I hid in the safe room, which we’d left open. I crouched low, near the toilet paper at the back of the room. After a while, I saw the light go out. I heard the sound of distant laughter.
I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they didn’t. Not a trace of daylight made its way through those shutters. Only blackness remained, a kind of blindness. It was, as we used to say,
dark as night.
After a few minutes, I heard footsteps outside the safe room, the creak of the door swinging open, the sound of breathing. Someone was in the room with me.
Several cans toppled to the floor.
“Shit,” said a boy’s voice. I could tell it was Josh, but I couldn’t see him, not even an outline, not a shadow, nothing.
He felt around the room until his hands bumped my shoulder.
“Found you,” he whispered.
I was glad. He sat down next to me on the floor. He touched my shoulder again, as if by accident. We had a miraculous new power: invisibility.
“You looked pretty in your swimsuit,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. I smiled an unseeable smile. It might have been the first time a boy had said he liked the way I looked. We sat without speaking for a long time.
“I’ve never kissed a girl,” he whispered.
There are creatures at the bottom of the ocean that can live without light. They’ve evolved to thrive where other animals would die, and the darkness endowed us, too, with certain special abilities. What was possible in the dark never would have worked in the light. I kept quiet and waited for something to happen.
I felt his breath on my cheek and held still. Seconds passed. And then: His lips pressed my chin. He’d misjudged in the dark.
“That’s okay,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He cleared his throat. “Can we try again?” he asked.
But I’d lost my nerve. “We’re in the middle of the game,” I said.
When I felt him lean toward me again, I leaned back.
“Come on,” he whispered. “We’re all going to be dead in a year or two, anyway.”
“No one knows what’s going to happen,” I said.
I listened for Kai and Michaela but heard nothing.
“When we run out of food, there’s going to be wars,” he said. “Major wars.”
He tried to kiss me one more time, but I jumped up, bumping one of the shelves behind us. Something crashed to the floor. In case of catastrophe, they’d have one less jar of jam.
“Fine,” he said. “I should have known you’d be totally lame.”
I heard him stand and shuffle toward the door in the dark. The smell of strawberries began to waft through the air.
“Anyway,” he said, “Michaela only invited you because her mom made her. She wouldn’t let her have her boyfriend over here unless someone
responsible
was here, too.”
I knew it was true as soon as he said it—the whole night, an optical illusion, now made clear. Michaela hadn’t invited me anywhere all year.
The door creaked open and clicked closed. I was alone again in the dark.
I huddled there awhile longer. The only option seemed to be to continue the game. But no one else came, and soon a crack of light appeared beneath the safe room door. They’d turned on the lights in the house—or raised the shutters.
In the hall, I had to squint to see. My eyes were slow to adjust to the light. They were watching television again: Michaela and Kai, legs intertwined on the couch. Michaela was eating bonbons from a carton. Josh was not with them.
“There you are,” said Michaela. She was in her bikini and nothing else. Her hair was still ropy from the Jacuzzi. “We couldn’t find you anywhere.”
The blue light of the television flickered on her face. Kai kept his eyes on the screen.
“You stopped looking?” I said.
“We couldn’t find you,” she said. She turned back to the television. “Josh said he checked the safe room and you weren’t in there.”
Later, I fell asleep in my jeans on the couch. I woke up twice: once when Michaela’s mother and Harry breezed into the house—the tapping of her heels on the tile, the two of them laughing—and later, to the sound of one of the boys—Josh, I think—throwing up in the bathroom.
I was the first one awake in the morning. A pizza box lay open on the counter, and a full carton of melted ice cream sat slumped beside it. Someone had cleared away the beer bottles.
The sun had set overnight. It was dark and cold, and it would be dark all day.
I called home, and my mother sent my father to pick me up. I left without saying goodbye. Someone must have answered the phone when the guard called because my father’s car soon appeared in the circular driveway, headlights blazing.
“Why so early?” he said as I climbed into the car. “Is something wrong?”
The air smelled heavily of smoke. The firefighting planes could not fly without the light, so the fires would burn free for hours. The car radio carried news of one more strange story: An earthquake had struck rural Kansas. It was the first of its size ever recorded there.
“I just felt like coming home,” I said.
24
Two days before my twelfth birthday, a group of whales washed up on our coastline. Nearby residents awoke one morning to find the whales slumped in the sand, twisting weakly as the tide receded without them. Ten sea creatures: stranded on earth.
Mass beachings were growing common all over the world. In Australia two thousand pilot whales and twelve hundred dolphins were laid out together on one beach. In South Africa, it was killer whales. Eighty-nine humpbacks had run aground on Cape Cod.
Theories abounded. But proof was scarce. The ocean was changing, that much we knew. The currents were shifting. The tides were coming loose. Every high tide crept higher. Every low tide swept lower. The food chain was withering, and new dead zones had formed in certain waters. Starving whales might venture into the shallows in search of food.
