Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (8 page)

He held his hands out to his side
s. “RAs can’t get involved with students in the same dorm. School rule.”

At my suspicious over-the-
shoulder glare, he walked in front of me. “I swear if I could say yes, I would.”

At that moment, I believed him
, though freshman year ended with no more real conversations. I decided he’d been trying to let me down easily. Because that’s the kind of guy he was. Nice. A rule-follower. Ladies first, and boys don’t make girls cry.

My flashback ended when
Cappy Hates You! blared to life with enough volume to give my breastbone sympathetic vibrations. I turned away to re-read the texts from Boone and find the cube of moldy cheese Mia’d made me think was there.

Doubt
lifted. He’d voluntarily checked in with me tonight, given me an update on his day, told me to B safe. I was going to consider his contact a good sign and accept he took his work responsibilities seriously. Couldn’t hate him for that.
 

 

We studied together in his room on Sunday afternoon while rain poured outside. Afternoon textbooks led to ordering Chinese food we ate sitting cross-legged on his bed, laughing about the fortunes in the cookies.

Boone’s said,
“You broke my cookie.”

Mine said,
“Rivers need springs.”

“Are you kidding?” I muttered. “We have a couple of springs around our house. Ugh. Here, you got mine by accident,” I insisted, shoving it at him. “I don’t want any reminders of Indiana.”

“No way. I don’t have any springs, just a bunch of watering troughs.”

I tried to force the slip of paper into the pocket of his T-shirt, and we ended up kissing. He reached
behind him to shut the door for ten minutes of privacy before, by unspoken agreement, we stopped and sort of gazed at each other. It sounds sappy but I could tell he really liked me by the way he looked at me, by the way his hand curved over my ribcage but didn’t stray north or south.

I imagined myself a rebel, a girl who wanted to run with the bulls, but I had to admit
we were moving glacially slow by college relationship standards. Nothing felt forced with Boone. We’d “talked” for three weeks at a comfortable, steady pace with no particular goal except “talking” the next time. We held hands and kissed and both wanted more without the rush, which suited my whole inability-to-show-affection hang-up.

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I thought he
might be about to say something when a freshman whom I would kill later knocked on the door.

“Duty calls,” he said
with an apologetic, playful wink.

The next
Friday, September 13th, I walked into geology class still feeling lucky. Dr. Potter had given our first tests back on Wednesday, and I’d earned a 105% ’cuz I rocked it—no pun intended—on the extra credit essay question. Maybe my science grade would offset calculus, which already threatened to spiral the drain.

Boone came over to say hello
, as he did before every class. “Hey, did you take calculus?” I asked before noticing the odd, unreadable expression on his face.

“What?” he said, finally registering my question. “Oh, yeah, I took
calculus. Why?”

“Because I stink at it.”

“I don’t remember much, but I can take a look.” He rubbed his hand over his short hair, messing it up in a distracted way I’d never seen before. His biceps looked awesome, but his frown worried me. “Make sure I get a chance to talk to you after class, okay?”

Red alert
. Could someone officially break up after three weeks of talking? Was our make-out session on Sunday subpar? Doubtful, when the memory of my boobies pressed against his chest made me wiggle in my chair. If glacially slow didn’t work for him he should stop answering the door for his freshmen charges.

T
he prom scene from
Carrie
played in my pessimistic brain. What if our three weeks of talking had been some kind of intricate setup to make me look like a fool?

Dr. Potter
arrived, uncombed and wrinkled. Even though his presence indicated he knew we had class, the view of us students gathered in the lecture room startled him out of intense concentration. He fumbled with his laptop then covered the lesson’s ideas with a Power Point minus his usual engaging spoken details.

Boone
hunched forward in his designated chair in the front row, far opposite from me, his arms braced on his thighs in his thinking posture.

Potter
finished twenty minutes early, told us we could go and scrambled out the door with his computer tucked under one arm. The power cord trailed him like a baby blanket behind a toddler.

I stalled for time, pretending to write some final notes in my binder. Most students used laptops or electronic tablets, but last year I figured out writing my notes by hand transferred the info to my amnesiac cranium.

A few studiou
s souls asked Boone questions. He answered what he could quickly and reminded them he held study sessions on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Those sessions happened to overlap with football practice—coincidence?—and I wondered what he did on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

I folded the desktop down along the side of the seat and shoved my stuff in my green and purple paisley messenger bag. Boone came over to sit in the chair next to me. He rotated a little, so that
, above my bag, his knee touched mine. He leaned forward on his thighs again.

“You’re starting to freak me out,” I said. He looked like he was going to tell me someone had died, but he didn’t know anyone in my family, and surely the Dean of Students would not give him the responsibility of passing on bad news
after three weeks of talking.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t decide if I’m freaked out or not.” He took a deep breath. “Yellowstone is erupting.”

