I went to bed even earlier that night. I felt unsettled and tossed and turned all night, thinking about the Skylar I thought I knew and the one I found out I didn’t know at all.
Chapter 2
I woke up on the third day rather groggy from lack of sleep, and I blinked uncomprehendingly at the dark digital alarm clock for several seconds before I remembered that there was no electricity to keep track of the time. I knew it was later than normal, though, because the sun was already shining through my east-facing window. It was cold again, and I would have loved to stay there under the covers and think some more about this new, very attractive Skylar I talked to last night. I mean, she’d been there all along, all my life, really, but I guess I had not paid attention to how she was growing and changing all these years. Funny how something can be right in front of your eyes, but you don’t really see it.
Anyway, as I was lying there in bed, the irresistible smell of bacon assaulted my nose like a line of C-dust (not that I’ve ever done it—I’ve just heard the class junkie, Irvine, talk about it. But with a name like Irvine, who wouldn’t be driven to do drugs? I mean, my name’s not great, but at least it sounds cool). I never could resist the smell of bacon, especially after two days of eating cold sandwiches and chips. I pulled on my jeans, a flannel shirt, and my favorite well-worn cowboy boots, and flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time.
Mom was in the kitchen, taking things out of the refrigerator, sorting some of them into piles on the counter and throwing others out the door to our three dogs, Ben, Shep, and Blue, who were lined up at the door, pushing and wiggling against each other to get into the best position to catch the next slightly spoiled treat. Every time she opened the door, I could hear the roar of the gas-powered generator hooked up to the circuit panel in our garage. Mom explained that Dad had decided to run the generator for a while to cool down the freezers—the one on top of the refrigerator and the big chest freezer in the garage filled with a side of beef and a whole butchered hog. The stuff in the refrigerator, however, was too warm to cool down again. Some could be cooked or eaten right away, but a lot of it had to be thrown out. The dogs were happy about it, though.
I don’t remember ever enjoying a hot meal more—bacon, eggs, sausages, leftover chili and meatloaf, all made even tastier by cooking it over the logs in the fireplace. Dad told me to eat up because he had a lot of chores for me today. Great, I thought. I was hoping we’d have another carefree day of hanging around in town, maybe getting to talk to Skylar again.
“Where’s Alex?” I asked Dad.
“He left before anybody was up this morning,” he answered, looking slightly perturbed. “Probably had an itch to see that girl again.” Dad usually didn’t say much, but I could tell volumes from the tone of his voice and his particular phrasing of the sentence.
Maybe he was beginning to see the real Alex, the not-so-great Alex that I saw every day. I bowed my head down low over my plate to hide a little smile that I couldn’t keep off my face.
After breakfast, Dad had me and Calvin take the chainsaw and the four-wheeler to the woods behind our house to gather firewood. I cut while Calvin loaded them into the little wagon behind the four-wheeler. When it was full, we drove it to the woodpile where Dad was splitting the logs into two, sometimes four, pieces to be used in the fireplace. Calvin and I started stacking the split logs neatly in a crisscross pattern onto the woodpile. We had learned long ago that wood stacking was an art and not one to be done half-assed—not if you didn’t want your ass tanned by Dad, that is.
Dad patiently explained every year when we cut firewood that, if you don’t stack it right, it’ll never dry out and be good to burn. He’d then follow up the words with a whack to the back of our heads or butts if we hadn’t listened. He was like that—he’d explain things once, quietly and succinctly, and then you’d better have listened or he would remind you in a rather unpleasant way. He wasn’t ever mean or angry about it; he just used it as a physical reminder to listen and follow directions.
Alex and I learned at a young age to listen to Dad, but Calvin was always more “recalcitrant”, which was Mom’s big word for stubborn and disobedient. This year, though, it seemed that Calvin had matured enough to accept Dad’s authority without question; or maybe it was just the odd situation we found ourselves in that made him obey. Whichever the case, the woodpile got stacked without any problems.
