by Amy Brashear
Mr. Truitt placed a new rack of beakers on the workstation in front of us.
“I’ll do it,” I said, knowing full well that I was being taken advantage of—again.
“It takes approximately thirty minutes for our Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile to hit Moscow. It takes approximately thirty minutes for their R-36M—known by NATO as SS-18 Satan—to hit our target, which, for all purposes, could be Blackwell or Hattieville, or what happened at Damascus could happen at one of those,” I said.
Damascus, Arkansas, was a little shit-hole town home to nothing except for the Little Rock Air Force Launch Complex. Fifty-some miles from Little Rock. Thirty-some miles from here was a secret thing that everyone here always knew was in the ground. That became a government cover-up.
My dad spent a lot of time in the bunker there, and then he spent a lot of time in the bunkers at the other nine missile silos around us. There were eighteen missile silos around Arkansas total. I didn’t see Dad a lot anymore. Mom was too preoccupied with Dennis to worry about my psyche, so I focused on school. It was the only thing that made any sense in my life.
On our first day in class, Mr. Truitt laid down the rules:
1. No eating or drinking.
2. No long sleeves.
3. Tie back hair.
4. Wear protective glasses.
5. Wear protective apron.
6. Wear closed-toe shoes.
7. Don’t smell the chemicals.
8. Don’t play around.
9. Wash your hands.
10. Do not pull the safety shower string.
If someone pulled the safety shower string, water would flood the room. Everything would get wet, and the person responsible would see the principal and be doing worksheets for the rest of the term.
While others thought about it or pretended to pull said string, I never did—but now that string was freedom.
I got up from my stool, leaving Rodney on his own, and went over to the shower and pulled. And it rained. It rained hard.
I had done it. I did the one thing that made the vein on the right side of Mr. Truitt’s neck pulsate. Oh boy, was he mad.
Talk of suspension. Talk of calling my mom. I was looking at hard time—
But I would pull that string again.
I was done with partners and raising the GPA of my fellow classmate. They wouldn’t use me anymore. No longer a tool for some trophy. Laura Ratliff was free of the oppressive regime of Griffin Flat athletics. Worksheets, lots of worksheets, would be in my future.
“Laura Ratliff, principal’s office. Now,” Mr. Truitt screamed, his finger pointed at me and then the door.
Oohs and aahs followed me out.
“Dead girl walking!” Max said, giving me a thumbs-up. He was trying to suppress his laughter and failing.
I sat in front of the principal. He stared at me through his glasses, the lenses so thick his eyeballs were magnified, and then at my permanent file, which was also thick. Thick with accolades, not demerits.
“Laura—” Principal Parker started, leaning back in his chair. His tie sat on his belly, and his mustache still had crumbs from this morning’s breakfast. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said, tapping his left hand’s fingers like he was playing a piano. The faint spot on his finger where a wedding ring once sat was hardly visible now. His wife had died. She didn’t leave him like my mom left my dad. “Truly disappointed.”
Disappointed was something my mom would say.
Principal Parker looked at me and shook his head. And it wasn’t meant in a sarcastic way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lying through my teeth. But I knew that was what he as the principal wanted to hear.
The principal’s office was one place not to talk back—even if you knew deep down in your heart that you did the right thing, not just for your sanity but for the athletes in this school to finally do their own work. Fight the power—oh, whatever, it didn’t matter. Principal Parker was talking suspension. A day. Worth it.
But then he brought up Mrs. Martin, and I felt my heart sink as I slumped into the chair.
Mrs. Martin was the supposed confidante for all students at Griffin Flat High School, but she was the one in danger of having a nervous breakdown. And according to Principal Parker, pulling the safety shower string that resulted in gallons of H2O being sent down in a waterfall and flooding a portion—a tiny portion, I may state as fact—of the chemistry lab classroom meant that I, Laura Ratliff, was on the verge of going full-on cuckoo, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest10 cuckoo. And I guessed liability issues deemed that I needed to see Mrs. Martin. Now, she had seen me in her tiny closet of an office before, ever since that Monday after the town found out about the dissolution of my parents’ marriage by way of a third party.
Mrs. Martin always talked in questions. “How does it make you feel?” was a given, but “What are you going to do about it, Laura?” was one of her favorites.
We’d talk about my parents’ marriage and how I wished it would have been. I wanted parents like Jennifer and Jonathan Hart. I wanted parents who loved each other. I wanted a grandfather like Max. I wanted a dog like Freeway. I guess I wanted to be Laura Hart, not Laura Ratliff. But like Hart to Hart,11 my family was canceled prematurely.
I moved from Principal Parker’s office to down the hall to see Mrs. Martin and sat in front of her, trying to figure out what her angle was going to be this session. I didn’t think anyone forced me to sit there. I mean, not really. I was not obligated at all to be here. Yes, the administration had to get permission from my parents. But I had the right to say no. Well, at least I thought I could. Though I never tried.
“Laura Ratliff,” she said, taking my file out of her filing cabinet and laying it on her desk. Then she pulled out a new yellow notepad from her bottom drawer.
