Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse

by Susan Vaught

  “Probably not, but that was a good idea.” I glanced at Springer’s face. He looked peaceful as he ran his hands over my blanket.

  His eyes drifted to mine, stayed a few seconds, then darted back to the window. “Who does your dad know best at school, grown-up–wise?”

  I leaned back so Sam could stretch out across my lap. “He knows lots of people.”

  “Yeah, but which ones would come in his room a lot? You know, so nobody would notice much?”

  “Oooh, yeah, that’s a good question.” Sam’s fur tickled my fingers as I buried my hands in it. “But I have no clue.”

  Springer leaned over and picked up one of the papers, and pulled a pen from his pocket. “Any students your dad talks about a lot?”

  I shrugged. “That changes from year to year. I guess I don’t pay attention.”

  “So really, the desk is the only starting place we’ve got, unless you want to question Ms. Jorgensen or Ryker and his friends.”

  I started to pass on that but stopped.

  “What?” Springer asked. “You had a thought. I could almost hear your brain working from here.”

  “It’s weird, but—” I stopped, trying to organize my suddenly itching brain and make it think in straight lines.

  Springer didn’t say anything, which helped a lot.

  I let out a breath. “They all send me mean stuff online, Ryker and the cockroaches. I deleted lots of accounts so they’d leave me alone, so they started sending text messages.”

  “That’s evidence, right?” Springer’s voice sounded sad. Or maybe mad. I couldn’t tell. “You could turn them in.”

  “I’ve showed their messages to people before, but they don’t curse or threaten me,” I explained. “They just poke and tease. Dad says it’s kid stuff. Mean kid stuff, but nothing illegal. I’ve blocked them before, then they get spoof programs that go around the blocks, you know, with fake numbers and stuff. So now I just ignore them. That works the best. But this morning—”

  I stopped again.

  Springer quit rocking. He turned his face toward me, but I couldn’t really look at him as he said, “They probably really needled you about your dad, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah. Ryker and Chris did,” I said. “But Trisha didn’t send me a message. And she’s the meanest one of them online. So that’s what’s weird.”

  When I glanced at Springer, he was chewing at his lip. “Maybe she’s grounded from her phone?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think her parents ever ground her from anything, like Ryker’s parents don’t ground him for being a jerkface to the universe.”

  “Is Trisha being nice?”

  That made me laugh. “She doesn’t have much nice in her, after growing up living in between Ryker and Chris. So no. I don’t think she’s being nice. More . . . weird, like I said. Maybe we do need to question them. Well, not question them, because then they would bust us in the face—but, you know, observe them. Listen and see if they say something incriminating. Collect evidence and stuff, and see if we can get a clue about whether or not they know something. From a distance.”

  Springer made a grunty noise like Charlie. I figured that meant he agreed.

  For a quick few seconds, I imagined us detecting all over the place, and maybe stealth-observing Ryker and the cockroaches, and then my dog helping me confront our final suspects, both of us standing there serious, like Mom and Shotgun. “Sooner or later we’ll have to talk to a lot of people. And we’ll have to make them talk. Explain. That’s what Mom always says to me when she wants more information.”

  “Okaaay,” Springer said. “Is your mom as scary as she sounds?”

  “Yes,” I said. And then, “No. She’s—she’s just Mom.”

  “I guess all soldiers can be scary when they need to be,” Springer said.

  “Is your dad as mean as he sounds?” I asked, then thought it didn’t sound tactful, and added, “I mean, not letting you have a rocker and stuff, and making you try out for sports you don’t like.”

  “He’s not mean,” Springer said. “Stern, I guess. And really stressed a lot lately. He wants me to be a good man. And be good at stuff so I’ll be able to make a living. He’s . . . just Dad.”

  “So I don’t need to call him Mr. Jerkface?”

  “Nah,” Springer said. “Not right now, at least. I’ll let you know if that changes. And I think we might be good at this detective stuff. My mom says I notice things other people don’t, that I’m observant.”

