The Age of Miracles (4 page)

By now, the fog had burned away, leaving a bright, clear sky in its place. In the wind, flags snapped on the school’s flagpole.

Through the crowd of kids out front, a potent rumor was wafting. These same channels had previously carried news of the illicit explorations of Drew Costello’s fingers and of the acrobatics of Amanda Cohen’s tongue, of the ziplock bag of marijuana found stashed in Steven Galleta’s backpack and, later, of the details of Steven Galleta’s life at the Mount Cuyamaca Camp for Troubled Boys. Amid this usual bilge now floated a different kind of gossip, its sources equally dubious: In 1562 a scientist named Nostradamus had predicted that the world would end on this exact day.

“Isn’t that creepy?” said Michaela, nudging me with her shoulder.

I was eager to escape. I wanted to burrow into the crowd, but I was afraid to leave Michaela’s side.

“I guess he was some kind of psychic or something,” she said.

You could still see the stretch marks on my T-shirt from the bus stop.

“Hey,” she said, looking around. “Where’s Hanna?”

“Utah,” I said. I could barely say the words. “Her whole family left right away.”

I pictured dozens of cousins sleeping in cars in the Utah desert, encircling a giant grain silo.

“Holy crap,” said Michaela. “Like forever?”

“I think so.”

“Weird,” she said.

Then Michaela asked to copy my history homework.

“I didn’t think we’d have school today,” she said. “So I didn’t do it.”

But I knew Michaela had stopped doing her homework earlier that year. She was developing a different set of skills. There was a lot to learn about the care of hair and skin. There was a proper way to hold a cigarette. A girl wasn’t born knowing how to give a hand job. I let her see my work whenever she asked.

In science, we made new sundials to replace the ones we’d made the first week of school. I was glad to be sitting in a classroom full of kids who had none of them been at the bus stop.

“Adaptation is a necessary part of nature,” said Mr. Jensen after he handed out the new calibrations. He was folding and unfolding his hands as he talked. “This is all perfectly natural.”

We were struggling to jam toothpicks into mounds of wet clay. The trick was to insert the toothpick at exactly the right angle. It was already clear that most of our sundials would tell a useless, sloppy sort of time.

“Think of the dinosaurs,” he continued. “They died out because they couldn’t adapt to a changed environment.”

Mr. Jensen had a ponytail and a beard. He wore a lot of tie-dye. He rode a bike to school, and it was rumored that he cooked his meals on the Bunsen burners in the back of the classroom and slept in a sleeping bag under his desk. He wore hiking boots to school every day. He looked like he could live for many months in the desert with only a compass and a pocketknife and a canteen.

“But of course,” he added, clasping his hands together, “we’re very different from the dinosaurs.” I could tell he was hoping not to scare us, but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.

Competing rumors held that Mr. Jensen was actually a millionaire or that he’d invented something important for NASA and taught science only for the love of teaching. He was my favorite teacher that year. I knew he liked me, too.

He set up a question-and-answer box that day so that we could ask anonymous questions about what was happening.

“There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” he said as he collected our scraps of paper in a converted Kleenex box.

This was the same box we had used on the day they separated the girls from the boys, and the nurse came to tell the girls about our futures. “Something very special is going to happen to you,” she had said slowly, like a fortune teller reading palms. “It comes from the Greek word for
month,
because it’s going to happen once a month, just like the lunar cycle.” Only Tammy Smith and Michelle O’Connor had sat apart, shifting knowingly in their seats, their bodies already in tune with the moon.

Now Mr. Jensen reached into the box and pulled out a question. He unfolded the piece of paper with great care: “ ‘Is it true,’ he read, ‘that a scientist predicted that the world would end today?’ ”

“Nostradamus wasn’t exactly a scientist,” said Mr. Jensen. He had evidently heard the rumor circulating the halls. “You all know that no one can predict the future. No one can say what will happen tomorrow, much less five hundred years from now.”

The school bell buzzed. But we all stayed put on our lab stools. The lunch bell was out of sync with us now.

