Masks replaced, they looked around their circle. Twelve of them, six feet apart, except for siblings. Danila had to bring Mimi, because she’d woken up and threatened to tell. There she was, bedhead and all. The same with Eden, in her pajamas.
For the weeks of the lockdown every one of them had longed to go outside. Not outside on their balconies, which felt like prisons now. Really outside. To run farther than ten feet. To kick a ball. To swim. To ride a bike or skip double Dutch. To swing from the monkey bars.
To be in the actual world, not just see it on a screen.
But now they just stood there.
“What now?” Claudia asked Conner, whose dangerous idea this was.
Conner glanced at Louis, the experienced one.
The eyes over Louis’ mask seemed to say, “Go ahead. It’s your idea.”
Conner said, “Follow me.”
He began to walk, hands in pockets, tilting back his head to look up at the mostly darkened apartments. The others fell in beside and behind him, awestruck by the novelty of walking. Of walking in the middle of the street!
“There are so many stars,” Juliet said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many.”
Reo came up beside her. “Air pollution’s way down. In Nepal they saw Mt. Everest for the first time in, like, decades.”
His eyes smiled at her above the mask.
Meena began to sign to the girls.
“What’s she saying?” Louis asked Jessica.
“She’s asking where we’re going.”
Did it matter? Louis’ walks with Sweet Pea were the best part of his day, but they left him feeling lonely. They all envied him his freedom, but what good was it if he couldn’t share it?
The Entrepreneur’s Bible had left out an important fact. Some things you couldn’t sell or buy. Some things were free. And now they were, all twelve of them.
Free.
Ivan and Alek felt the joy first, felt it deep in their DNA. They’d escaped the cave! They went wild, suddenly bursting out in grunts and running in circles, scratching under their arms.
Meena took out her phone. Whats with those kids?
“Don’t ask me,” Jessica signed to her, laughing.
“Come on!” Conner said and he joined in, racing around like that molecule on Mr. Faizabadi’s tie, leaping up on curbs, play-bashing into a mailbox.
“Be careful!” Juliet said. She wasn’t worried about Conner. She felt a sudden rush of fondness for the mailbox. Hand over her heart, she told it, “Mailbox! I missed you so much!”
Reo was right there at her side again, hand over his heart, too. “Juliet?”
She looked at him. “Yes?”
“Nothing.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked away.
Claudia rushed over to a power pole. “I thought we’d never be together again!”
Then all the girls began doing it — proclaiming their love to these ordinary, taken-for-granted things. Manhole covers and stop signs. Parked cars and trees.
Meena held out her hand with her two middle fingers folded down, the letters I, L and Y all in one. I love you.
Then everybody signed their love. Reo signed to Juliet and she signed back to him.
“Really?” he asked her.
He was acting as strangely as the twins, Juliet thought.
Then Conner said in a hushed tone, “Look.”
Everybody stopped horsing around. Ahead, a pair of glowing eyes stared at them from a dark alley. After a moment, the shadowy form that owned the eyes emerged and lumbered across the street, trailed by two other pairs of eyes. Under the street lamp they became raccoons.
“Numnum!” Ooak exclaimed to Eek.
They’d heard about this on the news. How all over the world, animals were thriving without humans.
“Shhh,” Danila said. “Maybe we’ll see more.”
They walked on, listening, peering all around the darkened streets, aware again of the stars and the quiet.
Until then, they’d been aimlessly following Conner, but now Meena texted to the other girls: Is this yr school?
Before them stood a darkened building, squat and concrete, with a sad, flagless flagpole jutting from a pad of cracked concrete out front. It was ugly, but the sight of it thrilled them.
Conner ran over and tried the door. Locked. He cupped his hands around his eyes and gazed through the glass at the long unlit hall, last season’s art still stapled to the bulletin board.
The school motto was painted on the wall. Is it Fair? Is it Safe? Is it Kind? Why had he never asked himself those questions before?
Reo raced past. He was running around the school.
Under the motto stood the lost-and-found box, lid open, a sleeve hanging out, as though somebody had rooted through it at the last moment before the doors were closed and locked. Look at how much stuff had been lost!
On Reo’s next lap, he stopped and looked inside. “I loved this place.”
“I love it, too!” Mimi said. “When will we get to go back?”
