H2O

Copyright © 2014 by Virginia Bergin

Cover and internal design © 2014 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover designed by Torborg Davern

Cover image © alexsalcedo/Thinkstock, 2xWilfinger/Thinkstock, Anastasios Kandris/Thinkstock, studio online/Shutterstock, Noraluca013/Istock

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

Originally published as
The
Rain
, © Virginia Bergin, 2014

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

Fax: (630) 961-2168

www.sourcebooks.com

Originally published in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Children's Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

The Ruby Morris Killer Rain Summary

Chapter Seven: Part Two

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Chapter of Shame—To Be Deleted

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For Karen, Sue, and John

As soon as I'd gotten the first warbling word out, I knew I'd made yet another horrible mistake. Not because of the not-being-able-to-sing thing, but because the song was the song my mom sang to me when I was little, the one she wouldn't sing that night when she sat outside the door—“Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

Every lovely, pretty thing in it felt wrong.

There were no stars. (YOU COULDN'T EVEN SEE THE STARS BECAUSE IT WAS CLOUDY AND IT WAS RAINING KILLER RAIN.)

There was no breeze. (THERE WAS JUST KILLER RAIN WHISPERING, “I WANT TO KILL YOU.”)

There was no birdsong. (BECAUSE THE BIRDS WERE TOO BUSY PECKING OUT HUMAN EYEBALLS.)

The next part is supposed to be really sweet, about how you'll dream of the people you love. It doesn't say anything about “EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE PROBABLY DEAD.” I couldn't go on. I got all choked up. I wanted my mom.

Genius, Ruby. You really are a genius.

The killer rain applauded me, drumming down harder on that thin plastic roof.

If this was a regular story, like the kind you'd read for fun, it would have such a great beginning. Probably they'd want to make it into a movie—it'd be that good. It would start in Mission Control—or maybe deep in space, where a massive hunk of rock—an asteroid—is whizzing through the stars on a collision course with planet Earth.

We cut to Earth: all over the world, everyone is terrified. They crowd around their TVs, weeping and praying. Probably there's also a lot of hugging and kissing and hand-holding, that kind of thing. Lots of deep and meaningful conversations—but not too many; we don't want to spoil the action.

The final countdown starts, and back in Mission Control some old guy in a uniform stands aside to let some hot young dude—a misunderstood rebel genius who's masterminded the operation—press the button. His girlfriend is there—or maybe she's at home, watching on TV, whispering, “I love you, Brad,” as he launches the super rocket that's Earth's only hope.

Now all everyone can do is wait and hope and pray.

You'd have to speed up the next part. Apparently in real life it took hours and hours, days, for the missile to reach the asteroid. In the movie of the book, it'd take just enough time to let the buff dude and his girl find each other, so they can be kissing when:

KA-BOOM!!!!

The asteroid is blown to smithereens. (It looks really pretty too: a shimmering starburst in the sky. Everyone on Earth goes
ooh
and
ahh
and does some more hugging and kissing.)

The buff dude has saved the planet! The hot guy triumphed! Hurrah!

See?!
What a great story!

Except, as I said, this is just the beginning…and in any case, I was too young to remember the asteroid and all that. Me and my friends, we'd seen the stuff about it on the Internet, and honestly, it was boring.

Simon, my stepdad, heard me say that once, and he went crazy.

“Are you telling me,” he said, “are you telling me”—

Here we go. You knew, you just knew, when he repeated stuff like that he was going to repeat a whole load of other stuff. On and on and on and…

—“that you find the near destruction of the planet Earth, on which you live, boring?”

I have to say that when he got on his high horse like that, I couldn't help it: I saddled up my own. Yee-haa!

“Well, yeah,” I said.

I was telling the truth. I hate it when you get into trouble for stuff like that, for just saying what's true. It's like THEY—the parental types and about 99.911 percent of all known teachers—want you to lie about what you think. You get into trouble for lying about everything else—who you were with, what you were doing, whether you've done your homework or not—but they don't care when you lie about what you think. They actually
want
you to do it. It's called agreeing with them, and that's what they want, all the time, even if they're totally wrong.

