“You were awesome. Both of…” I trailed off. My parents were elbowing through the still-anxious crowd towards us. Two others did the same: the woman who’d given the announcement earlier, and Ahmed, Samira’s brother-in-law. Neither looked happy.
“Did you like the show?” I asked innocently.
“That was not appropriate,” the woman said.
“I made sure the language was fine for kids. Can’t people use a distraction?”
Ahmed eyed me sharply. “Keeping order in a place like this is difficult enough without”—he gestured at the tables—“this.”
“Especially after news like today’s!” the woman added. “Any other time would’ve been fine, but this… this was…”
“Don’t do it again,” Ahmed said.
“We’re doing it again, right?” I asked the sisters in line for lunch the next day.
Things had quieted down since the announcement that the water levels had stabilised and our air vents were no longer underwater.
We had air. But we were just as stuck, and just as hungry. The flood had left something tense and restless and scared in the atmosphere. It was one thing to wait—it was another thing to wait without knowing what you were waiting for, without knowing when or if or how it would even come.
I wanted to do more than wait.
“We totally are.” Vera nodded vehemently. “Yesterday was great, but we can do better.”
“You just want applause,” Ginta teased.
My head snapped up at a commotion further down the line. Not that we had a “line”—more of an uncoordinated mess of people, with those who’d already gotten their food disappearing into a hall on the right, and everyone else pressing closer to the counters where volunteers were putting marks by our names and handing out our rations.
Near those counters, people were pushing and shouting. The rest of us surged back. I grabbed Vera to steady myself. There had been other scuffles—mostly people mad at others cutting in line—but the handful of volunteers standing on chairs and overlooking the hall kept an eye on those.
“’Scuse me? Sir?” I asked in English, tugging at the sleeve of the man ahead of us. “What’s going on? We can’t understand them.”
“Nothing to worry about.” He stared across the crowd with a frown. “I think there’s a woman who got a different lunch from everyone else. They’re saying she might’ve—ah—bribed people.”
“I thought lots of people get different rations,” I said. “If they have some sort of condition.”
The man offered a sympathetic smile. “That might be it.” He winced—as did the three of us—at a particularly loud shout. “But, well… they can’t exactly get special meals once they leave, either. It’s kind of a waste, isn’t it?”
He turned back as the line surged forwards. I watched him fade into the crowd, and was still biting my lip when Vera said, “Same song, or did you have something else in mind?”
Afterwards, I spoke to Samira—who seemed glad to answer questions other than about what her fiancé had seen outside—and asked whether she’d be able to check for hydrocephalus better than my parents and I could.
“Not without equipment. Do you have a headache? Nausea?”
“Not really.” I hesitated. “I wanted to know. In case.”
“How’s the pain?”
“Not gone, but so much better. But let’s talk about something else”—I gave a quick drumroll and ba-tish on an imaginary drumset—“can I extend a personal invitation for my show later today?”
After a few hours of practice, we performed “The Yes and the No”, which the sisters knew almost by heart, and which people in the hall knew, too. I assumed they did, anyway: some mouthed along, and others looked up, surprised, as though they’d heard their name being called.
“Again?” someone shouted. “Do you even realise—”
Conveniently, my next line had the word jackass. I placed extra emphasis on it.
I didn’t know whether I expected applause this time. But when Samira—standing a dozen feet from the stage—started whooping and bouncing at the end of the song, I couldn’t help a crooked smile.
Others hesitantly joined in. A few claps. A shout, “Nice!”
One person called out, “Are you that singer from Lithuania?”
“Latvia!” I shouted back. “And damn right I am. So are these two!” I swept an arm at Vera and Ginta.
Samira put her hands by her mouth and let out another whoop, though that wasn’t enough to distract me from a pissed-off Ahmed stalking closer. He threw up his hands. “Come on. We asked you—”
“—to not perform right after bad news.” I let Mum help me climb down. “You did say any other time would’ve been okay.”
“Will you perform again?” While my parents and I stood in line for dinner, a lanky woman by Dad’s side had kept glancing over. It looked like she’d finally scrounged up the courage to say something.
“You think we should?” I asked. My publicist would’ve been proud. Turn back the question, keep your fans involved. If I weren’t stuck with a hundred others in a sweat-stenched, candlelit hall, waiting for a meal that would’ve barely passed as a healthy snack last year, I’d almost have felt like I was backstage in the Arēna Rīga again, signing autographs for eager fans.
“It’s not really my kind of music. It’s not bad… just… just young. But my daughter was in line for the bathroom at the time, and she was so mad she missed it.”
“We’ll do another one,” I promised.
“Oh! She’ll be thrilled. Let us know when?” She gave the location of their cots. “I’m Mandy, by the way.”
“Line seems to be moving faster,” Dad observed, in English so as to not be rude.
Mandy nodded, glancing from him to me as if confirming we were together. “They split things up. Parents with young kids have a separate line. So do people with different diets. And I think they asked anyone over fifty-five, or who can’t handle crowds, to wait until after eight thirty to get in line.”
“About time they figured that out,” Dad said.
“‘Can’t handle crowds’? Oh, come on,” a woman on the other side of Mandy scoffed. “I heard they’re even delivering special meals to the med bay.”
“Well, people are in there for a reason.” Mum scrunched up her nose. “I heard there was a fight at lunch about a different diet. That must be why they split us up.”
“It’s such nonsense. Special diets? Come on. It’s the end of the damn world. If even one percent of us ends up surviving, I’d call it a win.”
I was glad to be hidden from the woman’s sight behind my parents. She was right, of course. That was the whole problem.
She was right.
Dad didn’t seem so convinced. Before he could say anything, the woman continued, on a roll. “I don’t like it either, but you know those people will die within a week of setting foot outside. A day! What’s the point in coddling them? We don’t have enough food for everyone. We should set priorities, right? Focus on people with half a chance of surviving? I mean, look at those sick girls wasting energy on silly teen music—like there aren’t more important—”
“Sick?” Dad said.
Silly? I mouthed.
Mandy stepped back, as if out of the line of fire.
“Well, you know! One of them was missing her arm. Another one, she could barely walk, and her shoulders were all…” I imagined the woman dropping one shoulder to form an uneven line.