Karen Walker - The Age of Miracles

A fruity shampoo scent wafted up from her hair whenever she moved.

“Ouch,” said Michaela, whipping around as if stung by a bee. There was Daryl, snapping the strap of her bra. “Quit it, Daryl,” she said.

That bra wasn’t supporting much. Michaela was as flat as I was. But she wore it anyway, a racy symbol of things to come. Visible through the white cotton of her tank top, those two empty cups held at least the possibility of breasts, if not the real things, and I guess just the expectation, just the idea, the mere dream of a female body was enough to lure the boys to her side.

“I mean it,” she said as Daryl snapped it again. I could hear the quick slap of the elastic landing on her skin. “You’re annoying me.”

In the distance, I watched Seth Moreno throw a rock over the chain-link fence and into the canyon. I had the feeling that he cared about important things. His sadness was always apparent. It was in the angry whip of his wrist as he let the rock go. It was in the tired motion of his head. It was in the way he squinted at the sky but would not look away.

Seth already knew about disaster: His mother was sick, and she’d been sick for a while. I’d seen him with her once or twice at the drugstore, a red bandana wrapped around her head where her hair once was, her skinny legs planted in a pair of chunky orthotic shoes. Breast cancer: She’d had it for years already, forever, it seemed, but I’d heard that now she was really dying.

Suddenly, I felt a hard pinch through the back of my T-shirt. I turned. Daryl was behind me. He was laughing at me.

“Gross!” he said, turning his head toward the rest of the kids. “Julia’s not even wearing a bra!”

My cheeks turned hot.

Hanna would have known what to do. She was the leader between the two of us, the talker, the boss. She could be mean when she needed to be. Maybe having sisters had trained her. She would have stepped in at that moment and said to Daryl the exact right thing.

But I was on my own that day and unaccustomed to getting teased.

A few months earlier, I’d passed through the lingerie section of a department store with my mother. A salesclerk had asked if we’d like to see the training bras. My mother looked at the clerk as if she’d said something about sex. I looked at the department store floor. “Oh,” said my mother. “I don’t think so.”

Daryl was staring at me. He had the palest white skin, the sharpest, freckliest nose. I could feel the eyes of the other kids on my face, attracted to cruelty like flies to meat.

A lie formed in my mouth. It tumbled out like a broken tooth. “I am too wearing one,” I said.

A silver minivan came around the corner, kept moving, and was gone.

“Oh yeah?” said Daryl. “Then let’s see it.”

Everyone but Seth was watching us. The older boys, the eighth-graders, had stopped their shoving matches to see what would happen. Even Trevor had stopped talking. Diane watched, too, rubbing with two fingers the silver cross that always hung around her chubby neck. The Gilbert twins stared their silent stare. Seth was the only one who stayed apart. I hoped he hadn’t noticed what was happening. He was standing on his skateboard, facing the other way, the wheels crunching the dirt, as he rolled back and forth on the other side of the lot.

“If you’re wearing a bra,” said Daryl, leaning toward me, “then prove it.”

I longed for the sounds of the school bus to rescue me but heard nothing—only the faint murmur of insects, busy among the flowers in the canyon, and the dull ring of Seth’s skateboard striking the curb again and again. The power lines were humming above us as usual, the flow of electric current uninterrupted by the slowing. I would later hear that all our machinery would keep working for a while even if all the humans were gone.

I fiddled with my necklace. Suspended from a delicate chain around my neck was a tiny gold nugget, unearthed sixty years earlier by my grandfather’s hands when he worked in the mines of Alaska. It was the one artifact of his that I treasured.

“Leave her alone,” Michaela finally said, but her voice was too thin and too late.

What I understood so far about this life was that there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the stronger and the weak, and so far I’d never fallen into any group—I was one of the rest, a quiet girl with an average face, one in the harmless and unharmed crowd. But it seemed all at once that this balance had shifted. With so many kids missing from the bus stop, all the hierarchies were changing. A mean thought passed through my mind: I didn’t belong in this position; it should have been one of the uglier girls, Diane or Teresa or Jill. Or Rachel. Where was Rachel? She was the nerdiest one among us. But she’d been kept home by her mother to prepare and to pray—they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, convinced that this was the end of days.

Another car floated around the corner. This time it was my father in the green station wagon, on his way to work. He waved as he passed. I wished I could flag him down, that he could rescue me. But he could not have read in that plain scene the signs of any trouble.

“Either you show it,” said Daryl, “or I’ll do it for you.”

As has been well documented, rates of murder and other violent crime spiked in the days and weeks following the start of the slowing. There was something in the atmosphere. It was as if the slowing had slowed our judgment too, letting loose our inhibitions. But I’ve always felt that it should have produced the opposite effect. This much is certainly true: After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known—no law of physics can account for desire.

I finally heard the bus rumbling around the corner toward us, its brakes squeaking, its engine rattling. Daryl heard it too, and that’s when he grabbed hold of the front of my shirt and pulled up. I twisted away from him, but I was too late.

Here’s what I remember next: the white of my T-shirt over my face, the whoosh of damp air on my bare breastbone and bare ribs, over the whole flat plane of my chest. The excited squeals of the other kids. As I turned, I saw Seth, his long limbs swinging as he walked, heading in our direction, just in time to see my bare chest. Daryl held me that way for a few long seconds while I twisted and turned, the two of us locked in a perverse dance. I could feel the cold air on my skin and the chain of my necklace digging into the back of my neck.

Finally, Daryl let the edge of my shirt drop.

“Liar,” he said. “I knew you weren’t wearing a bra.”

The bus stopped at the curb and began to idle there. The light sweet smell of diesel filled the air. I felt faint. I was blinking back tears.

“Jesus, Daryl,” said Seth, coming up and shoving him in the shoulder. “What the hell?”

Months later, Michaela’s mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone’s astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day.

“Don’t worry,” whispered Michaela as we climbed up the steps and into the bus. “No one saw anything.”

But I knew that this was just something you said when the exact opposite was true: Everyone saw everything.