The Eternal City

by Paula Morris

  “It’s a volcano,” he told her. “A volcano has erupted and this is like, like …”

  “An ash cloud.” Laura recognized Maia’s voice, as assured and calm as ever. “The volcano’s to the south, in the Colli Albani. It hasn’t erupted like this for thousands of years.”

  “How do you know all this already?” Laura swung around to face her. Maia might have sounded as matter-of-fact as normal, but the falling ash made her look very strange, as though she’d been crawling through spiderwebs in an attic.

  Maia shrugged. Laura would have been annoyed by her smug expression if she weren’t still struggling to grasp what was happening.

  The crowd assembling near the gates looked and sounded increasingly hysterical. One man was crossing himself; two Asian girls huddled under an umbrella, scarves drawn over their mouths. A woman in black was weeping, jabbing at the numbers on her cell phone. Someone in a military-style uniform stood at the gates, his gestures frantic, shouting at them.

  “We have to get back to the hostel,” Maia said, frowning at the crowd. “Where’s Morgan?”

  Laura had no idea. It was hard to see clearly or even walk through the ash; it was like wading in a sea of gray down. Last time she’d seen Morgan, her friend was off in search of Keats’s grave. It could only have been minutes ago—five, ten?—but it felt like an eternity. Laura had seen the Cupid shoot the arrow, had seen the gull fall, had seen the bird disappear completely from view. How was any of this possible?

  “There!” shouted Jack. He marched toward a ghostly figure staggering toward them, her fair hair and white dress gray with ash, and grabbed her by the arm.

  “I feel terrible,” Morgan gasped, leaning on Jack for support.

  “It’s just ash,” Jack said. He batted some away from his mouth and grinned, like a kid playing near a Halloween bonfire.

  “No, I mean …” Morgan bent over, gripping her knees. “I was feeling sick before … before this. My head is swimming. I didn’t even make it to the grave when … this started happening.”

  “Volcanic eruption!” Jack sounded delighted. Morgan groaned. “Hey—maybe we’re all going to die, like in Pompeii.”

  “We’re not going to die,” Laura snapped, though she wasn’t sure. How close was this volcano, anyway? Would the ash cloud be followed by torrents of boiling lava? The Seven Hills of Rome had been formed by volcanic eruptions, but that was millions of years ago.

  “Can we get a cab?” bleated Morgan.

  “Here!” Maia was calling them from the sidewalk just outside the gates. She’d managed to find a taxi, of course, even in the chaos of the ash rain. Maia, thought Laura, helping a rag-doll-like Morgan stagger toward the waiting car, always seemed to know exactly what to do.

  * * *

  Back at the hostel all the lights were on, though it was still early in the afternoon. Agent Orange on the desk was jabbering away in Italian on the phone, smacking one hand on the counter to make some agitated point. High on the wall, the TV showed pictures of a smoldering mountain and a vast traffic jam on the highway, with close-ups of swirling ash. Leslie and Jane, the two girls who’d gone shopping earlier, were slumped in plastic chairs, looking dazed and ashy.

  “What is this stuff?” Leslie moaned, trying to brush ash out of her long hair.

  “A volcano erupted, and there’s an ash cloud,” Maia told her. “It won’t kill you.”

  “But the volcano might,” added Jack, sounding gleeful. The girls looked like they were about to burst into tears.

  “I feel so … bad,” Jane groaned, and Laura jabbed Maia in the arm.

  “You should help them,” Laura hissed.

  “Why?” Maia looked bemused.

  “Help them get upstairs. They must be sick, like Morgan. You guys help them, and I’ll get Morgan up to our room.”

  It wasn’t easy pushing and tugging a dizzy, breathless Morgan up so many flights of stairs. Laura was desperate to tell her about what she’d seen—Cupid’s dart, the dead bird disappearing—but Morgan looked more ready to faint than to listen to such a far-fetched story. Maybe it had all been a hallucination, Laura thought, a symptom of this illness felling everyone around her. But she didn’t feel foggy. What she’d seen was crystal clear in her memory, even the soft thump when the bird hit the ground, and the glistening patch of blood it left on the ground.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” groaned Morgan. Laura steered her in the direction of the shared bathroom at the end of the hall and then went in search of help. Nicole and Courtney were both fast asleep on the lower bunks of their shared room, and there was no way Laura could push Morgan up the bunk-bed ladder without someone else giving her a hand.

