The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Page B

frail-looking cirrus was gliding in from the west, the first and only cloud of the day. I wanted to say something important and true.
    “I’m really sorry about your mom,” I said.
    “What?” he said. He turned toward me. He looked surprised.
    It was suddenly hard to look him in the eye. So I didn’t. Instead, I looked back up at the sky.
    “I’m just sorry that she’s sick,” I said. “That must be really hard.”
    Seth sat up and brushed his palms on the front of his jeans.
    “What the hell do you know about it?” he said.
    He was standing now. The sun was nearly full again, and it was too bright to look up; it was hard to see his face in the light.
    “You don’t know anything about my mom,” he said. His voice cracked. “Don’t talk about her. Don’t ever talk about my mom. Never talk about her again.”
    I felt each word sting a separate sting.
    I tried to apologize, but Seth was already walking away, hurrying off campus and out into the world. I watched him cross the street, looking angry and reckless, dodging traffic as he walked, moving farther and farther away from me.
    By then the sky had turned to its afternoon self, its boldest, bluest blue. I sat up and discovered that I was the only one left on the hill.
    I began to walk slowly back toward math. I passed Michaela on the way. She was heading toward the campus gate with a group of older kids I didn’t know.
    “We’re going to the beach,” she said as she passed me.
    “What about next period?” I said. I regretted these words as soon as they left my mouth.
    Michaela laughed. “Oh, God, Julia,” she said. “Have you ever done one bad thing in your life?”
    That afternoon soccer practice was canceled. My mother picked me up from school. She was furious.
    “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
    I climbed into the passenger side of the car and slammed the door shut behind me, hushing in an instant the giddy voices ringing from the bus lines.
    “It was just an eclipse,” I said. I clicked my seat belt and leaned back as my mother pulled away from the curb.
    “You should have answered your phone,” she said. “You should have called me back.”
    The air conditioner was blasting in the car. News about the eclipse was streaming from the car radio.
    “Are you listening to me?” my mother said, her voice rising as we waited in a line of slow-moving cars, waiting for the crossing guards to wave us out of the school parking lot.
    I was watching a swarm of kids through the window. They seemed suddenly distant out there on the quad. I traced my finger on the glass.
    “Hanna moved to Utah,” I said. I had known for two days, but this was the first time I mentioned it to my mother.
    She turned toward me. Her expression softened. A red Mercedes squeezed past our car.
    “She moved?”
    I nodded.
    “Oh, Julia,” said my mother. She reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Really? Are you sure it’s permanent?”
    “That’s what she said.”
    We headed toward the freeway. I could feel my mother glancing at me as she drove. She turned the radio down.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think they’ll come back.”
    “I don’t,” I said.
    “People are scared right now,” she said. “You know? They’re not thinking straight.”
    When we got home, we discovered that the garbage cans my father had wheeled out to the curb that morning were still heaping with trash. The garbageman had not shown up to collect, but the ants and the flies were busy. The bird was still in there. We rolled the garbage back into our side yard and unloaded the groceries from the car. My mother had bought several boxes of canned food, six jugs of bottled water. She suspected that shortages were on the way—and she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
    That night my father claimed he’d understood right away that the eclipse was an eclipse and nothing more.
    “You’re telling me that you weren’t afraid even for a single second?” asked my mother.
    “Not