Sweet (32 page)

“
Cómo se llama?
Your name?”

He said something that sounded all the world to me like, “You listen.”

“I'm listening,” I said.

“You listen,” he said, nodding.

“Okay, I listen.”

“No, no,” he said.

“His name is You-list-ease,” said Max, trying to help. “He's in first grade with me.”

“You-list-ease?” I repeated.

The Mexican kid said his name again.

And suddenly I got it. “Ulysses! His name is Ulysses!”

The Spanish pronunciation, let me tell you, sounds a lot different than the English.

Ulysses was now grinning like he'd won the lottery.

“Ulysses! Ulysses!”

A tiny, hardscrabble victory for him and me: Now I knew his name.

Chloe was the third grader who had been whining when Mrs. Wooly said she was going for help. Chloe was chubby and tan and very energetic. I made her a blue-and-red-striped slushie, like she wanted. However, it was not good enough for her.

“The stripes are too thick!” she complained. “I want it like a raccoon tail.”

But it turns out it's really hard to make a slushie with thin stripes, as I discovered after five or six tries.

I handed Chloe my very best effort.

“Not like a raccoon's tail,” she remarked. She shook her head sadly, as if she were a teacher and I hopeless student.

“This is as ‘raccoon tail' as I can do,” I said.

“All right.” She sighed. “If it's your best work.”

Chloe, I had already decided, was a piece of work.

The McKinley twins were our neighbors, actually. Alex and I sometimes shoveled their driveway for their mom, who I guess was a single mother.

She paid twenty dollars, which was okay money.

The twins were a boy and a girl both with red hair and freckles. They had the kind of back-to-back freckles that overlap so they hardly had any other kind of skin, just a bit of white peeping through the thick be-freckling.

At five years old, they were the youngest kids, and they were the smallest by far. Their mom was small herself, and the kids were just tiny. Perfectly formed but, like, knee high. Neither of them spoke much, but I guess Caroline talked a little more than Henry. They were just completely adorable, to use a word that is most often used by girls and maiden aunts.

I did not really save the best for last because Batiste, the lone second grader, was a real handful. He looked vaguely Asian and had glossy black hair that was cut very close to his head, like a brush.

For one thing, Batiste was from a very religious family, so he considered himself the authority on sinning. I had already overheard him reprimand Brayden for cursing (“Taking the Lord's name in vain is a sin!”), tattle on Chloe for pushing Ulysses (“Shoving is a sin!”), and inform the other little kids that not saying grace before eating was a sin (“Before we eat, God wants us sinners to give thanks!”).

He was always watching everyone, waiting for them to screw up, so he could point it out. A real charming quality, I tell you. I guess being a little self-important know-it-all was not considered a sin by his people.

The other two kids from the grammar school bus were my brother, Alex, and Sahalia.

Sahalia was advanced, for an eighth grader. She had a very cutting-edge idea of fashion. Even I, someone who had worn sweatsuits and only sweatsuits to school until seventh grade, can identify someone with style when I see one. On the day this all went down, she was wearing tight jeans held together up one side with safety pins and a leather vest of some kind over a tank top. She also had a leather jacket—a big one, much too big for her, lined with red-checkered material. She was three years younger but far, far cooler than me.

Many people were cooler than me. I didn't hold it against her.

It looked like she'd gotten into the makeup section. I swear when we first arrived at the store, she didn't have any on. But now her eyes were lined with black and she had on very red lip gloss.

She was kneeling up on the booth seat next to where Brayden and Jake were eating. She was sort of watching them eat and trying to be a part of their group at the same time. It was a sort of a sideways approach to being included in a clique. You get near them, and hope they'll invite you in.

No such doing for Sahalia.

Brayden looked up at her and said, “We're trying to talk. Do you mind?”

Sahalia slipped away and went to hang out near Astrid. She walked like she didn't care. Like it was her plan to go to the counter all along. I had to admire her slouch.

Niko was eating alone.

I should have invited him to sit with Alex and me, but by the time I'd gotten the slushies made, and remade in Chloe's case, the pizza was done. I was hungry enough to forget my manners.

Alex and I wolfed down our first pieces of pizza. The square, heavy Pizza Shack pizza had never tasted so good. I licked the red sauce from my fingers and Alex got up to get us seconds.

By the time he came back, though, I was watching Josie.

She was sitting sideways in her booth, with her back to the wall. Mrs. Wooly had wiped her face and hands clean, but Josie still had dried blood on her arms and her body and the space blanket was sticking to it in places. She was still wearing her old clothes. I felt bad for her; here we were all having a nice pizza lunch, and she was clearly still back on the bus.

I took my pizza over to her and sat opposite her in her booth.

“Josie,” I said quietly. “I got some pizza for you. Come on, Josie. Food will make you feel better.”

She just looked at me and shook her head. One of her giraffe hair bumps had come unrolled and the hair was sort of listing and drooping over, like a broken branch.

“Have one bite,” I bargained. “One bite and I'll leave you alone.”

She turned her face toward the wall.

“Well, it's here if you want it,” I said.

Astrid slid a large tray with some Sicilian pepperoni out of the oven. I was still somewhat hungry, so I went to the counter.

“Like pepperoni?” she asked me.

My heart was pounding.

“Yeah,” I said. Suave.

“Here you go,” she said, putting one on a paper plate.

“Thanks,” I said. Real suave.

Then I turned and walked away.

And that was my second conversation with Astrid. At least this time I responded.

I was walking back to my booth when we all heard the rumble of a machine. A heavy, rolling, clanking sound.

“What's that?” Max stammered.

*   *   *

Three heavy metal gates were rolling down over the gaping hole at the front of the store. One, two, three, side by side they descended. The two on the sides covered the windows. The center one was a bit bigger and covered the entire space of what had been the sliding doors.