  She tapped on door after door, peeking in to see who was around. Most of the sick girls probably had no idea about the ash cloud, because they were lying in bed with the curtains drawn, or they were fast asleep. There was no one at all in the female teachers’ room. Laura tore up the stairs to the fourth floor, where the boys were staying, but most of them seemed to be in much the same state, zonked out.

  Only Dan Sinclair was awake. He was sitting on the floor of his room, legs stretched out, flicking flecks of ash off his jeans.

  “Yes?” he said when Laura peered in. The room smelled of gym socks. It reminded her of her brothers’ bedroom, where things seemed to be fermenting. The other boys in the room were silent lumps in the bunk beds. She wasn’t sure whether to go in or not.

  “You don’t have to hide out in the hallway, you know,” he said, and Laura felt herself blush. She hated the way whenever there was an awkward social situation, her face went red.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. It felt strange speaking to Dan, let alone asking a personal question. They never talked in school. At least, unlike Banana Pants Ryan, he didn’t call her “Mutant Girl.” He didn’t call her anything at all.

  “I never get sick.” Dan sounded slightly offended. “I’m just here because, you know, there’s an ash storm outside.”

  It was hardly a storm, Laura thought, but she wasn’t brave enough to squabble with Dan, who was good at everything and clearly knew it. She felt embarrassed, and wanted to close the door and back away. But that wouldn’t help her get Morgan up a bunk-bed ladder.

  “Would you mind helping me—um, downstairs?” she asked after what felt like an endless pause. “Everyone else is, you know, sick.”

  “Sure,” said Dan, jumping to his feet and dusting himself off. He sounded kind of embarrassed as well, though Laura wasn’t sure why.

  By now the girls’ floor looked like some kind of zombie hospital, with the strong—Laura, Dan, Maia, Jack—helping the weak up and down the hallway, leading them to and from the bathroom or to any available bed.

  “Why aren’t you sick?” Maia asked Jack, in what Laura was beginning to recognize as her signature blunt/rude manner. “All the other boys are.”

  “I’m very healthy,” he told her, grinning. He was short and a little chubby, and did have a robust look about him. “Never missed a day of school, unfortunately.”

  “Dan’s not sick, either,” Laura pointed out, but Maia didn’t seem surprised.

  “We might need him,” she said.

  “What?” Laura asked, confused, but Maia looked away, saying nothing. Mrs. Johnson—POTUS—had reappeared, clearly sick herself but doing her best to direct traffic. Maia and Laura had to move to a room two floors up, she said, and would be sharing with a girl from one of the European school groups. Jack and Dan had to move to the sixth floor, in the hostel’s old attic.

  “I don’t think we need to move,” Dan argued. Laura remembered something that Morgan had said early in the trip, that just because Dan was the smartest kid in his grade, he sometimes acted like he was equal to all the teachers, even POTUS. “We can squeeze in wherever down here. It’s only for one night.”

  “I don’t want you getting sick as well,” POTUS said, steadying herself against the grubby wall. Her face looked gray, even though she hadn’t bee
n outside for an ash dusting. “And it’s going to be more than one night, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?” Laura asked. She was eager to get home and see her family. Rome wasn’t quite as enticing now with all this sudden, creepy strangeness—the extreme weather, the erupting volcano, birds getting shot out of the sky by stone Cupids. She fingered her wrist, startled at first that the bracelet was gone, before she remembered it was tucked safely away in her bag.

  She thought back to the thief and to the moving statues at the Trevi Fountain this morning. It all felt like a strange dream, disturbing because it was so vivid. Laura wished she could talk it through with someone, to try to make sense of what she thought she’d seen.

  “The ash cloud,” said Maia flatly, by way of explanation. She handed her backpack—as neat and compact as its owner—to Jack as though he were a doorman at a fancy hotel.

  “Maia’s right,” said POTUS. She looked half asleep on her feet. “The ash cloud means that all planes are grounded. Not just in Rome but in most of southern Europe, and the air travel ban may spread if the cloud grows. We can’t leave.”

