Empty

by Suzanne Weyn

  “I’m supposed to go clean out the boathouse. Mom wants to sell the boat, so she asked if I would clean out the storage shed that has all the boat stuff in it.”

  They were nearly to the lobby. “What are we going to eat?” Carlos asked, throwing his arms wide in frustration.

  “I don’t know!” Tom admitted. “What’s everyone else doing?”

  “I have no idea.” Carlos shook his head. “This is crazy, man. We’re stuck here in school with no food and no wheels.”

  “We can see if someone has a bag lunch we can grub from,” Tom suggested.

  “Now you’re thinking,” Carlos agreed. “We’d probably do better if we split up. No one will have enough for both of us.”

  “You’re right. See ya later.”

  “Later.”

  Students were milling around the halls and spilling out into the front walkway by the near-empty parking lot. Tom slid his student cash card into the vending machine before noticing every single thing was out. He wandered outside to the front of the building and scanned the parking lot across the road from the front entrance.

  A red two-seater sports car pulled in front of him. The window closest to him went down, and Niki leaned across the passenger seat.

  After their disastrous ice cream outing, Niki had been avoiding him. Tom could never make eye contact or find an opening to talk to her. He was sure she saw him as a complete loser for getting her stranded like that. And anyway, he’d heard she’d gotten back together with Brock. They were holding hands and nuzzling each other in the hallway once again, just like last year. He’d been delusional to think he ever had a chance with her.

  “What are you doing?” Niki asked, looking sleek in her hot pink sweater, her perfect blond hair seemingly unaffected by recent conditions.

  “Looking for lunch.”

  “Want to go to my house? I’ll make you a sandwich or something.”

  Why was she being so nice to him? “Okay,” he said. He caught sight of Brock standing in the parking lot with some of the guys from the football team. Easily six-foot-three and every inch the star quarterback, Brock was a formidable figure, not someone Tom would especially want to anger. “Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

  “Why? Because of Brock? He has nothing to say about it. We broke up.”

  “Again? Whose idea was that?” Tom asked, noticing when he got closer that she smelled like a heady mixture of lemon and honeysuckle perfume.

  Niki hesitated. “Mine.”

  Tom didn’t believe her. But maybe it was only wishful thinking on his part. If Brock broke up with Niki, he shouldn’t mind seeing Tom and Niki together.

  Deciding to chance it, Tom slid into the passenger seat.

  To get out of the school parking lot, they had to drive right past Brock. As they passed, Brock glanced nonchalantly into the car. Tom couldn’t read his expression, but he felt relieved that Brock wasn’t glaring at him angrily. Just the same, he unintentionally slid lower in his seat.

  “So, I haven’t seen much of you, Tom,” Niki said brightly, as though this wasn’t something she had intended. “What have you been up to?”

  “Not much. Since I’m not playing football, I’ve been looking for a job, but so far I haven’t been able to find one. Mostly, I’ve been trying to get my father’s old truck up and going.”

  “Oh, I heard about your father. I’m so sorry. I would have said something last time I saw you, but I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Thanks.”

  Niki turned out of the school lot and drove down a block of neat houses. Glancing to his right, Tom noticed a tall, thin man with a head of thick, blond hair, standing on a lawn. “Pull over a minute, please,” Tom said.

  “That’s Mr. Curtin,” Niki noticed, stopping at the curb.

  Tom sprang from the car. “Mr. Curtin!” he called, waving. Niki stayed in the car; clearly, she wasn’t looking for any student-teacher reunions this afternoon.

  The teacher looked to Tom and smiled. “Why aren’t you in school, Tom?”

  “Why aren’t you?” Tom inquired. “I’m supposed to be in your journalism elective.”

  “I’m coming back. I’ve finally bought this house closer to the school, so I can walk to work. I got a great deal because the former owner is moving south so his heating bill won’t be so high. I was just out here looking for a place to dig a root cellar.”

  “What’s that?” Tom asked.

  “A big hole in the ground for keeping food; it’s naturally cool so I won’t need refrigeration for things like potatoes, carrots, yams—root vegetables. I plan to grow my own vegetables next spring.”

  “Why don’t you just go to the grocery store like everybody else?” Tom asked.

  “Where do you think that produce comes from?” Mr. Curtin replied.

  Tom had never really thought about it. “I don’t know. Farms, right?”

  “Like all the farms in this town?”

  “Are you kidding? There are no farms here anymore.”

  “Exactly. The food is brought in by trucks and, especially in the winter, on freighters from places like South and Central America. Have you seen the supermarket produce department lately?”

  “No, my mom does the shopping.”

  “Check it out sometime. The fresh produce shelves are just about empty. The price of food in general has more than tripled. You need gasoline for trucks and freighters, and they pass that cost on to consumers like us. I wish I’d grown a garden this summer, but I never expected that things would get this bad this fast.”

  “Nobody did,” Tom said.

  A slim, blond woman with her hair in a ponytail approached. “Mary, this is one of my students, Tom Harris. Tom, my wife, Mary,” Mr. Curtin introduced them. “Tom and I were just saying how nobody expected everything to fall apart so fast.”