“Unbelievable. Did you hear that, Becky? Are you listening to this?”

That was another thing he did; he tried to drag my mom into everything.

“Simon,” she said. “Let it go. She's just trying to irritate you.”

The truth about
that
was half the time I didn't know myself whether I
was
trying to irritate him. I couldn't help myself. He annoyed me. My mom said we were two peas in a pod, which made me really angry because he wasn't even my dad. Like I would ever share a pod with Simon—being forced to share a house was bad enough.

“I'm not,” I said. “It
is
boring. Something really bad
nearly
happened. It's, like, so what? There are a lot of really bad things that are actually really happening.”

“Ruby,” said Simon, borderline total rage-out, “what you are failing to understand is that”—

I forget what else he said, what it was I was failing to understand. Same old, I expect—with same old results. He'd get madder and madder, I'd get madder and madder, and my mom would get drowned out. Or else we'd both end up going after her. It probably ended up with me getting grounded—that happened a lot—or being told to go and clean my room, or do the dishes even though we had a dishwasher, or clean out the stupid guinea pigs' cage.

The thing is, I would give anything to be back there in the kitchen having that fight. I would just agree with him or say sorry or something…but there will never be another argument in the kitchen. There will never be another argument anywhere in this house.

My name is Ruby Morris, and this is my story. If you are reading it, you are very, very lucky to be alive…but you already know that, right?

There's really no point going on about how things used to be. For one, I can't stand to think about it—even though I do, a lot, and it makes me want to throw up with sadness. For two, it kind of doesn't matter, does it? It's over. And for three, I'm not writing this because of how things used to be—I'm writing this because of what happened. So I'll start right there. This is what happened:

I was sitting in a hot tub in my underwear kissing Caspar McCloud.

Ha! That also sounds like a great beginning, maybe from some kind of kiss-fest romance, or maybe Caspar would turn out to be a sexy vampire. But the truth is—and this is the one thing I will do, for sure. I will try to tell the truth, even if it hurts me to say it, even if it shocks you to hear it (and I doubt it will, because if you're reading this you've probably had about a gazillion shocks already)—the truth is, it wouldn't be right to pretend that kissing in a hot tub was the kind of thing I usually did on a Saturday night, because it wasn't.

It soooooooooooooooooooooo wasn't. Don't get me wrong: I'd kissed boys before (two); I'd been to parties before (like, since I was five years old or something). I'd even sat in that hot tub in my underwear before (with Lee—that's Lee as in Leonie, my best friend). But that night, that party…it was the best, the most amazing—scarily amazing—time I had ever had in my life up until that point. (Not difficult.)

That night—that one, glorious, hot Saturday night—I was becoming a new me, one who was going to have a boyfriend named Caspar and do stuff like kiss in hot tubs at wild parties all the time. Yes, from the nagging jaws of the THEY, I was about to snatch complete, amazing greatness and total brilliance. And a boyfriend.

What can I say? It happened. It really happened! Zak, who lived in this massively cool, rambling old farmhouse, and whose parents were so laid-back you could basically do whatever you liked, pulled the speakers outside the barn where we—that's me and all my lovely friends (exception to be named shortly)—had been hanging out drinking LETHAL cider punch, and a bunch of us stripped down—to our underwear—and climbed into their hot tub.

We sort of danced where we sat, doing so-slick-yeah-check-it mini arm moves. It was totally hilarious, but it was also totally cramped…until people started getting out again, moaning that the hot tub was too hot.

It was like some dreadful slow-motion countdown. With every person that got out, the water in that tub got stiller and stiller. I kept wishing it was one of those Jacuzzi tubs with bubbles, but it wasn't; unless you kept trailing your hands around on the surface, you could see everything. So I sat there, casually fanning my hands around…because across that pool of steaming water sat Caspar
Swoon
McCloud.

And in between us sat Saskia, who wasn't fanning her hands about at all.