  “Cool.” Jack beamed, and hoisted Maia’s backpack onto his shoulder.

  POTUS sighed. “I called the principal, and he’s letting all your families know about the delay. Though they’ve probably all seen it on the news. Well, at least now we have a chance to recover from whatever this is.” She gave a feeble wave toward the dim rooms on the hall.

  “I have a track meet on Saturday,” said Dan, frowning.

  “Too bad,” Maia told him. She wasn’t in awe of anyone, Laura observed—not the teachers, and certainly not other students. Dan looked at Maia for a moment, as though he’d never seen her before in his life, and turned back to POTUS.

  “So, get settled in your new rooms,” she said, ignoring his indignant expression, “and Ms. Wilson will try to get you some pizza or something for dinner tonight. I think it’s best if you all stay inside until we know it’s safe out there.”

  This wasn’t at all the big final night they’d had planned, with a nice dinner at a nearby fancy restaurant that apparently served homemade pasta and a world-famous fried artichoke dish.

  Instead here she was, climbing the stairs with strange Maia to find a strange room where some strange European girl might be lurking.

  Room 32 had shabby curtains and garish smiley-face stickers plastered down one of the bedposts. Sitting cross-legged on one of the top bunks, reading a book, was a girl with fair spiky hair, wearing tortoiseshell-framed glasses and a striped sailor top. She looked at Laura and Maia and closed her book with a snap.

  “Hi,” Laura said, forcing a smile. She spotted her suitcase dumped—by Jack, the world’s most enthusiastic porter—on one of the lower bunk beds, and dropped her backpack next to it. Maia was still standing in the doorway, gazing up at the new girl in her usual brazen way.

  “You call yourself—what?” Maia asked. Laura’s face prickled with embarrassment: Didn’t Maia know you were supposed to introduce yourself before demanding someone else’s name? Also, Maia was clearly fluent in English; why did her phrasing sound so foreign?

  “Sofie,” said the girl, unsmiling. She pronounced it Zo-fee-ah. “It’s a German name. I’m from Hamburg, in Germany.”

  “We’re from the US,” Laura said quickly, before Maia could say anything else rude and/or strange. “Bloomington, Indiana. I mean, we go to school there.”

  Laura knew that Maia wasn’t really from Indiana—she was originally from Russia, or maybe the Planet Zog, for all Laura knew—but for the purposes of this extremely awkward meet-your-roomies moment, she was from Bloomington.

  “Indiana?” Sofie sounded amused.

  “Yes. And I’m Laura,” Laura continued, trying to ignore the other girl’s sarcastic tone. Her neck was stiff from looking up. “And this is Maia.”

  Maia walked to the window and stared out at the gloomy alley. She was terrible at conversation, Laura thought.

  “Are you the only one not sick?” Laura asked Sofie. “From your school, I mean?”

  “I am not here with my school,” Sofie told her, looking affronted by the very idea. She unfolded her long legs and stretched them out, like a ballet dancer limbering up. “We are on holiday now. I am traveling in Italy with some friends.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” said Maia, as though she’d just solved a mystery. “Who are your friends?”

  “Germans.” Sofie sounded bored. She slipped the book she’d been reading under her pillow, as though she didn’t want them to see it. “You don’t know them. And now they are all sick, of course.”

  “There’s just us and two boys—two who are not sick.” Laura was speaking the most stilted English, and she wasn’t sure why. Sofie made her feel flustered.

  “Boys?” Suddenly, Sofie looked interested.

  “Dan and Jack.” Something pinged inside Laura, like homesickness: She wished the boys were here right now. Jack was goofy and immature a lot of the time, but at least he was cheerful. And Dan might think himself better than practically everyone else, but it might be helpful to have someone confident to do all the talking and introductions. Maia was no help at all. Now that she’d finished examining the view, she was peeling the sheets off her bed and feeling along the length of the thin mattress.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked her.

  “Checking for bedbugs. Even good hotels get them, you know.”

  “And this is not a good hotel,” said Sofie.

