I had two younger brothers who died within a few months of each other in the third dengue fever epidemic—the one that become known as the blood plague—the year before we came here. It is one of those facts, as true and cold as any other. It seems to me like a failure of language that that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into one word. “Experience.” Just a regular old crowd of letters that doesn’t care about you or your brothers. I picture using that as my next hangman word.
It is almost impossible to think of that “experience” happening in the same life, in the same world we live in now.
My father, whom we called Poppy, survived the plague. I thought he was making the trip here with us, but he disappeared on the night before we left.
“He chose not to come,” my mother said, like it was just a case of cold feet or a more pressing obligation. But I know it wasn’t that. I may never know the truth, but I know it wasn’t that. I don’t bring it up with my mother anymore. I can’t bear the look on her face. He broke her heart too.
I go through the kitchen door to the deck beyond it. I lean on the railing and watch the sun go down. I search the sky for a crust of the moon.
I love this time of day. I love this time of year and the way our backyard comes to life with the wide white flowers of the dogwood trees and the clusters of daffodils that I myself planted. I can smell the verbena wafting from the bushes along the garage.
I’ve been here for four years, and I still can’t get over how beautiful it is. At first it was all too jarring and strange for me to enjoy it—the sounds, the colors, the smells, the shocking sight of squirrels and birds and chipmunks, the fact of being allowed to be outside in the first place. But now I enjoy it every single day.
I am amazed by the lushness, the generosity of it, all the things you can eat and plant and pick, the places you can swim. People here act like the great things have already been lost, but they are wrong. They have so much still to lose.
I hear the sickening whine of a mosquito and I freeze. I listen for it with hyper-tuned ears, waiting for it to land, which it does, pure quivering evil on the wooden rail beside me. I fight back the impulse I learned as a very small kid: never let a mosquito get close enough for you to slap. Now I take a nasty pleasure in smashing them when I can.
Back where I come from, mosquitoes represented our most primitive fear, the central fear all the other fears orbited around. We zipped our nets and sprayed our toxic sprays and said our prayers and huddled in our dark, decaying houses because mosquitoes carried death. It’s hard to unlearn it, even now. They don’t bring disease to this place, but for us they still bring memories and awful dreams.
Not yet. They don’t bring death here yet. I stare at the nasty speck in wonder and revulsion. We’re not afraid of the kinds of things people here worry about, like robberies and murders. Even the hurricanes and floods here are quaint compared to what is coming. This place seems almost laughably safe to us. The mosquito is the thing to worry about when the world gets wetter and hotter. Because when that happens, the mosquito’s territory is everywhere and its season is always.
It’s a wisp of nothing, its life barely bigger than a day. It has no will, no feelings, no memories, and for sure no sense of humor. I stare at it in sick fascination, waiting for it to make its next landing on my arm or cheek or ankle.
Maybe it does have a will. How else can you explain the number of its victims? Millions of people with big lives and heads packed with memories and all the stuff they knew—the accumulation of thousands of years of human history.
It is unfair. People versus mosquito. Who should win? We built rockets and cathedrals. We wrote poems and symphonies. We found a passage through time. And yet. We also wreck the planet for our own habitation and the mosquito will win. Unless we succeed in changing course, it will win.
Maybe it does have a sick sense of humor. I smash it under my palm. It will win, but not yet.
I see my mother through the kitchen window. I go back in and wash my hands. I see she’s managed to thwart my table setting by getting a sole plate and hunching over the kitchen counter to eat.
“How was your day?” I ask.
“Good. Yours?” She’s eating quickly and she doesn’t look up.
“Okay.”
“Listen, I got another call from Mr. Robert this morning.” She’s focusing on her coleslaw. “According to him, you followed a stranger for four blocks yesterday and asked her about her rain boots.”
“Oh, right.” I should be contrite, but remembering it, I’m kind of excited. “She had my old boots! You know, the bright blue rubber ones hand-painted with ladybugs and parrots and geckos? Do you remember them? I loved those!”
She’s picking at her chicken. “Prenna, the point is, that is red-flag behavior, and you know it.”
It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. There are so many clothes now. But by the 2070s there was almost nothing new being made, and by the 2080s we were all wearing recycled stuff, a lot of it recycled from now. By the late 2090s, by the time we left to come here, most of it was in tatters. I’ve seen sweaters and scarves and jackets just like ones we wore. I once saw a man in a plaid vest across the street, and I followed him around for an hour thinking he could be my dad. That was red-flag behavior too.
“They aren’t like my boots. That’s what was so amazing. They are my boots. They are unmistakably one of a kind. I’ve always wondered who painted them. That’s why I couldn’t help asking. It was this twelve-year-old girl. She didn’t look so great—I don’t think she’d brushed her hair since Christmas. And she wasn’t very nice either, come to think of it. But she was the artist! Pretty incredible. I guess your artist is never exactly who you want her to be.”
My mother looks up at me exactly once to indicate she is not enjoying my story. Katherine liked it better when I told her.
“Mr. Robert also mentioned he’d like you to do two extra counseling sessions this week and take the Saturday shift helping out at the office.”
