Natural Disasters

by J. K. Wise

  “So why does she hate you so much?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was probably a dick about it. Girls don’t usually say no to me, you know? She took me out of my game.”

  This moment, learning that Melanie rejected the almighty Chris Robbins, is a moment to cherish. Grabbing the top of the couch with my good hand, I haul myself up. “I really do need to go find her. I wonder if this place has a land line? My cell doesn’t work, and if I don’t call my parents, they’re going to call the National Guard.”

  “I’m pretty sure the National Guard is already in the neighborhood,” Chris says. He looks over my head to the door to the hallway. “Speak of the devil. Hey, Melanie.”

  I turn around. Melanie stands in the door, staring into a mug of coffee in her hand. “I never drink this stuff.”

  “Yeah?” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. She looks up from her mug but keeps her eyes away from Robbins.

  “I heard you fighting outside. Are you two okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” Chris says. “Portillo had a moment of uncontrollable rage and was going to wield his broken hand into my face, but I talked him down. Oh, yeah, we also got teargassed. All before breakfast. Welcome to the brave new world…”

  Melanie’s face is flushed. I wonder if she’s thinking about our almost kiss in the dark stairwell like I am, because she won’t look up from her coffee mug.

  Chris clears his throat. “Okay, well, I’m going to find something to eat other than crackers. If you guys want to evacuate this war zone anytime soon, you’ll find me in the kitchen.” He leaves. I can hear him humming the wedding march as he exits down the hall.

  When he’s gone, she look up at me. “I’m sorry I’m so weird about him.”

  “I don’t think Chris Robbins knows how to handle rejection,” I say.

  Her eyes widen. “He told you about that? He seemed to handle it fine. And it wasn’t like I really rejected him. I ran away when he asked me out.”

  “I don’t think his fragile ego knew what to do with that.”

  “He scared me. He told me I smell like lemons.” I have to take a second to process that. Does she smell like lemons?

  Will appears at the door with his posse still in tow. “Hey, you need a land line? I ran into your buddy in the kitchen. He was wearing my clothes. Wait. So are you.”

  “Sorry. I had to take a shower with my clothes on,” I say.

  Will reaches behind the couch and pulls out an ancient phone with a spiral cord. “Here. This works, unbelieveably.”

  I take the phone and hold it out to Melanie. “You want to call your parents first, or should I?”

  . . . . .

  Later, I find her on the third floor sitting cross-legged on top of a pile of books in the room that used to be the fraternity study room. Her back is to the door. She’s looking out of a window framed with broken glass. The rest of the shards are imbedded in the floor and covered by so much dust, I can’t tell what color the carpet used to be.

  Outside of the picture window, the grassy mall stretches out for hundreds of yards, all of it filled with the crowd that has grown to thousands. Police in riot gear stand with their backs to the limestone buildings around the perimeter, but within the mall, the fighting is over. Circles of people stand with their arms entwined, chanting. I can’t make out any of the words. At the far end, rows of vans and trucks wait with antennaes and radar dishes in the air, waiting for the next wave of action that will make a good story.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, making her jump. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About…?”

  “What is the point of all of this?” she says. I walk closer to her tuffet of books, but she still doesn’t face me. Her voice is dreamy, the underwater voice that has been gone for the last few weeks.

  “All of that out there?”

  “Just all of it. Like State. I’ve spent all of high school training for a day next week that isn’t going to happen. Even if it had, if I had won, what’s the point? So I can swim really fast. What difference does that make?”

  “I guess it would matter if you were being chased by a shark.”

  She turns to look at me now, her eyes dark. “Or what about love? All anyone can talk about, write about, sing about, is this idea of happily ever after. What’s so good about forever? It’s just a promise that no one can keep.”

  “I guess you talked to your parents?” I ask, leaning against the wall across from the windows.

  “Yeah, my Mom.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She wouldn’t talk about anything. She wants me to come home.”

  “Did you tell her where you are?” I ask.

  “I just told her I was safe.”

  I look outside again at the police holding bulletproof shields in front of their bodies. Rows of emergency vehicles line the street opposite the red brick university buildings. “That may have been a half-truth.”

  “Nothing is safe,” she says. “But maybe nothing ever was.”

  “Wow, you’re in a dark place.”

  She picks up a book and throws it out the open window, and the binding hits some of the hanging glass to the floor where it cracks apart.

  “I couldn’t reach Corrina. Her phone had a not-in-service recording.”

  I take a smoke out of my front pocket and light it, taking care to kill the match. “Mobiles aren’t working anywhere. That doesn’t mean Corrina’s not okay,” I say. I stare in the same direction that she is staring. Down the mall, I see news anchors lit by blue-white lights, the cameras rolling. “People are idiots, but it’s because they’re afraid. That doesn’t have to be us, Melanie.”

  “I have to find Corrina. How am I going to do that?”

