by Suzanne Weyn
That night, Gwen came into the house behind Luke. Two steps in, she stumbled on a box of motorcycle parts in the living room. “Ow!” she shouted. “Put on a light, will you!”
Luke struck a match. His illuminated face seemed to hang there in the blackness. “Can’t,” he said as his expression once more disappeared into the dark. “Price of electric went up again, and I couldn’t make it this month.”
“They shut it off?” Gwen asked, her voice rising.
“Looks that way. Our bill was nine hundred dollars for last month, so I couldn’t pay it. I don’t know what’s going on. I never thought I’d wish I lived next to a nuclear generator. But no. We live in a place where they generate electricity from oil-burning turbines. Lucky us!”
Gwen had heard this complaint plenty of times before.
“Yeah, lucky us,” she muttered. Then she went back outside. The constellation of Cancer the Crab hung brilliantly, perfectly defined above her. In the next second, she realized why the stars were so bright. Everything in her immediate area was black—all the lights were out.
Gwen ran around the back of the house and got onto the low roof. The sun had been down for hours, so it was no longer blistering hot. From there, she climbed to the peak of the second, higher roof. Looking down, she saw that Sage Valley was completely black. It was a long way off before she could see a patch of lights from some other town once again. Surely all these people hadn’t left their bills unpaid?
No, this was a blackout.
Just below, Tom’s yard was so deeply entrenched in darkness that she couldn’t see anything. The next second, a flashlight snapped on, throwing a pool of light. Tom stood at its center. Then, he turned off the flashlight and disappeared.
The impulse to call to him was strong, and Gwen opened her mouth to speak—but then shut it once again. What was the point?
In the intense heat, no breeze stirred. Beads of sweat formed on Gwen’s forehead as she sat just below the roof’s peak.
She had never known such a deep silence.
There were no engine sounds. No air conditioners hummed. No TV or music blared. The high, ubiquitous whine of electricity on the wire that usually buzzed just below the level of consciousness was missing.
Normally, cars would have been on the road, but tonight she couldn’t hear any pass. Was everyone conserving what gas they had left?
In the next moment, the stillness was broken by a rising chorus of crickets. Down on the far side of the road, in front of the house where the creek ran, a loon whooped its crazy call. As if roused by the maniac sound of the strange fowl, bullfrogs initiated a chant of call and response.
Did they do this every night? Gwen had never noticed it this fully before. Opening her eyes, she saw fireflies blinking in the blackness.
“Hey, crazy!” Luke’s voice stirred her from her reverie. In the darkness, he stood at the back of the house; she could barely make out his form looking up at her. “What do you see up there?”
“Everything’s out for miles,” she reported.
“Oh, man!” he yelled, aggravated.
At least we’re no worse off than everyone else, Gwen thought.
Moonlight rimmed the peak of the roof, tantalizing Gwen with its shimmer. The last time she’d walked it, she’d been twelve. Why had she stopped? As her body had started to develop, had it become more ungainly—or had she only felt that it had?
Gwen suddenly burned to know if she could still walk the narrow peak. Glancing down, she checked that Luke had gone back inside.
Climbing higher on all fours, she made it to the peak and squatted. Squeezing her abdominal muscles tight, she lifted herself, arms outstretched.
Inhaling deeply, she balanced. Had she tied the shoelaces of her sneakers? Gwen hoped so, because she didn’t dare look down for fear of losing her balance.
This was insanity—but it filled her with a serene happiness. She was lifted above the dark world below. Silver moon energy poured into her, traveling from the roof and up her body as she stepped into its light.
She could still do it.
Like riding a bike.
First one foot swung forward, and then the other. Steady on.
Deep, slow breaths.
Gwen was halfway across the roof when a dark form abruptly appeared in her path. Startling, she slipped and began an uncontrolled slide.
A strong hand gripped her wrist, halting her descent.
“Hector!” Gwen shouted, looking up into the narrow face of her neighbor. “Did you want to kill me?!”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Are you okay? Can I let go now?”
Gwen pulled herself to a sitting position and tried to contain her temper, because she knew it was really more surprise than anger she was feeling. “Why did you come up here?” she repeated.
Hector lived in the trailer home down the road. Gwen had met him while walking to the corner deli one day, and he’d started coming around. She hadn’t yet decided if he was just being friendly or if he was looking for a girlfriend.
Hector sat and pulled his knees to his chest. In the dark, his Mohawk made him look almost like an exotic bird. “There’s nothing to do. I figured I’d find you up here.”
“Next time whistle or say something, would you? Don’t just sneak up on me.”
“Sorry,” Hector repeated. “Don’t you think what you were doing was kind of dangerous?”
“Probably. Whatever,” Gwen answered with a shrug.
“Why did you do it?” he pressed.
“I like the feeling.”
“Don’t do it anymore, okay?” Hector said, his words half request, half command.
“Stop worrying. I have good balance. I was on the gymnastics team in my freshman year. I walked the balance beam.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Those gymnastic girls were real cliquish. I didn’t fit in. And once they stopped being able to afford the buses, the only team we could ever compete against was Marietta. That got old pretty quick.”