  “Well, we all should have seen it coming,” Mrs. Curtin said. “We’ve been headed down this road for a while. I guess no one—including me—thought the oil would really run out. We had no idea that everything is made from oil—plastic, insecticides, cosmetics—everything. Shampoo and soap are made of hydrocarbons, linked and processed from oil. Bricks and concrete are made with oil. The shingles on our roof. Carpet. Fertilizer. The asphalt we use to pave our roads—that comes from the bottom of the tank after oil’s been refined. When there’s no oil, the bottom of the tank is empty.”

  “My wife has her PhD in bioengineering. She’s been very involved with ecological issues for the last ten years,” Mr. Curtin explained.

  “So I should have known better. People have been predicting this would happen for the last thirty years,” Mary Curtin said. “Now, at last, it’s happened.”

  “What’s happened, exactly?” Tom asked. “I mean, once this thing with Venezuela is settled, we’ll be back to normal, right?”

  “Venezuela is bluffing,” Mr. Curtin said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Their oil supply is running dangerously low. They know it. It’s a con game to keep the world from bothering with alternative fuels. Saudi Arabia overreported its oil production for years until its supply of oil was completely gone. In the 1950s, the United States was the largest producer of oil in the world—then it just finally ran out and we became dependent on foreign oil.”

  “Now the foreign oil is almost gone,” Mrs. Curtin added. “It’s a nonrenewable resource. Our military is fighting for something that’s not even there anymore.”

  “Then why are they doing it?”

  “Maybe we want to get in and see if we can find more oil. It could be a move to corner Bolivia. The lithium is what we need if we’re going to be using more and more lithium batteries—though lithium will run out eventually, too,” Mrs. Curtin explained.

  “Still…it could tide us over until we come up with something better,” Mr. Curtin allowed. “We’re trying to gear up nuclear and wind-power facilities—but, ironically, it’s hard to build them without oil.”

  Tom absorbed this news with
a sense of growing dread. The subject scared him, and it wasn’t a good feeling. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He glanced back at Niki waiting in the car.

  “When are you coming back to school?” Tom asked his teacher.

  “Next week.”

  “Great. Well, I’ll see you then.”

  “See you then.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mrs. Curtin said with a wave.

  “You, too,” Tom replied, pulling open his car door.

  “What was that about?” Niki asked when Tom got back in the car.

  Once again, he found her lemon-and-honeysuckle scent drew him to her.

  “What did he say?” she prompted.

  “Oh, just about how the world is falling apart and there’s nothing we can do to stop it,” Tom said, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter. And when he was there beside her, drinking in her citrus-sweet perfume, it really didn’t seem to matter—nothing mattered.

  “What else is new?” Niki scoffed. “The world’s always been about to collapse. But it never does. Isn’t that what social studies is all about?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  They drove for a while in silence.

  “Didn’t we just pass your road?” Tom pointed out.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you—we’ve moved back into the lake house in Marietta. The electricity stays on all the time in Marietta! It’s not like here in Sage Valley, where it blinks on and off and nobody knows when or why. Things are much better in Marietta.”

  “How is Marietta managing that?” Tom asked, shocked at the news.

  “People in Marietta have connections,” Niki replied slyly. “There’s a rumor that they tapped into the power grid down county, where there’s still reliable electric. We have constant heat, hot water, refrigeration—just like always.”

  “Wow,” Tom murmured. He’d never spent much time thinking about what it meant to be wealthy. Now it hit him, in a much bigger way than before, how much of a difference money could make.

  They drove into Marietta. Unlike in Sage Valley’s downtown section, here people were on the streets, businesses were open. “Are your gas stations open?” Tom asked excitedly.

  “One is. A tanker comes every day and refuels it.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “I have no idea. There it is.” Niki pointed to a Shell station on the corner.

  Tom let out a low whistle. “Eighty dollars a gallon!” It amazed him that a line of vehicles snaked out of the station and down the road.

  “It’s not stopping people,” Niki commented.

  “Not these people,” Tom said. “It must be nice.”

  “What must be nice?”

  “To be rich.”

  “It is,” Niki told him with a grin.

  They got on the long road to the beach where they’d run out of gas, and passed the station that had been closed the last time. It was still shut down.

  After a few more miles, they arrived at the lake house. Niki opened the front door with a remote-control key, and Tom followed her in. “Wow, this is a cool place,” he said, impressed. He’d never been in such a luxurious home.

  “Thanks.”

  Niki picked up a note from the glass coffee table and read it. “Mom’s out with her friends,” she reported. “So, good—that means nobody’s home.” She gazed at Tom boldly. “You know I’ve always liked you, don’t you?”

  “No,” Tom admitted with a shaky laugh. “I thought you always liked Brock.”

  “I was always going with Brock, so I could never let you know how I felt.”

  Tom was struck by the faulty logic of that, but he had no interest in sorting it out—at least not right then. “I’ve always liked you, too. But I figured you thought I was a loser after we ran out of gas.”

  Niki waved his comment away. “That could have happened to anybody.”

  Stepping closer to her, he noticed how anxious he felt. He inhaled to quiet his rising nerves. This morning, he never would have dreamed he’d be alone with Niki Barton. Even an hour ago, it would have seemed impossible.

