lane …

I have to say that never once did I walk down our street and mistake it for a country lane cutting through some frontier prairie. Who, exactly, did the developers think they were fooling?

I could hear distant sirens. There were some pillars of smoke rising up in other places. A column of smoke was still rising from our burnt-out bus so I had a pretty good idea what the others were from.

I remember thinking that our town had really taken a beating. I wondered if we'd get some National Crisis assistance. We'd seen images of the San Diegans receiving boxes of clothes and toys and food after the earthquake in '21. Maybe now that would be us and our town would be besieged by the media.

Mrs. Wooly was taking nothing more than a pack of cheap cigarettes and a pair of knee-high rain boots.

Brayden stepped forward.

“Mrs. Wooly, my dad works at NORAD. If you can get a message to him, I'm sure he can send a van or something to get us.”

I was probably the only one who rolled my eyes. Probably.

“That's good thinking, Brayden,” Mrs. Wooly said in her gravelly voice. “I'll take it under advisement.”

She looked us over.

“Now, you kids listen to Jake. He's in charge. Astrid's gonna make you all a nice pizza lunch.”

She stepped through the door frame and out into the parking lot. She took a few steps forward, then turned to her right, looking at something on the ground we could not see. She seemed to recoil, gagging a bit.

Then she turned and said, with force, “Now go on inside. Go on! Don't come out here. It's not safe. Get inside.
Go.
Go have lunch.”

She shooed us back in with her hands.

Mrs. Wooly had such authority, we all did what she said.

But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jake step out to see what it was that she'd seen.

“You too, Simonsen,” Mrs. Wooly said. “This ain't a peep show. Get back in there.”

Jake walked toward us, scratching his head. He looked sort of pale.

“What?” Brayden asked. “What's out there?”

“There's some bodies out there. Looks like a couple of Greenway employees,” Jake told us quietly. “I don't know why they went out there in the hailstorm, but they sure are dead now. They're all mashed up. Bones sticking out all over the place. I've never seen anything like it. Except maybe for that mess back on the bus.”

He took a deep breath and shivered.

“Tell you one thing,” Jake said, looking at me and Brayden. “We're staying inside till she comes back.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

METAL GATE

DAY 1

“Who likes pizza?” Astrid yelled.

The little kids answered with a chorus of emphatic me's, their arms shooting up like it was a hand-raising competition.

“Pizza party! Pizza party!” they chanted.

Their excitement was catchy and Astrid looked beautiful talking to them, hearing about their favorite kinds of pizza, with the wind picking up the tendrils of her hair and bringing a flush to her cheeks.

Listen, the tragedy of the day and the destruction of our town wasn't lost on me—and I was worried about my parents and my friends and how the hail might have affected them—but I will admit that I savored being near Astrid.

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon-painted letters that spell out MANIFEST. The idea was if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be—if you just envisioned it long enough—it would come into being.

But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Lewis Palmer High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it.

Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blond ringlets, June sky–blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.

Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

And I wasn't. I was one of those guys who had stayed short too long. Everyone else sprang up in seventh and eighth grade but I just stayed kid-size through those years—the Brayden-hair-gel years. Then, last summer, I'd grown, like, six inches or something. My mom delighted in my absurd growth spell, buying me new clothes basically every other week. My bones ached at night and my joints creaked sometimes, like a senior citizen's.

I'd entered the school year with some hope, actually, that now I was of average—even above-average—height, I might rejoin society at an, um, higher level. I know it's crass to talk about popularity outright, but remember, I'd had a thing for Astrid for a long, long time. I wanted to be near her and working my way into her circle of friends seemed the only way.

I thought my height might do the trick. Sure I was skinny as a rail, but still, my inventory of looks had improved: green eyes—good asset. Ash-colored hair—okay. Height—no longer a problem. Build—needed major improvement. Glasses—a drag, but contacts gave me chronic conjunctivitis, which looked a lot worse than glasses, and I couldn't get Lasik until I stopped growing, so that was out for a while. Teeth and skin—fair. Clothes—sort of a wreck but getting better.

I thought I had a chance but the sum total of our communication to date were the two words she'd said to me on the bus:
Help me.

And I hadn't.

*   *   *

We all went back inside and Astrid got the Pizza Shack oven going and turned on the slushie maker.

Josie was still sitting in a booth, wrapped in her space blanket. I headed toward the soda dispensers to get her a drink, but I saw that she already had two Gatorades and a water on the tabletop in front of her.

The slushie maker was too high up for the little kids to reach, so after watching them jumping up to try to reach the handles in a cute but utterly futile way, I went over and offered to make each kid whatever kind of slushie they wanted.

They cheered.

They had never known you could combine the flavors, so they were impressed with the layered slushies I made for them.

“This is the best slushie I ever had!” gushed a towheaded first grader named Max. He had a preposterous cowlick in the back of his head that made his hair stand up like a little blond fan.

“I had a lot of slushies in my life 'cause my dad's a long-distance trucker and he's always takin' me on the road,” Max continued. “I probly had slushies in every state of America. One time my dad took me out of school for a week and he almost took me into Mexico but then my mom called him and said he'd better haul me back on up to Monument before she called the cops on him!”

I liked Max. I like a kid who holds nothing back.

One kid was Latino. I put him at about first grade, maybe kindergarten. He was chubby and jolly looking.

“What's your name?” I asked him.

He just smiled at me. He had two big holes where his top front teeth should have been.