Sahalia and the little kids came back with a cart loaded with medicines and first aid stuff.
Mrs. Wooly came and looked at us one by one and gave us whatever she thought might help.
Josie took the most of her attention. Mrs. Wooly tut-tutted over the gaping cut on Josie’s forehead.
The chocolate hue of Josie’s skin made the gash look worse. The red of the blood was brighter, somehow.
“It’s gonna need stitches, hun,” she told Josie.
Josie just sat there staring ahead, rocking back and forth.
Mrs. Wooly poured hydrogen peroxide over the cut. It bubbled up pink and frothed down over Josie’s temple, down her neck.
Mrs. Wooly blotted the cut with gauze and then coated it with ointment. She put a big square of gauze over it and then wrapped Josie’s head with gauze. Maybe Mrs. Wooly had been a nurse in her youth. I don’t know but it was a professional-looking job.
Niko returned with some of those silver space blankets hikers use. He wrapped one around Josie and offered me one.
“I’m not in shock,” I told him.
He just looked at me calmly, his hand outstretched with the blanket.
I did seem to be shaking somewhat. Then it occurred to me that the strange sound I was hearing might be the chattering of my own teeth.
I took the blanket.
Mrs. Wooly came over to me. She had some baby wipes and she wiped off my face and neck and then felt all over my head.
Can you imagine letting your grammar school bus driver wipe your face with a baby wipe and look through your hair? It was absurd. But everything had changed and nobody was teasing anybody.
People had died—we had almost died.
Nobody was teasing anybody.
Mrs. Wooly gave me three Advil and some cough syrup. She also gave me a gallon bottle of water and told me to start drinking and not stop until I hit the bottom.
“How are your legs?” she asked. “Seemed like you were walking funny before.”
I stood up. My ankle was sore, but I was basically fine.
“I’m okay.”
“I’ll get us some clothes,” Niko volunteered. “We can change and get cleaned up.”
“You sit down,” Mrs. Wooly ordered him.
He sank slowly into one of the booths, coughing black gunk onto his sleeve.
She looked Niko over and wiped down his face and neck, just like she’d done for the rest of us.
“I’m gonna tell the school about what you did back there,” Mrs. Wooly said to him quietly. “Real heroic, son.”
Niko turned red. He started to get up.
Mrs. Wooly pressed a bottle of Gatorade into his hands with some Advil and another bottle of cough syrup.
“You’re sitting,” she told him.
He nodded his head, coughing up more gunk.
Jake was pressing the screen of his minitab repeatedly.
“Hey, Mrs. Wooly, I’m not getting a signal,” Jake told her. “It’s like it’s out of juice, but I know it’s charged.”
One by one, pretty much everybody took out a minitab and tried to turn it on.
“Network’s probably down,” Mrs. Wooly said. “But keep trying. It’ll come back.”
Alex took out his minitab. It was dead—blank. He started to cry. It seems funny now. He didn’t cry during the storm, he didn’t cry seeing me all beat up, he didn’t cry about the kids who’d been killed on my bus—he started crying when we realized the Network was down.
The Network had never, ever gone down.
We had all seen hundreds of commercials aimed at reassuring people that the National Connectivity was infallible. We had to believe that because all of our files—photos, movies, e-mails, everything—were all kept in big servers “up in the sky.”
Without the Network, you had no computer. You just had a blank tablet. Maybe fifteen dollars worth of plastic and scrap metal. You had nothing.
And there were supposed to be a thousand backups in place to make the Network impervious to natural disasters—to nuclear war—to anything.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Brayden started railing. “If the Network’s down, who’s going to come and get us? They won’t even know where we are!”
Jake started talking in his deep, chill-out voice, telling Brayden to calm down. That everything would be okay.
But Alex slid out of the booth and started kind of screaming, “The Network can’t be down! It can’t be. You don’t know what this means!”
Alex was locally famous for being good with computers and machines. People we hardly knew dropped by with malfunctioning tablets to see if he could debug them. On the first day of high school, my English teacher pulled me aside to ask if I was Alex Grieder’s brother and did I think he would look at her car’s GPS.
So if anyone among us was going to get the implications of the Network being down, it was Alex.
Mrs. Wooly grabbed Alex by the shoulders.
“Grieder Jr.,” she said. “Go get some clothes for Grieder Sr.”
