The Girl at the End of the World, Page 2

  I think I came close to passing out then. I found out later that a lot of people had fainted at the sight of the dying man and what happened to him there in the aisle. I felt all the blood leave my head, and for a few seconds I was dizzy and nauseous. I stumbled, but my dad had me so tight that I didn’t come close to hitting the ground. He just held me, half pulling and half dragging me.

  I don’t remember leaving the stadium. It’s funny that I’d remember everything but that. Maybe I did pass out. Maybe my dad had to carry me part of the way.

  All I know is that when we got to the car and I piled into the back seat with my brothers, I put on the safety belt and then started crying inconsolably. My tears were contagious, or maybe frightening. At any rate, my brothers were crying too. My step-mom hit the gas, and we left Dodger Stadium behind forever.

  Chapter Two

  Someday, when all the electricity comes back on again and people rediscover all the technology that’s been lost, someone is going to find a way to tap into all the servers that held all the data from cell phones and emails and texts, and everything that was broadcast on TV and streamed on the web.

  It’s embarrassing to think about that as our legacy. All the stupid junk that people wrote about and fought about and scandalized each other over. I actually hope it never gets dug up again, that it’s the part that gets forgotten by future archaeologists or is irrecoverable and has to remain one of the mysteries of a lost civilization. Because we were really ridiculous.

  I was just as guilty as everyone else. That day, my mom had forbidden me from taking my phone to the game—quality time with your father, she’d said. That had been the only reason I hadn’t pulled my phone out at the stadium to text my friends about how bored I was by the game or how I wished I could be doing something different with my birthday.

  And I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I’d had a phone in my hand when the man two rows down started yelling about the foul ball. Or what I would have done afterwards. Would I have filmed it? I’d like to think not. That may not have been the case, though.

  At any rate, several dozen people who’d been in the same part of the stadium didn’t second guess themselves when the man had his attack, and none of them had mothers who’d made them leave their phones at home.

  I’m sure that within minutes of the incident, people had begun uploading their videos to the web. By eight o’clock it was on the local news, preceded by warnings from the newscasters that what they were about to show was extremely graphic and might be disturbing to younger viewers.

  Like they cared.

  My step-mom had driven me back to my mom’s straight from the stadium, the boys and I silent in the backseat while my dad called my mom to tell her we were on our way. I could tell she was giving him the third degree, trying to figure out why were coming back so soon, but he didn’t want to tell her over the phone, didn’t want us to be reminded in the backseat of what we’d just seen and couldn’t shake no matter how understated he tried to make everything sound. In the end, he lost it and shouted at her. “Damn it, Deena! Will you just believe me when I say Scarlett’s fine—no, we’re ALL fine—and just let me explain when I get there? Okay?”

  I wanted to yell back at him, to tell him to leave her alone, that it wasn’t her fault. But I kept quiet. Mostly because I wasn’t fine. I sat in the back of that car with Randy and Mike, and I trembled, squeezing Randy’s hand—something I’d never done before—and feeling for the first time like they were my real brothers, not half, not living reminders of the divorce. I probably would have held anybody’s hand just then, just to feel someone else alive and near me.

  When we got home, I ran past my mother without a word, straight to the bathroom and threw up. I hadn’t had any clue that it was going to happen, but the instant I walked in the door there was no question. Over the sound of running water, I could hear raised voices in the living room and then silence.

  By the time I came out of the bathroom, my hair now pulled back in a loose ponytail and feeling almost normal for the first time in an hour, I saw my dad standing in the open doorway, my mom a few feet away. He just stared at me, trying to look reassuring. My mom turned, her hand up over her mouth and tears in her eyes. Then she ran to me and threw her arms around me and squeezed, pulling my face into her shoulder as I squeezed back.

  My dad left a few minutes later after giving me another hug, shorter than my mom’s, somehow awkward now in this house. Then, hesitantly, he hugged my mom, too, just briefly. When he stepped away from her, he gave this funny little wave he always had when he didn’t know what else to say, and he was out the door.

  I watched through the window as the car pulled away, my two little half-brothers’ heads barely high enough to be visible in the backseat. Seeing them go made me feel suddenly worse again. I wouldn’t have been able to say why.

  Neither my phone nor the computer could pull me out of my mood, so I didn’t touch either one—just sat on the couch with my mom while she fretted over me, not thinking at all about checking my Facebook or texts for birthday messages or any other distraction. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to talk.

  After a while, my mom said I should get a shower. It helped.

  By the time I went back downstairs, dressed now in loose shorts and a soft old t-shirt, Anna had gotten home from her part-time job, got the short version of what had happened, and turned on the TV.

  The incident at Dodger Stadium was on every local channel.

  At first, I didn’t want to see, but after they’d shown it a dozen times from different angles, I got used to it, kind of numb to it. It was like watching a video of one of your nightmares, inexplicably captured in more detail than you could have remembered and at more angles than you’d have thought possible. The newscast blurred out the most gruesome parts, but that didn’t help me any; my memory filled those parts in without me even trying. Blocking those images wasn’t even an option. I saw the details so vividly in my mind’s eye that now, even though I know the real images were blurred out, when I play that night back in my memory, I remember it wrong, remember them showing the full uncensored version that I actually played in my head.

