Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [107]
I stopped and reconsidered this effete analogy. Teenagers who won’t use condoms aren’t impressed by the need for an umbrella. I surveyed the class thoughtfully and demanded, “Whose Dad or Mom ever worked in the smelter?”
About half the hands went up, reluctantly.
“You know what they did up there, right? One way or another they were around thousand-degree hot metal. You ever see them dressed for work? They wore coveralls like Mr. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and a big shield over their faces, right?”
They nodded, relieved, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to single them out for humiliation. I sat on the desk and crossed my arms. “Imagine that’s you, working up there with that hot metal in your face. Now, somebody rips that mask off you while you’re working. Goodbye face. Goodbye nose and eyelids, beauty queens. You’re dead.”
They might well have been dead, for all the sound they made.
“That’s what the ozone layer does for us, boys and girls, it’s a big face shield in the sky.” I was skipping a few steps here, but not really exaggerating the consequences. Not at all. I attempted to lower my voice and sound faintly reasonable. “And it’s slipping away from us. There’s a big hole in it over the South Pole. When you use a spray can you make that hole bigger. There’s something in most aerosol cans and refrigerators and air conditioners, called chlorofluorocarbons, that neutralizes the ozone. Factories are still making tons of it, right now.”
I suspect “chlorofluorocarbons” was the largest word ever spoken within the walls of Grace High, and I’m fairly sure also that nobody forgot it for at least the rest of the day.
After the bell rang, Connie Muñoz eyed me and said, “Miss, I seen you wear stone-washed jeans to school sometimes.” The other kids were already out of there like bats out of hell.
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t know about the mountains when I bought them. Just like Hector didn’t, and you didn’t.”
“Yeah?” She chewed her gum and held me under a neutral, military sort of gaze. I’d publicly humiliated her new boyfriend; this would require some diplomacy.
“I’ve been learning a lot of this stuff just lately,” I told her. “I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem.”
“So how come you’re so mad at us, Miss?”
I felt conscious of my height, and embarrassed. “Connie, I don’t really know. Because I’m guilty too, I guess. And now I’m trying to fix it all at once.”
A hint of life came into her eyes. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad. Everybody was paying attention. What you said was right, these guys just think when they use something up there’s always going to be more.”
“I shouldn’t have cussed,” I said. “I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I shouldn’t have picked on Hector the way I did.”
She laughed and cracked her gum. “Hector Jones is a dickhead.”
I had dinner at Doc Homer’s house. I’d done so every night since I got back from Santa Rosalia and found out Hallie had been kidnapped. If I badgered him enough, I kept thinking, he would have something more to tell me. But he couldn’t remember anything. If I’d ever doubted Hallie was his favorite, there was no question about it now—I’d never seen him so affected by any event in our lives. He still functioned, cooked for himself and went to work, but it was only an obstinate ritual; he was a mess. I’d found some of his medication bottles in a cache in the living room, inside an old iron coal bucket. There was no way to know whether he was taking them. Half the time he talked to me as if I were six years old.
“Who was the person you spoke with on the phone?