“Seriously?”
“Prenna.”
“It was totally harmless.” I think a change of subject is in order. “So, how’s Marcus doing?” I ask, taking my plate to the table.
“He’s, well … he’s alive.” She starts putting the food away. I know she won’t say more, and really, she can’t say more. I can only imagine how hard it must be to go to her job at the community clinic every day and watch a boy with kidney failure not receive dialysis.
My mom got her medical training at the end of a golden age of technology, so it’s got to be frustrating not to have so many basic things here. The leaders mostly won’t take on big equipment that requires special training or certification. But these are not my mother’s decisions to make, as she sometimes tells me.
She used to be a respected doctor and researcher, according to my dad, in charge of her own lab. It’s hard to picture that now. Here she mostly does paperwork and schedules appointments. She came here wanting to prevent the plagues, and I’m sure that’s what she cares about most, but I can see how the rules make it complicated. I don’t think she’s in charge of anything now.
I know this must be depressing for her, but not because she tells me so. She never argues, never complains. She rarely says much of anything at all, except to scold or caution me. She is an exemplary community member in that way. She eats and she works and she cleans up the house and she eats again and she reads, maybe, and she goes to sleep. Under her mosquito netting—that is her only quirk, her only concession to the past.
She’s been through terrible things. Sometimes I think she’s lost the idea of love. For her I think it’s another luxury. It just makes it harder when you lose people.
No, that’s not true. She loves me. I can see it in her face sometimes. It mostly takes the form of fear, when I say something or do something I shouldn’t.
I set out two bowls and two spoons and a pint of ice cream. I sit down at
the kitchen table, hoping she’ll notice. I feel like at least one of us should hold on to what little we have left of our family.
She finishes washing her one dish and fork and turns to go. “Good night, sweetheart.”
Unfortunately, I am alone in feeling that.
July 2, 2010
Dear Julius,
I’m trying to write and talk the way they talk here, but it’s not easy. Thanks for letting me practice on you. It’s just like Poppy said. All th-th-th-th-ths. People thalking through their theeth. Mom—I am supposed to call her Mom here, pronounced MAH-AHM—she gives me these worried looks when I mess up, but she can’t really say the “th” sound. She makes this wobbly rubber band shape with her lips.
She gets so uncomfortable when I talk about you or Poppy or anything from before, even by accident. I think the leaders and our counselors can hear everything we say. Not just in our house, but everywhere. I think that’s why she’s so nervous all the time. I’m not exactly sure how they do it, but I’m pretty sure they do.
I’m starting to think maybe Poppy really didn’t come here.
Love,
Prenna
FOUR
“Did you finish problem set C yet?”
Ethan rarely announces himself when he calls me. No Hey or Hi or How’s it going? It’s like in his mind we are engaged in a perpetual conversation that happens to be quiet a lot of the time.
I take a breath. I dread it’s him and I’m glad it’s him and I’m especially glad he can’t see my face. I sit at my desk in my bedroom shuffling through my physics papers. “Yeah.”
“Tricky, didn’t you think? Those last two?”
“Um …” I find the paper. They hadn’t been. Should they have been? “Sort of. Not too bad.”
“Of course not, Henny. They were only tricky for the normal people.”
I recoil a little but say nothing. I know I find school easier than most people. I am self-conscious about it. I’m not sure why I am this way—if it’s because of my father’s energetic homeschooling or if it’s just a quirk of my brain. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the reason they let me come here. To a different person I would say something like “I already got to this section in a summer school class,” but I had vowed the first week I met Ethan never to tell him any inessential lies. He pays too much attention and has a strange gift for catching me in them.
“Can you show me how you did them?”
“Seriously? Have you tried turning off the TV?”
Ethan laughs and I am inordinately pleased with myself. Nobody ever teased me before I met Ethan, and when he first did, the language was as foreign to me as Swahili and at least as beautiful.
Ethan is very good at physics. He reads about string theory and quantum gravity in his spare time. He spent the last two summers interning at some kind of lab in Teaneck, New Jersey, that does research in theoretical physics. He does his homework while watching old seasons of Breaking Bad. He doesn’t need my help, and he barely needs to do the problems at all. He’s going to Columbia Engineering in the fall.
He once told me he calls me for the homework because I am the prettiest girl in AP Physics, which got my heart racing shamefully but doesn’t mean a lot considering there are five of us in AP Physics and I am the only girl.
“Want to meet me at the library?”
I can hear in his voice he’s just checking on me, seeing if I’m okay. I was acting weird this morning. I hear other voices in the background. Probably his friend Matt and some of the other guys from the sports blog he edits.
“No,” I say. What if I were honest? I can’t meet your eye because I am ashamed of the romantic fantasy I spun out between you and me the night of the Rules Ceremony.
I pretty much never meet him anywhere outside of school or tell him anything he wants to know. I don’t even make up excuses, because of the problem of lying to him. He is undeterred by this. It doesn’t seem to discourage him that he calls me often and I hardly ever call him, or that he has about fifty dumb nicknames for me (Penny, Henny, Hennypenny, Ghouly, Doofus, James the First …) and I can barely bring myself to call him Ethan.