I do want to say that, even before that night, I wasn't really sure how much I actually liked Saskia. Not that I really knew her; she'd just started hanging out with us lately—even more lately than Caspar, who'd transferred to our school from the artsy hippie school, and was cool and wild and was in a band, and I'd once told Simon and my mom I was babysitting with Lee so I could go see Caspar's band play at a bar. And it was there, while Caspar was onstage at The George, doing his guitar thing, that he'd looked up and looked at me, and I'd looked at him and—

KA-CASPAR-BOOM!

(PART ONE)

I realized I was in love with Caspar McCloud.

And this is too much information, isn't it? This is exactly what I said I wouldn't do, which is go on about how things were. I can't stand it. I'll shut up.

Back in the hot tub, Lee came to my rescue—or tried to. She came up and asked Saskia where the gin had gone (I told you that punch was lethal), and Saskia said she didn't know, and Lee said she thought she'd seen her with it, and Saskia said she hadn't had it, and Lee said maybe she could just come and help her look for it, and Saskia, who SO knew all along what Lee was trying to do, sighed this enormous bored sigh and stood up and climbed out of the tub with her
chest
practically in Caspar's face and then turned to me and said:

“Don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

Then there really was nothing but a steaming hot tub of water between me and Caspar McCloud.

I was so shy. I nearly died of shyness. Also, I was slightly worried that I was going to cook to death or perish from an exploding bladder because I really, really needed to pee. I tried not to think about that, and it wasn't difficult because I was in a state of pre-kiss terror. For sure, any second now, there was going to be a kiss. There HAD to be a kiss.

“Hey, Rubybaby,” said Caspar.

That's what he called me: Rubybaby. From the lips of anyone other than a divine being, it would have sounded cringe making and vomit worthy. From the lips of Caspar McCloud, it was utterly thrilling, as if an electric-lipped angel was kissing your soul. You know: hot and crackly.

“Hey, Caspar,” I said, crackling.

“Why don't you swim on over here and keep me company?” he said.

I fixed him with this sultry model's stare (deadpan but pouty) that I'd been practicing at home. “Well, why don't you swim on over
here
?” I said.

It was the pre-kiss terror that made me say that. Basically I would have swum the Atlantic to get to him.
Genius, Ruby
. All I'd done was prolong the agony.

Slowly and sexily, we both scooted toward each other. Actually, I'm not sure if you can scoot slowly and sexily, but that's what it felt like. Also, it felt like it took an eternity, when really it was probably about ten seconds or something.

I looked into his eyes. Then I had to look away because it was just too, too intense. I could see all my friends, dancing and messing around like idiots, and behind them, this gorgeous red sunset blazing in the sky.

If I'd looked the other way, I would have seen something else. I would have seen clouds gobbling up the night. Maybe I would even have seen the clouds reflected in Caspar's eyes, but when I got a grip enough to stare into them again, I wasn't there to admire the view.

BOMF! I practically head-butted him as my lips mashed into his. His lips sort of opened a little, and I kind of pushed my tongue into his mouth. I thought that was what you were supposed to do, to show how passionate you felt or something. Like I said, I'd kissed boys before, and that's what we had done. It had been fairly disgusting. Kissing Caspar like that wasn't disgusting; it was scary, and it felt all wrong. Until…I dunno. It just changed. One minute it was tongue-on-tongue combat, the next minute…

If this
was
my blockbuster movie, we would pause here. It would be worth a whole scene all by itself, that kiss. We would linger on it for as long as possible. That kiss. Those kisses. Where does one kiss end and another begin? We just kind of melted into one another. I know that's the kind of stupid thing they say in cheesy romances, but we did. That's what happened! One minute I was my own clumsy me-being, freaking out, and I could feel this divine Caspar-being (was he freaking out too?), this Caspar-being's tongue, and the next minute…I dunno…it was total—

KA-CASPAR-BOOM!

(PART TWO)

We didn't hear the yelling.

Fingers dug into my arm. My lips disconnected from Caspar's. I turned and—

“GET OUT!” Zak's dad shouted into my face, hauling me from the tub.

And that is when it all began.