Maybe he just got swept up in the good feeling. Or maybe he was trying to take care of me and be a leader. I didn’t care if it was a put-on. It was good to feel normal for a moment.
“Hey, Jake,” I said. “Sorry about the puke.”
“Man, don’t think another thing about it,” he said.
I tossed him the sweatshirt Alex had gotten for me from the racks out in the Greenway.
“Here,” I said. “I picked it out just for you. It’ll go nice with your eyes.”
Jake laughed with a start. I had surprised him.
Brayden laughed, too.
Then our laughter chuckled along until it got completely out of hand, until we were all gulping air, tears in eyes.
It hurt my throat, which was still raw from the smoke, but Jake and Brayden and me, we laughed for a long time.
After we had changed, Mrs. Wooly held a kind of a makeshift assembly.
“It’s maybe eight or nine,” she told us. “The Network is still down and I’m a little worried about our friend Josie here. I think she’s in shock, so she’ll probably come around in a day or two. But it might be something more serious.”
We all looked at Josie, who stared back at us with a weird, detached interest, as if we were people whose faces and names she couldn’t quite place.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Mrs. Wooly continued. “I’m going to walk on over to the ER and get some help.”
A chunky little girl named Chloe started to cry.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Take us home! I want my nana!”
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wooly told her. “The bus has two flat tires. I can’t take you anywhere. I’ll be back with help lickety-split.”
Chloe didn’t look at all satisfied with this answer, but Mrs. Wooly went on.
“And look here, kids, your parents are going to have to pay the store back for whatever you guys use, so go easy. This ain’t Christmas.
“I’ve decided to put Jake Simonsen in charge. He’s the boss until I get back. For now, Sahalia and Alex, I want you to go and help the little kids pick out some good games and puzzles from the Toy Department.”
The little kids cheered, especially Chloe, who made a big show of jumping up and down and clapping her chubby little hands. She seemed a little fickle, emotion-wise. And a little annoying.
Sahalia sighed with irritation and got to her feet.
“Why do I have to do everything?” she complained.
“Because these guys nearly died and you didn’t,” Mrs. Wooly snapped.
The grammar school kids went off to the Toy section.
“Look,” Mrs. Wooly told us big kids after they had gone. “The ER’s not too far. I can probably walk it in a half hour to an hour. I might get a ride, which would mean I’ll be back much quicker. Keep Josie hydrated and every so often ask her what year it is. What’s her name? What kind of, I don’t know, pop does she like? Cookies. That kind of thing.”
She ran her hand through her wiry gray hair. Her gaze drifted past us, to the entrance to the store and the broken sliding-glass doors.
“And if people come, don’t leave here with anyone but your parents. Promise me that. Right now, you guys are my responsibility.
“And—not that I think there is going to be—but if there’s any rioting or looting or anything, you guys get all the kids together here in this pizza area, and you just stay together. Big kids on the outside and just stay together. You got me?”
Now I understood why she had sent the younger kids away. She didn’t want them to hear about a riot.
“Now, Mrs. Wooly?” Jake said. “What do we do if the people from the store come?” He gestured toward the damaged bus sitting in the midst of the empty shopping carts in the entrance foyer. “They’re gonna be pissed.”
“You’ll tell them that it was an emergency and the school board will take care of the damages.”
“I can make us lunch if need be,” Astrid said. “I actually know how to run the ovens in the Pizza Shack because I had a job here last summer.”
I knew she’d had a job at Greenway. It had been a summer that involved a lot of superstore browsing for me.
“A hot lunch!” said Mrs. Wooly. “Now you’re talking.”
The little kids came back with board games.
Mrs. Wooly got ready to go.
I went to the Office Supply section and picked out an eight-dollar pen and the nicest, most expensive, executive-brand notebook on the shelf. I sat down right there and started writing. I had to get the hailstorm down while it was fresh in my memory.
I’ve always been a writer. Somehow, just writing something down makes anything that happens seem okay. I sit down to write, all jammed up and stressed out, and by the time I stand up, everything is in the right place again.
I like to write actual longhand, in a spiral notebook. I can’t explain it, but I can think on the page in a way I can’t do on a tablet. But I know that writing by hand for anything beyond a quick note is weird, seeing as we’re all taught to touch-type in kindergarten.
Brayden stopped and watched me for a moment.
“Writing by hand, Geraldine?” he said with scorn. “Real quaint.”
We all lined up to say good-bye to Mrs. Wooly at the entrance to the store. The sky had returned to its normal resting shade of crisp blue clear. Like my mom used to say, “Colorado skies just can’t be beat.”
The hail was a foot deep most everywhere. At places where there was an incline, the hail had run off somewhat, depositing itself into huge drifts.
You would think it would have been fun to play in—like the outdoors was a giant ball pit. But the big chunks of hail, they had bumps and lumps and stuff stuck inside them like rocks and twigs. They were sharp and dirty, and no one wanted to go out and play. We stayed in the store.
There were a couple of cars in the parking lot. They looked absurd, all crunched in, like a giant had taken a hammer to them. Mrs. Wooly’s bus had sustained a lot less damage.
“If all the cars in town look like that,” Alex said to me, “we’re going to be walking home.”
I thought about walking home right then. I could have just waited until Mrs. Wooly left and then went home. But she’d told us to stay and I followed directions, and also, Astrid Heyman was at the Greenway, not at our dull, cookie-cutter house on Wagon Trail Lane.
The names of the streets in our development were all like that. Wagon Gap Trail, Coyote Valley Court, Blizzard Valley Lane…
I have to say that never once did I walk down our street and mistake it for a country lane cutting through some frontier prairie. Who, exactly, did the developers think they were fooling?
I could hear distant sirens. There were some pillars of smoke rising up in other places. A column of smoke was still rising from our burnt-out bus so I had a pretty good idea what the others were from.
I remember thinking that our town had really taken a beating. I wondered if we’d get some National Crisis assistance. We’d seen images of the San Diegans receiving boxes of clothes and toys and food after the earthquake in ’21. Maybe now that would be us and our town would be besieged by the media.
Mrs. Wooly was taking nothing more than a pack of cheap cigarettes and a pair of knee-high rain boots.
Brayden stepped forward.
“Mrs. Wooly, my dad works at NORAD. If you can get a message to him, I’m sure he can send a van or something to get us.”
I was probably the only one who rolled my eyes. Probably.
“That’s good thinking, Brayden,” Mrs. Wooly said in her gravelly voice. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