“I have a free period before lunch tomorrow,” I offer. I will pull myself together by then.
“I have Spanish. I’ll skip it.”
“I thought you had a test.” I hate the scold in my voice. I get scolded so often, sometimes I forget there’s another way to talk.
“So I’ll get there a little late.”
Ethan was the first person who talked to me the day I started ninth grade. It was the strangest thing. He was sitting in front of me in math class, and he turned around and looked at me like he knew me, like we were old friends with serious business between us, like he expected me to know him too. Two years later I am still trying to figure out that look.
It wasn’t the kind of look I was accustomed to getting. I was this confused, weirdly dressed fourteen-year-old spouting canned lines from nineties sitcoms, whose classmates stayed as far away as possible. Except for Ethan. It was almost like he had something important to say, like he’d been waiting for me to show up.
I remember the thought that hung in my head toward the end of that school year, when I finally got up the courage to look at Ethan and not just my shoes: Nothing bad has ever happened to you. You think the world is like this.
He is a year older and the opposite of me in every way: invited to everything, liked by almost everybody. But he isn’t your typical popular kid. His hero is Stephen Hawking. He has hair the color of Cheerios, which he cuts himself. He wears these oddball wool army pants even though they get shorter on him every month.
I’ve tried not to make too much of it. Ethan is genuinely nice to everyone, especially the underdogs. Since last summer, one of his favorite people is the homeless man who lives in the park and hangs out on a blanket in front of the A&P. Ethan calls him Ben Kenobi, and spends hours talking with him about quantum physics and whatnot.
Our last names are James and Jarves, and the school is very big on alphabetical order, so from the beginning Ethan steered me through a lot of picture days and field days and all-school assemblies.
I see myself kind of like the homeless guy in Ethan’s eyes: a bit of a sad case, but an interesting one. More of a project than a friend. He knows something’s a little off about me. Or suspects it. I can see by the way he looks at me, and I guess there is kind of a subtle alliance that goes with it.
I don’t lie to Ethan, but I don’t tell him the truth either. I can’t. To share anything with him, even if I could, would put him in an impossible place. Already he is the drip, drip of water that carves a canyon right through the middle of me.
The next Monday afternoon I sit in physics class gazing out the window at the bluest sky. I tune my ears to the traffic on Bay Street, and suddenly I’m deafened by the closer, louder clanging of the fire alarms in the hallway.
We take our time standing up and trooping to the door. Nobody looks particularly concerned. We join rivulets from other classrooms to form a stream down the hallway and then a raging river going out the side door.
“It’s not a drill, it’s a bomb threat,” I overhear someone saying upriver. The message makes its way back.
“Stupid seniors,” a girl to my left mutters.
It’s a tradition, an unimaginative prank, for a senior to call in a bomb threat twice a year: once in the fall, once in the spring, usually on a warm and sunny day. It’s as predictable as changing your clocks for daylight savings, but the administration has to take it seriously every time.
Faculty members are posted along the line, but we don’t need their instructions to know what to do. I wish we could hang around on the football field and soak in the sunshine until the threat is cleared, but it isn’t to be.
That’s what used to happen, apparently. A few hours outside and then you got to go home. But finally the administration wised up and realized that the dismal Village Community Center is only two blocks away, and since I’d gotten
to high school they’d started sending us there to make sure that the bomb threat posed as little fun as possible.
There is something humiliating about walking in a fat line down the sidewalk and across the street to the community center. It feels like nursery school.
We collect in the lobby to be shunted out to various rooms—alphabetically, of course. As through Is get the auditorium. Rs through Zs get the media center. The saggy middle of the alphabet waits for instructions. Finally Js through Qs are packed into a tiny room with four card tables usually reserved for old people who play bridge. I watch as the freshmen and sophomores call their parents and are signed out, one after another, by a young and inexperienced biology teacher. Maybe the principal reasoned that if the upperclassmen found themselves doing the lowerclassmen a favor with the bomb threats, they’d stop.
After they go, attendance is taken, and as soon as the well-meaning biology teacher is out the door, the rest of the Js through Qs up and walk out, leaving just Ethan and me. He looks at me and shrugs. He takes up a worn pack of cards from the basket in the middle of the table where we sit and starts shuffling them.
“Gin?” he asks. “Canasta? Spit?”
I shake my head. I am eager to have something other than schoolwork to do, but this is not it. There are still some holes in my knowledge normal kids don’t have. Most of them were hastily plugged in those first two years thanks to a steady diet of the Disney Channel and the Cartoon Network, but card games I somehow missed.
“No? Okay. How about Crazy Eights?”
I shake my head again. I feel my face getting warm.
“Old Maid? Go Fish?” he asks.
I am trying to think. Do I know any? I watched some kids play at a day camp once.
“Well, what games do you like?”
He is giving me a particular look. Not cruel at all. The opposite, if anything. I’ve seen it many times before. Curious, maybe a bit searching, like he knows he’s pressed against something a little bit tender, and he’s promising me he’s not going to take advantage of it.