Chapter 1
THE APRIL THAT EELS STARTED FALLING from the sky in Alaska—the same April that we Californians hoped for much-needed rain—everyone was looking up. It was like a cosmic magic trick, how we were all gazing in exactly the wrong direction the day it happened.
It had been a brutally hot week, and the heat showed no sign of breaking. The blacktop wavered as I locked my bike outside Randall High, and the tops of cars seemed to sizzle in the dry air.
Even in the air-conditioned gift shop of the Pioneer Museum, the heat snuck in whenever someone opened the door—which was often, since it was the museum’s only exit. I slouched behind the register most afternoons, ignoring the trickle of patrons who were forced to walk past me, most of them ignoring the unappealing carousel racks of stuffed animals on their way to the parking lot. Whoever decided people should exit through the gift shop had probably never worked in one.
It was a decent after-school job, though, working at the Pioneer, which was either California’s forty-ninth best natural history museum or its second-to-worst, depending on your perspective. Mostly, I babysat the bins of posters that no one ever bought and actually got paid to sit around and read library books. I measured my paychecks in romances and classics, in stories about big cities and boarding schools. There was the week of Meg Wolitzer, and the month of Haruki Murakami. So it was no surprise that I was reading on the day in question.
The museum was crowded, but it was early enough in the evening that most patrons were still loitering in the air-conditioned exhibition halls, pretending to be interested in the displays.
I was absorbed in a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, reading about Paris in the 1920s, which sounded fabulous, full of flappers and champagne, when the insistent squeak of a postcard rack brought me back to reality.
“Can I help you?” I asked with minimal enthusiasm, glancing up from my book.
Immediately, I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a boy, maybe nine years old, all swagger and basketball shorts. There was a yellow museum pin bunching the center of his T-shirt, which made it look like an invisible hand was grabbing a fistful of fabric.
“No,” he said. Without breaking eye contact, he pocketed a dinosaur eraser. “I’m just looking.”
And then he did it again. I watched in despair as more erasers went plonk, plonk, plonk into his pocket.
“Those cost fifty cents each,” I warned, using my babysitter voice.
“I said I’m just looking,” he shot back.
Plonk went another eraser.
It was like he knew I wasn’t going to do anything. Because, honestly, it wasn’t worth the trouble. No one was checking inventory on the eraser bin.
The kid shot me a screw-you grin, this time pocketing a miniature geode.
Six dollars each, my brain supplied automatically. And those would be missed.
“You can’t just take things,” I said.
“Oh yeah? ’Cause my mom will get you fired if you tell,” he threatened.
I suppressed a sigh. Shit like this was always happening to me. It was like the universe had stuck an invisible sign on my back, telling everyone to walk all over me. And the worst part was, he probably could get me fired. I pictured the confrontation, loud and exhausting. The kid crying until his outraged parents took down my name and threatened to write a negative Yelp review. The way that, somehow—this I knew with total certainty—everything would be my fault.
Or, I could just pretend it had never happened.
The boy was watching me. Waiting.
Well? his expression seemed to say.
My shoulders sagged.
“Um, let me know if I can help you find anything,” I mumbled.
The boy smirked, and I forced my eyes back to my book, trying to ignore him. Except I couldn’t concentrate. I was reading the same paragraph for at least the fourth time when the earth shook violently beneath us.
There was a rumble, and a tremendous boom. My chair rattled, and I grabbed on to the counter to keep my balance. I watched in horror as the postcard racks toppled like felled trees and the shelves shook, their contents cascading to the floor.
“Get under a table!” I yelled, ducking beneath the counter.
It’s just an earthquake, I told myself, trying not to panic.
We’d done earthquake drills in school for as long as I could remember, rolling our eyes each fall as our teachers forced us to squat beneath our desks, heads down, hands protecting the backs of our necks. And every year we brought in personal emergency packs (protein bars, bandages, water pouches) that our homeroom teachers collected, and which we never saw again. Sometimes, I imagined a gigantic room in the school basement with shelves full of the things, rotting away.
Still, all of the earthquakes I’d experienced had been tiny. At worst, a few seconds of swaying, and then it was over. Back to sleep, back to your tests, back to the mile run in gym. But as I ducked under the counter, something told me this was the reason for all those drills. It went on forever, the floor lurching and rolling, the building groaning in this deep, unsettling way. Inside the museum, I heard people shouting.
And inside the gift shop, the eraser thief let out a terrified wail.
“You okay?” I called.
“Y-y-yeah,” he said shakily.
“It’s going to be fine,” I promised, even though I didn’t know that.
At that exact moment, a light fixture crashed down on top of the cash register. Shards of glass rained to the ground, nipping against my arm. I hadn’t expected an earthquake to hurt. I was so surprised by the pain, and by the very real possibility that it might not be fine, that my head banged against the counter, hard.
The next thing I knew, the earthquake had stopped, and my ears were ringing. No, the museum was ringing. The emergency alarm flashed from the corner, its warning shrill and insistent.
I groaned, pressing the tender place just above my ponytail. My hand came away clean, but my arm was flecked with blood. I had the overwhelming sense that something terrible had happened, but for a moment I couldn’t think what. And then the ground lurched again—an aftershock—and I remembered.
The alarm blared. My head throbbed. My arm stung. The whole world seemed thick and slow. Plaster dust swirled through the air, like we were caught inside a snow globe. Not that anyone would want a snow globe of a scene like this. I’d seen the displays fall, but somehow, surveying the aftermath—the ruin—made it horribly real.
I was shaking shards of glass off my backpack when the kid crawled out from under a table with a muffled cough. He was dusted with plaster, his swagger gone. He looked stunned.
“Come on,” I told him. The path to the exit was littered with fallen postcard racks and shattered geodes that were no longer worth stealing. But the neon sign still glowed above the door. Exit through the gift shop, I remembered. This was the only exit.
I started clearing the debris, kicking it aside, making a path. The kid followed behind me like a ghost, silent and trembling.
When I got to the door, I pushed against it, hard, but of course it didn’t budge. I strained, pushing harder, and then I snapped at the kid to help me. He did what he was told, which honestly might have been a miracle. And between the two of us, the door popped open, the sunlight dazzling.
Chapter 2
TEN HOURS EARLIER, IT HAD BEEN just another late-start Wednesday. My high school had them every week, to the delight of no one. Homeroom was canceled, break was a fond memory, and each period got cut short by five minutes. Our teachers always forgot, their lessons spilling frantically into the passing bell. But the absolute worst part was not getting a bathroom break until lunch. The cafeteria line was nothing compared to the line for the girls’ toilets.