She looked us over.
“Now, you kids listen to Jake. He’s in charge. Astrid’s gonna make you all a nice pizza lunch.”
She stepped through the door frame and out into the parking lot. She took a few steps forward, then turned to her right, looking at something on the ground we could not see. She seemed to recoil, gagging a bit.
Then she turned and said, with force, “Now go on inside. Go on! Don’t come out here. It’s not safe. Get inside.
She shooed us back in with her hands.
Mrs. Wooly had such authority, we all did what she said.
But out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jake step out to see what it was that she’d seen.
“You too, Simonsen,” Mrs. Wooly said. “This ain’t a peep show. Get back in there.”
Jake walked toward us, scratching his head. He looked sort of pale.
“What?” Brayden asked. “What’s out there?”
“There’s some bodies out there. Looks like a couple of Greenway employees,” Jake told us quietly. “I don’t know why they went out there in the hailstorm, but they sure are dead now. They’re all mashed up. Bones sticking out all over the place. I’ve never seen anything like it. Except maybe for that mess back on the bus.”
He took a deep breath and shivered.
“Tell you one thing,” Jake said, looking at me and Brayden. “We’re staying inside till she comes back.”
CHAPTER THREE
METAL GATE
“Who likes pizza?” Astrid yelled.
The little kids answered with a chorus of emphatic me’s, their arms shooting up like it was a hand-raising competition.
“Pizza party! Pizza party!” they chanted.
Their excitement was catchy and Astrid looked beautiful talking to them, hearing about their favorite kinds of pizza, with the wind picking up the tendrils of her hair and bringing a flush to her cheeks.
Listen, the tragedy of the day and the destruction of our town wasn’t lost on me—and I was worried about my parents and my friends and how the hail might have affected them—but I will admit that I savored being near Astrid.
My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon-painted letters that spell out MANIFEST. The idea was if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be—if you just envisioned it long enough—it would come into being.
But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Lewis Palmer High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it.
Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blond ringlets, June sky–blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.
Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.
And I wasn’t. I was one of those guys who had stayed short too long. Everyone else sprang up in seventh and eighth grade but I just stayed kid-size through those years—the Brayden-hair-gel years. Then, last summer, I’d grown, like, six inches or something. My mom delighted in my absurd growth spell, buying me new clothes basically every other week. My bones ached at night and my joints creaked sometimes, like a senior citizen’s.
I’d entered the school year with some hope, actually, that now I was of average—even above-average— height, I might rejoin society at an, um, higher level. I know it’s crass to talk about popularity outright, but remember, I’d had a thing for Astrid for a long, long time. I wanted to be near her and working my way into her circle of friends seemed the only way.
I thought my height might do the trick. Sure I was skinny as a rail, but still, my inventory of looks had improved: green eyes—good asset. Ash-colored hair—okay. Height—no longer a problem. Build—needed major improvement. Glasses—a drag, but contacts gave me chronic conjunctivitis, which looked a lot worse than glasses, and I couldn’t get Lasik until I stopped growing, so that was out for a while. Teeth and skin—fair. Clothes—sort of a wreck but getting better.
I thought I had a chance but the sum total of our communication to date were the two words she’d said to me on the bus:
And I hadn’t.
We all went back inside and Astrid got the Pizza Shack oven going and turned on the slushie maker.
Josie was still sitting in a booth, wrapped in her space blanket. I headed toward the soda dispensers to get her a drink, but I saw that she already had two Gatorades and a water on the tabletop in front of her.
The slushie maker was too high up for the little kids to reach, so after watching them jumping up to try to reach the handles in a cute but utterly futile way, I went over and offered to make each kid whatever kind of slushie they wanted.
They cheered.
They had never known you could combine the flavors, so they were impressed with the layered slushies I made for them.
“This is the best slushie I ever had!” gushed a towheaded first grader named Max. He had a preposterous cowlick in the back of his head that made his hair stand up like a little blond fan.
“I had a lot of slushies in my life ’cause my dad’s a long-distance trucker and he’s always takin’ me on the road,” Max continued. “I probly had slushies in every state of America. One time my dad took me out of school for a week and he almost took me into Mexico but then my mom called him and said he’d better haul me back on up to Monument before she called the cops on him!”
I liked Max. I like a kid who holds nothing back.
One kid was Latino. I put him at about first grade, maybe kindergarten. He was chubby and jolly looking.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
He just smiled at me. He had two big holes where his top front teeth should have been.
“
He said something that sounded all the world to me like, “You listen.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“You listen,” he said, nodding.
“Okay, I listen.”
“No, no,” he said.
“His name is You-list-ease,” said Max, trying to help. “He’s in first grade with me.”
“You-list-ease?” I repeated.
The Mexican kid said his name again.
And suddenly I got it. “Ulysses! His name is Ulysses!”
The Spanish pronunciation, let me tell you, sounds a lot different than the English.
Ulysses was now grinning like he’d won the lottery.
“Ulysses! Ulysses!”
A tiny, hardscrabble victory for him and me: Now I knew his name.
Chloe was the third grader who had been whining when Mrs. Wooly said she was going for help. Chloe was chubby and tan and very energetic. I made her a blue-and-red-striped slushie, like she wanted. However, it was not good enough for her.
“The stripes are too thick!” she complained. “I want it like a raccoon tail.”
But it turns out it’s really hard to make a slushie with thin stripes, as I discovered after five or six tries.