“Are you ready for school to start next week?” Hector asked.
“No. You’re lucky you don’t have to go back.”
“Hey—when you’re homeschooled, you never have school vacation,” he reminded her. “So what do you think of all this—I mean the war and the no gas and no light?”
“The war part stinks,” Gwen said. “The rest of it isn’t so bad. I kind of like the quiet and the dark. Luke and I don’t have air-conditioning, anyway, so that doesn’t matter to me.”
“We don’t have it, either,” Hector said. “I would like my electric fan to work. I miss TV, too, especially the science fiction channel.”
Gwen laughed. “My tablet isn’t charged, so I can’t even read. Too bad there aren’t libraries open anymore; you could go get an actual book. Do they still have real books?”
“I think the old ones are all stored in a vault in Washington, or something.”
“I’ve never seen the stars so bright,” Gwen observed. “What do you think is out there, Hector?”
“I don’t know. Lots and lots of space, I guess.”
“But why is it out there? What does it mean?”
“I suppose there’s some larger plan, a bigger picture than we can ever be aware of.”
Gwen looked up at his face, its angular arches and planes rimmed with silver light. His dark, expressive eyes filled with moon. Hector could be deep sometimes, Gwen thought. “What good is a bigger picture if we can never know it for sure?” she asked.
Hector shrugged and smiled. “Trying to figure it all out keeps life interesting, I guess.”
Little by little, lights blinked on around the valley. “The power’s back,” Gwen said.
“I don’t think so. People are probably getting their small generators going.”
“Don’t those need electricity?”
Hector shook his head. “Lithium battery chips.”
“Better hoard battery chips, then,” Gwen commented. “If we can’t get them, w
e’ll be in real trouble.”
“Whatever happens, at least we have each other,” Hector said.
Gwen looked at him sharply. There was something in Hector’s low tone of voice, or maybe it was the bend of his body that made her think he was about to lean in for a kiss. “What do you mean by that?” she asked, moving back.
Hector looked hurt. “Mean by what?”
“‘We have each other.’”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” Gwen insisted. She had an idea of what it meant on her end of things, but she wasn’t completely certain. Friends? More than friends?
“It means I’ll be there to help if you need me.”
Gwen stood. “Uh, thanks, Hector, but I never need anyone. That’s not how I am.”
“Someday you might need some help. Everyone does, sometimes,” Hector insisted.
“Not me,” Gwen said as she sat and began inching quickly down the roof. “I’d better get inside. It’s going to take a while to wash my hair by candlelight.”
“You’re going to wash it in freezing cold water?” Hector asked.
“Why should the water be freezing?” Gwen replied as she made her way down the roof.
“Your furnace has an electric start button. Unless you have a hot water tank—and I doubt you do in a house this old—you don’t have any hot water.”
“I guess that means sleep,” Gwen said. That’s what the whole town would do—sleep until things got better. Because there was nothing else they could do.
NORTH COUNTRY NEWS
Bolivia Backs Out of Lithium Trade Talks With U.S.
Vows to Support Venezuela
The fighting in Venezuela, centered just outside the city of Maracay, has been brought to a temporary cease-fire in recent days while U.S. diplomats hold emergency sessions with Bolivian representatives.
Bolivia is the world’s greatest supplier of the valuable mineral lithium. When the lithium fields of Bolivia were seized by the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), party leaders called lithium “the mineral that will lead us to the post-petroleum era.” Their insistence on tightly controlling trade and pricing agreements led, in part, to the loss of the hybrid-car initiative in the U.S. that same year, with fuel-efficient cars taking their place. The U.S. failed to make trade agreements with the Chinese to tap into its lithium supply in Tibet, and had to depend exclusively on the much smaller lithium-producing salt flats of Chile and Argentina.
In the eleven years since, the Bolivian PRP has become the ruling party of Bolivia, and new trade agreements with the U.S. and Japan have opened the doors to renewed interest in hybrid vehicle development. As oil grows ever scarcer, the use of battery-powered cars and generators is seen as increasingly crucial. Any stall in talks with Bolivia could have dire consequences for the global economy.
CHAPTER 5
Tom thought that school might be canceled because of all the blackouts and the hard time people were having finding fuel. But the morning of the first day of school, the call Tom had been hoping for hadn’t come. Instead, he had to walk the two miles to school—there hadn’t been buses for as long as he’d been there—and head back to class. Most kids hadn’t been able to charge their tablets, and teachers were being discouraged from using the electric boards, so class was bordering on chaos. Concentrating on what the teachers were saying was harder than ever. Tom found himself praying the school’s generator would fail and the lights would suddenly blink out, causing the students to be sent home. Then he realized home wasn’t much better.
After a week back, things hadn’t really improved. Tom caught up with Carlos as they left their creative journalism English elective. “I thought the English electives were going to be fun, but this is a total bore,” he complained.
“I know,” Carlos agreed. “This substitute, Mr. Ralph, stinks. Where is Mr. Curtin, anyway? That’s the main reason I signed up for the class. Did he quit or something?”
Tom shook his head. “I heard he lives so far away that he can’t get enough gas to come to work each day, so he’s on temporary leave.”