  “My mom says I notice freaky things nobody else cares about, and that I’m weird. In a good way, though.”

  Springer grinned. “We could call ourselves the Observant but Weird in a Good Way Detective Agency. OBWIG for short? That would work if we have to speak code. Detectives need codes and secrets, right?”

  We looked at each other, then cracked up laughing.

  “OBWIG,” I said. Then I giggled all over again.

  Springer pulled off the weighted blanket, handed it to me, and said, “Here. This was great, but it’s probably your turn now.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  And for a while, OBWIG rocked.

  I had never had anybody to have codes and secrets with before, or anybody to rock with, either, other than my dog. It really was kind of neat, doing fun things with a person, too.

  9

  Monday, Right After the Train Came

  My ears buzzed.

  I couldn’t see anything but white swirly dust and some smoke.

  The train-not-train—so loud.

  I think I yelled.

  Crumbly plaster fell into my mouth. I spat it out and then I got up, and it was raining on my head because I was outside but I wasn’t supposed to be outside. I was at school. Not outside. I was still standing in the hallway. Only some of it was gone. And the roof was gone. And a wall.

  “Class is outside now,” I said, but I couldn’t hear myself, because my ears—and that not-train, still close. Everything seemed so dark. And weirdly green, like the air had turned the color of spring grass.

  Something hit my leg. An arm. I stared at it. Its fingers wiggled, then the plaster carpet underneath the arm moved, and Springer sat up, all covered in white dust. He looked like a zombie from a scary movie. He leaned forward, and I thought he was coughing, but he threw up. Then he looked at me.

  My ears kept right on ringing. I wanted to laugh and then cry because Springer was okay, but my feelings were mushed flat like the gym. Run over by a train. Yes. That was it.

  I looked around. Lots of the plaster was moving. And then people seemed to be everywhere. Teachers. Students. Some covered in plaster. Some covered in cuts. There was blood. Too many bright things. Too many moving things. Too many hands and arms and legs attached to crying people. I couldn’t count them all. I couldn’t keep looking at them.

  It kept raining. The rain seemed cold. I wiped it off my face.

  Springer got up and stood beside me. His cheeks had little cuts on them and his eyes were wide like moons. My eyes felt moony, too, and my cheeks stung like they were cut. I leaned toward him to be sure he was real and not just me dreaming that Springer was fine and that I was fine and that we got run over by a train and lived.

  Springer’s lips moved. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I knew the words.

  Okay to hug?

  I nodded, and he hugged me with one arm. It sort of hurt, like I was made out of bruises.

  Coach got up next, and Jerkface, and other people, too.

  I squinted through the dust and the gray and the rain.

  “Toothpicks,” Springer said, and the word drifted into my brain along with all the buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and I knew what he meant.

  Looking out at Avery, Kentucky, from the hallway of our busted school, everything looked like toothpicks, pushed on top of each other. Big giant toothpicks made of tree pieces and building pieces and car pieces and dirt pieces and other stuff I couldn’t even name. That’s what was left of the town. A big black
cloud swirled and swirled, from clouds to the ground, and it was still moving.

  Dad . . .

  But Dad was probably okay, because the not-train hadn’t come from the direction of the senior high, and it was moving away from us, away from the place where Aunt Gus got her nails done, too.

  It was headed more toward—

  I froze, staring at the way the busted stuff made heaps on either side of a weird, twisty path of wet dirt. Springer got hold of my hand, and he looked where I did, at the new sort of road made by the train. The tornado.

  The tornado was headed more toward—it was headed—

  “Straight toward your house,” Springer said.

  “Jesse?” Dad’s voice called from somewhere behind me, but I didn’t answer.

  I let go of Springer, already moving, stumbling and falling over moving plaster and moving people, because my house, I didn’t care, I really didn’t, not about the house, let it all be gone, all of it, every brick, every fork and spoon and curtain, just not—

  Tears streamed out of my eyes and washed away in the rain as some teacher tried to grab me and hollered, “Stop! You can’t go running out there!”

