“You really can’t do that,” she says.
But a moment later comes the soft pop of cork leaving bottle. A tenseness spreads through her—who knows what else this boy will do?
“It isn’t right that they have so much when some people have so little,” says Matthew. “We could pour all this down the drain as a protest.”
Instead, he pours the wine into two coffee mugs and slides one across the counter toward Mei.
“No thanks,” she says.
He laughs. It was a mistake, she knows now, to bring him here.
“Come on,” he says.
He is just standing there, staring, so she takes a tiny sip. The taste is a surprise: fresh and cool in her mouth, not at all like the heavy red wine she has tried once or twice at Katrina’s, never enough to feel more than a slight warmth on her tongue—it seemed so important, back then, not to mess with her mind. But it sounds juvenile now, like bullshit—that would be Matthew’s word.
“We have to remember to take the bottle with us when we leave,” she says. “So they don’t know we drank it.”
“That’s the least of our worries,” he says.
She takes a few more sips. Maybe she doesn’t want to be this girl anymore, this girl who follows the rules.
Now and then, the call of sirens in the distance. The chop of helicopters.
Matthew turns on the television. They sink into the couch, the cool of real leather beneath her palms.
“Look,” says Matthew. “We’re on TV.”
On the screen is the campus, as seen from a helicopter, ringed with the flashing of police cars. Unconfirmed reports, says the reporter, suggest that as many as twenty students have left quarantine.
From this couch, the situation seems less and less urgent. It seems a little funny, actually. Matthew keeps refilling her mug.
He is saying something about American history. He is saying something about the fucked-up ethics of quarantine, civil liberties.
At a certain point, she has the urge to close her eyes. A few seconds later comes the sound of strumming. The autographed guitar from the mantel is now stretched across Matthew’s lap.
“I think that’s just for decoration,” Mei says, but she is melting into the couch.
The bottle of wine stands nearly empty on the coffee table.
“This thing is totally out of tune,” says Matthew.
Somewhere in that room is the idea that he should not be playing that guitar, but it is a concept and not a feeling, like something theoretical and not at all connected to her.
She’s getting tired, too, so tired—maybe she’s never felt so sleepy in her life. A flicker of fear makes her wince: What if this is it, the sickness finally taking over her body? But this concern quickly floats away. Something is dulling every possibility but this one: the cool calm of the leather couch beneath her palms, the softness of the cushion beneath her head.
“Hey, wait,” Matthew says. “Maybe you should drink some water before you go to sleep.”
But it’s too late. She falls asleep right there, sitting up on the couch beside Matthew. It’s a dark, oceanic sleep: deep and still, and empty of dreams.
21.
The girls: from the gym, some sprint to the parking lot, barefoot or in flip-flops, hair flying in the wind. They pack into their cars, in threes and fours, zooming toward the main road. One car is stopped by the police right away. One is found parked outside a boyfriend’s house, the girls eating pizza inside. But one car makes it through, flies right out of town, undetected. Inside that car buzzes a familiar exhilaration, a free-floating fun bubbling beneath everything. It’s in the sound of their voices, singing loud to the radio, the flashes of forest in the headlights as the road turns and turns at high speed. What a story they’ll be telling someday. The high of the near miss. They zip past cabins and campsites until there is nothing but woods in all directions. They swerve to miss a deer, headlights gleaming in its eyes. How they feel is invincible. And also, suddenly: in love—with each other, with themselves, with life! Everything is a part of it. The stars. The woods. The smell of smoke in the air. The proximity of danger—or the idea of it, anyway—is only heightening the pleasure of being eighteen years old in a fast car on a dark road on this particular night.
They make it twenty miles to the next town over, a tiny roadside place, population 250. They stop at a gas station, buy gum. One girl uses a fake ID to buy a six-pack of vodka lemonade. Money slides from her bare hands to the bare hands of the clerk. One of the other girls whispers something flirtatious into a stranger’s ear, her breath mixing with his. Their palms glide across the counter. Their hands touch the handles of the coolers as they pull out the ice cream and the wine. They finger the key chains that hang near the register.
They cannot at this moment conceive of it—the danger they present. It is impossible (impossible!) on this night and in this mood to imagine that just one day later, they will all succumb to the sleep in a room in the retro motel they will soon find down the road, or that, a few days after that, the clerk will be found slumped on this same counter late in the graveyard shift. The sleep will come for that stranger, too, who, after a few days backpacking alone, will fall asleep in his sleeping bag, deep in a remote part of these woods, and will lie there, undiscovered, for two years.
22.
You never know at the start how much damage a wildfire will do, but the following sunrise reveals only a few acres of dead trees, black and stark against the sky, the branches stripped of needles, as if winter has finally come for the evergreens.
Much later, officials will trace the spread of the sickness to this night, to the tainted exhalations of those twenty-six students as they poured down the hill through the woods into town.
But here the timeline grows murky, the chain of transmission unclear. Always, there are gaps in these narratives. A limit to what can be known. In some kinds of cracks, speculation is the one thing that takes root.
In the first minutes of morning, on the day after the fire, Sara is stretched out on a wooden floor, her head turning slightly in her sleep.
One of the kittens is licking up something from the floor. That’s what she wakes to, the white of those paws at eye level, the ticking of eager claws. Otherwise, the house is quiet. Sunlight.
Their father, in his bed, seems the same as before, still deep and silent in sleep.
“Dad,” she whispers. No answer.
The panic from the night before comes back in a different form: congealed. Her father has the sickness—he must.
Sara feels a swell of something else, too: that she has seen all this coming in advance, has been expecting it for years, not this disaster exactly, but some inevitable loss, some sudden coming apart, as if all those nights she lay awake worrying were all of them rehearsal for this.
Their father looks calm in his bed, and young, or younger than usual, anyway, his forehead as smooth as a sheet. How rare it is to catch that body at rest, those eyes closed.
His eyelids, Sara notices, are fluttering.
She wonders what it is he dreams of in that head. Of catastrophe, or its absence? Of a different life, or their own?
When they pull the covers back from his body, the smell of urine wafts up from his sheets.
“I think we should call someone,” says Sara. “Maybe 911.”
“No,” says Libby. “He wouldn’t want that.”
And it’s true. They know what he would say: the police are a bunch of liars, the doctors are just in it for the money, the whole system is rigged against them.
“And they’ll take us away,” says Libby. “We’ll be foster kids and never get to see each other.”