I grabbed a Snickers from her bowl of candy, tore it open, and popped it in my mouth.
“Congratulations,” she said, sitting at her desk and finding an ink pen that actually worked.
She collected pens, especially ones that held no ink.
“Thank you,” I said. “It was my finest moment. Honestly, I probably should have pulled it sooner.”
“No, on being caller number nine,” she said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have pulled the string to the safety shower.”
“Shouldn’t have, but—”
Mrs. Martin knew of my tendency to be a smart-ass. “You know better than that.”
I grabbed another Snickers.
“Laura, where should we start?” she asked.
She started the discussion. I went back to eating another Snickers. When I didn’t answer her question, she took away the Snickers bowl.
“You pulled the safety shower. Does it have anything to do with being caller number nine?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“I need you to talk to me,” she said.
I twisted my scrunchie around my wrist.
“Remember, The Day After12 was only a movie,” she said, repeating the one line that she told me after I came in crying last November. The time when I broke out in a cold, shivering sweat, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.
It’s only a movie. Just like it’s only a game.
“Do you believe everything they tell you?” I asked.
“Laura—”
I sighed, reaching for the bowl of Snickers, but then realized she took that away, just like the politicians were doing with my hopes and dreams.
“No, it has nothing to do with that—though that subject appears nightly in my nightmares,” I said.
“Laura, how does that make you feel?”
That dreaded question that people who get psychology degrees and decide to head-shrink for a living ask.
How does the fear that adults with the power to flip a
switch are going to mess it up before I got my chance sound to you? Not good. We were living in a nuclear soap opera.
“How does it make me feel?” I said, repeating her question.
“I asked you,” she said.
“It makes me feel—”
There were two camps: the holy beep, we all could die and the maybe things won’t be so bad. I fell into the first camp. The camp that knew it had fifteen minutes to accomplish everything it wanted to before it died. That did weigh on your psyche.
Last November, after watching The Day After, I called 1-800-NUCLEAR with the rest of the poor saps. I was afraid that my parents would be killed and I would survive. I was afraid that I would die and my parents would survive. I once had to make Mrs. Martin a list of everything I was afraid of:
My parents will die
I’ll get sick
I’ll die
Bad grades
People won’t like me
I’m not pretty
I won’t ever have a boyfriend
Nuclear war
Whenever I tried to talk about my feelings on nuclear war, what actually happened was silence. I couldn’t. If I talked about it, then that meant it was on the horizon. A nuclear payload heading down on us, down on me.
Yeah, we did drills where we hid under our desks. You know, those were some badass desks. Immune to an ICBM, or what you probably would see in your underpants right after. And we had a fallout shelter in our basement at school, but it was locked after too many students found that to be the perfect make-out spot.
On a scale of one—does not bother me—to five—very disturbing—I was on a ten going on eleven.
Mrs. Martin looked at her watch. “We should continue this conversation,” she said. “I’ll schedule you in for a weekly session.”
I was defeated. But nodded anyway.
“Does this count as my punishment for pulling the safety shower in chemistry?” I asked.
She shook her head and smiled. “No, you’re suspended for one day. You got off easy.”
Worth it.
I leaned over the desk to grab a handful of Snickers from the bowl she purposely put out of reach. I took a glance at my folder, which was flipped open, and died a little inside.
Laura Ratliff is afraid of not having a future. She is afraid of dying in a nuclear blast. She comes from a broken family, which isn’t that uncommon, but it was done in such a way that it became town gossip.
Mrs. Martin, I thought, you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.
* * *
10 It’s a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey and a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson. It takes place in a mental institution.
11 It premiered in 1979 and stars Robert Wagner as Jonathan Hart, CEO of Hart Industries, and Stefanie Powers as Jennifer Hart, a freelance journalist. They jet-set around the world solving crimes. I wanted to be part of that family. I would have gladly walked Freeway.
12 On November 20, 1983, 100 million people dropped everything to watch The Day After on ABC, a TV movie about the nuclear annihilation of Kansas City and the aftermath in Lawrence, Kansas. Prior to the TV movie airing, there was a special viewers guide sent in the mail. We were supposed to watch The Day After and then have a discussion, but if we needed to talk to someone, there was 1-800-NUCLEAR, a special counseling hotline. If we needed to talk to someone because it got too much too fast, they were there. Seriously, as a nation we had homework. And we were warned, DON’T WATCH IT ALONE! Local affiliates even went so far as to advise parents not to let kids watch it at all. Mom and Dennis didn’t listen. They let me watch it. I curled up on the couch and watched the end of the world happen with no commercial breaks!
Terrence said he watched half of it at his mom’s house before he got bored and did homework instead. He missed the mushroom cloud, the firestorms, the wind, the skeletonized people, the buildings exploding, people vaporized, the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands, the radiation poisonings, the panic, the savaging, the pillaging, the government not knowing how much to dig in the irradiated farmland, the possibility of deformed infants, no medicine, no cures, no hope, only despair. We don’t even know who shot first. But as John Lithgow said in the movie, it doesn’t matter.
