My heart beats so wildly I half expect it to stop.
A person’s heart isn’t meant to beat this fast.
I scream and scratch at the sliver of light, desperate to make it bigger. Dirt and dust and rocky bits of building drop down around me. I have to slow down. The rubble is unstable. Digging is dangerous. I know this. I’ve been taught this.
But I need air.
I’m suffocating.
I swipe my face clean and cinch the hood of my sweatshirt over my eyes to protect them. I claw at the hole in a panic. Drywall dust lodges underneath my fingernails but I manage to make a big enough space for real air to enter. I inhale deeply, my lungs expanding with the relief of oxygen even though I need to cough out the grime and dirt that comes with it. I’m probably choking on asbestos.
Then I feel the pain. A searing ache along the left side of my head above my ear. Surely I’m dying.
I reach for the wound. Press against it. Will the ache to stop. And then someone is wailing and I’m not alone. The cry is primal. It is fear. It is agony. It is close. But muffled. Buried, too.
“C. Smith?!” I yell. “Are you there? Is that you?”
He grunts. “There’s something—on me. It’s heavy.” Another grunt. “Can’t—breathe.”
There’s the scrape of metal against metal. A groan. I picture toppled triple-load washing machines crushing his small frame.
“What are you doing?!” I shout.
“I’m just—I need to get this off me.”
“What is it? Can you move? Can you crawl out from under it?” I hear the rise in my voice. The frantic sound of it. The plead. The beg. “You have to move. You have to find air.”
“I’m—trying.”
Another push. Another screech of metal. Another grunt. And then silence. I wait in it. I wade in it. Tentatively whispering his name.
“C. Smith?”
I’m scared to ask because I’m scared of no answer. When I finally hear him suck in a breath, I flood my own lungs with air. With relief. I’m so grateful to know I’m not here alone. Even though I shouldn’t wish this nightmare on anybody else.
“Where are you?” he says.
“I don’t know. Trapped. Where are you?”
“I went under the table across from yours but I didn’t get all the way under it.”
“But you have air?”
“I do now.” He moans. “Barely.”
“Are you okay? How bad are you hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?”
“There was something on me. On my chest. I moved it but I don’t know. I just—I don’t know.”
“You’re going to be okay.” I say this firmly. With conviction. He has to believe me so I can believe me.
I remember having the stomach flu for the first time as a kid. I felt like leftovers gone bad in the fridge. I told my mom I was dying.
“You’re not,” she said, gently dabbing a cold wet washcloth across my sweaty forehead. “Your body knows how to recover. You just have to get through this.”
“We just have to get through this,” I tell him. I tell myself. I hear my mom’s voice: Ruby Babcock, you just have to get through this.
Outside, sirens wail. Car alarms. Fire alarms. And then a cough from C. Smith right here and now. He’s only a few feet from me. The place got tossed, but he’s close. I spread my fingers out above my head, trying to make contact. Like feeling the physical skin-and-bones presence of him will make me feel less alone. He coughs again and I pull my hand back. What if he’s dying?
“Do you have air? Can you breathe?” he says.
“I can.” But for how long? And is this table teetering? What is that creaking sound? Is it only a matter of time before the legs break and the unstable walls of this tiny safe space collapse on top of me? Panic spirals to my fingers and toes. It shortens my breath. I focus on anything else.
“What’s your name?” I can’t keep calling him C. Smith.
A push. A hiss. “Charleston.”
“Like the dance?”
“Like the city. When your last name’s Smith, your parents are pretty much obligated to give you a bold first name.” A grunt. “My friends call me Charlie, though. Because Charleston makes me sound like an asshole.”
“Are you from Charleston?”
“Conceived there.”
“That’s . . . graphic.”
“No kidding. I can’t even think of Charleston without imagining my parents boning.”
He actually manages a laugh. It’s pained but legitimate. His laugh makes me laugh.
“I shouldn’t be laughing,” I say.