  The antenae spin, the lights shine, and I hear the words that the crowds are chanting: Stand together. Don’t look back. Stand together. Don’t look back.

  “I have an idea. I want to do something. Will you come with me even if I seem crazy?” I ask.

  “Will you come with me to find Corrina?”

  I nod, and I reach out my hand to help her step over the glass splinters.

  Stand together. Don’t look back. Stand together. Don’t look back.

  Chapter 27

  Stand Together

  I follow Jared across the grass and through the chanting crowd. The air feels different than this morning, a shift from the violence of individual people fighting for their lives and holding onto their personal things. People are standing and facing the police, speaking their words together with one voice. Stand together. Stand together. The words are loud but not angry, a peaceful request, like a prayer.

  “Are we walking to the car? Are we going to go get Corrina now?”

  Jared shakes his head. “I can’t drive with this busted hand, and I don’t think we could get anywhere anyway. I saw on the news that most of the downtown streets are closed or blocked off by riot police. People are supposed to stay in their houses, but instead, everyone is coming down here.”

  “How are we going to get to her? I have to know if she’s allright,” I say.

  Jared doesn’t answer, but he takes my hand and leads me through the crowd. Up ahead, the rows of vans topped with spinning satelite dishes create a wall at the end of the mall. Remote reporters speak into cameras and shining lights that create halos around their heads. The reporters motion to the crowds behind them as they speak into the cameras, but I can’t hear what they are saying.

  Off to one side, a small crowd of people
stand quietly in front of a makeshift shrine. Posterboards with pictures of faces, cards, balloons, plastic flowers, and stuffed animals are laid out on the grass and propped against a short brick wall. One of the signs says “Rest In Peace” in sparkling glue. Another is the airbrushed picture of a woman’s face, blue tears falling down her cheeks as she looks down at a little girl in her arms. Candles burn in glass tubes, the kind Corrina’s family lights at Mass. They are all different colors of wax, white, red, blue, green. Even now, in the middle of day, they shine and the flames dance inside the glass tubes.

  “Hey, are you guys ditching me?” I hear behind us. Chris Robbins walks up followed by the guy who led me to Theta Chi in the first place.

  “No, man. I’m going to talk to the TV people,” Jared answers. “My small corner of this bullshit has to stop.” His eyes flash as he looks around the mall, the energy feeding him. He holds up his purple hand like a mirror in front of his face.

  Chris laughs. “What are you going to say that’s going to stop it? There are a million people losing their minds, Portillo.” He looks over at the memorial, and I watch his eyes as he takes in the scene and reads some of posters and cards. A helicopter flies over our heads. “A lot of people have lost a lot more than their minds, too. Come on, let’s get inside before the police start gasing people again.”

  A few feet away from me, a man in a brown safari hat takes pictures of the remembrances and talks to some of the people who stand and stare at collection. He squints his eyes and writes their words in a small notebook. His eyebrows are in charge of his face. They stick straight out, grey and shaggy. When he looks up and sees me standing at the edge of the crowd, he narrows his eyes, considering me. He looks back and forth between me and Jared before he starts to walk in our direction. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him before, but he looks at me like he knows who I am.

  Jared turns to me, still holding my hand. “We have to do something. Anything, even if that means begging people to act like actual humans. I can’t sit back and watch the world fall apart.”

  The man with the eyebrows walks closer and stops a few yards from where we are standing. “You two were in the Safeway riot on the Northwest side,” the man says. A few of the people near the shrine hear him, and they look up at us too.

  “Jared, I didn’t tell you yet. We were on the national news about that day at the store. He told me last night.” I nod over Adam who looks down at the growing shrine.

  The man in the hat walks a few steps closer. “I’m Matt Randle. I work for the Arizona Daily Star,” he says.

  Jared holds my hand a little tighter, and Mr. Randle looks down at our hands clasped together. “On the news, they said that you pushed her down in the store.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not what happened. Jared and I were in the Safeway, and people went crazy all at the same time. Everyone was trying to grab what they could, and I fell down. Jared picked me up.

  Matt Randle opens his notebook.

  “Wait, are you writing this down? I don’t want to be news.”

  “You already are, whether you like it or not. FOX decided that you’re a story, pretty white girl attacked by vicious Mexican boy.”

  Jared growls. “People are assholes.”

  Matt starts to write again.

  I take a step closer to him. “Wait, don’t write that down.” I turn to Jared. “Don’t say stuff like that to him.”

  Jared drops my hand and looks over at the TV trucks and then back to the crowds of chanting people.

  “Why not, Melanie? So my grandparents are from Mexico? Why is that even part of the story? People in that store needed food, and they needed water, and they went to buy those things. What difference does it make that they were from the Southside?” He looks as tired as I feel, barely standing and hardly able to make sense out of anything around me.

  Randle clears his throat. “Why don’t you both tell me what really happened in the Safeway? I’ll try to get your story printed. And you can tell me what you’re doing down here at the University shelter. What’s your name?”

