The Last Place on Earth

by Carol Snow

  “You think I was going to take my car all the way into the mountains? It wouldn’t have been safe.”

  “So the Civic cooked?”

  “It was time for her to get a new car anyway.”

  A couple of hours later, Mr. Hawking pulled up in front of my house. It was so weird to be back, so normal, and yet … not. Part of me felt like nothing would ever be the same, and part of me felt like the entire time on the mountain had been a dream or just a really bad vacation.

  I stood up to scramble around the seats, but Peter said, “Um…”

  “What?”

  “Mom’s not here.”

  With all that had happened, I’d forgotten about sending my family to the Hawkings’ house. Fortunately, Henry quickly explained the situation, and if his parents were angry, at least they didn’t express it.

  Until we actually reached their house.

  The Hawkings’ front door stood wide open. On the front lawn, cats of every color clustered around three big feeding bowls. A German shepherd scampered up the front walkway and into the house. A tiny white dog followed on its heels.

  “What in the name of God?” Mr. Hawking stopped the car with a lurch and left it in the driveway. He and his wife hurried to the doorway, the rest of us close behind.

  We found my mother in the kitchen. There were two cats on the black granite counters and three … no, four … no, six dogs running in and out of the room.

  Mrs. Hawking said, “You set up an animal shelter? In our house?”

  “Somebody had to!” I had never seen my mother look so furious. “People were abandoning their pets—poor, innocent creatures that have done nothing wrong! And why? Just because they might carry fleas that might carry a disease that might infect someone? Where is the sense? Where is the humanity?”

  The fury brought color to my mother’s cheeks. She was wearing her favorite yoga pants and one of Peter’s old sweatshirts, and her hair swung from a high ponytail. It was like she had gotten younger in the time we had spent apart.

  “How many dogs and cats are here?” Mrs. Hawking asked. (Her husband had returned to his former speechless state.) “It is just dogs and cats, right?”

  “I don’t know how many. I’m not good with numbers. And yes—just cats and dogs. I received inquiries about a rat, but with all these cats around…” She shook her head. “I blame the media for blowing everything out of proportion. They tried to make us believe that the world was coming to an end! Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous? But you know what? Everything happens for a reason. Bad times bring out the best in people, and I for one have learned a great deal from this experience.”

  I started to laugh, which pretty quickly turned into a kind of maniacal sobbing.

  “Daisy! I didn’t even see you back there! How was camp?”

  “Camp sucked,” I said through my tears.

  She took me in her arms. “You never did like nature.”

  Three months later

  MY HOUSE SMELLS. I’m used to its being dirty, but now every time I open the door and step inside, I am shocked anew by the wall of pet dander, cat litter, and kibble dust that has become the new normal.

  Buddy immediately assaults me, rearing up on his hind legs and throwing his full weight against my chest, drowning me in stinky dog slobber.

  “Down, boy!” I say. And then I correct myself. “Girl.”

  Buddy is the fourth dog we’ve called Buddy since my mother embraced animal rescue as her life’s calling and started taking in fosters. Big dogs we call Buddy, little dogs we call Squirt, and cats go by color or pattern: Smokey, Blackie, Snowy, Tiger, Patches.

  Buddy gets down, but then she dances around and makes these high-pitched noises. I don’t speak Dog, but I’m pretty sure she is saying, “I’m hungry,” or “I gotta pee,” or maybe—probably—both.

  “Peter?”

  No answer.

  “Peter!”

  Smokey curls around my ankles, and I scoop him up. Immediately, he begins to purr. I fell in love with the first Smokey, and it broke my heart when he got adopted. So now I try not to get attached, kind of like with the Man-Frans.

  Speaking of Man-Frans, my mom broke up with Randy. No one’s fault, really, but it turned out he was allergic to cats.

  Peter is in his room, iPod buds in his ears, bent over a book. When he sees me, he turns off the music.

  “You were supposed to pick me up if it’s raining.”

  “So?”

  “It’s raining.”

  “It is?” His eyes flit over to his window, which doesn’t do any good because the blinds are down. He still hasn’t changed the burned-out overhead light, but he moved in a floor lamp from the living room.

  The latest Squirt, who is white and not too yappy for a little dog, is passed out on the bed. When Smokey sees her, he jumps out of my arms and bolts from the room. Squirt and Smokey have issues.

  “Did you feed Buddy?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you walked her since this morning?”

  “No. I’ve been reading. This is due tomorrow.”

  Peter has enrolled in community college, and whenever he talks about his assignments, he uses this reverent, hushed voice, as if taking Introduction to Accounting is right up there with joining the Peace Corps. I’m not sure if he’s really that into his studies or if he just sees school as the best way to avoid dealing with the in-house zoo, but I did see one of his papers lying around, and he got an A-minus, so he must be taking his classes at least kind of seriously.

  Mom made him get a job to help pay for her new (well, new to her) car. She got some insurance money for the Civic but not a lot since it was so old. Four nights a week, Peter works the Jamba Juice counter at the Brea Mall. He says he hates it, but I stopped by once, and a cute girl from Forever 21 was hanging around, so it can’t be all bad.

