Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (32 page)

She patted my foot again. “I talked to him a little while ago. We’re cool,” she said.

“Omigod!” I clapped my hands over my face. “Omigod! What did you
say
?”

“I told him pretty much what I told you. Oh, and that the condoms are stored under my bathroom sink.”

She kept talking about how many condoms she had and where she’d bought them and why she hid them
instead of displaying them in the dining room but I was pretty much stroking out. I’d never before lost the power of speech. I was not a goldfish in an aquarium, I was a goldfish in a Baggie, gasping for oxygen in stale, poopy water, getting carried and shaken and killed minute by excruciating minute at an elementary school fun night.

It shouldn’t be physically possible to
swallow my tongue and puke at the same time, yet my body did its darnedest to test the hypothesis.

“Why do you look so shocked?” Mom asked, finally noticing her first-born child about to go into a seizure.

“Seriously? We are having
this
conversation, and then you tell me you also had it with the guy I like. You told him where to find your
condoms
, and then you ask me why I look
shocked
?”

“I’ve always been a realist, Violet. I’ve never shielded you and Sara from bad news or banned books or any of that stuff. This is life.
Your life. I always want you to be prepared with the information you need to make good decisions. I know it seems personal, but this conversation is about making good decisions, because you’re getting old enough, and our situation could get strange enough, you might bear a lot of responsibility if you make bad ones.”

I sighed. “
Okay, Mom. Great. I got it.” I reached out to give her a hug. No matter if the topic mortified me, in the big picture, my ever-involved mother expected me to make my own choices and live with them, which bordered on revolutionary.

“How was Boone when you talked to him?”
I asked, not too proud to get info in whatever way I could.

“Polite. He apologized again.”

“Do you think I should go down?” I asked. The bedrock beneath Indiana might be shifting as profoundly as Yellowstone’s if I was asking my mom for advice.

“Hmm,” she hummed. “I’d probably wait until tomorrow morning. I think the Perch family has about worn him out today.”
 

 

My phone chirped in the middle of the night. Charging. The faint whir of ceramic heaters sighed through the house. Why ceramic heaters? Mom wanted to save the fuel oil and firewood, so the electric heaters stood poised to run at every opportunity. I met her, bleary eyed, in the laundry room and sent her back to bed. I loaded up enough dirty towels to make the washer groan.

I flopped onto the couch
—the scene of the interruptus—ready to swap loads every hour, on the hour.

Text to Mia:

 

I showered
before sunrise, after the water heater’d had a few hours to work its magic. Tranquil with the steam of the shower and the warmth of the house, I returned to the couch with a cup of hot coffee made the easy way—in the drip coffee maker. The morning newsreel showed a cluster of fat silver pipes jutting out of the ground then running parallel to a blue metal building.

I heard Boone in the kitchen but decided not to pounce on him. He came out with
a steaming mug to sit with a definite buffer between us.

The broadcaster
warned to expect rolling blackouts for the foreseeable future, and not only from weaknesses in the grid. Forty percent of electricity generated came from coal-powered plants, and forty percent of the coal came from—or used to come from—Wyoming. The second most commonly used fuel, natural gas, fared a little better with the top producers being Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, power outages interrupted the flow of gas. Some stations generated their own electricity with generators fueled by the natural gas itself.

“Shouldn’t have taken a genius to figure that out,” I commented
during a commercial. I blew on my lukewarm coffee.

“
We Americans have felt invincible for a long time,” he said.

“Speaking of invincible, I’ve been meaning to ask about Cramer. Have you heard anything from him since we left school?” I asked, hoping to ease back into normalcy with some small talk.

Boone rubbed one of his eyes sleepily. “Umm, his dad showed up at his apartment last week and made him come home. I don’t think he put up much of a fight. He’d run out of easy mac.”

“No diploma?”

“I think we’re all pretty much out of luck on that front.”

An
advertisement for a greenhouse kit blared from the TV at twice the volume of the normal program. “Hey, look. We could be marketing what Mom put in the front yard.”

He sipped at his java
.

I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about her walking in yesterday. And then coming to talk to you about it. That was probably even worse.”

He turned his head, finally willing to look at me. His hair pressed flat where he’d slept on it, and the wrinkle of a pillowcase indented his cheek. “Let’s sort of…forget about it, if we can. Starting at the point where she walked in, I mean. I wish I could burn that moment out of my head with a cattle prod. I’ll keep remembering the earlier part, though.”

A bubble of happiness rose up in me. “
Sounds like a good plan. I’m good with the cattle prod plan.”

He nodded. His grim expression told me he hadn’t forgotten any of it.

The news came back on with video footage of a hundred-car pileup on Route 80 in Iowa. Boone leaned forward. All the cars looked the same, bent hulks of metal dusted with ash. I scooted across the couch to put my hand on his back.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” I whispered. “They should already be at the cousin’s house, right?”

“Yes, but they haven’t called like Mom promised. The phone at the number they gave me gives a busy signal.”
 

 

Mom checked on Grandma and Grampa in the morning then cooked a pile of food while our oven and stove worked. Sara and I kept the laundry going and half-heartedly cleaned the gritty floors. Boone worked on the solar power project.

We
’d settled in to a luscious lunch of steaming creamy tomato soup and grilled cheese when Mom muttered, “Who in the world is that?” A pickup truck stopped on the driveway near the big spring. A middle-aged man and a woman climbed out and made no secret of their interest in the stream of water.