by Anna Woltz
It’s incredible. Everything looks as if it was never dark. Illuminated window displays, neon letters, stoplights going on and off—exactly how things should be at the center of the world.
I almost start running. Over the past few days I kept checking online to see if there was any news about the blackout. I know more about the New York power grid than I could ever hope to understand about the Dutch one. I know they were going to restore the power neighborhood by neighborhood. Block by block.
Has everything really been repaired now? Or are Seth and Abby still in the dark?
I quickly walk onward. At every street I cross, I’m scared the black will begin again. Everything is light, all the way to Union Square. But after that the difference between zero and one becomes clearer than ever: The blocks to the left of Broadway are sparkling in the light, but the houses on the right-hand side of the street are still as dark as ever.
I’m walking along the border. None of the houses is somewhere between a zero and a one. But I am.
I go deeper and deeper into downtown Manhattan. And when I come to Seth and Abby’s street, I laugh out loud. For the first time in a hundred hours, I can see their apartment by the bright glow of a streetlight. I can simply ring the doorbell. It feels strange. And suddenly I’m really nervous. Is their mom back home? What should I say to them? And how am I going to say good-bye?
Seth opens the front door. His hair’s wet and he’s wearing a blue sweater I don’t recognize.
“The power’s back!” I scream.
He nods. “Everything suddenly went back on at four thirty. Faucets started running, devices flashed, my cell phone beeped … ”
“And what about your mom?” I ask. “She must be home by now, right?”
“She just went out shopping with Abby. And Jim’s gone back across the street.”
So there’s no one home. No one but Seth.
I look at his dark eyes and his short tousled hair and his shoes with tied laces—and I feel my knees go weak.
“You must be disappointed,” he says.
“Why?”
“That Jim’s not here. You and Abby both … like him, don’t you?”
“Not me,” I say. I’m a little out of breath. “Well, I like Jim, but not like that.”
Seth frowns. “But he’s so handsome! And so ‘megacool’!”
“Well, he is handsome! And cool. And funny.” I look at the ground. “I actually thought that maybe I was going to like him that way. I kept expecting to. But that’s not what happened … ”
I look up again, but just as I’m about to say something else, Seth turns around and starts heading upstairs. I hurry after him, because he’s walking quickly. He’s almost running.
It’s warm again inside the apartment. The used tea lights have been cleared away, the crumbs have been swept up, and half the dishes have been washed.
So there we are. Facing each other in the light.
Suddenly, I don’t understand why anyone ever invented lightbulbs. What was wrong with candles? Electric lights are way too bright. We can see each other so clearly that we don’t dare to look.
“I’ll get my things,” I say quickly. “I’m staying with my mom and dad tonight, so I’ll be out of here in five minutes. You can finish doing the dishes.”
In the bedroom I throw everything into my suitcase without folding it and without thinking about whether socks and underpants are allowed to touch one another. It’s all dirty anyway. I hear plates and glasses clinking in the kitchen. But then the noise stops.
“You can’t leave yet,” says Seth. He’s standing in the doorway.
I try to say something, but he goes on.
“Abby will kill me if I just let you go. And Mom wants to meet you too.” He makes a hesitant gesture with his hand. “Come and sit down. Would you like some tea?” And then he sighs. “Okay, I don’t know what’s going on. It’s so dumb, now that we don’t have a hurricane shelter anymore. I just don’t know what to say.”
I laugh nervously. “Did you ever know what to say?”
Fortunately, he acts like he didn’t hear me. “So tell me all about it,” he says. “How did it go with your dad?”
I walk with him to the kitchen and sit down. My knees are still weak.
“What did he say?” he asks.
I look at the clean white counter. “My dad is a loser who had a crush on a seventeen-year-old girl. I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to look at him in the same way again. But it’s his problem now. Well, yeah, sure it’s my problem too … But it’s not as bad as it was.”
I think Seth’s forgotten he was going to make tea.
“So you don’t mind going home?” he asks.
“Well, actually … There’s kind of a plan. Nothing’s certain. But there’s kind of a plan for us to move to New York.”
I’ve never seen him look so shocked.
“What?” I ask. “I’m not allowed to live here?”
“Of course you are … ” I can see him hesitating. “But you’re Dutch. I kept telling myself that you weren’t going to stay. That I shouldn’t … ”
Now I can really feel that the electricity’s back. There are sparks in the air.
“Nothing’s for sure,” I say. “First we have to figure out green cards. My mom has to sell some paintings, so we’ll have enough money. And my dad has to stop hiding away in a corner like a timid little bird.”