  “Jesse!” Dad again.

  I pushed the teacher trying to snatch hold of my wrist, and then I was running before anybody could grab at me again, before Dad could get to me, and Springer was running beside me because he knew why, he knew, he knew, and I knew, and I cried, and I said it over and over and over and over.

  “Sam-Sam! I have to get to Sam!”

  10

  Wednesday, Five Days Earlier, Early Morning

  Your face looks better,” I told Springer.

  “Thanks.” He tapped three fingers against the edge of the now brownish-green bruise. “I looked up the real name for the bruise. Periorbital hematoma. That’s cool-sounding, right?”

  “Well, yeah.” I fiddled with the grapes in my hands. “Especially compared to black eye.”

  Morning sunlight worked its way into the September chill as Springer and I walked down Oak Lane, heading away from my house. I shifted the straps of my school-color green backpack. We hadn’t made it two blocks yet, and my shoulders already burned under the weight of my books, OBWIG’s investigative papers, an extra sweater, a throw blanket, several pairs of socks, snacks, and four bottles of water. It was only a mile or two to AJS, but since I had never walked to school before, and Springer was with me, I wanted to be prepared in case we needed anything.

  Springer didn’t seem as worried. He had on a blue jacket, and his backpack was a Darth Vader head. It didn’t look too full. When we got to the corner of Oak and Cedar, we stopped in front of a redbrick house that had fourteen flamingos and six gnomes in its sidewalk garden. I pointed ahead to our right. “We take a right on Cedar, left on Maple, then left on Spruce.”

  “Where the school is,” he said as I handed him a big, fat grape. “We should get there by six thirty. That’ll give us an hour to investigate before first bell.”

  Springer stared at his grape while I ate mine, savoring the sweet juice as it ran across my tongue. I loved fruit, any fruit. I ate another, and another, then realized Springer was still staring at his, to the point I had to grab his arm to keep him from veering off the sidewalk and strolling into traffic. Well, into the road. We’d only seen two cars since we left.

  “This isn’t a Frankenfood, right?” Springer managed to look up and keep himself on the sidewalk. “Mom doesn’t want me to eat genetically engineered stuff.”

  “It’s just a grape,” I assured him.

  “A big grape.” He touched it to his lips but pulled it back. Then he bit into it and chewed. When he swallowed, he held out his hand immediately. “Okay. It was great. Can I have another?”

  I pulled off a cluster and handed it to him.

  After he ate a few more, Springer said, “Dad was glad I was walking today. Said I was showing initiative.”

  “Okay.” I shivered, even though I wasn’t that cold. “Whatever that means. My dad and Aunt Gus . . . we have a deal that I won’t go more than a mile in any direction, which I guess I’m technically breaking this morning, since school is farther away from home than that.”

  Springer gave me a quick glance, then went back to staring straight ahead. His voice seemed a little too quiet when he asked, “You didn’t tell your dad and your aunt we were walking this morning?”

  “I left a note on the kitchen table,” I said, doing my best to sound like it was no big deal, only it was starting to feel like a big deal, especially since I’d had to give Sam lots of extra treats when I crated him early, and all of a sudden I missed him a lot and wished he were in my arms, except my backpack was really, seriously too heavy, so it was probably good I wasn’t carrying a dog, too. “Dad probably won’t see the note until he heads to my room to wake me up. That’ll be about half an hour from now. And he’ll still have to get dressed before he drives to school. So even if he wants to holler at me and ground me, it’ll take him a while.”

  Springer ate his grapes and didn’t say anything.

  Powered by the best purple fruit in the world, we walked fast. At least, I thought we were walking fast. I wasn’t sure what was normal for speed when people walked to school, since nobody ever let me do it. The air smelled wet, and like grass, too. Sometimes I caught a sniff of something like spice. Cinnamon, maybe, or wintergreen. Was that Springer smell? People had scents, or at least most of them did. I wondered what I smelled like. Was that something I could ask Springer, or would that not be tactful?

