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“I can’t get through,” he says flatly.
Cary picks up the pieces and fits them back in place.
“Give it more time. You will. ”
“Think they’d pick up if I did?”
I watch Cary, waiting to see if he’ll defend himself. He doesn’t. He turns the cell phone over and over in his hands and says, “Trace, the message is a good thing. I think it means they’re leaving priority signal for emergency workers. ”
Harrison sniffs. “So they can save us?”
“Yeah. ” Cary nods. “We’ll be saved. ”
“And that’s your expert opinion?” Trace asks.
Cary shrugs but he doesn’t look Trace in the eyes, focusing instead on the doors. His expression reveals nothing, but he’s turning the phone in his hands faster now, clumsily.
“It just makes sense,” he says.
“That’s what you said about coming here. That really paid off for me and Grace. ”
Cary winces.
“He got the rest of us here,” Rhys says.
There were eight of us, before.
“Oh, so I’m here. Hey, Grace!” Trace turns to her. “You’re here. We’re here with Cary Chen. ” He laughs bitterly. “You think that means anything to us when—”
“Trace, stop. ” Grace sounds just broken enough that Trace doesn’t take it any further. He frowns, holds out his hand to Cary and says, “Give me back my fucking phone. ”
Cary stares at it like he doesn’t want to give it up, like Trace’s cell phone is an anchor keeping him here but I don’t know why anyone would want to be anchored here.
“Now,” Trace says.
Cary holds it out and finally looks Trace in the eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “about your parents. ”
Trace rips the phone from Cary’s grasp.
I close my eyes and imagine this place under totally normal circumstances. We have assemblies here. The principal gives speeches here. We eat in this room at lunch. I imagine a day, any school day, setting up the lunch tables and getting in line, picking from the menu. I can almost smell the food …
But then the noises outside get louder than anything I can imagine. They pump through my veins, speed up my heart, and remind me to be afraid even though I have never stopped being afraid, not since Lily left. I open my eyes at the same time the whole barricade seems to shift. Rhys rushes to it, pushing against the desks and tables until they’re settled again.
“What was that?” Harrison asks. “Why did it—”
“It’s just the way this desk was—it wasn’t the door—”
“It’s the door?”
“It wasn’t the door. Just calm down, Harrison. Jesus. ”
Harrison starts to cry. He stands in the middle of the room and holds himself because no one else will and it’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen. I’d go to him, maybe, but I don’t even know Harrison. None of us do. He’s one of those invisible freshmen made even more invisible by the fact he just moved here four weeks ago. Cary had to ask him his name after we found him trapped under a bike with his jeans caught in the spokes.
Things I know about Harrison now: not only is he short and stocky, he also cries. A lot. Grace takes pity on him because she’s better than I’ll ever be. She wraps her arm around him and murmurs gentle-sounding words at him and I watch his sobs slowly turn to gasps that turn into pathetic little hiccups. Everyone else averts their eyes. They find things to do so they don’t have to watch. I watch because I don’t know what else to do. I watch until I can’t anymore. I dig my hand into my pockets. My fingers curl around a crumpled piece of paper.
I take it out and unfold it.
Lily,
“Hey. ”
The voice is quiet, close. I shove the note back in my pocket. Rhys hovers at the edge of the stage. His brown hair sticks up everywhere and his brown eyes are bloodshot. Things I know about Rhys: he’s a senior. Our lockers are across from each other.
He put his hands on me and told me I was okay.
He has a case of water in his arms. He sets it on the stage and holds a bottle out to me. I don’t even ask him where he got it, just rip it from his hands. I remember us huddled around this old birdbath yesterday, yesterday morning. We cupped our palms together and lapped up all the dirty, stagnant water and it tasted so awful but so, so wonderful because we were so desperate and isn’t everything better when you’re desperate? We managed to forget our parched mouths and cracked lips while we secured the school and settled into the last two hours, but now I don’t even know how that’s possible because I am so fucking thirsty. I down the water quickly and then I want more. Rhys hands me another and watches me drink it too. I drink until I feel like the ocean is in my stomach and when I’m done, I’m spent. I curl my knees up to my chin and wrap my arms around them. Rhys gives me a crooked smile.
“Still here,” he says. “We made it. ”
“Is that water?” Trace calls from his side of the room. “Is that really water?”
I turn my face to the doors.
Sloane.