“I’m glad you’re laughing. It’s making me laugh and—” A groan. “I’d rather die laughing.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Okay.” A grunt. “Do you have a name?”
“Ruby.”
“Ruby? Were you conceived at a fifties-themed restaurant made famous for its cheeseburgers?”
Another laugh escapes. “Ruby’s Diner? No.”
“Ruby’s the name of my dog. Is that weird?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“I guess not.”
I can feel the stiffness settling. In my shoulders. In my legs. Reminding me how stuck I am. I want to spread out but I can’t. My hands are over my head with only a couple inches of space all around me. I pat the ground under my head, and the cracked, teetering table above it. There are shards of glass and things split in half. I sense how tight things are. How small. I have no room. My heart races.
This is a coffin.
I suck in air.
Flap my hands as much as I can.
“Someone has to find us soon,” I say.
Surely first responders are already responding. Firefighters. Rescue workers. I can hear the sirens on top of the car alarms. So much noise. They’ll be here. Because there isn’t enough air. There isn’t enough room. There isn’t anything but a pain in my head and Charlie trying to catch his breath.
Tears track through the dust on my face. Then I gasp. Choke on a sob.
“Ruby? Ruby, what’s wrong?” Charlie’s voice rises in panic.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I want my mom.” I feel bad for getting so mad at her last night. “I can’t breathe.”
“Ruby! Listen to me. It’s going to be okay.” Charlie’s voice cuts through the stillness. It is strong. Sure. Like someone who has been trained for situations like this. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you said so!”
What do I know? Growing up in California doesn’t make me an earthquake expert. And what if the whole world looks like this laundromat? This could be the end of everything. I push at the pain in my head. It’s still there. Throbbing.
“We should make noise,” I say. “We need to scream so someone will hear us.”
Charlie lets out a low and guttural yell. I follow with a scream, high and screeched. I scream over Charlie, through the rubble and out into the dusty air, until my throat hurts and my chest heaves and my head feels like it could explode.
Someone will hear us. Someone will help.
CHAPTER THREE
5:00 P.M.
Through the pain and the dust and the dirt, a speck of a promise slips through.
“Charlie! My phone!”
“Get it!”
I hear the hope in his voice and suddenly wish I’d kept the revelation to myself. Because okay, fine, I have a phone, but, “It’s in my back pocket and I can’t move my arms. Where’s yours?”
“Hell if I know. We need yours. Okay?”
“Okay.” I coax my left arm off my face, but the space above me is tight, pushing down. Boxing me in. My arm, just below my elbow, scrapes against a sharp slice of something jutting out from overhead. Glass, I think. From the window. A jagged spike rips through the sleeve of my sweatshirt and into my flesh like the tip of a knife cutting through birthday cake. Up an
d down my forearm the shock goes, like it’s cut clean through my skin and tissue and gone straight to the bone. The pain sears through me and I cry out.
“What is it? What happened?”
I grit my teeth, biting down to get through the burning pain. My vision fades for a split second, making everything too bright, like a camera flash. My stomach rolls with nausea. Then just as quickly, I’m back in the dark and panting again. I can’t twist my body enough to see the damage, but I can feel the blood as it spills out and seeps into the thick cotton sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“What happened?!” Charlie shouts this time. “Answer me!”
My stomach lurches again. I might throw up. I heave.
“Ruby!”
“I cut myself. I think it’s bad.” I’m scared to touch it. I don’t want to feel how deep it is. I don’t want to feel my own muscle and bone.
Charlie’s voice rises again. “Get your phone. We need help.”
“I’m close but I can’t.” I whimper. “I can’t get it.”
“Ruby. Focus.” Every time Charlie says my name, it grounds me. “There’s literally nothing more important right now.”
I twist my body into the inches of give this space will allow me, finally managing to get the tips of my left fingers into my back pocket. “Wait!” I can feel it. “I’ve almost got it.” I push my fingers a millimeter deeper, but I can’t pull it free. “I’m trying.”
