1.
now
I am walking back from the water when it happens. I am looking down at my hands in the late-summer sun. It is the time of day when afternoon slides into dusk. I am looking at them, thinking, these are my hands, that is so strange.
My hands are my hands. Like in kindergarten when you have to practice writing your name over and over again until it looks so weird. You start to wonder, Is this really my name? This can’t be my name. Like a straggle of string unraveled from a sweater, a trail made by a snake in the mud.
I am thinking that and then
I feel the world
empty around me.
Cicadas stop screaming.
Cars stop humming along the road past the edge of the wood.
My phone, which had been buzzing buzzing buzzing in my pocket, goes silent. When I pull it out, it’s cold and dead. When I turn it on, there is no signal.
In the distance, the water splashes over the spillway, but no one calls or cries out.
I know before I know
that everyone is gone.
2.
now
Just your mind, my brain says. Just your mind playing tricks on you. Everyone’s not gone. The world’s not empty. That’s impossible. Get in the car. Go home. Everything will be fine.
I’ve made it through the woods and I’m standing where we leave our cars when we go to the jump. Parked under a heavy-branched tree is my beat-up old Subaru. Silver. Long scratch on the driver’s side door and an old, peeling KEEP LITHIA GREEN bumper sticker on the back.
But there is no sense of coming and leaving. No engines turning off or on, no crunch of footsteps in the gravel of the parking area, no people calling out to one another in greeting or farewell.
I unlock the car and get in and lock it.
The car is hot and muggy inside, an empty Gatorade bottle rattling around in the front seat where Sam or Sydney or Alex or Ella or Jack used to sit.
I hear my friends laughing. I see Sam turn his head to look at me, the lights from the dashboard illuminating his face. The air rushes in through the windows and it smells of summer rain.
I turn away from the memories and put my hands on the steering wheel. Then my forehead against it.
Breathe, I say.
Just your mind.
3.
now
I send a message to everyone in my contacts. The message says:
Hello?
I wait.
Nothing, no one writes back.
4.
now
Not a single other car on the road.
No one out with their dog
walking across the yard with a plate of cookies for their neighbor
pushing a lawnmower into the garage
talking at the mailbox
the curb
the little park at the end of the road.
No kids playing in the yard
or runners on the street
or teenagers walking together in knots on the sidewalks.
Not a soul along the wide grassy areas by the college dorms.
5.
now
I drive, slowly, down the street.
There is no screen-blue light seeping through windows. Nobody playing in their yards. No snick-hiss of backyard sprinklers, no smell of burgers grilled for dinner in the air.
I get out of the car and go up the sidewalk to my house.
My heart tick-tocks with hope.
Someone has to be there.
They can’t all
be gone.
6.
now
The dishes sit on the table, clean. The chairs are tucked in nice and neat.
My brother, Jack, would never leave his that way. He’s always on his way to a baseball game or a night out with friends or a morning practice and so his chairs are left askew, his sentences are half-finished, his life is in medias res all the time.
“Hey?” I call out. “Mom? Dad? Jack?”
I check all the rooms, the closets, under all the beds, in the backyard, the side yard, the front yard.
It’s like they haven’t been here for a long time.
But they were just here.
Weren’t they?
I look down at my phone.
Still nothing.
From anyone.
7.
Therapist: You should make a list.
July: Of what?
Therapist: Of ways to calm yourself. To settle the weather pattern in your head.
July: I don’t—
July:
Therapist: You don’t what?
July: See how that’s going to help.
Therapist: You don’t have to do it now. That can be your homework, okay? Bring it with you next time.
8.
now
Think.
In the event of a disaster, our neighborhood’s designated meeting place is supposed to be the high school. Maybe that’s where everyone went, and they just forgot me.
Back when we were little, my parents did that to Jack once; they forgot him at a picnic table in Hopkins Glen State Park. We turned the car around, my dad on the phone to 911 and my mom crying. When we got back to the park, Jack was exactly where we’d left him, except surrounded by people and eating a piece of chocolate cake with buttercream frosting from someone’s birthday party that they’d been celebrating at a nearby table.
Both my parents’ cars are in the garage.
Maybe they walked, I tell myself.
My car waits out front. When I turn it on, the radio is nothing but static.
9.now
The parking lot at Lithia High School is empty. Every door is locked. I tried them all. Front doors, back doors, gym doors, doors I’ve never noticed before. I peer in through the windows: vacant rooms. I circle back to the front of the building again, to the marquee out on the main lawn.
This is where we always met for our cross-country training runs. In the summer mornings, after school when classes started up again.
Technically, the cross-country teams have Fridays off in the summers. But the runners who really want to be good, they come anyway.
We do this long run called the Fall Creek Run on Fridays. Eight miles. It’s a monster. You start here at the high school, and then you run up a huge hill, through the gorge. Then out past the farms, up another hill, circle back and come down past the Howell University horse pastures, and then down Fall Creek Road. About a mile before we get back to the high school, we cut through the wildflower preserve to the pond above the spillway on Fall Creek.
And that’s where we jump.
Someone on the girls’ team started the tradition years ago. Then the guys joined in. College kids do it, too, but not early in the morning like us. One of them died at the jump a few years ago. You can see the white cross his friends made for him when you’re coming along the path. He was drunk.
Other people have died there, but not everyone gets a cross.
We’re like the opposite of drunk when we jump. We’ve been running for miles by the time we’re leaping from the cliffs into the water just above the spillway. Once you make the jump on one of the Fall Creek Fridays, you’re part of the team. It’s our rite of passage.
It feels so good. The water is so cold. Then we get back out and run the last mile back to school. Right back here.
Lithia High doesn’t have enough money for one of those electric marquees like other schools have. We’ve got an ancient sign with plastic letters that the student government officers have to change by hand whenever it’s time for a new announcement or event. On the coldest, worst days, when we were out there freezing, trying to get those damn letters up on the board without dropping them, we cursed the cheapness of the school district, the fact that we’d ever signed up for this in the first place, the whole thing.
The last time I noticed, the marquee said HAVE A GOOD SUMM3R, the way it had for weeks. There was only one E, so the student body officers always ended up having to use 3s instead.
But now, those words are gone.
Instead, a date.
8/31.
My heart is tick-tocking harder than ever.
Who did this?
My hands begin to shake.
Who put this up?
How long has it been here?
Did it happen before
or after
everyone disappeared? ...
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