I jolt awake, forget where I am for a second. Everyone is laid out around me, asleep on the dusty blue gym mats we dragged in from the storage room. The last thing we had energy for, the last thing we could do for ourselves before we totally crashed.
I raise my head and listen.
It’s just deep breathing, the noises outside, and nothing else.
I listen hard, but there’s nothing else.
I pull at the collar of my shirt and rest my head against the mat. My clothes feel scratchy and awful against my skin, which is covered in a layer of sweat. I force my eyes shut and drift or maybe it’s sleep and then I think I hear him again—Sloane—and I jerk awake again and this time, when I close my eyes I see the living room floor covered in little pieces of red glass.
After a while, I give up on sleep. I check my watch. It’s almost six a. m. I have to pee. My muscles protest as I edge off the mat. The floor is cold and my toes curl in on themselves. I cross the room and step into the hall. It’s an open mouth that forks off in different directions. The tiled floors shine weirdly under the emergency lights lining the ceiling. They wash out the uninterrupted stretch of beige and purple walls and make them almost seem to glow. I feel like a ghost underneath them. The robot beep that happens just before an announcement comes over the loudspeakers drifts through my head. It’s that woman on the phone and on the radio and she wants us all to listen closely. I imagine this place crowded with students, all our faces tilted up. Everything about this is wrong. This school was never built to be empty.
Maybe it’s not safe to be out here alone.
Maybe I should go back and wake someone up.
I don’t.
If anything happens, it will just happen to me.
I push through the doors to the girls’ room and head straight for the sinks where I’m sick. The sound of myself retching makes me retch more. The only way I get myself to stop is by forcing myself to straighten before I’m finished. Bile dribbles down my chin. I twist the faucets without thinking.
Water.
Water. Comes. Out.
Does everyone know this? Did they find out before me? I avoided the taps when I was in here before because I didn’t want to end up disappointed if they didn’t work but they work and no one said a word to me about it. Running water. I stare at the gushing faucet for too long and then I hold my hands under the stream and splash my face, my neck. Dip my wet hands below my shirt. My body trembles in gratitude but I have no idea who to thank. I turn the faucet off and then I turn it on again just to be sure of what I saw, that I didn’t imagine it.
I didn’t imagine it.
The water is real. It moves effortlessly from spout to drain.
I turn it off. I use the toilet. When I come out of the stall, I’m confronted by something else I’ve managed to avoid. My ref
lection. My skin is tinged green and my brown hair is greasy, strands all clumped together, hanging around my face. There’s a bruise directly below my right eye and I’m not sure how it got there. I trace it with my fingertips. I look better than I did three weeks ago. Funny. The end of the world has done less damage to my face.
I laugh. I lean against the sink and laugh so hard my sides split and I die and it’s good. I press my hands against the mirror. Over my face. The glass feels weird and unreal against my palms. If you break glass into pieces, you can use one of those pieces as a highly effective weapon against another human being. Right through the eye. I saw it. I saw it, I did, I saw it. I stare at my fingernails. They’re ruined, cracked. Rhys and Cary found me sitting in the middle of the road, six streets away from my home, digging my fingernails into the pavement. They thought I was trying to get to my feet, that I wanted to keep going when really I was just waiting to die because I thought I had actually found Lily’s pills and taken them and my brain was inventing this weird dreamscape before it finally shut down for good because how could this be real? How could it be true? The dead don’t just come back to life.
By the time I realized it was real, it was true, it was too late to tell Cary and Rhys I wasn’t like them. That I didn’t want to keep going. They were working so hard to hold on, I knew they wouldn’t understand. So I stayed with them.
Mostly because I didn’t think we’d make it this far.
I reenter the auditorium as quietly as I exited it and lay on my mat. Rhys is on my left, facing away from me. His gray shirt is splattered with dirt and blood. Trace is on my right, on his back, his mouth hanging open. I stare at the skylights overhead until weak rays of sun filter in. A new day. If what I hear beyond them is any indication, it’s the same as the last.
Someone stirs. Cary. First awake, not counting myself. So strange. I think of him in English class at the back of the room; how he listened with his head in his arms and answered all of Mr. Baxter’s questions in the same unhurried way: I don’t know, and how he couldn’t afford to because he was repeating eleventh grade and didn’t he just want out of here like the rest of us? I close my eyes but he tiptoes his way over to me—no, Rhys. He wakes Rhys and they soft-shoe across the room. I hear the slight jangle of the keys he stole from Principal LaVallee’s office and then the sound of the kitchen door gliding open and closed.