by Will Weaver
“Sure you did. I saw it fall,” he says.
Sarah swallows.
Kilt Boy examines the green sticker, then glances at her packet.
“Um … oh. I think it’s for new kids,” Sarah says.
He smiles. His teeth are slightly crooked—but white and clean. A no-braces teenager. His stock goes up another hundred points. “No one wants to be a new kid in middle school.” He wads the smiley-face sticker into a small ball and flicks it away without looking where it lands.
“Tell me about it,” Sarah says. He feels weirdly trustworthy.
Kilt Boy puts out a hand. An old-fashioned, correct, business-style handshake. “Ray,” he says.
“Sarah,” she answers. “Nice, um—”
“Kilt,” he finishes. “You like? My older brother and I saved up and went backpacking through northern Europe, and then up to Scotland where my dad’s family came from. My last name is O’Keefe, by the way. Funny how my parents never wanted me to go anywhere until the volcanoes happened. Now it’s like, ‘See the world before it ends.’”
“Oh, Gawd,” a voice says. “Ray’s back. We were hoping you were, like, in juvie for the year. Or at least the alternative school.”
“And miss out on another totally fabulous year with you, Mackenzie?” Ray says, imitating the girl’s voice. “Never!”
Sarah turns to see a cluster of girls with look-alike book bags and a queen bee leading the group.
“This is Sarah,” Rays says.
“We’ve never seen you before,” the queen says, inspecting Sarah. She is a couple of inches shorter than Sarah and wears lots of makeup—way more eyeliner than she needs to. Her eyes are smallish and she knows it.
“I’m from Park Rapids. Transfer student,” Sarah says, and begins to look through her stuff again.
“What grade are you in?”
“Eighth,” Sarah answers.
“So, how old are you?” the leader asks.
“Thirteen.”
“She’s advanced for her age,” Ray says. Then he coughs. “I meant smart—you know, advanced mentally?”
The other girls snicker.
“Shut up, Ray,” Mackenzie says without looking his way; she keeps her eyes on Sarah. “There are several new kids this year,” she continues. “They say they’re from around here, but I think some of them are Travelers. Are you?”
“What?!” Sarah exclaims, as if that is the biggest joke in the world.
“Does she look like a Traveler?” Ray asks.
Mackenzie gives Sarah a long look up and down. “No,” she finally says.
“So that’s settled,” Ray says.
“Mackenzie Phelps,” the girl says, thrusts out a hand.
“Sarah Newell.”
“We have first-hour English; what do you have?” Mackenzie asks.
Sarah glances down at the class schedule in her hands and realizes she has crunched it. She smooths the page. “Biology.” She tries not to sound too relieved.
“With Mr. Soames. That’s in room 10-B,” Mackenzie says.
Ray has not gone anywhere. He continues to stand close by, just watching. It doesn’t seem to bother him that the girls ignore him.
Mackenzie looks Sarah up and down one more time. “You can sit with us during lunch.”
Sarah smiles weakly. “Great, thanks,” she answers.
“Or with me,” Ray says to Sarah.
“Don’t sit with him,” Mackenzie says before Sarah can answer. “Ray is creepy. All he does is draw people—mostly girls.”
“It’s what artists do,” Rays says easily.
“There are artists and then there are creeps,” Mackenzie says.
“Uh, sounds like there’s some history here. I should go,” Sarah says. “Literally, I mean. Where’s the bathroom?”
The other girls giggle.
Mackenzie points while continuing to glare at Ray.
Sarah escapes down the hall, and once inside the girls’ room she chooses a toilet stall, closes the door, and locks it. She drops her jeans and sits down. Who knew a toilet seat could feel so good? Other girls come and go, laughing and flushing and running water. Sarah takes her time. When the bathroom is finally quiet, she emerges. In the mirror is a tanned Minnesota girl—so generic looking that for an instant Sarah doesn’t recognize herself. She lets hot water run on her hands—silky, warm water—and all the soap she needs. Glancing around, she bends to the sink to wash her face. Handfuls of hot water steam her skin. “Mmmmmmm,” she murmurs, then freezes.