Without saying anything, Seth starts filling the kettle. He stands there forever with his back to me.
I get up and walk over to the window. The streetlights are working again, so I can see if Abby and her mom are coming back from the supermarket. But the brightly lit street is completely empty.
“You want to hear something dumb?” I clear my throat. “I’d been looking forward to that radio show, the one with all the songs that got us through the hurricane. But now that the lights are back, of course it won’t be on anymore.”
“You want to listen to some music?” Seth turns around. “My laptop’s working now … ”
I shrug. “Okay.”
I follow him into his room. There’s the woman with the two faces above his bed. There’s the spot on the wall that he thumped when I asked him about his dad.
“What do you want to listen to?”
I don’t need to think about it. “ ‘Autumn Song.’ But first that other one, about every little thing being all right.”
He looks at the floor. “You do know it’s just a song, don’t you? Doesn’t mean everything’s going to be all right, not in real life.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “But I happen to like real life. However it works out.”
“But what if … ” He pauses and brushes a couple of socks underneath the bed with his foot. “What if you could choose what happens.” He looks up. “Would you choose for Abby to get home right now? Or would you choose for her to get back a little later?”
I feel the electricity crackling. This isn’t a movie. This is real life—with all the associated risks.
“I’d choose for her to get home later,” I say.
He turns to his laptop. I sit down on the bed, which is a lot more crumpled and dusty than I could have suspected in the darkness. But hey. I’ve sat on it before. And I’m still alive.
Seth clicks his laptop and the song begins.
Don’t worry ’bout a thing, ’cause every little thing gonna be all right …
He sits down on the bed beside me, leaving at least half a meter between us. We both sit stiffly, with our backs against the wall, just listening to the music. My heart is pounding.
“This is ridiculous,” he says after a while.
“I know,” I reply.
He’s still looking straight ahead. “You know I’m not going to kiss you, right?”
“Eeww,” I say. “Of course you’re not.”
It’s silent for a moment. And then, as I hear the opening notes of “Autumn Song,” I imagine what it would be like. Him moving to sit closer to m
e. Taking my hand. And me—feeling his dry, warm skin and not thinking about bacteria. I imagine his face coming very close to mine, and I picture myself not starting to shiver. Seeing his eyes from up close without a misty porthole between us.
I imagine us flying together through the stars. Not alone and not just within hearing distance, but very close to each other.
“I know why it feels so weird,” I say. “The light should be off.”
He nods. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
ANNA WOLTZ was living in New York when Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2012. She spent the days afterward wandering through Lower Manhattan, searching for warmth, food, and electrical outlets. When the lights came back on, she began writing A Hundred Hours of Night. Born in London in 1981, Anna grew up in the Netherlands, where she now lives in Utrecht. She has written twenty books for young readers, and her work has been translated into nine languages.
LAURA WATKINSON studied medieval and modern languages at Oxford University and taught English around the world before returning to England to get a master’s in English and Applied Linguistics and a postgraduate certificate in literary translation. She is now a full-time translator from Dutch, Italian, and German. Her translations have twice received the American Library Association’s Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the year’s most outstanding children’s book in translation. Laura lives in Amsterdam.
Originally published in Dutch as Honderd uur nacht by Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij BV in 2014.
Text copyright © 2014 by Anna Woltz
English translation copyright © 2016 by Laura Watkinson
All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij BV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Woltz, Anna, author. | Watkinson, Laura, translator.
Title: A hundred hours of night / Anna Woltz ; translated from the Dutch by
Laura Watkinson.
Other titles: Honderd uur nacht. English
Description: First American edition. | New York : Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., 2016. | Summary: Furious at her father, who is caught up in a sex scandal, and suffering from panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder, fifteen-year-old Emilia December de Wit runs away from Amsterdam to New York City, where she meets sixteen-year-old Seth, and his eleven-year old sister Abby—and then Hurricane Sandy hits and the lights go out.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039412 | ISBN 9780545848282 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
Subjects: LCSH: Runaway teenagers—Juvenile fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Juvenile fiction. | Hurricane Sandy, 2012—Juvenile fiction. | Panic disorders—Juvenile fiction. | Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Juvenile fiction. | Friendship—Juvenile fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Runaways—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Hurricane Sandy, 2012—Fiction. | Panic disorders—Fiction. | Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.W8373 Hu 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039412
First American edition, May 2016
Jacket photo by Allison Joyce, © Getty Images
Jacket design by Yaffa Jaskoll
e-ISBN 978-0-545-84830-5
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
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