All the hard work in the crisp autumn air made us all hungry again, so we went inside to find Mom frying up some rather gray-looking pork chops and lots of sliced potatoes and onions in a big cast-iron skillet she’d found in our camping gear in the garage. She was singing some old song from the seventies and doing a little dance, wiggling her rear end while she leaned over the fire. Mom was loving this!
She and Dad had always loved roughing it, taking us kids camping and spending quiet evenings at home around our fire pit in the backyard when we were growing up. We hadn’t done either in the last couple of years because our lives had gotten so busy with sports and other school activities. I could tell Mom was happier than she had been in a long time. I could also tell that Dad was enjoying Mom’s good mood too, as he stood and watched her wiggle, a little smile dancing around the corners of his mouth.
“Are we going into town today?” I asked hopefully between mouthfuls of the surprisingly savory pork chops.
Dad pursed his lips while Mom answered cheerfully, “No, I think we need to go over to check on Granny and Gram and Papa.”
Granny is Dad’s widowed mother, and Gram and Papa are Mom’s parents. They all lived in another town about thirty miles from our town in senior living apartments. Mom and Dad must have felt they were safe for the first couple of days without electricity, but now were starting to worry about how they were getting along. They were all in pretty good health—none of them needed oxygen or anything—but they were old and you never know how something like this would affect them. I started to ask if I could go into town instead, but a stern look from my father put that idea to rest right away.
We left a note for Alex on the kitchen table and took Mom’s car since it got better gas mileage and had nearly a full tank. I won’t say too much about our visit to the grandparents, except to say that they were having a grand old time, reminiscing about the old times with their “vintage homeys,” as Calvin called their friends.
“Don’t worry about us, dears,” said Gram, “We used to live like this all the time, you know.”
Even though they had had electricity in their day, living in the country back then meant spotty coverage with lots of outages. Most rural farm folk at the time just used electricity for lights and still relied on fireplaces and wood stoves for heat and cooking. They often still did laundry by hand and used clotheslines to dry them. Most had merely a radio for entertainment; even when TVs were available, it was a long time before my grandparents got one. My Mom and Dad were in their early teens before their parents got TVs. Imagine no cartoons to watch when you were a kid, no shows to watch when you were bored after school. Well, we can imagine it now, because we’re living it, but before PF Day I couldn’t have.
On the way back home, I was able to talk Dad into going into town to “check on the electricity situation.” If Dad didn’t quite buy my fake intentions, he never let on. Maybe he wanted to “check on things” himself. On a normal day this time of year, he would have had breakfast at Tipton’s Diner with his farmer friends and spent the morning talking about the weather, the harvest, grain futures, and whatever else farmers talk about in the off-season.
Don’t get me wrong—farming is hard work. You work 18-hour days during the spring planting and the harvest in the fall, then you work hard all summer reinforcing levees along the river so the rain doesn’t wash your topsoil away, working on your tractors and combine, leveling or terracing fields that are lying fallow in crop rotation, and hundreds of other things that always seem to take up a lot of time. Dad works hard from sunup to sundown for three-quarters of the
year, so he and the other farmers deserve a break after harvest.
Anyway, Dad seemed as keen as I was to get to town to “check on things.”
I was secretly pleased when Dad pulled into the gravel parking lot of Tipton’s Diner. Calvin immediately jumped out of the car and ran off to find some friends, waving to Mom as he went to acknowledge her instruction to meet back there at sundown. Mom looked at me a little suspiciously as I led the way into the diner, something I’d never been known to do before.
I sat with Mom and Dad in a booth in the middle of the diner, while Dad immediately began talking with his cronies and Mom exchanged pleasantries with their wives. I was disappointed when Mrs. Tipton came over to the table instead of Skylar to ask us what we’d like to drink. The grill was off for now, she said, to save the gas in the generator for dinner service, but she could bring us water, tea, or sodas.