Before anybody could think how to answer, a siren sounded in the distance, growing louder. Soon the ambulance came into view. It screamed past right in front of them, lights flashing, freezing them in its red strobe.
After it passed, a hollow silence gathered all around them.
“It’s never going away, is it?” Mimi said.
“What?” Danila asked her.
“The Grown-up Virus.”
“Sure it will,” Louis said.
“The thing is,” Conner said. “It’s not fair. They started it.” He meant the adults. “And they don’t even act like grown-ups.”
All of them pictured the adults they lived with losing their tempers. Ivan and Alek covered the ears that Doodoo had twisted. Jessica remembered how Alan had yelled at her and Jacob, “Stop fighting!” way louder than she and Jacob had been arguing. The kids only fought like sisters and brothers. The moms and dads sometimes fought like cats and dogs.
In fact, the kids were doing okay. (Well, Jessica hated Jacob, but even she understood this was temporary.)
Jessica texted Meena what they were saying. Grown-ups started the problem. They ARE the problem.
With her pinky on her temple, Meena signed. Then she spelled it out.
“I-M-A-G-I-N-E,” Jessica read.
Imagine if we were in charge, Meena meant.
“There would never be a Grown-up Virus,” Danila said, “because we wouldn’t keep wild animals in cages, so we wouldn’t catch diseases from them.”
Mimi chimed in, “There wouldn’t even be any animals left at the Espisiay.”
“The S.P.C.A.,” Danila said.
“They would get adopted. And our auntie wouldn’t get sick and …. And ‘Happy Birthday’ would just be for birthdays, not washing hands.”
“And there really would be unicorns!” Eden added.
Then Mimi slumped against Danila. “I’m tired.”
“Time to go,” Conner said.
Time to go inside. Forever? Were they going to grow up inside and apart?
Reo brought up the rear to make sure nobody got left behind. They went straight back — past the gloomy buildings and shuttered stores, the graffiti-scarred alleys.
A half a block from their building, they saw a light. From the way it swept the ground, it seemed to be a flashlight.
They looked at each other in a panic. Were somebody’s parents on their way to find them?
As they got closer, they saw it was a flashlight. Somebody was sitting in front of the playground. The beam found them.
“You startled me!” she said.
They hadn’t heard that voice in a long time.
“Mrs. Watts?” Mimi said.
She shone the flashlight at her own face, so they saw her eyes behind h
er huge glasses. Everybody from the front side of the building remembered the night the paramedics came, how she had given them that weak thumbs-up sign.
Now she brought a crooked finger to her masked mouth.
“Shhh. You’ll wake them.” Their parents. “What are you gang of vagabonds doing up in the middle of the night?”
“What’s a vagabond?” Conner asked.
“A wanderer.”
“We just wanted to go out,” Jessica told her.
“We had to go out,” Conner said.
“We only went to the school and back.”
“Don’t tell on us.”
“I certainly won’t,” Mrs. Watts said.
“Are you okay now, Mrs. Watts?” Eden asked.
“I’m … splendid. Just weak. But now I have this contraption.” With the flashlight she showed them what she was sitting on — a walker with a seat.
“My auntie’s got the virus,” Mimi told her.
“I hope she recovers soon.”
“Me, too!”
Mrs. Watts moved the flashlight over them again. “Which one of you helped me that night?”
Everybody pointed to Meena. H-E-R-O Jessica finger spelled for her.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Watts said.
“She’s Deaf.”
“Like this.” Jessica showed her the sign for thank you.
“It’s like blowing a kiss,” Mrs. Watts said. She made the sign to Meena, who shrugged and pointed to Jessica.
“No way!” Jessica said. She texted U figured it out!!!
“What are you doing out, Mrs. Watts?” Louis asked.
Mrs. Watts chuckled. “Are you going to tell on me? I’m sitting and thinking. Thinking about when I was your age, actually. You probably don’t believe that I was once a child.”
She pulled her mask down and shone the light on herself again.
“You’re really old!” Eden said.
When Mrs. Watts laughed, they did see a younger her. Brown hair instead of white. A smooth face, not a wrinkled one. A teasing smile.
“A terrible thing happened back then, too. I was afraid, like you are now.”
Mimi and Eden moved closer. “What?”