Another girl has emerged from a stall. She is thin, with dark, short hair and quick-moving eyes. She looks at Sarah; her eyes go to the running hot water, the foamy soap. There’s a long moment of recognition: You’re one of us. Then the girl leaves in a rush, without washing her hands.
CHAPTER FOUR
MILES
AFTER BACKTRACKING FROM THE BUS stop, Miles pauses, then leaps from the asphalt to the road bank. He tries to leave no tracks in the ditch. Mr. Kurz would be proud. A slight breeze stirs the dust and softens the edges of his boot prints.
He angles through the woods, then to the hill above their cabin. Below there are no signs of life. His parents have gone back to bed—either they’re fooling around or they’re just lazy today. But white motion flashes behind the riverbank brush. It’s his mother in the swimming hole, splashing, bathing. He turns away—not that he saw anything—and heads upstream along the ridgeline.
Carrying his gun loosely over his shoulder, he walks slowly, first planting the heel and then the rest of the foot: heel-toe, heel-toe. Goat Girl walks like an elephant: clump, clump, clump. He has tried to teach her the hunter’s walk to spread out the impact, but she just doesn’t get it. Or she gets it briefly, but soon it’s back to clump, clump, clump.
The deer trail on the high bank follows the path of least brush, but with easy escape routes. Deer are not dumb. This would be a good spot for hunting deer, but the weather must be colder or else the meat would spoil. This morning he is on the hunt for a grouse.
Grouse are not dumb either. They do not like open spaces where an owl or a hawk can fly in and get them. Look for grouse in the thickest brush, the kind a man can’t walk through. A good hunter sometimes has to crawl. Mr. Kurz’s gravelly old voice comes into Miles’s head, like it does several times a day.
He eases through the brush, its bristles sweeping his bare arms like a coarse broom. He pauses. Sniffs the air. A fruity, sweet-and-sour odor drifts up from the river’s edge. He heads that way, eyes on the ground, until he realizes that the scent is above him: clusters of translucent red-orange berries. Bears won’t eat them; birds won’t touch them unless there’s nothing else to eat. So much acid in them that they barely even freeze when it’s twenty below zero. But they make the best jelly and pancake syrup a man could ever want. You’ve got to know your wild berries if you want to live off the land. But why am I telling you this? You don’t write anything down.
I don’t need to write things down.
You told me you had some report to write for your teacher.
I do, but I can remember every word you say.
So tell me what I said.
“‘Bears won’t eat them; birds won’t touch them unless there’s nothing else to eat. So much acid in them that they barely even freeze when it’s twenty below zero. But they make the best jelly and pancake syrup a man could ever want—’”
Hehe. That’s pretty good, kid.
I told you—I can remember every word.
You’re a strange kid, that’s for sure.
You’re a pretty weird old man.
Hehe. Want to play cards?
You don’t want to play cards with me.
Why not?
I can memorize cards, too. Every hand you play.
Hehe. We’ll see about that....
Miles reaches up and picks a single glowing-red high-bush cranberry—and pops it into his mouth. “Phaw!” He spits out the berry in an explosion of pulp and tiny seed. The b
erry is impossibly sour, but probably high in vitamin C. Miles marks this spot in his mind and moves on.
Not far from the cabin he sees tracks. He kneels to examine the round, good-sized paw prints in the dust. Dog. One of the paw prints is faint—almost invisible—and turns sideways when it lands. A bad leg. A limping dog. He follows its trail, which backtracks and meanders and then returns toward the cabin. Miles slips a shell into the chamber and stays on the tracks.
CHAPTER FIVE
SARAH
SARAH FLOATS THROUGH THE MORNING classes, then joins the rest of the students in watching the clock as lunchtime approaches. She tries to be casual with her glances. Someone’s stomach growls loudly, and there is sudden laughter. The clock hands tick slowly on. Other stomachs begin to growl like a slow-gathering chorus of frogs. The one good thing about environmental collapse and reduced food supplies is that there are way fewer fat kids.