Dad ordered coffee, but Mrs. Tipton said it wasn’t hot since the generator was off. Dad looked a little confused for a moment—he had never sat in the diner without a cup of hot coffee in front of him—before he quickly recovered and ordered iced tea instead. Mom and I ordered Pepsi and were a little surprised when it was brought back in cans instead of from the soda fountain.
“The fountain needs electricity,” Mrs. Tipton explained, pouring the soda into glasses of half-melted ice for us.
I was sipping my Pepsi and trying to think of a nonchalant way to ask where Skylar was when I caught her looking at me from the kitchen. When she saw that I could see her, she motioned for me to come back there and I felt my face flush with excitement. I made a hasty excuse to my Mom and tried to look cool as I sauntered to the kitchen.
I’d never been in the kitchen before, despite having been to the diner probably a thousand times in my life. I was struck now by how dark it was in there, the only light coming from a small window on one wall and from the door leading into the dining area where large windows lined two walls. Skylar grinned at me, conspiratorially.
“I’ve been so bored today!” she whispered. “There’s really nothing to do here with the power off and my parents won’t let me run around with everyone. Maybe they’ll let me talk to you outside like last night. Wait here while I go ask.”
I nodded enthusiastically and watched in admiration as she scurried off into the dining area to find her parents. I found I really liked her quirky style of thrown together clothes: turquoise sweater over an olive green flouncy skirt with navy blue leggings stuffed into worn brown cowboy boots. On anyone else, it would probably look careless, but it somehow suited Skylar with her slim figure and curly, light brown, shoulder-length hair. On her, it just looked adorable.
Like I said before, I’d known Skylar practically all my life, but I’d never really gotten to know her. Her parents were pretty protective of her, never letting her hang out with other kids or even to join any clubs or play sports. As far as I knew, she’d never gone out on a date, although that was not unusual for a fifteen-year-old. She spent most of her time after school and on weekends working with her parents at the diner. As an only child, they relied on her more and more to help out.
She came back to the kitchen with a broad smile on her beautiful face, grabbed her jacket with one hand and my hand with the other, and announced, “They said yes! Let’s go!” Then with a backwards glance at me as she pulled me out the door, she said, “We have to stay in the back, though. Mom said we could start a fire in the fire pit if we want to.”
After we’d started the fire and pulled a couple of metal lawn chairs up close to it, I felt suddenly shy and awkward. Surprisingly, though, given that she’d never had a lot of interaction with kids her age, Skylar was not the least bit shy as she excitedly told me how great everything was going without electricity. For some reason, she was being allowed a little more freedom now—perhaps there wasn’t as much work to do in the diner, or her parents were preoccupied with the loss of income that went along with the loss of power.
Whatever the reason, Skylar was ecstatic with the change and she declared that nothing would ever be the same from this day forward. Turns out, she was quite prophetic.
Skylar and I had the place to ourselves for a couple of hours until the sun started to set and townspeople began to show up for dinner. Mr. Tipton came out to start the generator and told Skylar she was needed in the kitchen. With a slight nod to me, he went back in and Skylar all of a sudden became shy. I couldn’t understand the abrupt change in her until she surprised me with a quick kiss on my lips. Then she was gone. Just like that.
I’m embarrassed to admit that that was the first real kiss I’d had—the first one that mattered, anyway. Sure, I had been kissed by girls in elementary school, girls who had lost at truth or dare or who thought they had a crush on me, but never when I had wanted it. And oh, how I had wanted to kiss Skylar that night; only I had been too shy too awkward too—I don’t know—too polite to initiate it. All I know for sure is that I was walking on clouds for the rest of the night.
We ate dinner in the diner, during which Skylar slipped me a huge chocolate chip cookie; “on the house,” she whispered to me. The dinner was otherwise uneventful, although not as tasty as usual due to the lack of preparation and the limited menu, and we headed home in the darkness soon afterward. Alex didn’t come home that night, which had my Mom in a near panic, but Dad convinced her he was probably just low on gas and was staying the night at Robin’s house. Mom felt a little better until Calvin mischievously mentioned that they were probably busy making a baby right then, at which point he was sent to his room for the rest of the evening.