“Don’t give up, Ruby.”
My arm screams with pain, a sharp spike carving, but the extra push is enough to get my hand all the way into my pocket.
I pull my arm back, crying out as the spike cuts back through the other way. “I have it!” I shove my phone so close to my face that I can’t even see the whole thing at once. Blood drips down my hand and smears the screen. I try to wipe it clean with my chin. “It’s five o’clock.”
“Who cares what time it is? Do you have any reception?”
I swipe at my phone and dial 9-1-1. When I press the green call button, my phone sits there, doing nothing, not paying attention to me. Like a glazed-over Leo playing video games last summer on the massive sectional couch in Michael Franklin’s pool house while Mila and I texted annoyed sighs back and forth across the room.
Mila doesn’t text me anymore.
“Nothing’s happening,” I say.
“What are you trying to do?”
“I dialed nine-one-one.”
“Everyone’s doing that. Try something else.”
Right. What was I even thinking? The 9-1-1 lines have to be crammed. “I’ll call my mom.” I pull up her number and press the green call button again. And there is . . . nothing. “It’s not going through.”
“Try again.”
I do. Still nothing. “I can’t.” It feels like my failure. Like it’s my fault my phone doesn’t work after an earthquake. I never should’ve told Charlie I had it. I never should’ve given him hope.
“Crap!” He punches something and I wait, frozen, as the space around us creeks and sways. Charlie sucks in a breath. “Oof.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I hurt.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. My ribs hate me.”
I don’t like knowing Charlie’s in pain. “But your head’s fine. You aren’t concussed?”
“Concussed? Why wouldn’t you just call it a concussion?”
“Argh. I don’t know.” It’s a term they used in this junior lifeguard program I did as a kid. I was super obsessed with calling everything by the correct name because I wanted the instructors to see my dedication. So they would think I was the best. I don’t even know what I’m saying right now. “Just—are you okay? Do you have a head injury?”
“I don’t think so. Everything fell on my chest. I saw you put your hand over your head so I did the same thing.” He groans.
My own head hurts enough for me to have a possible concussion. Or a brain bleed. Is a brain bleed the same thing as a concussion? It’s likely either one could kill me. Is it a painful death? Or will I simply fall asleep and not wake up?
Wait. What if I fall asleep and don’t wake up?
“Is your head okay, Ruby?”
“I don’t know. It hurts.” I press at the pain.
“How bad?”
“Bad. But not like my arm.”
“Is it bleeding?”
“My arm or my head?”
“Both. Either. You tell me.”
“My arm is bleeding. Underneath my elbow.”
“Is it gushing blood?”
“More like oozing.”
He coughs. “You should apply pressure to try to stop the bleeding.”
Thinking about the seep of blood makes me light-headed. Foggy. If I could just shut my eyes for a second . . .
“Ruby!” Charlie’s shout is an electric jolt of energy to my brain. “Can you get your arm out of your sweatshirt sleeve so you can wrap it around your cut and use it to apply pressure?”
“I’ll try.” I wiggle. I’m like a worm. No arms. No legs. Rolling a millimeter in either direction, trying to avoid every sharp thing as I ease my arm out of the sleeve. It feels like hours pass, but I finally get it. “It’s off.”
“Okay. You need to wrap as much of it as you can as tight as you can around your arm. But don’t make it so tight that you cut off your circulation.”
“Are you a Boy Scout?”
“Hell no.”
I laugh, letting go of my worry long enough to free my right hand and wrap the sleeve around my left arm. I pull it tighter by using my teeth. I grunt through each step, all of it so much effort in this limited space.
“Got it.”
“Good. Good job, Ruby.”
A small laugh escapes my lips.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I imagined you talking to your dog just then, like, Good dog, Ruby.”
“Well, Ruby would dig us the hell out of this mess, that’s for damn sure.”
“I wish Ruby was here.”