  I say, “Take Buddy for a walk. Like now, or she’ll pee all over everything like the last Buddy.”

  He puts down the book. “Fine.”

  “I’m going over to Henry’s house to study.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Is that what you kids are calling it nowadays?”

  “Henry and I are just friends.”

  “Right.”

  I cross my arms. “I hate you so much right now.”

  “You can’t hate me. I saved your life.”

  “You did not save my life. I saved your life.”

  “But my life was only in danger because I came to save you.”

  “Ah … but you didn’t.”

  We’ve had this discussion before. In fact, we have it pretty often. It’s a way to face up to what happened without getting sucked in by the terror of what almost happened.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  Really?

  Peter went back to school, and my mother discovered a passion for animals.

  Mr. Vasquez recovered, but Mrs. Jessup, the English teacher, is gone. I missed her funeral, but I hear it was standing-room only and everyone sobbed. A fund has been set up to help her little kids.

  The yearbook will be dedicated to our classmates who died. Each one gets a page. There’s talk of creating scholarships in their names.

  The Dunkles were never found. No one reported a burned-out bus or RV, either, but that may not mean anything. Though I hope it does. I hope that every day.

  * * *

  When I let myself out the back gate, the rain has stopped, but the path is soaked. By the time I reach Henry’s house, mud coats my bright pink sneakers, which were none too clean to begin with.

  Mrs. Hawking answers the door. When she sees me, she gathers me in her arms and says, “Sweetheart! It is always so good to see you!”

  Ha. Kidding. When she sees me, she says, “Daisy.” And then she kind of sighs.

  “Henry and I were going to study. Is he here?”

  She takes a step backward so I can enter the Fortress. “I’ll tell him to meet you in the TV room. You can leave your shoe
s by the door.”

  Ever since our time on the mountain, the Hawking parents have implemented a No Girls on the Second Floor rule. By girls, they mean me, of course, even though Henry and I really are just friends. I didn’t think we could ever go back to the way things were, but weirdly enough, we fell right into our old patterns.

  “I hope my mother gets a job soon,” Henry mutters when he comes into the den.

  The Forever Friends Pet Insurance Company suffered serious losses from plague-related claims (including hundreds of thousands of lab tests, the vast majority of which determined that the animals did not, in fact, have the disease), and Mrs. Hawking got laid off from her job. It probably didn’t help that she disappeared right when the company needed her most.

  Now that his mother is home all day, Henry hasn’t missed a single day of school. Instead of pulling straight As, he is getting straight A-pluses. It is annoying.

  He sits next to me on the beige leather couch, and I open up our chemistry textbook.

  “I need to tell you something,” he says.

  I keep my expression neutral. Winter Formal is in two weeks, but neither of us has mentioned it. Henry can go with Hannah Branson if he wants, and I really won’t care. Okay, I will care. Of course I will. But in the bigger scheme of things, dances just don’t matter that much.

  “I’ve joined the JV baseball team,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be on the bench this year, but Coach said that if I come to all the practices and then do summer camp, then next year I might get some playing time.”

  “You hate baseball,” I say.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’ve always said the baseball stuff in your room is stupid.”

  He shrugs. “It is stupid. I’m not eight.”

  “But you never wanted to watch any games on TV.”

  “That’s because watching baseball just made me feel worse about not being able to play.”

  “But…” I am so confused. “If you’ve always wanted to play, why didn’t you?”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me. Too dangerous. I could get hit by a ball. Or a bat. Though that seems unlikely. But I think they’ve finally realized they can’t protect me from everything. Plus, I asked them, like, five times a day for the past month until they finally caved.”

  Mrs. Hawking pops her head into the room long enough to see that we are not engaged in any unseemly behavior, then she disappears.

  “You like baseball.” I am still trying to process this. Does it mean I’ll have to go to the school games? Or watch the sport on TV? Will that be payback for all those Nicholas Sparks movies I’ve forced on Henry?

  “So the thing is,” he says, “I’ll have a new schedule, starting tomorrow.”

  “Huh?”

  “They had to switch my classes around to fit in baseball. We’ll still be in AP Euro together, but that’s it.”

  “That’s … okay,” I say, trying to convince myself more than him. “The courses are still the same, right? So we can still do homework together after school.”

  “I’ll have practice after school.”

  “Right.” The textbook feels heavy in my lap.

  “But we can study together in the evenings.”

  “Okay.”

  He leans toward me, trying to catch my eye. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Right,” I say to the textbook, thinking, Of course it changes things. It changes everything.

  But that is the nature of life. Nothing stays the same.

  His mother pops her head in for the second time.

  “Wanna go for a walk?” he asks me.

  The rain has washed the smog from the air. Patches of brilliant blue push away the clouds, and the trees glow with golden light. At the pond, waterfowl outnumber humans for once. Coots dive under the surface, while mallards nap in the shadows by the banks. On the far side, a white egret stands on one leg. In a few months, ducklings will paddle and chirp in the shallows. Seasons follow seasons. Life goes on.