The gate was perforated so we could still get air and see out, but it was kind of scary.

We were being locked in.

The little kids lost it. “What's happening?” “We're trapped!” “I want to go home!” That kind of thing.

Niko just stood, watching the gate come down.

“We should like get something under it. To like wedge it open,” Jake shouted.

He grabbed a shopping cart and rolled it forward, under the central gate.

But the gate dropping just pushed the cart out of the way.

The three gates settled with a heavy
CLANK
that rang with finality.

“We're locked in,” I said.

“And everyone else is locked out,” Niko said quietly.

“All right,” Jake said, clapping his hands. “Which one of you little punks is gonna teach me how to play Chutes and Ladders?”

Alex came up beside me and tugged at my shirt.

“Dean,” he said, “wanna go to the Media Department with me?”

*   *   *

All the bigtabs in the Media Department were dead, of course. They ran off the Network, just like our minitabs. But Alex found the one old-fashioned flat-screen TV. It was hung down low, near to the floor, off to the side.

I'd never really understood why anyone would want to buy a plain television, when bigtabs were only just a little more expensive and you could watch TV on a bigtab and use it to browse and text and Skype and ‘book and game and a million other useful things. But every big store kept a couple televisions on display and now I knew why. They worked without National Connectivity. They were picking up some kind of television-only signals. And though the screen was kind of grainy and stripy at times, we watched eagerly.

Alex turned it to CNN.

The rest of our group filed over, drawn, I guess, by the sound of live media.

*   *   *

I expected the story of our hailstorm to be all over the news. It wasn't.

Our little hailstorm was nothing.

There were two anchors working together and they explained it very calmly, but the woman was shaken. You could see she had been crying. Her eye makeup was all smeared around her eyes and I wondered why nobody fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God's sake.

The man in the blue suit said he would repeat the chain of events for anyone just joining the broadcast. That was us. He said a volcano had erupted on an island called La Palma, in the Canary Islands.

Shaky, handheld images of ash and a fiery mountain appeared on the screen behind the anchors.

The woman with the bad makeup said that the western face of the entire island had exploded with the eruption of the volcano. Five hundred billion tons of rock and lava had avalanched into the ocean.

They didn't have footage of that.

Blue Suit said the explosion had created a “megatsunami.”

A wave a half a mile tall.

Moving at six hundred miles per hour.

Bad Makeup said that the megatsunami had grown wider as it approached the coast of the U.S. Then she stopped talking. Her voice caught in her throat, and Blue Suit took over.

The megatsunami had hit the Eastern Coast of the United States at 4:43 a.m. (mountain time).

Boston, New York, Charleston, Miami.

All had been hit.

They couldn't estimate the number of fatalities.

I just sat there. I felt completely numb.

It was the worst natural disaster in recorded history.

The most violent volcano eruption in recorded history.

The biggest tsunami in recorded history.

They played some footage.

It played so fast they had to slow it down so you could see what was going on.

From the street, a shot of the Empire State Building and a tall cloud drawing closer and closer, frame by frame, but it wasn't a cloud—it was a wall of water—and then the image went blank.

A beach and you're looking out at the water, only there is no water, just a boat stranded about a mile out into the ocean bed and you hear a voice praying to Jesus and then the image is shaking, shaking, and a wave so high the minitab can't see the top thunders up. Then darkness.

Chloe said she wanted to watch kid TV. We ignored her.

Bad Makeup said the National Connectivity was down because three of the five satellite centers had been located on the East Coast.

Blue Suit said the president had declared a state of emergency and was safe at an undisclosed location.

We watched, mostly in silence.

“Turn it to
Tabi-Teens,
” Chloe whined. “This is bo-ring!”

I looked at her. She was totally clueless. She was listlessly picking at a label stuck on the minitab counter.

None of the little kids seemed to understand what we were learning. They were just kind of slowpoking around, hanging out.

I had to keep watching the TV. Couldn't think about the kids.

I felt gray. Washed out. Like a stone.

Bad Makeup said the megatsunami had triggered severe weather conditions across the rest of the country. Her voice caught on “rest of the country.” She mentioned storms called supercells, sweeping across the Rockies (that was us).

I looked over at Josie. She was watching the screen. Caroline had crawled onto Josie's lap, and Josie was stroking Caroline's hair absentmindedly.

CNN showed more footage from the East Coast.

They showed a house carried up the side of a mountain. They showed a lake full of cars. They showed people wandering around half naked on streets in places that should have looked familiar, but now looked like locations from war movies.

People in boats, people crying, people washed down rivers like logs on a log float, people washed up along with their cars and garages and trees and trash cans and bicycles and god-knows-what else. People as debris.

I closed my eyes.

Near me, someone started to cry.

“Put it to
Tabi-Teens!
” Chloe demanded. “Or
Traindawgs
or something!”

I took my brother's hand. It was ice cold.

*   *   *

We watched for hours.

At some point, somebody turned off the television.

At some point, somebody got out sleeping bags for everyone.

There was a lot of whining from the little kids and not a lot of comforting coming from us.

They were really bothering us. Especially Chloe and Batiste.

Batiste kept talking about the “end of days.”

He said it was just like Reverend Grand said would happen. The judgment day was upon us. I wanted to punch him in his little greasy face.

I just wanted to think. I couldn't think and they all kept crying and asking for stupid things and clinging to us and I just wanted them to shut up.

Finally Astrid bent over and grabbed Batiste by the shoulders.

She said, real clear and kind of mean, “You kids go and get candy. As much as you want. Go do that.”

And they did.

They came back with bags from the candy aisle.

That was the best we could do for them that night: candy. We took the bags and ripped them open and made a big pile in the middle of the floor, and everyone gorged on fun sizes of all brands and types.