by Nick Courage
As if they’d given up on themselves.
Her mother flinched, then hardened.
“Emily,” she said. “He’s not out of the woods yet. His immune system…”
Emily shook her head.
“I know,” she said, swallowing the second round of sneezes she felt itching at the back of her throat. She held her breath as she watched small particles of dust swirl in the light between them, but her mother didn’t say anything. She just scowled at Emily from the doorway, the phone pressed tightly against her chest.
“I know, okay,” Emily repeated, sounding calmer than she felt. “I’m not sick. It’s just”—she gestured at the mess—“I need to clean my room, is all.”
Her mother frowned, then nodded, wrinkling her nose at Emily’s wet clothes. The turtle crawled out from beneath her desk as if on cue. No, Emily whispered to herself. Not now. But her turtle didn’t listen. His square little head peeked out into the sunshine as her mother checked the corners of the ceiling for traces of mildew. “Make sure you get beneath the bed,” she said, stepping into the hall. “Something’s…gross in here.” The turtle’s upturned nose mirrored her mother’s almost exactly, and Emily’s lips twitched into an unexpected smile as her mom put the phone back to her ear and stepped into the hallway.
She was lucky her room was so messy.
If it had been any cleaner, her mother would have seen the turtle. A sneeze was one thing, but a wild animal from Audubon Park was something else entirely.
One look at his mossy shell and she would have short-circuited.
“Sorry about that, Lil,” her mom said, shaking her head as she walked away.
As soon as the door closed behind her, Emily sneezed again…and again. She fell back onto her pillows while the turtle clawed its way toward a pair of tangled earbuds. It felt good to sneeze, and Emily stretched herself awake for the second time that morning as her turtle gnawed contentedly on the knotted cords. She watched him for a full minute, mesmerized by his determination, before she started patting her sheets—searching for her dying phone.
“Glamor shot,” she said, zooming in on her turtle’s crossed eyes.
She snapped five quick pictures, then chose the best one and traced a pink heart around his scaly head so he wouldn’t blend into the detritus of her room. Grinning at her handiwork, Emily texted the photo to her brother. Are you awake yet? she asked, her charge slipping from ten to eight percent. While she waited, she checked her messages…but she still didn’t have any. Not from Elliot and not from Katie and not from any of her other friends. Except for Elliot, who was sleeping fifteen feet away, they were all out living their own lives.
Having fun, like regular kids.
Or evacuating, like Katie.
Cramped in the backseat of an overpacked Toyota, driving north out of Florida.
Even that didn’t sound so bad to Emily, considering the alternative: two more months alone in her dirty room, bored out of her mind with no one to talk to and nothing to do except finish her summer reading. She picked at the dirt beneath her nails, glancing around the room for her mom’s old copy of My Side of the Mountain. It wasn’t on her bookshelf or stacked on top of her dresser with her other books. Unless it had somehow settled into a secondary layer of laundry on her floor, Emily wasn’t sure where it could be. The turtle stopped chewing on her earbuds and blinked at Emily, jogging her memory.
Shoot.
She jumped out of bed, rifling through the clothes on the floor for a fresh pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt. Even though she needed one, she didn’t have time for a shower. She’d left her book in the park. She remembered it now. Not on the island, but on the grass, where she’d fallen asleep. It was so old it was probably worth something—another reason for her mom to be mad at her. The turtle watched Emily with curiosity, ducking back into his shell as she picked him up and stuffed him without warning into the big pocket of her empty backpack. Just beyond her bedroom door, her mom shuffled back and forth in the darkened hallway, finishing her call. “Honestly, I understand why you’d worry, but the weather’s totally fine here,” she said, laughing politely. “It’s better if we don’t move him around too much.”
Hovering.
“Okay, then,” her mom said. “We’ll just wait and see.”
As soon as she hung up on Aunt Lillian, she threw Emily’s door open again.
Emily stood in the middle of her room, dirty but dressed, her backpack at her feet.
“Good,” her mom said. “You’re up.”
Now that she was done pretending to be happy on the phone, her voice was back to normal. The mask of a smile was gone—changed in an instant to the expressionless thin lips Emily had grown to recognize. She held out a handful of bills, crumpled from her purse, and set them on Emily’s overflowing dresser. “This is for pizza or something,” she said. “I need you to stay with Katie for a day or two, just in case you’re coming down with something.”
A chill ran up Emily’s arms despite the heat.
She was almost too stunned to argue.
“Isn’t there a storm coming?” she asked.
Emily’s mom slumped against the doorframe, looking almost like her old self again as the television played two cat food commercials in a row. Emily could feel the turtle rearranging himself in her backpack while kittens meowed onscreen. “We’ll figure that out when your dad gets home,” she said. “But a little rain is nothing compared to what we’ve been through already.”
Her face tightened, and Emily nodded.
It was easier not to fight when her mom was like this.
There was no winning—and she was just worried, Emily knew. She was worried and she was tired and she was alone. They both were. Emily slipped her phone into her back pocket and slung her backpack over one shoulder. Her mom had made up her mind, and there was no point in telling her that Katie wasn’t around.