“Me too.”
“So now what?”
“We wait.”
“For how long?”
“Who knows? Until it stops. Until we get help.”
I feel like we’re talking about two different things now. The bleeding and this nightmare.
“And then I can untie it?”
“When it stops, yes.” He sounds so calm. Like someone trained to deliver bad news without any emotion. How did he get this way? “It’ll be okay, Ruby. Now can you try your phone again?”
I pull my phone back to my face with my free hand. Press the redial button. Absolutely zero happens. “Nothing. It won’t dial out.”
“Text?”
I type out a text to my mom with my right thumb: I’m trapped at the Suds and Surf laundromat on Belmont. None of those words looks real.
My phone waits and waits and waits. “It won’t go through.”
“Can you get online?”
I try that. The swirly gray ball at the top of the screen whips around and around, struggling to load. It’s hopeless. Everything is down. Everyone is unreachable.
No phone calls. No texts.
But then my phone dings with an emergency alert from the California Earthquake Warning System.
7.8-magnitude quake. 4:31 p.m. PST San Andreas fault line. Severe damage.
My vision blurs. All I see is 7.8-magnitude.
My heart stops in my chest. I think of my house. Of my mom. My school. My friends. Are they okay?
“Charlie,” I whisper. “It was a seven point eight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
The worst earthquake I’ve ever experienced was probably a high magnitude 4, and it barely broke a couple of glasses in our cupboard. So when you figure each additional point is something like thirty times more energy, I’m pretty sure a magnitude 7.8 is “The Big One.”
Charlie’s clearly done the same math.
“Can you try
your phone again?” His voice sounds different. Like hope has left it. Reality has sunk in.
I call my mom again. Text her. Still nothing. I can only hope she’s okay and she’ll get my messages eventually. “I’ll keep trying.”
Something suddenly pops. I flinch. Hit my head. Another pop. And another. Three times. Then a sizzle. The sound seems like it’s coming from outside. Away from us, but still close enough to hear.
“What was that?” I say.
“My best guess would be a downed power line.”
“It’s outside, right?” I think of the toppled washing machines. The water that surely leaked out. This isn’t a good place to be near downed power lines thrashing around like out-of-control garden hoses.
“Definitely outside. Pretend it’s fireworks.”
Fireworks. “I like fireworks.” They remind me of the day I met Leo. I do what Charlie tells me. I close my eyes and pretend.
LEO
There’s something about fireworks.
The crisp crackle of them equals a promise, and it’s suddenly okay to wish on new beginnings. It’s okay to wish on kisses from the boy you’re sharing a towel with on a dark sandy beach on the Fourth of July while the bright lights wheeze their way upward to bust open the sky above.
Maybe I got caught up in the idea of fireworks on that night seven months ago when Leo weaved his way through the masses to plop down next to me, still smelling like sunblock at nine p.m.
We’d just met but had been flirting all day. A smile here. A touch there. By the afternoon, we were tangled feet under the ocean water. He was at least as tall as me and wore red-, white-, and blue-striped board shorts that were more subtle than cheesy.
“Summer,” he said, leaning back on his elbows in the sand as the sun skimmed the horizon. “Doesn’t it seem like everything lasts longer? A week feels like a year.”
“So a day feels like a week?”
He looked at me. Squinted. “More like a month.”
“So you’ve known me a month.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. Shy. “It’s been a good month.”
What he’d said was true. My arrival at the beach with Mila at ten a.m. felt like weeks ago. Since then there had been bodysurfing and volleyball and a bonfire. Lunch. Dinner. Multiple applications of sunblock. Beer.
All day long, Leo had been at my side, asking me questions and answering mine. He was funny and smart and thoughtful. And even though I was wearing a bikini, he looked at my eyes when he talked to me. It’s sad how that’s a thing you notice when you’re a girl at the beach. I wondered how I hadn’t talked to him before, but maybe it’s because we weren’t meant to talk until that day.
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