  After getting used to the surreal images, and my mom’s and sister’s gasps as we watched together, the weirdest part was seeing myself in the background of some of the videos. People who’d been a row or two below the dying man had filmed the whole thing, and there I was, two rows up beside my dad. A few minutes into the coverage, I began watching myself on the screen more than the spectacle of the dying man. I knew that I was the blonde girl standing next to her father, wearing the red t-shirt and jeans, but at the same time it was hard to believe that girl was me. She looked so scared and confused by what was happening in front of her. She cringed and clung to her father’s arm and turned her head away a few times as the man went through his final moments. I didn’t remember doing any of that, but there it was on the screen for anyone to see. No arguing with video.

  Along with endless variations of the scene, the newscast included several interviews with witnesses. They made me glad my dad and step-mom had hustled us out of there so quickly. I was glad not to have been one of those nervous, freaked out people with cameras and microphones in their faces. After that, the news switched to “experts” and medical correspondents and other people speculating on what had happened to the man.

  This I wanted to hear, but it was difficult because our phone had started ringing.

  “Reports are that the victim has been positively identified, but his name has not yet been released pending notification of his family,” said the newscaster, an overly sincere brunette who’d probably practiced her catastrophe face before going on the air.

  “She’s okay, yes,” my mom was saying in the background. A friend of hers had called after seeing my dad and me on TV.

  “The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office has announced that an autopsy will be performed and that there will be a news conference tomorrow morning.
”

  “I don’t think so, no,” my mom said. She sounded annoyed, wanted to be off the phone.

  “Our medical correspondent”—I forget the man’s name—“joins us now to try and shed some light on this horrific scene.”

  “I will. Thanks,” my mom said and hung up. The phone rang again before she’d been able to put the receiver back on its charger.

  “It’s difficult to know exactly what took place at Dodger Stadium this evening based solely on the images we’ve been seeing,” the medical expert was saying.

  “Hello? Yes, yes, it was her.”

  “But the evidence suggests that the victim was afflicted with some sort of parasite. The erratic behavior before his death would indicate that the parasite was putting incredible pressure on parts of his brain.”

  “No, she’s fine.”

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this?” the anchor asked.

  “Really. No, I don’t think she should. But—”

  “Not in my experience, no. But we have to remember that there are countless new discoveries every year of insects and microbes and all manner of things. This could be something we’ve known about previously, but in a mutated form.”

  “I have to go now. I’m sorry. Yes, yes I will. Bye.”

  “And it could be something undiscovered up to now, maybe the kind of thing that doesn’t normally attack human beings.”

  The phone rang again. My mom unplugged it and then gave my knee a squeeze. I tried to smile.

  “Frightening,” said the anchor. “Have health officials made any announcements about any danger posed to fans at Dodger Stadium who may have been exposed to the same parasite?”

  “No official word yet, but it would still be a good idea for anyone who witnessed this incident to get checked out by their doctor as soon as possible.”

  For the second time that day, I felt all the blood drain out of my face. The television was still on, but now it sounded like I was listening to it with pillows pushed up against my ears.

  I looked at my mom. Her mouth was moving. Anna was at my other side, and I felt her take my hand. Then my mom stopped moving her mouth and looked at me with real worry, like she had just figured out that I wasn’t processing anything she’d said.

  She put a hand on my cheek.

  And it was like she broke a spell. Sound came rushing back at me, and now I could really feel my sister’s hand in mine, could feel the fabric of the sofa against my legs.

  I collapsed into my mom’s arms and cried. I’m not ashamed to say it. I cried and cried like I was just little again, and she held me and told me it was going to be all right, told me we’d get to the doctor tomorrow and that it would all be fine.

  Her words and the feeling of her arms around me made some of the fear go away, but not all of it. I was going to die. I knew it. With luck, it wouldn’t happen tonight, and I wouldn’t start shouting about foul balls before it happened, but I knew that I’d go a little bit crazy soon and then it would all be over.

  The newscast had moved on to an entertainment report, something about a movie premiere in Hollywood. I remember pulling away from my mom and turning to see an actress in a backless red dress smiling for the crowd as hundreds of flashbulbs went off. It was such a contrast to what they’d been showing a minute before that for a moment I thought it couldn’t be real.

  I got off the couch quickly.

  “What’s wrong?” my mom asked, alarm in her voice.

  I just shook my head, trying not to look at the television.

  “What if I go crazy like him?” I said, my voice trembling.

  “You’re not going to go crazy. You’re fine.”

  “You don’t know that!” I shouted, and instantly I feared the sound of my own voice, feared that this was it.

  “Sweetheart, you need to calm down. It’s going to be all right. If there was even a chance that something could have been contagious, they wouldn’t just be speculating on the news. The Health Department would be giving instructions right now. Don’t let it get to you. Anna, shut it off please.”

