I handed Chloe my very best effort.
“Not like a raccoon’s tail,” she remarked. She shook her head sadly, as if she were a teacher and I hopeless student.
“This is as ‘raccoon tail’ as I can do,” I said.
“All right.” She sighed. “If it’s your best work.”
Chloe, I had already decided, was a piece of work.
The McKinley twins were our neighbors, actually. Alex and I sometimes shoveled their driveway for their mom, who I guess was a single mother.
She paid twenty dollars, which was okay money.
The twins were a boy and a girl both with red hair and freckles. They had the kind of back-to-back freckles that overlap so they hardly had any other kind of skin, just a bit of white peeping through the thick be- freckling.
At five years old, they were the youngest kids, and they were the smallest by far. Their mom was small herself, and the kids were just tiny. Perfectly formed but, like, knee high. Neither of them spoke much, but I guess Caroline talked a little more than Henry. They were just completely adorable, to use a word that is most often used by girls and maiden aunts.
I did not really save the best for last because Batiste, the lone second grader, was a real handful. He looked vaguely Asian and had glossy black hair that was cut very close to his head, like a brush.
For one thing, Batiste was from a very religious family, so he considered himself the authority on sinning. I had already overheard him reprimand Brayden for cursing (“Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a sin!”), tattle on Chloe for pushing Ulysses (“Shoving is a sin!”), and inform the other little kids that not saying grace before eating was a sin (“Before we eat, God wants us sinners to give thanks!”).
He was always watching everyone, waiting for them to screw up, so he could point it out. A real charming quality, I tell you. I guess being a little self-important know-it-all was not considered a sin by his people.
The other two kids from the grammar school bus were my brother, Alex, and Sahalia.
Sahalia was advanced, for an eighth grader. She had a very cutting-edge idea of fashion. Even I, someone who had worn sweatsuits and only sweatsuits to school until seventh grade, can identify someone with style when I see one. On the day this all went down, she was wearing tight jeans held together up one side with safety pins and a leather vest of some kind over a tank top. She also had a leather jacket—a big one, much too big for her, lined with red-checkered material. She was three years younger but far, far cooler than me.
Many people were cooler than me. I didn’t hold it against her.
It looked like she’d gotten into the makeup section. I swear when we first arrived at the store, she didn’t have any on. But now her eyes were lined with black and she had on very red lip gloss.
She was kneeling up on the booth seat next to where Brayden and Jake were eating. She was sort of watching them eat and trying to be a part of their group at the same time. It was a sort of a sideways approach to being included in a clique. You get near them, and hope they’ll invite you in.
No such doing for Sahalia.
Brayden looked up at her and said, “We’re trying to talk. Do you mind?”
Sahalia slipped away and went to hang out near Astrid. She walked like she didn’t care. Like it was her plan to go to the counter all along. I had to admire her slouch.
Niko was eating alone.
I should have invited him to sit with Alex and me, but by the time I’d gotten the slushies made, and remade in Chloe’s case, the pizza was done. I was hungry enough to forget my manners.
Alex and I wolfed down our first pieces of pizza. The square, heavy Pizza Shack pizza had never tasted so good. I licked the red sauce from my fingers and Alex got up to get us seconds.
By the time he came back, though, I was watching Josie.
She was sitting sideways in her booth, with her back to the wall. Mrs. Wooly had wiped her face and hands clean, but Josie still had dried blood on her arms and her body and the space blanket was sticking to it in places. She was still wearing her old clothes. I felt bad for her; here we were all having a nice pizza lunch, and she was clearly still back on the bus.
I took my pizza over to her and sat opposite her in her booth.
“Josie,” I said quietly. “I got some pizza for you. Come on, Josie. Food will make you feel better.”
She just looked at me and shook her head. One of her giraffe hair bumps had come unrolled and the hair was sort of listing and drooping over, like a broken branch.
“Have one bite,” I bargained. “One bite and I’ll leave you alone.”
She turned her face toward the wall.
“Well, it’s here if you want it,” I said.
Astrid slid a large tray with some Sicilian pepperoni out of the oven. I was still somewhat hungry, so I went to the counter.
“Like pepperoni?” she asked me.
My heart was pounding.
“Yeah,” I said. Suave.
“Here you go,” she said, putting one on a paper plate.
“Thanks,” I said. Real suave.
Then I turned and walked away.
And that was my second conversation with Astrid. At least this time I responded.
I was walking back to my booth when we all heard the rumble of a machine. A heavy, rolling, clanking sound.
“What’s that?” Max stammered.
Three heavy metal gates were rolling down over the gaping hole at the front of the store. One, two, three, side by side they descended. The two on the sides covered the windows. The center one was a bit bigger and covered the entire space of what had been the sliding doors.
The gate was perforated so we could still get air and see out, but it was kind of scary.
We were being locked in.
The little kids lost it. “What’s happening?” “We’re trapped!” “I want to go home!” That kind of thing.
Niko just stood, watching the gate come down.
“We should like get something under it. To like wedge it open,” Jake shouted.
He grabbed a shopping cart and rolled it forward, under the central gate.
But the gate dropping just pushed the cart out of the way.
The three gates settled with a heavy
“We’re locked in,” I said.
“And everyone else is locked out,” Niko said quietly.
“All right,” Jake said, clapping his hands. “Which one of you little punks is gonna teach me how to play Chutes and Ladders?”
Alex came up beside me and tugged at my shirt.
“Dean,” he said, “wanna go to the Media Department with me?”
All the bigtabs in the Media Department were dead, of course. They ran off the Network, just like our minitabs. But Alex found the one old-fashioned flat-screen TV. It was hung down low, near to the floor, off to the side.
I’d never really understood why anyone would want to buy a plain television, when bigtabs were only just a little more expensive and you could watch TV on a bigtab and use it to browse and text and Skype and ’book and game and a million other useful things. But every big store kept a couple televisions on display and now I knew why. They worked without National Connectivity. They were picking up some kind of television-only signals. And though the screen was kind of grainy and stripy at times, we watched eagerly.
Alex turned it to CNN.
The rest of our group filed over, drawn, I guess, by the sound of live media.