But there were some who took a more conservative view.
“These events have occurred throughout history,” said Miss Mosely, our new science teacher, as we shifted on our lab stools.
Under Miss Mosely’s direction, we had stopped updating Mr. Jensen’s solar-system wall. The black butcher paper had begun to fade. The paper planets were curling at the edges, and the moon had fallen from the sky. Under Earth, the label still read
28 hours and six minutes,
though the natural days had more than doubled in length since then.
Miss Mosely bent over a laptop at the front of the lab, in gray pencil skirt and white collared shirt, to show us photographs online of hundreds of whales scattered on a nineteenth-century beach.
“See?” she said. “These new beachings might have nothing to do with the slowing.”
But we didn’t buy it. We knew what was coming.
I had begun spending my lunches in the library, land of the friendless, where Trevor Watkins sat hunched at a computer, powering a spaceship with the fuel of correctly answered algebra problems, and Diane Kofsky read romance novels, sneaking cheese puffs from her backpack. There was no eating in the library, and no talking, either.
The only good excuse for choosing to be in the library at lunch was if you had to do homework for the next period. But my homework was done. I tried instead to read—I was reading a novel about a boy stranded alone in the Canadian wilderness—but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Mrs. Marshall read the newspaper at her desk, looking up now and then to watch the movements of Jesse Schwartz. Maybe we were all in the library against our will, but Jesse was here as punishment for some unknown but easily imagined infraction. He sat alone at a distant table, fidgeting and gazing out onto the quad where he belonged, his natural habitat, the sounds of which reached us here as a faint underwater murmur.
On the first day of honors pre-algebra that year, Mrs. Pinsky had drawn a funnel chart on the white board to illustrate that a sifting process had begun. “You’ve all been placed in the honors class for now,” she said. “But the number of kids who can understand the math is going to shrink every year from now on.” It was that time of life: talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kind of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. The chubby ones would likely always be chubby. The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.
About halfway through the period, the glass door of the library swung open. The noise from outside surged in but was quickly sliced away again as the door banged closed.
When I looked up, I was shocked at who was walking down the ramp. He was different from the rest of us in the library—better-looking, better liked. Seth Moreno: I had never seen him in the library at lunch.
He sat down two chairs away from me. I wondered for many minutes whether this nearness was accident or will.
He rested his skateboard against the chair. Diane looked up from her book. You didn’t see many skateboards in the library.
From his backpack, he pulled out a spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil. He turned to a fresh page and smoothed it with his palm.
He began drawing carefully in a college-ruled notebook. I could see the shape of a small bird in flight emerging slowly from the tip of his pencil, its wings tucked at its sides. He drew a second bird a few inches higher in the sky. He began to outline a third, erased it, began again.
The sounds of the library were these: the squeaking of our chairs as we breathed, the tapping of Trevor’s computer keys, the muted crunch of cheese puffs beneath the force of Diane’s teeth, the turning of my pages—and the soft, pleasing scratch of Seth’s pencil on paper.
Outside, someone banged on the window.
“Man,” Seth whispered to me. “I can’t handle it out there, you know?”
He looked over at me and then down at his drawing. His eyelashes formed a thick fringe as he blinked.
“I know,” I finally said.
The bell rang. We began to pack our bags. Diane struggled with the zipper of her backpack. Trevor remained hunched at the computer.
“Trevor,” said Mrs. Marshall from her desk, “the bell has rung.”
And then, someone was standing next me: It was Seth, and he was saying something. Seth was saying something to me.
“Hey,” he said.
There’s a certain kind of shock that’s possible only when you’re young. I had the idea that he might be talking to someone else.
“Thanks for the card,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
“Did you hear about the whales?” he asked.
I had to look up to see his eyes. I worried I would say something wrong, so I said nothing for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said.
He waited for me to say something more. I could feel my face turning red. The flags of every country in the world fluttered from the ceiling tiles above the library.
“Maybe someone can help them get back into the water,” I said.
Seth shook his head.
“They would probably just beach themselves again,” he said. “My dad’s a scientist. He says that when whales beach themselves, there’s a reason.”
Other kids began to trickle into the library. These were the ones with doctors’ notes excusing them from PE.
“I’m going down to the beach after school to see them,” said Seth. The wheels of his skateboard spun slowly as he shifted it from one hand to the other. “Want to come?”
“What?” I said.
Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth’s Moreno’s mouth: “Want to come?”
I can still remember the red diamond pattern of the library carpet, the way the opening and closing of the library doors caused the overhead flags to swing back and forth above our heads.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay, then,” he said.
And that was it. He turned and walked away.