  My sister did as she’d been asked, and I felt a little better, but I still worried that I was about to go crazy. I questioned every one of my thoughts, trying to determine if they were normal or not.

  My mom stood up and took both my hands in hers. “You maybe need some rest. You want me to go upstairs with you?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be okay,” I said, just above a whisper.

  She kissed my cheek, and I tried hard not to flinch. As quickly as I could, I let go of her hands and walked to the foot of the stairs.

  “Mom? Anna?” I asked with one hand on the rail. They both looked at me expectantly. “Will you promise me something?”

  “Sure,” my mom said, and my sister nodded. They both seemed so sincere that I found myself not wanting to believe them, but I went on anyway.

  “If I start…going crazy…doing things or saying things that just don’t seem right…”

  “You’re not going to,” my mom interrupted.

  “Stop. If I do, then stay away. Don’t try to help me. Just…just get out of here. Okay?”

  They both stared silently. I knew they were weighing what they wanted to say against what they thought they should say instead.

  “Okay?” I repeated, more insistently.

  “Okay,” my mom whispered, tears in her eyes.

  I raised an eyebrow as I looked past her toward Anna.

  “Okay,” she said.

  There wasn’t much point in saying anything else, so I just nodded at them and turned to walk up the stairs. I hoped I’d be able to make it to my room before the sobbing started, but I was only halfway along the upstairs hallway when the choked sounds reached me from the living room, mom crying first and then my sister with her. My chin quivered at the sound, but I clenched my teeth and wiped at both eyes with the back of my hand. Then I was in my room, shutting the door and leaning hard against it. It felt like I was trying to shut the whole world out, to lock myself away from it, but I knew it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t the first time I’d used my room as such a refuge; the door had never worked before when it came to keeping the world away for long, and I knew the same would be true tonight. Still, I felt a strange sense of comfort standing there and feeling my shoulders and back against the solid door, the sounds of my mother and sister crying now muffled and almost indistinguishable from the other sounds of the night.

  Almost.

  Chapter Three

  After a while, I stepped away from the door. Downstairs, my mom had suggested I get some rest, but I wasn’t tired. That hadn’t been my reason for leaving the living room. My real reason had been to get away from them, to put some distance between myself and the people I might hurt if I really did go berserk like the man at Dodger Stadium.

  So instead of undressing and getting into bed, I pulled my phone from my back pocket. How many times in the past had I pulled the phone out the second I closed the bedroom door, walking across my cluttered floor without noticing where my feet fell, my eyes not drifting from the screen? For a few seconds that night, it was like old times. The unanswered texts were in the double digits, and I started thumbing through them as I made my way to the bed. I sat cross-legged and began reading and responding.

  The texts were all from friends asking if I was all right. Some sounded scared for me. Others tried to be macabre and joke about it, but I knew they didn’t really find any of it funny. They’d all seen me on TV or YouTube. Most of the videos had gone viral, none of them edited the way they’d been on TV. People sent me links by the dozen as the night wore on. I didn’t want to click on any of them.

  The later it got, the more surreal it all seemed. I almost could have convinced myself that everything that had happened at the stadium had been a dream and that all the texts and Facebook messages were just part of it. But even though my friends helped take the edge off of what had happened, there was still a part of me—a big part, I guess—that was ter
rified and in denial and wanting desperately for the distraction to work just a little bit better.

  My phone had been chirping at me every time I got a new text, so when it actually rang around 11:00, I jumped.

  Jen was my closest friend. We had three classes together that year and had known each other well since eighth grade. Of all the people who were texting and messaging me, Jen was the one whose words helped the most that night, the one person who didn’t joke at all about what had happened and who seemed to get just how serious the whole thing might have been. She was the one who I knew really meant it when she said she was worried about me.

  Now a silly picture I’d taken of Jen filled my phone’s screen and a clip from her favorite song played as her ringtone. Anyone else’s call I might have ignored. Not Jen, though.

  “Scarlett?” she sounded scared, about to cry.

  “I’m okay, Jen,” I said. It seemed a bit odd that I was the one having to comfort her, but I gave it only a second’s thought. “Don’t get so upset.”

  “Scarlett, you have to turn on channel seven. Right now.”

  “Why? What is—”

  “Just turn it on! Oh my God!” Then she was sobbing on the line.

  I had a TV in my room but hadn’t turned it on in months. You’d normally have found me on the computer or the phone if you’d come into my room those days—that or doing my homework or maybe reading a book. So of course I couldn’t find the remote.

  “Jen, come on. You have to calm down,” I said while turning over magazines and looking in my nightstand drawer. Jen gave only sniffles in response.

  I finally found the remote on a shelf above the television and turned it on to channel seven. A press conference was in progress, a gray haired man in a rumpled suit talking before a bank of microphones.

  “There is no way to tell what Mr. Kirby or his co-workers came in contact with, but the other deaths do point to the airport as the source of initial contact.”

  Other deaths? I thought, my heart pounding. This can’t be real.