Lucy was totally disoriented, forgetting where she was and what had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours. She reached out to silence her alarm clock and felt nothing but air where her bedside table was supposed to be. She tried to tug her comforter around her body, but the fabric slid off and wouldn’t cover her shoulders or reach her feet.
“Mom?” she called and then she cleared her throat and sat up. Rubbing her eyes, she looked around and recognized the journalism room and her brain began to make sense of their surroundings. Tossing the flimsy Spartan-themed sweatshirt to the floor, she put her feet on the tile. For a moment she sat with her head in her hands as her stomach growled, and she put her hand over it to silence it.
It didn’t take long to reconnect to her reality. She was in the journalism lab at school and she had been sleeping on the couch, there was a hole in the roof, and outside the world was dying. She was cold and shivering, hungry and confused, and to make matters worse, she was alone.
Grant and Salem were not asleep in a corner of the room and they were not awake and waiting for her. If they even came back to the room that evening and had seen her sleeping, she didn’t know, but they weren’t there now and the anxiousness and heaviness in her chest felt oppressive and unmanageable. The terror of day two was here and Lucy woke up abandoned.
Lucy stood up and stretched. For good measure, she walked to the computer and tried to refresh the Internet pages, check on the status of the world, but it was futile. Not only would the news pages not refresh, they simply did not exist.
They were off the grid.
She tried to check her feed. Nothing. In that moment, more than any other, Lucy felt her brain grow fuzzy from the realization that she was cut-off. There was no way to connect with the outside world and without the news, status updates, feeds, her endless salvo of human contact would come to an end. Now she realized how much she needed Salem and Grant, without them she would be left with only her overactive brain.
She hurried back over to her pants and found her phone in working order, but empty. Void and lifeless. Not a message, not single a notification. And to top everything off, her battery life was diminishing fast. With a fast-building fury, Lucy tossed the phone to the couch and let out a primal growl.
It was then she heard the journalism door slide open. In the silence of the morning, it was impossible to disguise the subtle squeak and she spun her head toward the sound and eyed a tentative Salem poking her head through the doorway, the rest of her body planted in the hallway. Salem’s eyes were wide with worry, but Lucy recognized the look—it was not the fearful expression of someone expecting to find a dead body, but the hesitant mien of someone who was guilty and afraid of being yelled at.
“Good morning,” Lucy said, her words clipped and dripping with as much sarcasm as she could muster. She would not yell at Salem, but she didn’t feel like acting particularly warm toward her either. Salem looked behind her, nodded to an unseen lurker and then ventured inside—she was frowning as she walked back over to the couch. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair matted in the back; her lips were void of her trademark lip-gloss. Salem collapsed upon the couch and leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her hand found an errant thread, and she began to pull at it mindlessly.
“I’m alive,” Lucy said. “Not what you were expecting?”
Salem’s face collapsed and she tipped her body over on the couch and she let out a giant, far-reaching wail. Lucy rushed over and sat herself down beside her and stroked her hair. All her plans for stoic and coldhearted responses leaked out of her and Lucy felt only compassion for her crying friend. It was, she supposed, a consistent reaction based on the last few days; there was comfort in knowing what was expected of her.
“Lo siento. Lo siento,” Salem said over and over. She sat up and her eyes were bright red, a thin stream of snot dripped from her right nostril and she let it fall until it passed her lip. “Forgive me. Please?”
Lucy looked down. Then she took Salem’s hand and held it. “I didn’t leave this school for you. I stayed with you.”
“I know, I know,” Salem said. “I was afraid. I can’t lose you Lucy don’t you see? I’ve got nothing else.”
She sat up. She had wrapped the thread around her index finger until the skin around it turned white.
“Yesterday, when I woke up, my dad was just hovering over my mom. He was just screaming at me and screaming and I didn’t understand. And I ran to call 9-1-1 and the recording said that the hold time was over an hour to reach a dispatcher,” Salem looked at Lucy, pleading. “He wouldn’t let me near her. All I wanted to do was just touch her...feel her for myself. But he just grabbed me and shoved me.”
She grabbed her shirt and lowered it over her shoulder, exposing her collarbone, where a deep purple bruise in an abstract shape materialized. When she was sure Lucy had seen it, she pulled her shirt back up, hiding the pain. Knife wounds, colorful bruises: Salem’s adventures seemed so violent compared to her own. Here was her friend and every comfort in her life had been violated.
“Whatever happened to you yesterday…you didn’t see your own parent scared, Lucy. I could just see it all over his face, this fear...this total fear. And I said, ‘Papa, que pasa? Que pasa?’ And he just sat down. In the middle of the floor. Sat down. He sobbed and sobbed because she was already gone…Lucy…there was nothing we could do. She was gone and he thought I was next. But dear God, I wasn’t next. And there’s no way you can understand that.”
From somewhere outside, they heard a crash and a boom. The boom shook the school and the leftover plastic on the skylight rattled.
The girls jumped. Lucy picked the sweatshirt up off the ground and wrapped it around Salem.
“I was afraid.”
“I know,” Lucy answered.
“Don’t let me watch you die.”
“That’s out of my control.” Lucy didn’t say it meanly, but she realized as the words left her mouth that it was the truth. Nothing was safe.
“I can’t watch you die,” Salem said and she grabbed Lucy’s hands.
“I’m not going to die,” she said and she smiled to help cover the unease she felt in saying it out loud. She wondered if it was like birthday wishes: Saying it out loud ruined the chance of it happening.
“It’s just us now,” Salem continued. “It’s always been us and now it’s just us.” Then she looked over to the wall and smiled. “Well, us and Grant Trotter.”
Lucy leaned her head back. “Strange,” she muttered. “Grant Trotter.”
“Strange,” Salem echoed.
In a swift motion, Salem tucked her feet up under Lucy, connecting their bodies in a tangle of limbs.
It was an apology.
Lucy accepted and she reciprocated by lifting her right leg and laying it over Salem’s body. She reached over and tried to untangle a mass of her hair with her fingers, but she didn’t get very far; her fingers latched themselves into Salem’s waves and got stuck, so she released her grip and then tried to smooth her own hair instead.
“And where is Grant?” Lucy asked. “And how long did I sleep? Did I miss anything?”
Salem gave a half-chuckle and closed her eyes. “Did you miss anything?” She repeated the phrase, amused. “Let’s see…Kelsey asked Domo to the prom and that made Kevin Yourn, you know, from ninth grade bio, really mad because he’d been planning to ask Kelsey. Made a video to put online. But she jumped the gun…poor Kevin.”
“You don’t say.”
“Mercedes works at Safeway and told me that she ran into Mr. Russo there and he had Magnum extra large condoms in his cart.”
“That’s really gross.”
“And…I know this is going to come as a huge shock,” Salem said in a calm voice, “but I spent the night with someone last night.”