“It was cold last night, did you notice?” Carlos asked as the two of them headed for the cafeteria.
Tom blasted him with laughter. “Did I notice? How could I not notice? I begged Mom to turn on the heat, but she couldn’t. Our oil tank is nearly empty. The oil company doesn’t know when it’s going to be able to deliver. Mom has to save what we have in case it freezes. She says if the pipes in the house freeze, they could burst.”
“My parents don’t have any oil, either. I slept with four blankets,” Carlos recounted. “And I wish the electric would come back on. This is starting to drive me nuts.”
“Mom has an emergency crank radio. Last night, I heard that they expect emergency oil to bring the electric turbines back up by tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait,” Carlos said. “I’ve been going to sleep at six o’clock because there’s nothing to do. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can’t even watch TV. If I could at least recharge my phone, I’d call you and make you crazy, too.”
“I already feel crazy. My mother keeps wanting us to spend time talking, and then all she wants to do is freak out about this war. I was actually glad to come back to school this morning, because at least the generator means there’s hot water. I actually enjoy showering after gym now.”
Tom saw Gwen turn the corner, walking toward them. He’d paid her money back on the first day of school, and ever since then they’d chatted briefly in the hall sometimes. He considered their relationship as being friendly, even if they weren’t exactly friends.
Each time they met, Tom had the sensation Gwen was a girl in a costume, that she was hiding under the dark eyeliner, the jet-black hair, and the scruffy outfits. She was entirely different from Niki—and he still thought of Niki as the perfect girl, even though she’d forgotten all about him. Yet he thought Gwen was also attractive, intriguing, and sort of mysterious but with a dry sense of humor. There was something about her that he really liked.
Too bad she was seeing that guy with the Mohawk—the homeschooled one. He’d have asked Gwen if she wanted to hang out with him sometime if she wasn’t already involved with another guy.
“Hey, Gwen,” he greeted her when she was close. “Why weren’t you in journalism?”
Gwen checked to see who else was nearby before replying in a conspiratorial voice, “I ditched. I can’t take that Mr. Ralph—what a dork. I wish Curtin would come back.”
“We all do,” Carlos said. “Did you freeze last night?”
Gwen answered with a little shrug, not meeting his eyes. “Not really.”
Tom suddenly realized what she meant. He stepped in closer to her. “Your brother has oil, doesn’t he?” he whispered.
Gwen didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. Tom could tell that her choppy, black cut was clean. Most of the girls at Sage Valley High had taken to wearing their hair pulled back or in braids to hide the fact that it was overdue to be washed. It was just too dark at night and the water was too cold for them to attend to their usual hair routines, at least not with the same care they usually used. The ones who washed it in the school showers didn’t have time to style it.
“Where is he getting the oil?” Tom asked in a low voice. “Is it at the same place we went that day I got it from him?”
Tom remembered the old building where Luke had taken him. Luke had parked his motorcycle in front of the burned-out wooden building and insisted Tom stay with it while he disappeared around the back, before returning in ten minutes with a red canister.
“I told you…he doesn’t have oil. That was just that one day. He can’t get it anymore.”
“I don’t believe you,” Carlos challenged her softly. “You can trust us. We won’t tell anyone else.”
“He doesn’t have oil or gas or anything,” Gwen insisted.
“Then why weren’t you cold?” Tom asked.
“It wasn’t that
cold.”
“I froze my butt off! You’re crazy,” Carlos scoffed.
“Could be,” Gwen agreed. “You’re probably totally right about that.”
“Come on, Gwen, tell us,” Tom coaxed. “We just want to buy enough to get a generator going. The nights are really getting cold.”
Gwen looked at him and their eyes connected. Tom felt something pass between them before they both darted self-consciously out of the connection.
“Anyway, I have to go to the computer room,” Gwen said, backing away down the hall.
“It’s closed,” Tom told her.
“They hook into the generator between one and two,” Gwen called over her shoulder.
Tom waved good-bye as he watched her disappear into the crowd.
“What do you think of her?” Carlos asked.
“She’s interesting,” Tom replied. “She has sad eyes.”
“I like her stuff when she reads it in journalism. She’s a good writer. Smart,” Carlos said. “She might be pretty if she wasn’t so weird.”
“Yeah,” Tom agreed. She was pretty. Not his type, of course, but still…there was that something about her.
Tom and Carlos arrived at the wide double cafeteria doors and instantly saw the sign taped to it: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Mr. Ralph was nearby, and Tom turned to him. “No cafeteria?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the sign.
“No refrigeration and no electricity equals no lunch,” Mr. Ralph replied without stopping. “It’s more than the generator can handle. You can go out to eat if you want. New rule.”
“Do you have your car?” Tom asked Carlos.
“Yeah, but I just have enough gas to get home—I hope. I’m cruising on fumes as it is.”
“That stinks.”
“No luck with your dad’s truck?”
Tom shook his head. “Not yet. There’s no rush. I couldn’t afford to put gas in it even if I got it going.”
“Doing anything this weekend?” Carlos asked as they headed down the hall.