“Ruby!” Charlie’s shout is an electric jolt of energy to my brain. “Can you get your arm out of your sweatshirt sleeve so you can wrap it around your cut and use it to apply pressure?”
“I’ll try.” I wiggle. I’m like a worm. No arms. No legs. Rolling a millimeter in either direction, trying to avoid every sharp thing as I ease my arm out of the sleeve. It feels like hours pass, but I finally get it. “It’s off.”
“Okay. You need to wrap as much of it as you can as tight as you can around your arm. But don’t make it so tight that you cut off your circulation.”
“Are you a Boy Scout?”
“Hell no.”
I laugh, letting go of my worry long enough to free my right hand and wrap the sleeve around my left arm. I pull it tighter by using my teeth. I grunt through each step, all of it so much effort in this limited space.
“Got it.”
“Good. Good job, Ruby.”
A small laugh escapes my lips.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I imagined you talking to your dog just then, like, Good dog, Ruby.”
“Well, Ruby would dig us the hell out of this mess, that’s for damn sure.”
“I wish Ruby was here.”
“Me too.”
“So now what?”
“We wait.”
“For how long?”
“Who knows? Until it stops. Until we get help.”
I feel like we’re talking about two different things now. The bleeding and this nightmare.
“And then I can untie it?”
“When it stops, yes.” He sounds so calm. Like someone trained to deliver bad news without any emotion. How did he get this way? “It’ll be okay, Ruby. Now can you try your phone again?”
I pull my phone back to my face with my free hand. Press the redial button. Absolutely zero happens. “Nothing. It won’t dial out.”
“Text?”
I type out a text to my mom with my right thumb: I’m trapped at the Suds and Surf laundromat on Belmont. None of those words looks real.
My phone waits and waits and waits. “It won’t go through.”
“Can you get online?”
I try that. The swirly gray ball at the top of the screen whips around and around, struggling to load. It’s hopeless. Everything is down. Everyone is unreachable.
No phone calls. No texts.
But then my phone dings with an emergency alert from the California Earthquake Warning System.
7.8-magnitude quake. 4:31 p.m. PST San Andreas fault line. Severe damage.
My vision blurs. All I see is 7.8-magnitude.
My heart stops in my chest. I think of my house. Of my mom. My school. My friends. Are they okay?
“Charlie,” I whisper. “It was a seven point eight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
The worst earthquake I’ve ever experienced was probably a high magnitude 4, and it barely broke a couple of glasses in our cupboard. So when you figure each additional point is something like thirty times more energy, I’m pretty sure a magnitude 7.8 is “The Big One.”
Charlie’s clearly done the same math.
“Can you try your phone again?” His voice sounds different. Like hope has left it. Reality has sunk in.
I call my mom again. Text her. Still nothing. I can only hope she’s okay and she’ll get my messages eventually. “I’ll keep trying.”
Something suddenly pops. I flinch. Hit my head. Another pop. And another. Three times. Then a sizzle. The sound seems like it’s coming from outside. Away from us, but still close enough to hear.
“What was that?” I say.
“My best guess would be a downed power line.”
“It’s outside, right?” I think of the toppled washing machines. The water that surely leaked out. This isn’t a good place to be near downed power lines thrashing around like out-of-control garden hoses.
“Definitely outside. Pretend it’s fireworks.”
Fireworks. “I like fireworks.” They remind me of the day I met Leo. I do what Charlie tells me. I close my eyes and pretend.
LEO
There’s something about fireworks.
The crisp crackle of them equals a promise, and it’s suddenly okay to wish on new beginnings. It’s okay to wish on kisses from the boy you’re sharing a towel with on a dark sandy beach on the Fourth of July while the bright lights wheeze their way upward to bust open the sky above.
Maybe I got caught up in the idea of fireworks on that night seven months ago when Leo weaved his way through the masses to plop down next to me, still smelling like sunblock at nine p.m.
We’d just met but had been flirting all day. A smile here. A touch there. By the afternoon, we were tangled feet under the ocean water. He was at least as tall as me and wore red-, white-, and blue-striped board shorts that were more subtle than cheesy.
“Summer,” he said, leaning back on his elbows in the sand as the sun skimmed the horizon. “Doesn’t it seem like everything lasts longer? A week feels like a year.”
“So a day feels like a week?”
He looked at me. Squinted. “More like a month.”
“So you’ve known me a month.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. Shy. “It’s been a good month.”
What he’d said was true. My arrival at the beach with Mila at ten a.m. felt like weeks ago. Since then there had been bodysurfing and volleyball and a bonfire. Lunch. Dinner. Multiple applications of sunblock. Beer.
All day long, Leo had been at my side, asking me questions and answering mine. He was funny and smart and thoughtful. And even though I was wearing a bikini, he looked at my eyes when he talked to me. It’s sad how that’s a thing you notice when you’re a girl at the beach. I wondered how I hadn’t talked to him before, but maybe it’s because we weren’t meant to talk until that day.
In the dark, a few hours later, waiting for fireworks, he handed me an unlit sparkler stick.
“Want me to light it?” he asked, nudging his broad swimmer’s shoulder against mine.
“Yes. I want you to light me up.” I’d intended to make a joke, but I realized how it sounded and wished I could disappear.
But Leo laughed.
“Just you wait, Babcock,” he said, flicking a lighter open and holding the flame to the tip of my sparkler. The fire sizzled and swirled, shooting sparks into the air and onto the sand where they instantly died. “Just you wait.”
CHAPTER FOUR
6:18 P.M.
There are sirens outside, their screams slicing through the hollow holes of the laundromat. I angle my body toward them, like they’ll sense my presence as they pass. My throat is caked with dust. Each inhale is dry and gritty. Filth gets stuck in my chest until it hurts, like breathing smog-filled air on a hot California day. I know it’s impossible to hear my cries for help over the wail of the sirens, but I yell anyway because it’s the only thing I can do.
“You can probably loosen your sweatshirt from your arm now,” Charlie says when I pause to suck in air. “Just a little. See if the bleeding has stopped.”
I’ve been trading off between my teeth and my right hand to pull the sweatshirt taut. My jaw is tight. My fingers are stiff. It’s a relief to give them both a break. The pain isn’t gone, but I don’t feel any blood rushing to the surface when I let go.