After the movie they said it would be much worse than what we saw—there would be vomiting with acute diarrhea, and much, much more.
Max’s parents confined him to his bedroom and checked on him to make sure he wasn’t watching it. He had little to add to the conversation the next day at school. The movie was scary. It left me feeling nothing. I was hollow inside. I was afraid. I still am.
Chapter Three
I was sent home—and by home I mean the Flat Inn. My mom was the general manager of the only decent (or so she claimed) hotel in the town. Helping was my after-school job. Folding towels, emptying the trash, stocking the sweets shop. That afternoon, I grabbed an orange soda from the cooler, found a comfy seat in the lobby and watched as my mom dealt with crisis after crisis.
“What’s leaking from the ceiling from the fourth floor?” a guest asked.
Um. Rain? I didn’t say it out loud. That would be rude to the guests. End of the world to some of these people. The customer wasn’t always right. Sometimes they were downright stupid.
“I’m sorry, sir. Let me see if we have any available rooms I can move you to,” Mom said.
The phone didn’t stop ringing, and Mom didn’t stop trying to explain why they were sold out. She hung up the phone. “Why don’t you take your little hammer and nails and build you one,” she said to no one as the phone rang again. “Flat Inn, this is Edna. How may I help you? No, I’m sorry. We are all sold out for that week. What’s going on? Well, ma’am, they’re shooting a movie—”
Some of the crew and a few of the actors were staying here, and Mom was going insane. Some of the older actors were renting houses. I guess they were too old for the hotel lifestyle. I didn’t blame them. After the “secret” came out about my mom and Terrence’s dad, Mom and I pretty much moved into room 104. Next to the kitchen. Noisy. And you could smell the free continental breakfast at five-thirty in the morning. Dad escaped to Little Rock Air Force Base’s barracks.
“Welcome to Flat Inn. Checking in?” she asked a man with a suitcase.
Paula walked over and sat down a stack of brown and green folders and a stack of paper. “Put a copy of this letter in each one.”
The letter. Mom worked hard on that letter. The owner, Paul Passoni, wanted to make sure he had all his bases covered when it came to the possibility of a nuke attack. I mean, Griffin Flat might be smallish, a little over eight thousand people, but we were on the nukemap.13 There were eighteen possible targets, not to mention the Little Rock Air Force Base, and Nuclear One.14 We were pretty much right smack dab in the vicinity of a ground zero situation.
“Your mom wants this done ASAP,” Paula said.
“And let me guess: She wanted you to do it?”
Paula always was a slow learner. She was hired because she was the owner’s sister. Nepotism and all. She blew her gum into a bubble and walked away. No matter how incompetent, you didn’t fire family.
I started stuffing and occasionally reading the letter.
Dear Guest,
I hope your stay will be comfortable and enjoyable.
As you may know, our country is in tense relations with the Soviet Union. We may have to face the threat of rising tensions, which may escalate to a full-out nuclear strike.
Whilst Arkansas has not yet been affected, we request that you follow the instructions below, should there be an air raid in the vicinity of the hotel.
1. If you hear a siren while in the hotel, please go down the staircase to the lobby, which is the lowest floor of the hotel.
2. Please do not use the elevators.
3. Disabled gues
ts or guests who might have difficulties reaching the lobby are requested to inform our front desk at check-in.
4. Staff will direct you to the shelter area.
5. Please stay in the designated area until it is safe to leave.
For any other assistance, please feel free to contact the Front Desk or the Manager on Duty.
I am sure you will join me in hoping a quick end to the Cold War.
Sincerely,
Edna Jennings
General Manager
No matter how insane—I mean insane—this thing was, I felt like I was living in a movie. We were on the eve of destruction. (Laugh-out-loud funny here. I get the title of the movie. What do they say? Roll credits.)
When Mom had a moment’s peace, she came over and sat down at my small table in the breakfast area. “You shouldn’t have to do that,” she said.
“Paula—”
“But thank you.”
Before she could lecture me about my one-day suspension, I told her about the radio contest and how I won. “They were chanting my name in the locker room.” I raised my right arm and started chanting, “Laura! Laura! Laura!”
“And then—”
“And then I get to bring a friend with me to the set.”
She smiled, sort of. “So I guess you’re going to be bringing”—she sighed—“Dana.”
Dana. The bane of her existence. I am not going to use the word hate because that might not be the type of word Mom would use. No, slash that. She hated Dana. A lot of parents did. Dana was the type of friend who would barge into family situations without asking. One time she just showed up after Mom was going to take me on a special trip to Little Rock and thought she was going, too. Once my dad sent me flowers to my school for Valentine’s Day, and she got mad. Her mom did too. (Her dad didn’t send her any.) Her mom called my mom at work and complained. Like, who did that? I wasn’t exactly friends with Dana. Never really had been. She was just there. And I told Mom that repeatedly, but she didn’t believe me.