At 10:57 A.M. the first lunch bell rings. The students lurch up from their desks, and she joins the giant snake of bodies speed walking to the cafeteria. Last year she hardly ever ate the school’s lunch; and when she did, she was never in any hurry. This year she walks fast and keeps others from cutting ahead of her. Lunch is serious now.
At the counter a woman wearing a hairnet and clear plastic gloves dishes out spoonfuls of a cheesy hot dish that has clumps of mystery meat. The next woman in line piles on soggy, limp green beans. After that it’s the potato woman—whose face looks like a potato. But any food is a nice change from river fish and rice. The other students in line carefully watch the cafeteria women dish out their food.
“Hey, he got more potatoes than me!” someone says.
“Keep moving,” the potato-scooper woman says.
With her tray, Sarah turns toward the crowded cafeteria tables. Always the big question: where to sit. She doesn’t see Mackenzie’s group. She drifts along, looking for an open space on the benches.
Ray O’Keefe is seated at a table with kids of many colors: a peroxide blond Latino boy; a skinny Gothy girl with long black hair with cherry-red streaks; a couple of black-haired Native American boys; two white girls in dreads and tie-dyed T-shirts; one fat girl between two scrawny, bushy-haired white boys. Ray has a sketch pad open and a pencil in his hand.
“Sarah—here we are!” calls Mackenzie. She is moving along with a tray, and uses it to herd Sarah away from Ray’s table. Sarah glances over her shoulder helplessly at Ray.
He shrugs and turns back to his friends.
“You weren’t actually going to sit by him, were you?” Mackenzie says, plopping down her tray.
Sarah stammers, “I—I just heard someone call my name, you know....”
“Gawd, imagine having to sit through a whole lunch period with those freaks,” says another in girl.
“Torture,” another says.
“So what’s your deal with Ray?” Sarah asks Mackenzie.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie says.
“You’re just mad because he’s never asked you.” One of the girls giggles.
“Asked what?” Sarah says.
“To pose.”
“Pose?” Sarah asks.
“Like, model—so he can draw her.”
“You mean a life model?”
“Huh?” one of the girls says.
“Nude,” Sarah says.
The table full of girls shrieks with laughter; one of them coughs up food, which only brings more laughter.
“No, not nude!” Mackenzie says when the girls quiet down. “Though that’s probably what he really wants.”
“He’s an amazing artist,” one of the girls says softly. “I mean, it was fun letting him draw me.”
“Me, too,” another says. “He’s gonna be famous someday.”
Mackenzie turns to them with a long glare; they quickly look down at their food.
“So what did you do in Park Rapids?” Mackenzie says to Sarah. “Any sports?”
“Not really,” Sarah says. “I was homeschooled, actually,” she explains, and rolls her eyes.
“So why’d you come here?” Mackenzie asks.
“I told my parents I’d sue them if I had to stay at home another year,” Sarah says.
The girls giggle.
“Well, since you’re here, you clearly need to know stuff about this school,” Mackenzie says. She looks around the cafeteria. “See that cute guy with the buzz cut over there? That’s Django. Isn’t that the coolest name ever? He’s really good at basketball, and we, you know, go out once in a while.”
“They’re going steady!” one of the girls says, and everyone laughs.
“And next to him, that guy in the red T-shirt? He’s Derek.”
Sarah lets Mackenzie rattle on and concentrates on her lunch. She scarfs down everything. She was never part of the clean-plate club BV (Before Volcanoes), but now, even bad cafeteria food is too precious to be tossed. She puts her tray on the conveyor belt, where all the other plates and dishes are as empty as if a dog has licked them shiny.
Ray catches up with her in the hallway. “Nice lunch?”
“Sort of.”
“So you’re friends with Mackenzie now?”
“Maybe.”
“I gotta say, they just don’t seem like your crowd.”
“What’s my crowd?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says. His dark eyes probe hers; it’s as if he can see all the way through her. He reaches out and puts a finger on the ancient, faded NOFX patch stitched onto her backpack—and also brushes her arm. Her bare skin tingles.
