I never wore purple again. I tried to blend in. To camouflage. But Tara’s campaign to take me down was a resounding success. Partnering up in class was a nightmare. Girls scooted away from me in the locker room. Offensive notes constantly turned up in my locker.
But middle school is terrible for everyone. At least, that’s what my mom said when she realized I wasn’t sleeping over at Tara’s anymore. I didn’t tell her the truth about what my former friends were doing. It was too humiliating. And anyway, it wasn’t fixable.
In high school, I found ways to fake a social life. I learned photography off YouTube and volunteered to take the photos for the yearbook. That way I was always attending school events, and it didn’t matter that I had no one to go with. I stood off to the side, with my camera, documenting.
Enough time passed that everyone mostly forgot about middle school. But still, whenever I saw Tara in the halls, my stomach twisted, and I found myself terrified that it could all start up again.
And I’d rather be invisible than find myself a continued target. Especially since Tara had come so close to getting a bull’s-eye. So I made myself forgettable. I held the yearbook camera from an unimportant corner of the gym. I captured my classmates’ best angles, their perfect moments. And in a way, their moments became mine, too: photos by Sasha Bloom, the captions read in six-point font.
I stared down at the quarter page of our yearbook celebrating how well liked and popular Tara was. If the headline were accurate it would read, Worst Personality: Tara Angel.
Actually . . . I clicked the little text box. And then, my heart pounding, I changed it. I added her picture, and for one glorious moment, everything was perfect. The caption revealed her. Her eyes seemed mean, and her smile fake in a way that it hadn’t before.
There was a chance no one would catch it. And if they did, they’d never know it was me. Still, the stress of doing something wrong made me feel ill. I didn’t upset the status quo—I tiptoed around it. By the time the bell rang, I’d put everything back to the way it was supposed to be.
I biked to the museum that afternoon thinking about alternate captions for the yearbook, ones that exposed a truth far deeper than best hair or most class spirit. Mentally, I sorted through my classmates, choosing who would win worst lab partner, or dirtiest gym clothes, or most desperate for Instagram likes.
I spent my afternoon sitting in the museum gift shop, reading about Zelda Fitzgerald and trying to stop eraser thieves and forget about Tara Angel.
And then, miles away, deep beneath the ground, the San Andreas Fault shifted at exactly 5:02 p.m., and with it, my entire life crumbled to pieces.
Chapter 3
WHILE EVERYTHING LEADING UP TO THE earthquake is as clear in my mind as a page of study notes, everything immediately after is blurry and fractured, as though, in all of the chaos, the pen slipped, leaving a smudged, illegible trail down the page.
And so I can recall very little from the rest of that day. Even now, there are only fragments: strangers exiting the museum, shaken and trying to get cell service. The eraser thief shouting “Mama! Mama!” and launching himself at some spiky-haired woman in a navy tracksuit. Sirens in the distance. Sirens getting closer. The dark plumes of smoke that signaled us from town, from my suburb, from the next suburb over. The choke of cars on the road. The five tries it took to unlock my bicycle with shaking hands.
And in the background of all of these flashes, the unbearable silence from my mom. The lack of missed calls. The way she wasn’t answering her phone. The frantic stack of texts I sent, all asking the same question over and over: Mom, where are you?
When I’d left the apartment that afternoon, hastily changing out of my school clothes into a button-down shirt for the museum, I’d thought: turn off the lights, lock the door, did you forget anything, got your keys?
Except it turned out none of that mattered. When I finally made it home, the sky hanging dark overhead, I didn’t need my keys. The large apartment building on the corner had collapsed, debris and concrete spilling into the street. A row of cars was crushed under a fallen oak tree. The houses, small one-story cottages, slanted crookedly, a collection of sagging roofs and smashed porches.
There was a surreal quality to all of it, as though I were seeing a simulation of a disaster, instead of numbly witnessing the real thing. The electricity was out, and the streetlamps should have come on by now. Without them, everything was in shadow, twisted and wrong. The neighbors, instead of going for their nightly jogs, were digging their cars out from under debris.
I called my mom again, getting her voice mail. Despairingly, I tried the salon and then considered calling the police. But what could they do? She wasn’t missing. They probably had real emergencies. Car accidents. Wrecked buildings. People stuck in elevators. Any minute now, her red Civic would pull up. Any minute, my phone would ring.
I didn’t know what else to do except wait, so I sat down on the curb, feeling shaky and unglued and a little dizzy.
Living in California meant we were always teetering on the cusp of disaster. Between top forty hits on the radio, commercials urged us to earthquake proof our homes, and then to buy a season pass for Six Flags. Every few months, there was a wildfire, a landslide, a drought. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before something like this happened. So we’d kept on living in denial, figuring that, when the big one did strike, it wouldn’t hit so close to home.
It was going to be fine, I told myself. My mom’s phone could be broken, or dead.
But then again, she could be broken, or dead.
A harsh light flooded over me, and I shielded my eyes, squinting up. An eyewitness chopper circled overhead. I imagined its camera pointed right at the breaking news, the way my classmates did at parties with their phones.
Let’s go to our reporter on the scene, where a 6.0 earthquake struck the San Bernardino Valley this evening. Devastating. Just devastating. Thoughts and prayers go out to the victims as hashtag San Bernardino Quake is trending worldwide. You can text SANB to the number below to donate ten dollars to the Red Cross. How’s it looking out there, Bill?
That’s what all the news reports said, more or less. But of course I wouldn’t know that until later, at the hospital.
Is this part important? The part between the earthquake we all experienced and the aftershock that was mine and mine alone? I don’t know. When I close my eyes sometimes, I can still see bodies being pulled out of the crushed cars. I can still remember how it hurt to squint into the searchlight of the eyewitness chopper. To sit there, waiting, my unease giving way to panic, even before my phone finally rang.
An unfamiliar number flashed across my screen, but still, I scrambled to answer it.
“Hello? Mom?” I said, my voice tinged with desperation.
That was the last time I’d ever answer the phone thinking she was on the other end.
Earthquake footage was playing on every television at the hospital. It didn’t feel real. But then, bad things never do, at first.
I don’t remember getting to the hospital, or what they said on the phone after realizing I didn’t count as an emergency contact because I was only sixteen.
I just remember the doctor in his green scrubs, his eyes shadowed, his mouth a thin line as he told me what I didn’t want to hear: that my mom was in critical condition. That she was undergoing emergency surgery.