  Niki stepped closer and took his hand. “I need a date for the bonfire,” she said. “Want to go with me?”

  Was this really happening? “Yeah, sure I would. I’d love to go with you.”

  “I’m glad. That’s great,” she said, her face softening. Lifting her hand to caress his cheek, she kissed him on the lips.

  If this was a dream, Tom didn’t want to know.

  He placed his hand on the small of her back and pulled her closer, kissing her passionately on the lips.

  Though his stomach growled, he was no longer hungry for anything but her. Let the world fall apart; he didn’t care. “When are your parents coming home?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Not until later.”

  Still holding her waist, he kissed her again.

  NORTH COUNTRY NEWS

  Hundreds Flock to Marietta Township Seeking Gasoline

  The well-to-do residents of the usually quiet town of Marietta have seen their sleepy lake vacation community transformed in recent days. News has traveled fast that in these tough times, the town has been able to parlay the clout of its most influential citizens into tangible advantages—most significantly, a daily visit from a tanker containing gasoline.

  The Route Six thoroughfare leading into Marietta is clogged for miles as motorists, desperate to obtain a tank of this liquid gold, line up at the local station—all willing to pay from seventy to ninety dollars a gallon, depending on the day in question.

  “We’re out of gas by ten in the morning,” says Pete Patterson, the station’s owner. “Folks come with ten-, even twenty-gallon containers. I don’t allow them to fill up with extra gas, though. I only permit each driver to fill his or her tank.”

  “That’s so unfair,” complained Alice Tucker of Sage Valley. “My tank is smaller than the tanks of some of these gas guzzlers. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to buy as much gasoline as they do?”

  When asked about the source of this gasoline tanker, Patterson revealed that Shell has released some of its emergency oil reserves to key distributors.

  “That’s a lie,” Mike Kravner, a spokesman for Shell, claimed last night in a widely released response. “We are sending all our oil reserves to the military fighting in Venezuela and to our troops on alert in Bolivia. As much as we respect the hardship on Americans, making oil and its by-product, gasoline, available to our troops is a higher priority. What the Marietta Shell is selling is stolen gasoline. Patterson obviously knows someone with access to our emergency reserves. We are sending a team of investigators to get to the bottom of this.”

  In the wake of Kravner’s comments, the line of cars lined up outside the Shell station more than tripled. Violence ensued in several incidents when cars with low fuel tanks had their engines quit while on line. In one instance, a motorist refused to push his stopped vehicle to the side of the road or even get out. Several waiting on line rammed the stalled car until it careened down an embankment and into Lake Morrisey with the driver still inside. (He was rescued shortly thereafter.)

  Police commissioner Jay Parks announced in a press conference yesterday that due to the chaos caused by this situation, only residents who can prove they own property in Marietta will be able to access gasoline from the station. This was met with loud booing. A man was arrested for throwing a rock at Commissioner Parks.

  CHAPTER 6

  Niki ransacked her top dresser drawer, searching for a box of contact lenses. Her mother always dropped a new box into the drawer when Niki told her she was out. Where was it? Tom was going to come pick her up for the bonfire in less than a half hour. “Mom!” she shouted, leaving her room for the top of the stairway. “Mom! Where is the box of contacts I asked you for?”

  Her mother, a petite woman with short blond hair, came to the bottom of the stairs and spoke from there. “BJK-Mart was out,” she explained, referring to the large box store with an optometrist where Niki got
her lens prescription filled.

  “That’s crazy!” Niki cried. “Did you call Dr. Philips?”

  Her mother nodded. “He’s out, too. He says he didn’t get his delivery this week. Apparently, the truckers are refusing to come this far north because they can’t get enough gas. Wear your glasses.”

  Niki stared at the blurred form of her mother, speechless. This wasn’t happening!

  “Mom! I cannot go to the bonfire in glasses!”

  “Niki, I don’t know what to tell you,” her mother replied with a note of helpless frustration. “Lots of people wear glasses. You look cute in your glasses.”

  Niki threw her arms up. “You have got to be kidding!”

  “It’s not the end of the world!”

  “Not for you,” Niki shot back. Brock would be there with his new girlfriend. Bad enough she was going to show up with a second-string lineman—now she would be wearing glasses! “Call Dad,” Niki said, coming halfway down the stairs. “Maybe he can find some contacts in the city and Dr. Philips can call for them.”

  “Your father is already on his way home.”

  Niki’s face wrinkled into a bewildered expression. “Why so early?”

  “Niki, come down here. I have to talk to you.”

  Getting to the bottom of the stairs, Niki trailed her mother into the living room. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Dad was laid off a couple of weeks ago,” Niki’s mother said as she sat on the couch in front of the large, stone fireplace.

  It was as though the shocking news had physically hit Niki, leaving her unsteady on her feet. “Are you kidding? Why?”

  “This oil and gasoline shortage has affected stock prices around the world. People’s stock values are plummeting, so they’re pulling their money out of Dad’s brokerage in record numbers. Because of this, and the cost of keeping their building going, the company is downsizing. Massively downsizing.”