  Henry shoves his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “Mr. and Mrs. Waxweiler are getting a divorce.”

  “Really? That’s too bad.”

  “My parents said Mrs. Waxweiler couldn’t forgive Mr. Waxweiler for leaving Martin behind on the mountain. But I think it’s more than that.”

  I feel bad for Gwendolyn, who kept her spot on the drill squad but looks tense all the time, and for Martin, who was so happy to find out that Sienna hadn’t gotten sick—only to discover that she had left him for another guy. And I feel bad for Mr. and Mrs. Waxweiler, too, because I know they wanted the best for the children, even if they went about it all wrong.

  “Let’s go this way,” Henry says, wandering along the pond and then turning off near a feeder stream.

  “It’s muddy there.”

  “You’re afraid of a little dirt?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.” It’s a lie, of course. I’m afraid of so much, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  The pond is stocked with fish. At the edge of a tiny waterfall, a metal grate protects the young trout from being eaten by bigger fish below—though not from the opportunistic ducks who paddle on the surface.

  A plastic bottle lies in the water, wedged between two rocks.

  “I can’t believe someone would just throw their trash in the water,” Henry says.

  I think of the stream near the cave, where Kirsten picked berries so I could dye her hair. How clear that water was, how clean. It was like we were the only people who had ever been there. Or like we were the last people left at the last place on earth.

  Henry points at the bottle. “You should grab that. Put it in the trash.”

  “Why don’t you grab it?”

  “You’re closer.”

  “Fine.” I lean over and pick it up. There is something inside.

  “That’s weird.” I glance up. Henry looks … not nervous exactly, but … well, yeah. Actually, he looks nervous.

  “You should probably open it,” he says.

  I unscrew the cap and pull out a slip of paper.

  Daisy:

  1. Will you please go to Winter Formal with me?

  2. As a date. (In case that wasn’t clear.)

  3. I still think that movie was stupid.

  Henry

  He looks up at the sky. His eyes are so dark. “I almost left a trail of pebbles to lead you here, but I didn’t think you’d appreciate that.”

  “I wouldn’t have.”

  “And then I thought about leaving a trail of bread crumbs instead, but I figured the ducks would eat everything before we got here.”

  “They would have.”

  We hold each other’s eyes. “So … you want to go to the dance? If not, we can just stay home and watch Netflix. I’ll even let you pick the movie.”

  “I want to go to the dance.”

  “Good.”

  “You’ll need to get me a corsage.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Okay then.”

  He leans forward and touches his lips to mine. And the earth moves.

  No, seriously. It moves.

  “Earthquake!”

  We jump apart. By the metal grate, a mallard flaps his wings as the water around him swishes back and forth and splashes onto the bank. Around the pond, other ducks awake from their naps to squawk in protest, and a few frightened coots take to the sky. A tiny wood duck rides a wave like a surfer.

  The earth lurches. The earth churns. And then it stops.

  Like a pendulum, the pond has found its rhythm and continues to move even after the ground has stilled. Back and forth, it sways. Back and forth. If I close my eyes, I can almost believe we are at the ocean.

  “It must have been a sign,” Henry whispers.

  “Of what?”

  “I dunno. Of something good?”

  “Or something bad.”

  He takes my hand. “One of those.”

  The churning in t
he pond slows and then stops. The coots return from the sky and land in the water, where they resume their paddling and their diving. It is like nothing has happened, and life goes on as before.

  Acknowledgments

  I’VE WRITTEN FAR too many books to have launched into this one as I did: with a few suspenseful pages and no idea whatsoever where the plot was headed. I owe a mountain of thanks to my gifted editor and dear friend, Kate Farrell, for falling in love with that brief beginning … as well as for her honesty a few months later when she told me that the next sixty pages really had to go—but not to worry because we’d figure something out. And it looks like we did.

  My wonderful agent, Steph Rostan, has been involved in every phase of every book I’ve written, and this one was no exception. I am endlessly grateful for her support, as well as for the smart and hardworking crew at the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. I am thankful, too, for all the people at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers for turning my messy manuscript into such a pretty book. Thanks to Rachel Murray for her attention to detail; the art department for the gorgeous cover and book design; and the eagle-eyed copy editors whose fact-checking and map-reading skills saved me from tremendous embarrassment.

  Thanks to Paul Chiotti and Sue Sefcik for sharing their professional expertise; to Kim Snow for her enthusiastic early reader feedback; and to Tim Scott for backpacking with my husband so I don’t have to. Next time, guys, try to remember the matches.

  Finally, thanks to my family: Philip, my self-appointed target reader; Lucy, who found a new use for Kool-Aid; and Andrew, who is my everything, always.

  About the Author

  Carol Snow is the author of Bubble World and many other books for teens. She has also written five novels for adults. Originally from New Jersey, she now lives in Southern California with her husband and their two children. Visit her at carolsnow.com or sign up for email updates here.

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