That she didn’t have anywhere to go.
Not really.
Emily closed her eyes and wished for her dad to walk through the door right then. She wished as hard as she could, but when she opened her eyes, nothing had changed. “Elliot can’t handle a cold right now,” her mom said, her voice even and calm. Like everything was normal. It was hard to look at her without crying, but Emily looked up anyway—squinting through tears.
Her mom looked tired, like she was the one who was in recovery.
She looked sorry.
“We just can’t risk it,” her mom said. “I’ll call Katie’s parents; they’ll understand.”
She forced a smile as she waved Emily out of her own room.
“It’ll be fun, okay?”
“Okay,” Emily mumbled, trying to keep her voice flat and steady as she took the bills from her dresser. She folded them into her pocket slowly, taking stock of her bedroom. It was hard to know what to pack when she didn’t know what she was doing or where she was going, so she decided not to bring anything at all.
Just her turtle in her backpack and a pocketful of cash.
She’d be back soon enough, anyway.
It was only a matter of time before her mom found out that Katie and her family were in Atlanta. As soon as she got around to calling them, she’d panic and call Emily. She’d tell her how sorry she was for sending her away and beg her to come back home. Even so, Emily wasn’t happy about it. She wanted to sprint past her mom and into Elliot’s room. To give him a hug and tell him everything she’d done. To show him her turtle. But instead she walked through the sunless living room, past the cold glow of the television and into the foyer, her stomach growling as she pulled her mud-encrusted shoes onto her bare feet.
Her shoes were still wet, and they squeaked as she plodded down the stairs.
But Emily was too angry to cry, and too hungry to be angry.
Pushing the front door open with her shoulde
r, she stepped into the morning light, squinting as she smoothed and counted the crumpled bills on the sun-dappled steps. It didn’t take long—she had one twenty, two tens, and three one-dollar bills. Forty-three dollars in all. A strawberry milk was a dollar and nineteen cents at Winn-Dixie, and they sold doughnuts there, too. Big, sticky ones—the glaze so thick it pooled in hard white piles at the bottom of their wax paper wrappers.
Emily could almost taste them just thinking about it.
She swallowed.
She was on her own, and her lost book could wait.
It was a long walk from her apartment to the grocery store, but Emily knew where she was going. She just had to follow the traffic away from the park and not stop until she reached a series of sprawling parking lots. Fields of black asphalt baking in the sun. She stared at her shoes as she walked, kicking rocks beneath the flowering crepe myrtles. Halfway to the grocery store, she realized she was humming tunelessly to herself and looked up. Squirrels chased each other across fresh-cut lawns and entire families rode their bikes toward the park, laughing as they dodged potholes and off-leash dogs.
It was another beautiful day in New Orleans.
Emily sighed.
Her arms were turning pink from the sun, and by the time she reached the grocery store, she felt more guilty than angry.
It wasn’t always easy, but she loved her family.
If anything happened to any of them, she didn’t know what she would do….
An old minivan honked—two beeps, short and insistent—as she stepped onto the blacktop. The parking lot was as packed as she’d ever seen it, and Emily had to weave through gridlock to reach the entrance. Somewhere behind her, someone shouted out their unrolled window and the honking escalated. As it reached a crescendo, Emily looked for her friend—the security guard who always smiled—but he wasn’t in his usual spot. His cracked plastic chair sat between the entrance and the exit, empty except for a folded newspaper and a half-finished booklet of word searches. A young woman pushed past her as she stood in front of the sliding glass doors—her purse knocking into Emily, hard, as she hustled into the air-conditioning. The woman didn’t stop to apologize, and Emily rubbed her shoulder as she followed her into the store and out of the sunshine. After her eyes adjusted to the flickering fluorescent lights, Emily noticed the security guard pacing by the registers.
She waved, but he was too distracted to notice her.
She didn’t blame him.
The grocery store was a madhouse.
Emily usually lingered by the candy and comic books stocked at the front of the store, but the checkout lines were so long that they snaked in front of her favorite displays. It figured: now that she had money for Batgirl and sour straws, she couldn’t get to them. Everywhere she looked, carts were filling the aisles, piled high with bags of bread and bottles of water and boxes of cereal—entire shelves pushed into baskets, like the store was going out of business.
Like there wasn’t going to be anything left for her.
Emily half jogged through the frozen food aisles, juking past slow-moving shoppers and spinning around abandoned carts. There was less traffic at the back of the store, and less food on the shelves. Emily’s stomach clenched as she reached the bakery—preparing itself for the worst as she slowed, walking past the empty shelves in disbelief. There weren’t any glazed doughnuts or chocolate-covered doughnuts or jelly doughnuts—and there wasn’t anything else, either. Not even a burnt apple turnover or a stale baguette. The entire bakery was cleaned out except for a dented white box that had been kicked halfway beneath a rolling wooden island.
Emily kneeled onto the scuffed tiles and inspected the box.
It was a cherry pie, crumbled from its fall, with dark red syrup oozing through the broken crust.
Emily didn’t care that it was a floor pie.
It was perfect.