  Hanging out with other people was complicated.

  When we got to a wooden house that had twenty AJS-green shutters on the front and no flamingos anywhere in the yard, I stopped. I figured the house had windows in the back, but I couldn’t see them, so I couldn’t count those shutters. It bothered me that I didn’t have a definite green shutter tally. It had a lot of cars in the driveway, though. Seven. Some were parked on the grass.

  “It’s weird I never noticed flamingos and gnomes and shutters when we drive,” I said.

  Springer glanced from me to the house, then looked up at the street sign. “This is Maple. We’re supposed to turn left here, right? And yeah, I always see different things when I walk than when I’m in a car.”

  “Right, left,” I said. “Wait.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then I opened my eyes. “You are correct that we’re supposed to turn left here, but I have to take my pack off for a second.”

  I fought to lift the strap off my right shoulder enough to wriggle out of it, and I saw Springer look confused. He leaned over to help, then said, “Jeez. What did you put in here, Jesse? Rocks?”

  “Not gnomes.” I blew out a breath as Springer slid the weight off me. “Not flamingos. Not shutters. Springer, do I smell like anything?”

  He gave me another confused look as he lowered the pack to the ground, opened it, and stared inside. “A little like cigar smoke, and your dog, but mostly . . . cherries.” He poked around in the pack. “Four waters? Those are really heavy.”

  Cigar-Dog-Cherries.

  Well.

  As human scents went, that wasn’t all bad, right?

  “I thought we might need the waters,” I said. “I’ve never walked to school before, and I don’t really know why. It’s not that far. Why would Dad and Aunt Gus always use the car? I mean, half the reason Aunt Gus lives with us is so I can sleep a little later and then come home when our grade lets out instead of having to stay in after-school care and wait for Dad, since he always works late grading stuff and doing his lesson plans. I could have been walking all this time.”

  Springer took off his pack and handed it to me. “Here. You wear this one. I’ll wear yours.” He didn’t wait for my answer, but instead worked on the strap length until he could get my pack over his shoulders.

  I picked up Darth. Compared to my pack, Darth felt like his black-metal-print head was stuffed with feathers. “Do you think it’s because they thought I’d get lost, or all, I d
on’t know, absorbed in counting flamingos and gnomes and shutters?”

  Springer centered my heavy pack on his back. “Maybe they’re worried you’ll get mugged or hollered at or something. My mom says neighborhoods aren’t what they used to be, even in little towns like this one. She says people can be mean, and that money problems push even good folks to make bad decisions.”

  “Money problems.” I had heard people talking about stuff like that. We weren’t rich like people on television, but we didn’t really have money problems. At least, I didn’t think we did.

  “Yeah.” Springer looked at the house with all the cars, then pointed. “Like, maybe those people have a lot of people living with them so they can pay rent—and that helps them pay for the house. If they can’t pay for the house, a bank could take it away.”

  “I didn’t know banks took houses.”

  “Before we came here, a bank took ours,” Springer said. His cheeks colored up a little. “It made Mom upset, and Dad got really mad they wouldn’t wait for him to make money again after the bottom fell out of the construction market where we lived.”

  “The bottom fell out,” I echoed. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means Dad didn’t get to design and build houses anymore, because nobody could pay for them, so we lost our own house.”

  I wasn’t great with feelings, but I heard all the sad in Springer’s voice. “Did you like that house?”

  He shrugged. “It was the only place I had ever lived. For a while I was scared we wouldn’t get another home. But then Dad said the construction market was good here, and we moved. Our new house isn’t as big as the one we had to leave, but I like it okay.”

  “I’m sorry you had to move,” I told him. “But also glad, since I got to meet you.”

  “Same,” Springer said. Then he jerked his thumb toward the house with all the cars. “So if I weren’t with you, would you have gotten absorbed in counting all that stuff?”