I can’t even look at him, I can’t, because I hate him. I suddenly just hate him. Fuck you for fucking me while my parents were dying.

There is nothing rational about grief. I’m already learning this.

I’m also worried his scent will eat up Mom’s.

“Anything new?” Micah asks.

“I don’t think so,” Mae says. “Let’s see.” She turns the sound back on.

“It’s hard to believe, but this is even worse than the tsunami that hit Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka back in 2004,” a reporter is saying.

The landscape behind her is still bright, since it’s not even sunset yet over there. Every few minutes, they cut to footage of the wave. I’ve memorized all the cuts they have—I’ll never forget them. Her voice talks over someone’s cell phone video, the camera jumping around as they run, and you keep hearing oh my God, oh my God and then crying and screaming. There’s one taken by someone who was standing on the roof of a resort while the wave covers the pool below, a perfect, clear shot. There’s the one of the wave surging up over a dock, taken by someone too fucking stupid to run. There’s the satellite map, the graphs showing the earthquake’s radius on the ocean floor. And dozens of other things people caught and sent in.

“Malaysia’s never seen this level of devastation, and aid workers are struggling to respond,” the reporter says.

The wave is a monster, devouring everything. It covers whole hotels, throwing cars around. It moves like a starving, wild beast. I try to picture my petite mother in that water. I try to picture her swimming, but I can’t. You can’t swim in that.

“Fuck,” I say. I draw my knees up and push my eyes against my kneecaps. Micah rests his hand on my back. I hate you! I hate you!

“Hannah.” Mae presses closer to me on my other side. She smells like oranges and sugar. “Listen, the chances of dying in a tsunami are one in five hundred thousand. Obviously the fact that they actually experienced a tsunami raises the odds, but even so, people survive these things all the time. I mean, look at all the survivors they’ve interviewed so far. A lot of people are going to live, so why shouldn’t Mom and Dad be two of them?”

This is self-preservation. This is Mae hiding in her books, behind her telescope. Numbers and formulas and theories. She has to say this because nothing else is allowed to be true.