I said goodnight to Mom and Dad and went to my room too, saying I was tired, which wasn’t a lie, although I knew I’d never be able to sleep with the memory of that kiss and the image of Alex and Robin “making a baby” in my head.
All I can say is that it was a very, very long night.
Chapter 3
My family began to develop a pattern during the days following the power loss. We would get up around dawn and do chores in and out of the house, Mom would cook us something for breakfast (Dad had rigged up some grates in the fireplace to help her out), and for the first few days, we’d drive into town in the afternoon to check in on the latest news, if there was any. There usually wasn’t any news, but it was nice to go into town and see friends anyway.
One day—I can’t remember exactly which, but it was within the first couple of weeks when we still had gas to get to town—Bob Knadler, the serviceman from the electric company who had been sent to find parts to fix the blown transformers, finally made it back to town. The news he brought with him was grim.
Bob had made it to Kansas City, the biggest city to our south and the one most likely to have parts, but they had too many of their own emergencies to spare any equipment. Bob said he felt lucky to get out of there alive; apparently, if the power plants he had visited had been in the inner city—where thousands of desperate people were trying to leave by any means available—he might not have made it. Kansas City had had outages before, some lasting several days, but this situation was obviously not going to be fixed anytime soon and people were panicking.
There had been rioting and looting, made worse because the police were trying to conserve gasoline in their vehicles for major crises. Bob said that, right before he’d left Kansas City, the National Guard had come in and declared martial law. They believed that the Governor of Missouri would extend that martial law to the whole state soon. It appeared Kansas was going to do the same, as Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri are separated only by the Missouri River. Once again, I was happy to be living in the country; our whole family was –except for Alex.
Alex was driving us crazy. After his girlfriend’s dad gave him just enough gasoline to get back home on the fourth morning, he begged and begged Mom and Dad to let him use their vehicles or to give him enough gas to get to Robin’s house. Of course, they refused.
“You don’t need to see her every day, Alex,” and, �
�Let her come see you for a change,” they told him. They also got him with, “You should have been more careful about conserving gas so you’d still have some,” which just made him sulk even more. Everything out of his mouth was “Robin this” and “Robin that”; I was beginning to think he really was in love with her, but that didn’t make hearing it constantly any better.
Eventually, they made a compromise: every other day, Mom and Dad would drop Alex by Robin’s house on our way into town and pick him up on the way home; mostly, I think, just to shut him up for a while. He wasn’t happy about the limited time with her, but it was better than nothing.
After about two weeks—two heavenly weeks of getting to see Skylar every day—our gasoline ran out. Well, not exactly. Dad had some gas in reserve in an underground tank that he used for his farm machinery. There wasn’t much in the tank, however, because he had just finished the harvest and hadn’t had it refilled before we lost power. He said we needed to make sure we had some in case of an emergency, and also some to run the generator as needed. He had to put a lock on it because he was pretty sure that Alex had become so desperate to see Robin that he would steal some of the gas.
Surprisingly enough, I could now understand how Alex was feeling. After spending so much time with Skylar, my life at home now seemed dull and boring, like she had been the sun that brightened my day or a star that decorated my life at night.
Speaking of stars, I couldn’t believe how bright the stars were. Mom said they’d always been that bright out here away from city lights, which was one of the thousands of reasons she and Dad had decided to live in the country, but I couldn’t even remember looking at them, because my life had been so busy with school activities in the past few years.
Since we couldn’t drive into town anymore, we had begun hanging out around the fire pit again in the evenings. It was chilly, but Mom would make us hot chocolate or, when that ran out, coffee, and we’d grab some long sticks and roast whatever meat was taken out of the deep freeze to thaw that day. We’d talk and look up at the sky; Dad would tell us which tiny, white dots were planets and which were stars. He mentioned how it was odd not seeing any planes or satellites in the sky anymore.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 2