Muncie and I went into a huddle. It was the closest she’d come to me all day.

“I think Dan likes you,” she said.

“You’re crazy.” I took a bite of my pickle.

“I’m not—”

A pink sweetener packet landed on the tablecloth between us.

“Isn’t anybody sweet on me?” Dan asked.

Muncie got a know-it-all look on her face.

I picked up the pink packet. Without looking, I tossed it back over my shoulder toward the boys’ table. It landed with a plunk in Dan’s water glass.

“Great shot, Sumner,” Dan said. “Three points.”

“Three points for Sumner,” the boys echoed.

My cheeks went hot. I liked Dan. Not as a boyfriend, just liked him. He was funny. Like Ezra.

At the next table one of the boys gave a phony cough. Suddenly pink packets, dozens of them, rained down onto Muncie’s and my heads.

The waitress shouted, “You kids. Cut it out.”

“Yeah,” Muncie said. “Cut it out, you kids.”

“Hey, dwarf, why don’t you run back to your cottage and fetch your seven little brothers,” one of the boys said.

Dan hit the boy in the arm.

“Let’s go,” I told Muncie.

We paid our bill and left.

By the end of the day I’d had enough of Christmas shopping. I’d had enough of being in town. We planned to meet Gran outside Radio Shack at six fifteen. We had fifteen minutes to kill.

“Let’s wait inside,” I said. “You’re shivering out here.”

Inside Radio Shack, rows and rows of television sets were turned on, tuned to the local station. No sound, just the same picture, repeated thirty times on the various-sized screens.

As we stood and watched, the local newscasters sat behind a desk, soundlessly introducing the first story.

They ran a film clip showing one side of the Cookshire plant blown open. A blackened, ragged hole filled the screens. Twisted chunks of debris spewed across the ground. Helicopters passed above with monitoring equipment, measuring the radiation release from the containment building. All around the site emergency firefighters scrambled, wearing suits like astronauts wear.

The next film showed New Hampshire traffic jams. People fought, children hid under blankets in the backseats of abandoned cars. We’d seen that clip at school.

Then they panned across stretches of land, showing aerial views of the evacuated cities and towns: mile upon mile empty of life. Everything looked perfectly normal, just empty. An orange wind sock flapped above the unplowed runways at Logan Airport. The streets of Boston’s business district stood empty.

But not completely empty. Packs of dogs, looking thin and dangerous, stalked up and down the avenues, weaving in and out between the abandoned cars. Shoulder to shoulder they scavenged, occasionally turning on each other.

They showed a crowded evacuation center, a hospital with patients on the floors, bodies in a temporary morgue. Men weeping. A child, wide-eyed, under a clear plastic tent.

Other people gathered around us in the store.

The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission appeared, identified by a flash of words under his face.