By Grieder Sr. she meant me, of course.
“But you don’t understand,” Alex wailed.“Go get clothes for your brother. And for these other guys. Take a cart. Go right now,” she directed. “Sahalia, you go with him and get stuff for the girls.”
“I don’t know their sizes,” Sahalia protested.
“I’ll go with you,” Astrid said.
Mrs. Wooly opened her mouth to tell Astrid to sit down and then closed it again. Mrs. Wooly knew her kids, you see. She knew that Astrid wouldn’t be told what to do.
So Astrid and Alex and Sahalia went.
I drank my water.
I worked real hard on not throwing up any more.
A couple of the little kids pawed at their minitabs. They kept pressing the screens on their dead minitabs and cocking their little heads to the side. Waiting, waiting.
They couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on.
* * *
It was weird, changing with Brayden and Jake in the bathroom. These were not guys I was friends with. Jake was a senior. Brayden was a junior, like me. But they were both on the football team and were built. I was neither.
Jake had always ignored me in a genial kind of way but Brayden had been downright mean to me.
For a moment I considered going into a stall to change. Brayden saw me hesitate.
“Don’t worry, Geraldine,” he said. “We won’t look if you’re shy.”
Dean … Geraldine … Get it?
He’d started the Geraldine thing back in grammar school.
Then, when we were in eighth grade, he’d had this bit about my hair. That it needed “styling.” He’d spit in his hands and work it into my hair, like the spit was gel. By the end of the year, he would just spit right on my head and mash it around with his hand.
Real stylish.
I understood Brayden was considered handsome by the girls. He had that olive color of skin that always seems tan, and brown, wavy hair and very thick eyebrows. Kind of Cro-Magnon-man eyebrows to me, but I gathered that the girls thought he looked rugged and dangerous. I gathered this because every time he was around they’d twitter and preen in a way that sort of made me hate everyone.
What I’m saying is—me and Brayden—we were not friends.
I didn’t go into a stall, I just shucked off my dirty shirt and jeans and started washing up at the sink.
“Can you believe that hail?!” Jake said.
“It was unbelievable,” Brayden answered.
“Totally unbelievable,” I agreed.
“I know!”
Jake asked me about a particularly foul welt on my arm from a hailstone.
“It really hurts,” I said.
“You’re okay, Dean,” Jake said, and he clapped me on the shoulder. Which also hurt.
Maybe he just got swept up in the good feeling. Or maybe he was trying to take care of me and be a leader. I didn’t care if it was a put-on. It was good to feel normal for a moment.
“Hey, Jake,” I said. “Sorry about the puke.”
“Man, don’t think another thing about it,” he said.
I tossed him the sweatshirt Alex had gotten for me from the racks out in the Greenway.
“Here,” I said. “I picked it out just for you. It’ll go nice with your eyes.”
Jake laughed with a start. I had surprised him.
Brayden laughed, too.
Then our laughter chuckled along until it got completely out of hand, until we were all gulping air, tears in eyes.
It hurt my throat, which was still raw from the smoke, but Jake and Brayden and me, we laughed for a long time.
* * *
After we had changed, Mrs. Wooly held a kind of a makeshift assembly.
“It’s maybe eight or nine,” she told us. “The Network is still down and I’m a little worried about our friend Josie here. I think she’s in shock, so she’ll probably come around in a day or two. But it might be something more serious.”
We all looked at Josie, who stared back at us with a weird, detached interest, as if we were people whose faces and names she couldn’t quite place.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Mrs. Wooly continued. “I’m going to walk on over to the ER and get some help.”
A chunky little girl named Chloe started to cry.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Take us home! I want my nana!”
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wooly told her. “The bus has two flat tires. I can’t take you anywhere. I’ll be back with help lickety-split.”
Chloe didn’t look at all satisfied with this answer, but Mrs. Wooly went on.
“And look here, kids, your parents are going to have to pay the store back for whatever you guys use, so go easy. This ain’t Christmas.
“I’ve decided to put Jake Simonsen in charge. He’s the boss until I get back. For now, Sahalia and Alex, I want you to go and help the little kids pick out some good games and puzzles from the Toy Department.”
The little kids cheered, especially Chloe, who made a big show of jumping up and down and clapping her chubby little hands. She seemed a little fickle, emotion-wise. And a little annoying.