On the way home, we sat separately on the bus. We both stepped off with the usual kids at our stop. It was hot and hazy in the neighborhood. Dust blew across the empty lot. The other kids scattered. I drifted in Seth’s direction. I thought he might throw his skateboard on the asphalt and fly down the hill without me. Perhaps I’d misunderstood. Maybe this was some kind of joke.
Instead, he turned, squinting, and said, “We can drop our backpacks at my house on the way.”
We were quiet as we walked. We communicated with our feet, mine following his down the sparkling sidewalk to his house.
I did not tell my parents where I was going. They wouldn’t be home from work for hours anyway.
Seth lived two streets away from us in a beige ranch-style with a rusted basketball hoop overhanging the garage. The front yard had turned to dirt. A row of terra-cotta pots stood empty of flowers.
The front door was unlocked, and we walked right in, leaving our backpacks in the hall, which was cluttered with newspapers and laundry. Thick quilts served as makeshift blackout curtains. An oxygen tank and its accompanying tubing lay tangled like wreckage in one corner. Seth’s mother had died in this house.
“Want a Coke?” he said.
“Okay.”
We drank them at the kitchen table.
His father was at work, he said, he was there all the time. He was a bioengineer, Seth explained, at work on a new type of corn.
“If it works,” he said, “it’ll be able to grow without light.”
Seth knew a shortcut through the canyon to the beach. It was a steep and sandy trail littered with pinecones and shaded by limestone bluffs. The smell of the canyon was the same as ever, like soil and sage, but the colors of California were turning starker. All the greens were fading away. Most everything was dying. Still, the canyon buzzed with beetles and mosquitoes and flies—whatever the birds had once eaten was flourishing, unhunted.
“Watch out for snakes,” said Seth.
I liked the way he walked: loose and unhurried, a boy who knew his way. I was the girl walking with him, so I walked that way, too.
The trail swung around a corner, and the beach came into view. It was low tide—lower than I’d ever seen it. The slowing was throwing off all the tides. Hundreds of feet of sea floor lay exposed, the sand ribboned black with bits of iron. These were the ocean’s insides, revealed.
We stopped on the trail for a moment watching the ocean, side by side. Our hands were so close, they almost touched.
We crossed the coast road, ducked beneath the caution tape, and cut through the space between two ruined mansions, wet from the last high tide. One house had collapsed like a cake. Its walls were lined with barnacles. Sea anemones carpeted the front steps.
I bent to take off my shoes.
“Look,” said Seth.
There they were: the whales, dark and still, prehistoric in size.
A small crowd of people had gathered on the beach. Good Samaritans were dumping salt water on the whales. Other volunteers were returning from the distant tide, swaying with buckets full of fresh seawater.
We could hear the whales breathing, a slow rising and falling. We listened. We watched. They were social creatures, the whole group distressed by the stress of any one individual. It was obvious they were dying. But we couldn’t help it. We were mesmerized.
Seth picked up two empty plastic cups from the sand. They were bits of ancient litter. He handed one to me.
“We have to do something,” he said. “Come on.”
We ran barefoot down to the water, cups in hand. It was a long run. The mud sucked our feet. Creatures slithered unseen beneath my toes. Dead fish sparkled in the sun as my hair whipped in the wind. When we reached the lapping water and looked back, the humans on the beach were barely visible. Their hairline arms and hairline legs fluttered soundlessly around the whales. The only noise was the churning of the ocean.
We rushed to fill our cups with water and then ran back across the thick band of mud. We looked for the driest whale, the one most in need. We found it at the edge of the group, and we imagined that it was older than the others. Its skin was striped white with scars. I shooed flies from its eyes, one eye at a time. Seth poured our meager water supply over its head and into its mouth. He petted its side. I felt an urgency like love.
“Hey, kids,” someone called from behind us. It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. A gust of wind drowned out what he said, so he shouted it again: “That one’s already dead.”
We were solemn as we climbed back up through the canyon. We were hot and exhausted. It was the twenty-third hour of daylight. The sun showed no signs of sinking.
“It’s the magnetic field that’s doing it,” said Seth.
“What is?”
A strong wind blew through the canyon, kicking up dust and dried leaves.
“That’s why the whales are beaching themselves. They use the magnetic field for navigation, and now it’s decaying because of the slowing.”
I glanced at the sky, a smooth, unblemished blue.
“You can’t see it,” Seth said. “It’s invisible.”
Those were only the first of the whales. Hundreds more would soon wash ashore on the California coastline. Then thousands. Ten thousands. More. Eventually, people stopped trying to save them.
“It’s not just the whales who need the magnetic field,” said Seth as we arrived at the edge of the canyon and took our first steps on paved ground. “We need it, too. My dad says that all the humans would die without it.”
But that day I could hardly hear him. My mind was elsewhere. I was a little bit in love. I’d spent an entire afternoon with Seth Moreno.