I stared at him, not a flicker of comprehension illuminating my dim-bulb mind. Nothing. “Yellowstone? The place with the, umm, geysers?” Obviously I’d heard of Yellowstone, never been there, not sure I could place it on a map in the murky part of the U.S. between where I lived and Hollywood.

“Yeah
. Yellowstone sits over a hotspot that’s been around for millions of years.”

“
Instead of steaming it’s now erupting? As in lava erupting?” We’d covered igneous rocks in a very general way already so I knew hot liquefied rock below the ground was called magma and, when it erupted, became lava.

“Dr. Potter says nobody knows what it’s doing.
It blew this morning. I mean explosively blew. All the local sensors went offline. Satellite pictures show a big brown cloud of dust. Like two hundred miles across.”

Boone
’s voice shook a fraction. I put my hand on his forearm. He sat back so he could hold it in his.

I asked,
“Do you have friends out there, or family?”

“
Not close. Dr. Potter knows I’m from Nebraska. He asked me where—made me point to it on a map. He said my family might want to stockpile supplies, or better yet, leave.” He paused, prompting me to scoot to the edge of my seat. “My house is nine hundred miles away from Yellowstone, Violet.”

“Are you serious?”

“He says if it does anything close to what it’s done in the past, thirty percent of the U.S. is pretty well screwed.”

I rifled through my bag
to find my tablet. “Show me,” I said. “I need to see a map or something.”

“C’mon,” he said.
He took me to Dr. Potter’s office. The professor ignored us. He jabbed his finger at his cell phone to enter a text message. The screen of his laptop glowed with a cascade of open program windows, and his iPad bonged with an incoming email tone. His finger did not pause when Boone led me to an ancient roller-shade map of the US.

“Yellowstone is here. Dr. Potter drew this red circle this morning.
”

That’s not coming off any time soon
, I thought as I studied the thick line of scarlet Sharpie.

“
The last eruption basically obliterated everything within this oval.”

“
When?”

“
Six hundred thirty thousand years ago,” Dr. Potter muttered. His trendy rectangular glasses sat askew on his nose. He swept his hand toward his laptop’s screen in a disgusted now-look-what-you’ve done gesture. I circled around his desk to see images more current than the one offered by the cartographic fossil on the wall.

A
dark mess of chocolate pudding plopped in the midst of the whipped topping clouds of a satellite loop. The mass burgeoned over the northwestern U.S., dry pudding mix edges caught and swept east by the prevailing winds.

Anyone with a grandpa
who blares Weather Watcher on the TV all day knows weather moves east.

Apparently, crap shot into the air by Yellowstone moves east, too.

I studied the image until I found the familiar outline of Indiana. Almost due east, but far, far away from the pudding. This couldn’t possibly impact home.

“Where
’s your family?” I asked Boone. On the old map he pointed to the southeast corner of a rectangle with an undulating eastern edge and a western corner chewed off by Colorado.

Dr. Potter grunted.
“My wife is in friggin’ Rapid City, South Dakota.” He aimed a pen at a spot enjoying sunny skies at the moment yet precariously close to the encroaching volcanic cloud. “She thought it was a good time to take the baby to meet her sister since I’m always so distracted at the beginning of term. I called her the minute I got the first alert from USGS. Barely seven a.m. out there, and I’m telling her to get the hell out, to drive north or south before she turned east, and I’m not sure she believed me. Now the circuits are all busy. No text, no cell, no landline.” He looked at Boone. “Did you call home yet?”

Boone nodded. “I told them what you said. I forgot my brother is on a hiking trip in Alaska. He’s off the grid. It’s just my parents. I mean, they have
friends around, but they’re alone.”

“The ash will be there soon, and this isn’t some thunderstorm
that’ll blow through in a few hours.” I wasn’t sure if he spoke of South Dakota or Nebraska and, when he thrust his fingers in his hair like he would pull out chunks by the roots, I decided not to ask.

Well, no wonder
Boone flipped out this morning. Dr. Potter gave a wicked mind job. The sense of doom made me want to find a bomb shelter, or better, an end-of-days prepper to move in with. Sell my skinny body for a cot in an underground bunker. “Is it still erupting?” I asked.

Dr. Potter zoomed in on the center of the pudding. “The ejecta obscur
es the caldera, but I’d say yes.”

I understood the last four words more than the beginning part.
“What about the people?” I pointed at the dark circle on the satellite.

He
cringed. “Dead or dying. I hope I’m wrong,” he added quickly. “The initial blast, though, would be devastating—look at the rate of expansion in between those first two images—and you can see what that ash cloud is like.”

“Ash?”

“The initial pressure wave may have leveled a hundred miles or so, depending on topography,” he said. “That’s followed by ash, maybe still mixed with gasses, dirt and debris. Not much fun to breathe and falling like snow. It’s probably dark as night and those poor people have no idea what’s going on. If some at the edge saw it coming, they might at least know what direction to try to run. The periphery may now be survivable.” He tugged at his hair again.