  “I have to find my friend. I can’t waste anymore time,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asks.

  “We got seperated when they closed the west side down by the Rillito River,” I say.

  He whistles and shakes his head. “It’s tough luck, all that you’ve seen. But it might help people out to hear your story. The news spin on that footage of the two of you in the store alone is making up some people’s minds, and before long, everyone forgets that an earthquake started all of this. Everybody wants to blame someone when they’re hurting…” Matt takes his hat off his head and rubs his forehead with a bandana from his back pocket.

  I know that he’s right. I stopped watching the news a few days ago. I couldn’t stand it anymore, all of the loss and the blaming, the darkest side of how people can be.

  “I’m not good with talking. I always say the wrong thing. Even when I know what I want to say. It all comes out wrong.”

  Adam steps up. “Why would you talk to him? Have you read the paper lately?”

  Chris looks over at Adam, annoyed. “Who are you?”

  I take a step forward between Chris and Adam. “He gave me a blanket last night, and then he pulled me into Theta Chi when things got real this morning.”

  Matt Randle watches us, spinning his pen around his fingers.

  Jared throws his arms up. “This is what I’m talking about. Everyone’s an enemy.”

  “Whatever, hulk,” Chris says. “You were going to punch me in the face before we got gassed.”

  Adam kicks the grass with the toe of his Vans. “We’re just a bunch of fucking kids. Who cares what we have to say or what happened to us?” Behind us, a small crowd gathers. A few people point between Jared and I.

  “That FOX NEWS story about Jared and Melanie in the store has traction. People are looting stores, going after people, going crazy because of what they think happened to you, Melanie, and not just in Tucson.”

  “Like the stuff in California?” Adam asks. “That guy on TV basically told people to go out and take whatever they wanted from anyone brown.”

  “And people listen.” Matt says. “There’s violence happening all over the country by people who are frustrated with who-knows-what in their lives. Those people were nowhere near the earthquake, but now, they feel like they’re part of the story.”

  “But the people who are doing all that stuff aren’t kids like us. It’s the adults,” Chris says. “We just want to get back to normal, go to school, play football and drink some beer in the desert.”

  “I watched my friends’ Dad shoot some guy in the street. There’s no coming back to normal from that,” Jared says.

  Our quiet, desert street, lined with prickly pear cactus and mesquite trees…

  “Why do you think Portillo here is walking around like the poster child for PTSD?” Chris says. “My boy’s been through it.”

  Matt Randle clears his throat. “Listen, talk to me, or don’t. I’d like to write your perspective, what you’ve been through, and what you want people to do about it. But it’s your choice. There are a million stories. All I’m saying is that if no one steps up, people will listen to the loudest voice. Right now, that loudest voice,” he nods over to the FOX NEWS truck parked on the street, “is telling lies about what happened to the two of you.” He takes a step back, wipes his hand on his khaki pants, and tucks his pen under his hat and behind his ear.

  Jared drops my hand and walks over to Matt. “I’m Jared. This is Melanie.”

  “Good to meet you,” he says, shaking Jared’s hand and nodding over to me. Adam makes an e
xasperated grunt, but he doesn’t move from where we stand in a small circle. “Did you two meet at the Safeway?”

  Jared laughs, and Chris answers for us. He points at Jared and me. “We’ve all known each other forever. They’re neighbors.”

  “Neighbors? The boy next door?” Matt asks.

  I feel my face heat up, and I can’t look up at Jared. Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. Before I can stop myself, I make a noise that feels like a giggle but comes out like a snort. I keep my eyes down in the ground, but I can hear the people around us laugh.

  Matt asks us questions about where we were on the night of the earthquake, what school we go to, what our friends think about the quake. Chris talks about how his dad got arrested for guarding his house. I talk about Jenny Hepburn’s house and Benji from the swim team who is in the hospital.

  “Swim team? Are you all on the team?” Matt asks the three of us.

  “Naw,” Jared shakes his head. “Robbins and I play football. But Mel’s kind of a big deal as a swimmer. She’s a lock to win State.” His words make my cheeks warm again. “She was in your Sports section before all of this crap happened.”

  Chris clears his throat. “Wow, check this out, you guys. We’re disaster-time celebs,” he says with swagger as we look around at the gathering crowd.

  We answer all kinds of questions about the school, Safeway, the police barricade by the Rillito. I ask Matt Randle to print that I’m trying to get to Corrina. When Matt Randle asks me about swimming, I start to answer, but I have to stop and swallow to clear the lump in my throat.

  “Swimming is my anchor. Nothing but the worst case scenerio could keep me out of the water, so this must be it. Without swimming, I don’t know who I am.”

  Matt Randle writes down my words. “Does anything else make you feel that way? Your home? Your family?”

  “Only Jared.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize what I’ve said. Chris Robbins whistles, long and low.