Outside, the sky remained bright. Sunlight was pouring in through the windows, catching on the rows of clean beakers and clean test tubes, glittering like wineglasses on the shelves.

Mr. Jensen pulled another question from the box. Someone asked if the slowing might be caused by pollution.

This question seemed to depress him. “We don’t know yet why this is happening,” he said.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He paused near the fish tank, empty since September, when the filtration system abruptly stopped working. It happened on a weekend. We had returned Monday morning to find five fish floating like leaves on the surface. You could see the blood beneath the scales on their little bodies. The water looked clear to our eyes, but it had turned toxic for fish.

“Human activity has done a lot of damage to this planet,” said Mr. Jensen as we continued to work on our sundials. “Humans are responsible for global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, and for the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species. But it’s too early to say yet if we’ve caused this change, too.”

Before the end of the period, Mr. Jensen updated our solar system wall, where outer space was neatly represented by six yards of black butcher paper and nine butcher-paper planets. There was also a sun on our map and a tinfoil moon. Scattered in the corners were rainbow-colored pushpins that stood in for all the planets we had not yet discovered. There were supposed to be thousands of them out there. Millions, maybe. It still astounds me, how little we knew about the universe.

On the sign above the earth, Mr. Jensen replaced
24 Hours
with
25:37,
but he wrote the new figure on a Post-it note so we could update it if we needed to.

Classrooms were half empty all day or, depending on your outlook, half full. Dozens of desks stood unused, attendance sheets went largely unchecked. It was as if certain kids really had been sucked up from the earth to the heavens, the way some Christians were expecting, leaving the rest of us behind, we the children of scientists and atheists and the simply less devout.

Our teachers discouraged us from following the news during class, but one kid had a radio and we all had cell phones.

The first outbreaks of gravity sickness were already popping up around the globe. Hundreds of people were experiencing symptoms of dizziness, faintness, and fatigue. In P. E., some kids got out of running the mile by clutching their stomachs, complaining of nausea and mysterious pains. “I can’t help it,” they’d say. “It’s the sickness.”

The teachers pretended not to worry. But at lunch, they all watched the news in the teachers’ lounge. We could see their expressions as they watched, their tired eyes, their wrinkled foreheads, the naked fear in their faces.

I didn’t see Seth Moreno again until fifth period. We had math together. His assigned seat was directly in front of mine, and I looked forward every day to being near him. I knew everything about the back of that head—the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.

We never talked to each other. I had never even said his name out loud, not even to Hanna. “Come on,” she used to whisper in the dark of my living room, both of us curled deep inside sleeping bags. “There must be
someone,
” she’d say. But I’d always shake my head and lie. “Nope,” I’d whisper back. “There’s no one.”

For weeks I’d been hoping that Seth might look my way, but not today. I was too embarrassed about what had happened that morning.

Mrs. Pinksy was trying to make a lesson out of the slowing. On the chalkboard, she’d written the Daily Math Brain Teaser:
The length of a day on earth has increased by ninety minutes in two
days. Assuming a steady rate of increase, how long would a day on earth be two days from now? What about three days from now? A week?

“Do we have to do this?” asked Adam Jacobson, slouching in his chair. He was always asking this question.

“The only thing you
have
to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky. This was one of her favorite sayings. “Everything else is a choice.”

Mrs. Pinsky was morbid and intimidating. If ever a kid got the hiccups in her class, she called the kid up to her desk. By the time you reached the front of the classroom, the hiccups were always gone; it was as sure a cure as any other sudden fright.

“Don’t just write the answer, show your work,” she said, walking up and down the aisles, the folds of her orange dress swishing against the chrome-colored legs of our chairs. “And no guesswork. Use your algebra.”

The walls of her classroom were lined with encouraging posters: never say never, expect the unexpected, the impossible is possible.