“So what’s your crowd?” she replies quickly. Her arm burns where his hand touched her, and she feels her face go hot, too.
“Probably not this whole school,” he says quickly with a glance around them. “I’d really like to be at the arts school in Minneapolis; I have my application in.”
She laughs.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says quickly. “I mean, you do seem sort of … artsy. A guy who wears kilts.”
“It’s my disguise,” he says.
She’s totally warm and blushing and very short on words.
“What’s yours?” he asks.
“My disguise?”
He waits for her reply.
“What makes you think I have one?” she throws back.
“Everybody does,” Ray says with his killer grin.
CHAPTER SIX
MILES
TUNK. TUNK-TUNK.
At the sounds, Miles drops low behind some brush. He is following the wild dog’s tracks along the riverbank away from his mother, but now he pauses to listen. On the river, coming closer, tunka-tunk: the noise comes from canoe paddles.
Clumsy paddling. Miles looks over his shoulder, back toward the cabin and the riverbank where his mother might still be having her morning swim. He eases backward to take a shortcut home so that he can call out to warn her. On the river, the woman’s voice says, “I think I had a bite!”
“Did it jerk back and forth?”
“No, just kind of a tug,” she answers.
“Probably a weed. Check your hook.” The guy makes a clumsy cast with his fishing pole.
They’re a youngish couple who clearly haven’t fished much. They seem harmless enough, but at a bend in the river, Miles leaves the deer trail and angles straight across to get ahead of the canoeists. When he comes to the edge of the clearing, his mother is fully dressed. But she is sitting on the riverbank with a towel draped around her hair, and with a small bottle and brush she is doing her toenails.
He waves with both hands, but she’s engrossed in her toes.
By then it’s too late: A canoe paddle goes clonk!, and his mother suddenly looks up as the canoe comes around the bend.
“Hello!” the woman says as the canoe approaches.
“Hi there,” Nat says. She doesn’t scramble or run, but glances around for Miles; she spots him but doesn’t give him away. Miles shrinks farther back into the trees.
“Wh
at a surprise!” the young woman in the bow says. She has reddish hair, lots of it, tucked under a scarf, but her face is thin.
“Yes!” Nat says.
The man in the stern steers the canoe to the shore; its nose grinds into the sand. “I didn’t think anyone lived way out here,” he says, looking up the bank. He has a short, dark beard and hollow cheeks and is wearing a baseball cap. Miles follows his gaze; luckily there is no smoke rising from the cookstove. The only sign of human life is the faint, narrow path leading uphill from the river.
“Live out here?” Nat says. She manufactures a laugh. “I don’t think so. My family and I are just camping for a couple of nights. You know, get away from it all.”
“Same with us!” the woman says quickly. “We’re just out fishing.”
“Trying to,” her partner adds. He keeps looking up the trail—trying to see what’s behind the trees. “Must be a nice place to camp.”
Miles steps out from the trees.
“My son,” Nat says.
The woman reaches down to the bottom of the canoe; Miles tightens his grip on the shotgun, but she lifts up a bundle that emits a tiny, perfect wail.
“A baby—congratulations,” Natalie says.
“Thanks,” the woman says, holding her baby tightly as Miles approaches.
“Howdy,” he says.
“Hey,” the canoe couple say simultaneously to Miles.
“So how old is your baby?” Nat asks pleasantly.
“Four months,” the mother says. The baby is totally wrapped in a blanket; its face is not visible.
“Believe it or not, this guy used to be that small,” Nat says as Miles arrives at the river’s edge. The fishing couple look warily at Miles’s shotgun.
“Any luck?” Miles asks in the universal greeting to people in a boat with fishing poles.
“Nothing,” the guy answers. He seems defeated—as if he’s totally out of his element.
“The fish are in the weed beds, not in the open channel,” Miles says. “For bass, use something silvery that looks like a minnow. Northern pike like to hang right on the weed lines. They’ll hit a red-and-white spoon.”
“Thanks!” the woman says.
“Well, we’d better keep fishing,” the man says. “Have a nice day camping.”
