Three

I sat in the dark, the radio playing softly on my nightstand. Science class kept echoing in my mind. Today was our first full day back at school since the accident. Instead of his regular lesson plan, Mr. Sobel had talked about nuclear stuff.

I liked it better when science didn’t come so close to home. When it fit neatly inside a textbook, with five questions at the end of each chapter, questions easily answered if you read the assigned pages.

The accident last week raised questions hard to answer, scary questions.

I couldn’t get away from it. My cousin Bethany so sick. My aunt and uncle’s farm ruined. And now this boy and his mother downstairs in the back bedroom.

“Sometimes you have to do things you’d rather not,” Gran had said. Like listening to Ripley insult Muncie. Like digging a grave in the frozen ground for a dead sheep.

Mr. Sobel had said certain radioactive waste could kill plant and animal life for a thousand years. Radioactive particles traveled through air, through water, through earth. Government and industries had been generating deadly waste since World War II, and they still couldn’t safely contain it. Now there would be so much more waste, just from the cleanup at the Cookshire plant.

I thought about the boy downstairs, Ezra. Pulling my radiation mask out of my pocket, my rough hands snagged the fine gauze.

I rubbed the material between my fingers. How could such a thin weave protect me from death? You can’t see radiation, or smell it, or feel it. Could a mask stop it so easily?

Bayley padded softly up from the kitchen.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth twice, and Bayley crouched and jumped to join me on the window seat. He climbed into my lap, circled, and curled against my stomach.

How long had it been since I’d used the bathroom? Certainly not since I’d come home from school. I moved Bayley a little so he’d put less pressure on my bladder. The bathroom was downstairs, across the hall from the back bedroom.

I tried finding a comfortable position. “Maybe people will wear masks all the time,” I told Bayley. “Forever. And special protective clothing. They’ll have to make masks for animals.” I put the gauze mask over Bayley’s face. His gold eyes opened wide and the white tip of his tail twitched.

You couldn’t make a cat wear a mask. You couldn’t keep a mask on a sheep, either. How would a sheep graze with a mask on? What would a sheep graze? All the animals in the contaminated zones would either starve to death or die—from eating radioactive grass, drinking radioactive water.

It scared me, thinking about a world polluted by radiation.

What if everything died off but people? People wrapped in special space suits, eating imitation food. No more touching. Even if people wanted to touch. Even if they really wanted to. No more touching skin to skin, because of the radiation. How long could humans last that way?