H2O (2 page)

Like most people in the country, Zak's parents had gone to a barbecue that night. That's the thing about Britain, isn't it? First glimmer of sunshine, first sign of heat and everyone goes nuts, puts on their shorts, and has a barbecue. Doesn't matter if it looks like rain; we go out and we stay out until the first drop falls. No—it's worse than that: it actually has to start pouring before people give up and go inside. You add to that a holiday weekend—a whole extra day for sunburned people to lie around wishing they hadn't drunk ten zillion cans of beer and/or that they had cooked the hot dogs properly on the grill—and you get…well, you get what happened, don't you?

Zak's parents weren't supposed to be coming home, so it was obvious right away that something was wrong because they were back, but it was even more obvious that something was wrong because they were freaking out. Normally, they wouldn't have cared at all about whatever it was we were doing. That was what was so cool about Zak's. OK, he had the hot tub and the barn and woods and fields and everything to hang out in, but the really cool thing was that his parents were completely chill. They smoked joints in front of us—hey, they even gave Zak weed! That's how chill they were.

Tonight, they were not relaxed. They basically went all Simon on us. They herded us all into the kitchen. The only thing that was un-Simon was that Zak's dad, Barnaby, kept swearing.

OK, so this is going to be the only other rule about this story: I will try to be honest; I will try to tell everything as it was, but I will not swear. My mom hated me swearing—the word
God
included, despite the fact that 1) she said it herself all the time (but denied it) and 2) as far as I can tell, everyone else on the planet says it all the time too. “There's no need for swearing,” she'd tell me. Even with the whole world in the grip of a death-fest mega-crisis, she'd say, “Ruby, there is absolutely no need to swear.”

Actually, there
is
a huge need for it in this story, and a lot of swearing did happen, but out of respect for my mom, I will not write those words. If, like me, you curse all the time anyway, you can go ahead and add your own swear words, but I hope you'll understand why I can't.

I'll write something beautiful instead. I'll write “
.” For my mom.

“Oh
! Oh
! Oh
!” Barnaby kept going.

(The thing is, Zak's parents were always into some pagan-y religious thing or another, so it's possible that Barnaby really was calling on some specific god and wasn't just generally ranting.)

He locked the kitchen door.

“You're frightening them,” said Zak's mom, Sarah, but Barnaby wasn't listening. He closed every window in the kitchen, and when he'd finished doing that, he started closing all the other windows.

You could hear him, banging around all over the house.

We weren't frightened at all. It was a little weird, but the hardest thing was not to get the giggles—although in my case I had nothing to laugh about, now there wasn't even any water to cover me. I did my best with dish towels. All our stuff, everyone's stuff, was in the barn.

“Mom, what's going on?” said Zak.

“We're not really sure,” said Sarah. “Someone Barnaby knows called him and—”

Thump, thump, thump—bang!—thump, thump, thump
, went Barnaby upstairs.

“Mom?” said Zak.

Bang! Thump, thump, thump
. Barnaby came back down the stairs.

“You'd better ask your dad,” said Sarah.

See now, that
was
kind of weird, wasn't it? Zak didn't normally call his mom “Mom”; Sarah didn't normally call Barnaby “your dad.” If I didn't know Zak was practically immune to a whole lot of stuff that really bothered other people—like being embarrassed by your parents—I would have thought he was freaking out too. But his parents did crazy stuff all the time, and everyone knew they did, and usually no one laughed about it much because everyone understood what Zak had to deal with…and also because Sarah and Barnaby were so kind to us.

This latest crazy thing, whatever it was, it was just bad timing, party-wise.

“Turn the radio on,” Barnaby told Zak.

“
Dad?
” said Zak, but he turned it on anyway.

They didn't have a TV. Zak's parents didn't even have a digital radio; they had the old-fashioned crackly kind. Guess what was on?

Gardeners' Question
Time
.

They were discussing the best methods of tackling blight on roses.

Someone lost it and giggled. The giggling, it spread.

“This isn't right,” said Barnaby quietly. “It should be the news.”

I laughed too; it was impossible not to crack up with Mrs. Fotheringay-Flytrap describing the spots on her Rambling Rector rose…but you want to know something weird? While I certainly wouldn't in a million years have thought,
Oh
no! This must mean the world as we know it is about to end
, I kind of
knew
it wasn't right too. I didn't know what was
supposed
to be on, but I knew
Gardeners' Question Time
shouldn't have been. My mom LOVED that program and listened to it every Sunday—every Sunday. Not on a Saturday night. Never on a Saturday night. Not exactly scary, though, was it?

“Go and put your clothes on!” Sarah snapped at us.

I shivered. Caspar hugged me close. Leonie grabbed my hand.

Sarah
never
snapped at us.

“They're in the barn,” said Saskia—in a really horrible way, like Sarah was stupid.

“Take ours, then,” said Sarah. “Take whatever you want. Just get dressed.”

Someone muttered something and headed for the kitchen door.

“Don't go outside,” said Barnaby. Loudly, angrily. “You do NOT go outside.”

We shuffled out of the room, the whole herd of us. On the stairs, someone cracked up, and we all had to make a mad dash for Zak's parents' bedroom so we could laugh our heads off in private, without hurting their feelings.

“What the
is up with your parents, man?” said Caspar.

“Got me, dude,” said Zak. But he didn't sound OK; he still didn't sound OK. “C'mon,” he said to Ronnie—my techie-est friend—and they went off to Zak's room.

The rest of us, we played dress-up with Zak's parents' clothes. It was so funny we forgot all the weirdness. Caspar pulled on a kaftan.

“Ohhm!” he said, doing this prayer thing with his hands.

I laughed so hard I almost—

“I need to pee,” I remembered.

Lee followed me to the bathroom. I went first. I had to—I was bursting. Then Lee went while I surveyed myself in the mirror:
. So much for the model look. The big, baggy hippie dress was the least of it. My lips, which felt puffy-bruised and tingling from the kissing, looked kind of normal, but I had mascara zombie eyes, and where I'd had bright red lipstick on earlier, it looked like it had sort of smeared itself all over my chin; even my nose had gone Rudolf. No hope Sarah would have makeup remover, so I wet a piece of toilet paper, dabbed it in the soap, and wiped at my chin.

It wasn't really lipstick at all; it was my first ever full-blown kissing rash, and it stung. It
really
stung.

Nothing I could do about it, so I quickly scrubbed at the mascara disaster. Their soap—which wasn't like the soap we had at home but some organic, lentil-based, gray-green thing—was useless. It didn't even foam up, so that was it, then: I was half black-eyed zombie, half human cherry. Mortifying. Seriously mortifying.

“C'mon, get out!” shouted Caspar through the bathroom door. “Molly wants to puke!”

Great. I had to face him knowing what the face I was facing him with looked like. We opened the door, and Molly burst in, about to be sick. Under normal friendship circumstances, it would have been our duty to stay with her—but, honestly, just listening to her made my own stomach start to heave. It was bad enough looking like a mutant in front of Caspar—I definitely did not want him to witness me spewing my guts out, so I grabbed Lee's hand, and we went back downstairs.