Dark Water - Laura McNeal [65]
My only option was to pretend it was a normal day, except that you couldn’t run a hair dryer, coffeemaker, microwave, or toaster. You couldn’t see yourself in the bathroom mirror because the bathroom was so dark. My mother stood by the living room window and looked in the mirror over the fireplace to put her hair up in a bun. I did a ponytail the same way. She took an Excedrin to replace her cup of coffee. Robby, frazzled and furious from not finding the car keys, met us at the Oyster.
“I even looked in the pool,” he said.
It wasn’t until we reached the overpass that I had a good look at the eastern sky. West of us, above Fallbrook and the river, the sky was blue, but behind us, it was Armageddon brown.
“I think we should turn back,” I said. “We should pack our stuff.”
“I can’t be late,” my mother said.
Robby twisted his head around to scrutinize the cloud. “Relax,” he said. “My dad’ll check it out. He’ll get pretty close and let us know if there’s any danger.”
“Right,” my mother said, accelerating.
She kissed me goodbye on the cheek in the high school parking lot. She didn’t normally do that anymore, and it made me nervous. The air still had that campfire smell, but from the parking lot, the huge milky stain in the sky was invisible. Some hills and houses were blocking it.
“Whatcha le think?” I asked Robby. I stood looking in the direction of the hidden smoke.
“About the fire?” he asked. He shrugged. “I think air quality’s gonna be low, so they’ll cancel PE today.”
I thought of this as a positive, but Robby looked glum.
“See you at lunch?” I asked.
“Right,” he said. “Meet you by the flagpole.”
But we didn’t make it to lunch. At the end of second period, Mr. K. came on the loudspeaker and announced that school was canceled. Buses would run. Parents had been notified. Evacuation orders had been issued to parts of Fallbrook, Rainbow, and Pala, so we should proceed home.
Kids in my history class pulled out their cell phones and turned them on. I did the same, and as we all lifted our heavy backpacks, the doors of every classroom clanked open and out flowed a river of students with phones clapped to their ears. Soon the quad was a sea of backpacks and people staring nervously into space as they had conversations with people who weren’t there.
My mother had already left me a message. She said she had to stay in her classroom until every single child was signed out. “Go home with Robby and Uncle Hoyt,” she said. “Stay with them, and I’ll meet up with you when I can leave here.”
Robby was standing at the flagpole, his backpack slumped casually by his feet. “Weren’t you just totally Cassandra this morning?” he said.
“Who’s that again?” Robby disliked all fiction except Tintin and Greek mythology, so I assumed Cassandra was Greek.
“She foretold the future, but she was also cursed so that everybody always doubted her.”
“Yes, then. Cassandra, c’est moi.”
“My dad said my mom’s freaking out and packing stuff. We got a reverse 9-1-1 call.”
I’d never heard of this.
“They dial in instead of out,” he said. “Instead of you calling the emergency people, they call you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did your dad go see the fire?”
“He said he tried. It’s not that far away. He said he’s filling the truck up with gas and we’ve got to find a place to stay.”
“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.
“Not up 15,” Robby said. “The freeway’s closed.”
It was as if he’d said the sky was closed. “Closed? Then how’s everyone going to get out?”
“The other way,” he said. “You have to get to the 5,” which was the other eight-lane freeway going north or south but along the coast. Getting to the coast freeway could be difficult even on Sundays, when people in Fallbrook and Temecula and Vista tried to go to the beach on a winding road that was just two lanes wide.
In other words, we were in a maze with two exits, and one of them