“A war. We weren’t locked inside like now, but sometimes? When the bombs fell? We had to go down to the cellar.”
“Bombs?”
She nodded.
Jessica took a stab at signing Mrs. Watts’s story, miming the shooting and the falling bombs. Then she took out the phone again and texted it.
Meena nodded solemnly as she read.
“It was dark and cold down there,” Mrs. Watt told them. “Worse though, sometimes we came back up to find, instead of a shop or a friend’s house, a smoldering hole.”
“Wow,” Louis said. “You lived through that?”
“I did. The thing we were most afraid of was poison gas. It was like this virus. Deadly, invisible. Everywhere we kids went, we had to carry a mask. Even babies had them. Not cloth masks like these. Rubber and canvas masks that covered our whole faces. Hot and smelly and awkward.”
“Did the gas come?” Danila asked.
“It didn’t, thank goodness.”
“Did the war end?” Mimi asked.
“After four years.”
“Four years?”
She seemed sorry to tell them. “They were hard years. There were shortages. Food shortages, too. But we helped each other through them, like now. Like how you helped me.”
“Were you starving?” Eden asked.
“No. We were lucky. We started growing food. Every patch of ground, we dug up and planted. We called them Victory gardens.”
As Mrs. Watts was talking, Jessica was still texting to Meena what was being said. Some of it she acted out. Digging a hole, dropping in a seed. A growing plant.
“We didn’t only grow food. We grew friendships as we worked. It helped a lot with the fear. The helplessness,” Mrs. Watts said. “Anyway, this was a long time ago. I’m only boring you with it to say that you’ll get through this, too.”
“Thank you,” Louis said. The others echoed him, like in church.
They waited for Jessica to finish texting. Meena nodded. She did that pinky thing again. Placed it above one temple and motioned forward.
“She’s saying ‘imagine,’” Mimi told Mrs. Watts, pleased with herself for remembering.
What Meena did next shocked them all. She marched over to the playground entrance and tore away the yellow tape. Then she stepped right into that forbidden space and began to tear the tape off the equipment, too.
The ground was strewn with wood chips mixed here and there with litter. Meena pointed to where the monkey bars were cemented in the ground. When Mrs. Watts shone the flashlight on it, Meena scraped away the wood chips with her foot. Her fingers gestured up the pole.
“Yes,” Mrs. Watts said. “Peas would work there. Beans, too.”
They all imagined it, even the hunter-gatherers. A garden. The monkey bars covered in vines — a green hideout.
Meena went over to the swings and drew an outline around them with her foot. They saw themselves soaring high above the zucchini. Potatoes. Peppers. Cucumbers. Sliding down among the tomatoes. Tending them. Sharing them.
Juliet said, “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember…”
“What?” Reo said.
Mrs. Watts chuckled. “And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.”
Meena looked at Jessica, who knew the sign for flowers. Meena nodded and pointed to a place beside the fence.
They would order the seeds tomorrow. But for now they said goodnight to Mrs. Watts.
“Do you need help going back in?” Conner asked her.
She said she’d sit and think a little longer. She shone the light on the door to guide them, waved and watched them go back inside.
Single file. Together, six feet apart.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 2020 and 2021, the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, spread around the globe. Though no country was spared, they were all affected differently. Many areas imposed at least a short-term period during which citizens were asked to remain inside their homes in order to halt the spread of the disease. The policy had various names, such as “lockdown,” “sheltering in place,” or a “stay at home” order.
I wrote this book early in the pandemic, inspired by the stories I read in the newspaper or on social media about the ingenuity and resilience of children during those frightening months. While some events mentioned are true, the characters and setting are imagined and intended as a tribute to children the world over.
Many thanks to Shelley Tanaka, Allison Matichuk, Ariel Baker-Gibbs and Rachel Wyatt for their wise input and kind support.
CAROLINE ADDERSON is an award-winning author of many books for adults and young readers, including the picture books Norman, Speak! (illustrated by Qin Leng) and I Love You One to Ten (illustrated by Christina Leist), and the Jasper John Dooley and Izzy series. Her middle-grade books are Middle of Nowhere, A Simple Case of Angels and The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat. She has won the Sheila Egoff Award, the Chocolate Lily Book Award and the Diamond Willow Award, among many other honors. Caroline lives in Vancouver, BC.
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