Mrs. Pinsky called a few of us up to the board to show our answers. Seth and I were among the chosen, and we stood side by side, transcribing our work from our notebooks to the board. I remember being aware of his right arm beside me, stretching up to write his answers, his numbers slanting down and to the right as his chalk scraped the board. The hard brown carpet felt worn out beneath my feet. Thirty years worth of sixth-graders had worked out solutions in these exact same spots.

Seth clapped two erasers together. The dust made him sneeze. Even his sneeze was endearing. He had wonderful hands. You could see the strength in his wrists, right in the veins, and in the tendons that traversed the backs of his hands. Seth’s mother was at home, dying. But here Seth was, growing stronger every day.

As I checked my work, I noticed that Seth’s answer was wrong, and I felt a sharp protective stab for him. I wanted to fix it or say something, but he’d already dropped his chalk in the tray and was walking back to his seat.

Through the open windows of the classroom, we heard the screech of a fire truck racing away somewhere. A moment later, a second one set off in the same direction. But these were the ordinary sounds of our school days. There was a fire station across the street. Sirens rang out all day. The sounds had bothered me at first, all the emergencies of strangers, but I’d grown used to them. We all had.

The shift in the air was barely perceptible at first: a fading. It was the feeling you get when a cloud moves across the sun.

“Something weird is happening outside,” said Trevor from the back of the classroom. He’d been playing with a metal compass but now dropped it on his desk with a clink. “Something really weird.”

“If you have something to say, Trevor, please raise your hand,” said Mrs. Pinsky. She was preparing the rest of our lesson on a transparency. A cooler breeze had begun to blow. I could hear the squeak of her pen on the plastic, the hum of the projector’s fan. She preferred the old technology over the computers that all the other teachers were using by then.

“Holy crap,” said Adam Jacobson, whose desk was closest to the windows. “Holy shit.”

“Adam, watch your language,” said Mrs. Pinsky.

We could hear voices rising in the neighboring classrooms too.

“Come look,” said Adam. “It’s getting dark.”

The windows were on one side of the classroom, and we all rushed to that side like objects sliding across the deck of a listing ship. I couldn’t see much over the heads of the taller kids, but I sensed the changing light. A strange gloom was moving in like a storm, but this was no storm. The sky was cloudless. The sky was clear.

The rest happened quickly—thirty seconds.

“Return to your seats,” said Mrs. Pinsky. But no one did. “I said return to your seats.”

She stepped outside to see for herself what was happening. Back in the classroom, she snapped into emergency mode. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Stay calm. Everyone just stay calm.”

She grabbed the whistle and the bull horn, the master keys and the walkie-talkie. These were the supplies for fire drills and earthquake drills and drills to practice what to do if a shooter started shooting at our school.

All the colors of the spectrum had collapsed to a few dusky grays. There was a paleness in the classroom. That light was the light of the last small moments of a day, the thin wedge of time just after the sun has set but just before you reach for a lamp. A sudden sunset at high speed. It was 1:23 in the afternoon.

Kids began to leak out of classrooms, a trickle at first, then a flood.

Someone grabbed my wrist. I looked up. I was shocked to see that it was Seth, his sharp features even more lovely in the halflight.

“Come on,” he said. His palm on my wrist felt electric. Even then I noticed it, the sweaty warmth of his hand on my arm.

We burst outside together.

“Come back here,” said Mrs. Pinsky, but no one was listening. She said it again, this time shouting it through the bullhorn. Not a single kid turned her way. We were running in every direction, most of us rushing up the grassy hill behind campus.

Within a few seconds, it was as dark as dusk outside and growing darker. The sky turned a brackish evening blue. An orange glow ringed the whole horizon.

Seth and I threw ourselves on the grass, sensing it was safer to lie low.

“This might be it,” he said. I thought I heard a thrill in his voice.

All around us, kids were screaming. I heard someone sobbing in the dark. Camera phones were clicking and flickering in the blackness. We could see the stars in the sky.

On the road beside campus, dozens of cars were stopped. Drivers stood in the streets, car doors flung open like wings, headlights flipped on in the dark. Every eye was on the sky. A cool night wind was blowing across the grass.