  Laura wondered if she should check her own bed, but she didn’t want to slavishly copy Maia. What she really wanted to do was pick up her bags and run, back to her old room, where the other girls were more or less normal.

  “So you have two boys,” mused Sofie. “Interesting. They are not sick at all?”

  “Not yet,” said Maia.

  “And there is the Danish boy,” Sofie said. The tiniest of smiles flickered across her face. Maia stopped shaking her sheets and frowned. “He is on a school trip like you. He is very tall. A Viking.”

  From the smile on Sofie’s face, Laura guessed that “Viking” must be a code word for cute.

  “Do you know his name?” Laura asked. Sofie gave a one-shouldered shrug and said nothing. Silence settled in the room like a heavy blanket.

  “Our teacher is bringing us pizza later,” Laura said at last, because she couldn’t think of anything else to drum up some intelligent conversation. Maia was now absorbed in remaking her bed, stirring up dust when she shook out the comforter. “I’m sure you can have some, too.”

  Sofie sniffed, and dug around under her pillow for the book. Obviously she found Laura’s conversation dull. If Laura was honest, she found it pretty dull herself. It was so hard talking to unfriendly people. She couldn’t wait for the stupid cloud to drift away so she could go home to her family, who liked to laugh and talk and play board games. If her dad were here, he’d be leaning way too far out the window, taking way too many photos; her younger brothers would be leaning out as well, trying to catch ash on their tongues. Her mother would be coming up with stupid newspaper headlines, like “Ash the World Turns” or “Eruption Destruction: Vacation Disruption.”

  After obsessively checking every neat pile of folded clothes in her backpack, Maia settled onto her bed and started scratching away in her diary, her dark head bowed low. Sofie kept reading. Laura walked over to her new bunk and tried to distract herself by reorganizing the things she’d thrown, in haste, into her suitcase. She turned her back on Maia and Sofie, in case they felt like making snarky comments about her messy packing: She really wasn’t in the mood.

  Her backpack, Laura realized, had deposited an ashy residue on the new comforter. She unzipped the bag’s pocket to fish out her broken bracelet. The chain looked so fragile, rudely snapped by that horrible person who tried to mug her. Looking at it made her feel tearful, even though she knew she could get it fixed at home.

  She rubbed a finger over the gray-blue stone, su
spended in its silver setting. It felt reassuringly smooth, exotic and familiar at the same time. Long ago she’d decided that this gray-blue color was the exact shade of her grandfather’s eyes. That was probably untrue, Laura knew, but she liked thinking of it that way, as a link to the past, and to some of the happiest times in her childhood. She looked like him, people said.

  Laura tried to dust the ash off her comforter and realized that she had stupidly been walking around with the main compartment of her backpack open a fraction, offering just enough of a gap for ash to infiltrate.

  “Annoying!” she murmured, but Maia and Sofie didn’t say anything in response. Everything in her bag—phone, camera, notebook, guidebook, lip gloss, hand sanitizer, and a red pashmina shawl belonging to her mother, used as a cover-up when the group toured a church—was smutty with ash. Laura laid them all on the floor and carried her backpack over to the window, to empty out the rest of the ash into the alleyway.

  She cracked open the window just wide enough to squeeze the bag through. The air smelled of distant fire, with a hint of smoke. The alley below lay empty and quiet. Before Laura tipped her bag upside down, she remembered her pen—the purple one presented to her at the hostel in Athens by the cute guy who worked evenings on the desk. Not something, she decided, to just throw away into the street in Rome.

  She tugged the bag back inside and felt around for the pen: There it was, lurking in the ashy debris at the bottom of the bag. And something else was rolling around with it—a piece of gum? No. A pebble, maybe?

  Laura fumbled around until she grabbed it. Maybe the stone was something spewed hundreds of miles by the volcano, a molten chunk that one of her brothers might like as a souvenir.

  Laura pulled the stone from her bag and gasped so loudly that Maia asked her what was wrong. But she couldn’t reply, couldn’t say a single word.

  The stone in her hand was a smooth gray pebble, the size and shape of an almond, shot through with a constellation of gold. A star sapphire, the exact replica of the one in her snapped bracelet, lying there on her dusty bunk bed.