Time Lost: Teenage Survivalist II by Julie L. Casey Page A

to it. The words made me so sad, but she said they gave her hope. I don’t know what hope she could find in them; all I heard was sadness. Her favorite line, she said, was the part about God making her a rainbow so she could shine down on her mother, but she said she thought of it the other way around, that her mother was the rainbow shining down on her. Another line she loved said to save her tears in her pocket for when she really needed them. She would pat her left jean pocket and say that it was full of tears. I didn’t tell her, but I kept my own tears of a sort, stuffed down deep in my pocket: Mom’s watch pin—even though it no longer kept time, it was a reminder of how much time I’d let slip away when I’d had a chance to use it wisely.
    A song that I liked and would listen to over and over was Mad World by Gary Jules. It made me sad, too, but it seemed like I needed to be sad now, like if I heard a happy song it would cheapen all that I’d been through. The words of that song held so much meaning for me. I know when it was written the words were talking about people scurrying around in their busy lives, not pausing to consider what’s important, but since the day of the CME and all the terrible things that had happened thereafter, the meaning of the words changed in ways I don’t think the songwriter could have imagined. My chest would always feel kind of hollow when I heard the words about hiding my head and drowning my sorrow, because there’s no tomorrow. That’s how I felt: like my life, like Time, had stopped and there was no future for me, just today plodding on and on, going nowhere in this mad world.
    Sara had a pocketful of cash from her parents, not in the pocket where she symbolically stashed her tears, but in her right front pocket of her jeans, where she claimed no one could pickpocket her. She took it out and showed it to me, a wad of $100 bills—Benjamins—and said we would use it to start a new life for ourselves. We began to collect things we’d need, like blankets, warm clothes, extra coats, and water bottles, and stuffed everything into two large gym bags. We got most of it from Sara’s old house, which was just a few blocks away and still stood empty. She said we couldn’t stay in it when we ran away, though, because that’s the first place they’d look for us. School was set to start May 1 st and we were supposed to register the week before. We decided to leave the night before my birthday, so we could celebrate our new life and my birthday together. I also wanted to be sure that the official date of our freedom wasn’t the 13 th , because I still didn’t trust that number, but I didn’t tell Sara about it. I just wasn’t ready to open up yet about all my past problems. We had too many things to think about right then to dredge up old thoughts and memories.
    We left shortly after midnight on April 12 th , when we were sure the rest of the family was asleep. We had left our gym bags at Sara’s old house, so we went there first. We were tempted to stay the night there, but we knew it was too risky, so we set out right away toward downtown. We had dressed in some of Sara’s parents’ clothes so that we would look older to people on the street. I had on one of her dad’s suit jackets over my winter coat and one of those furry Russian hats on my head. Sara wore her mom’s red wool pea coat, which looked much more mature than her pink parka.
    We had to stay off the main highway this time, as there were a few cars back on the roads now, even though gasoline cost a fortune since the refineries had been slow to start back up after the power was back. We followed the general route of the highway, though, and when we came to the river we had to use the highway bridge to cross. It was early in the morning and no cars passed us as we crossed. This time, I was afraid to look down into the river, remembering what I had felt the last time I’d crossed it so, instead, I just walked