She cradled the box protectively against her chest as she jogged back to the front of the store—stopping just once, to grab one of the flavored milks the security guard seemed to like so much. There was a cow in a berry patch on the label. The cow was licking its lips and giving Emily a thumbs-up. She smiled to herself as she found her place at the back of the checkout line, three carts behind the woman who had knocked into her outside. She wouldn’t have recognized the woman’s face, but she remembered the faded pink of her oversized purse. Emily stared at the back of the woman’s head as the rest of the store eddied anxiously around her.
There was a buzz in the air—an excitement that bordered on aggression.
If she hadn’t been so hungry, Emily would have left her crumbling pie on a shelf and walked right out the smudged glass doors. But she’d skipped dinner the night before and her stomach churned, loud enough to remind her that she’d been kicked out of her own house before she’d had a chance to eat breakfast. Not that there was anything good in her kitchen, anyway—just off-brand Cheerios and hard green apples….
But Emily wasn’t sure when she’d be back, and she was hungry.
So she stood patiently, waiting for the elderly cashier to ring up the overloaded carts in front of her. The line hadn’t moved one inch by the time the security guard noticed her—the one person in line with five items or less. “You here with your momma?” he asked, waving as he ambled toward the back of the line. Emily shook her head, and the guard carried her pie and strawberry milk as he guided her toward the front of the checkout line, placing it on the belt as the woman with the pink purse scowled at her from behind her cell phone.
Emily didn’t pay her any attention.
“Customer emergency,” the security guard said, his voice loud enough for everyone to hear as he winked at the old man working the checkout. “This is my buddy,” he whispered. The old man smiled at Emily, handing her a plastic spork from beneath the register as she unfolded her money. “You got the right idea,” he said, chuckling as the security guard resumed his patrol. “Girl after my own heart.”
Emily smiled back at him and slipped the change into her pocket.
The sun reflected off the hoods of the cars in the parking lot as she stepped into the heat, tempting her to sit in the security guard’s empty chair. In the shade. Emily perched on the edge of his seat, not wanting to disturb his newspaper. The picture splashed across the front page was an aerial shot of the flooding in San Juan. The roofs of the houses looked like islands in the surf. DESTRUCTION AT DAWN, the headline read, the black ink smeared where the guard had folded the page in half.
Emily drank her milk first, watching the cars circle the lot for spaces that didn’t exist. There were no clouds in the sky, but it wasn’t blue. It was more of a yellowish green, like plastic left out in the sun. A weird color, to match her day. Emily wiped the pink froth from her lips and started in on the pie. It was so sweet it gave her a headache, but she didn’t care. She had already eaten her way through the better part of it when her phone vibrated in her pocket.
A text from Elliot.
Finally.
Mom’s crying again, he’d written, leaving off the period.
Letting the observation hang in the hot summer air.
Sorry, Emily texted, her screen sticky with syrup from the cherries. All of a sudden, sitting on the security guard’s cracked plastic chair in front of the crowded Winn-Dixie, Emily felt like crying too.
“Did you really bring a turtle home?” Elliot texted.
A tear fell on Emily’s screen, blurring his message.
She had five percent battery left and had forgotten her charger in her room.
Alejo blinked awake in the dark to the sound of whistling, tuneless and high-pitched. Like a teakettle boiling over. He kicked his legs off the futon and onto the cold wooden floor, reaching beneath the frame for his spare pair of sneakers. The power was still off and the shutters were pulled tight, so there was no telling what time it was or how
long he’d slept. The only thing he was sure of was that the storm was still raging.
He could hear it, just outside the door.
Waiting to get in.
“Aló,” he called out, his voice echoing through the empty house. “Is anyone home?”
Except for the knocking of the wind against the shutters, there was no answer. He was lucky the shutters had held through the night. That Padrino Nando had made time to lock his house down against the storm. Others hadn’t, and the squalls blowing in from the Atlantic had only gotten stronger while Alejo slept. They’d broken most of the windows in La Perla in the small hours of the morning and had been whipping across the cracked and jagged glass ever since.
Moaning as if they were bleeding.
As if they were alive.
Safe inside—cocooned in darkness—Alejo tried his best to ignore the wind. He stumbled to the old-fashioned armoire and pulled what he needed from the hangers. He was sore, his bony shoulders aching from the tense drive home, but it felt good to be wearing a fresh shirt and a dry pair of shoes.
He blindly knotted his laces, then rubbed the crust from his eyes.
Alejo had hoped he would wake up to a new day—a day without Valerie. That Nando would be brewing coffee and boiling eggs as he stretched in bed, the sunlight hot on his sheets. Like nothing was wrong.
Like usual.
But he was still alone.
And Hurricane Valerie was far from over.
Alejo opened the front door, shielding his eyes.
It wasn’t that it was bright out, but it wasn’t dark either. It was somewhere in between. Somewhere Alejo had never seen before. He squinted, casting a long shadow in the empty house as he blinked the sky into focus. The rain had let up for the time being, but the horizon in all directions was a wall of gray, unbroken except for a thin green line splintering between the gathering clouds. The wind swept roughly across the waves, spitting seawater onto Alejo’s clean clothes and whistling so loudly he covered his ears.