The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Read Free Book Online

than usual, harder to herd. We were loud and wound up. I hid out at the edge of the group while teachers tried in vain to corral us. Their thin voices were drowned out by the ocean of our own.
    This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. I knew I still looked like a child.
    By now, the fog had burned away, leaving a bright, clear sky in its place. In the wind, flags snapped on the school’s flagpole.
    Through the crowd of kids out front, a potent rumor was wafting. These same channels had previously carried news of the illicit explorations of Drew Costello’s fingers and of the acrobatics of Amanda Cohen’s tongue, of the ziplock bag of marijuana found stashed in Steven Galleta’s backpack and, later, of the details of Steven Galleta’s life at the Mount Cuyamaca Camp for Troubled Boys. Amid this usual bilge now floated a different kind of gossip, its sources equally dubious: In 1562 a scientist named Nostradamus had predicted that the world would end on this exact day.
    “Isn’t that creepy?” said Michaela, nudging me with her shoulder.
    I was eager to escape. I wanted to burrow into the crowd, but I was afraid to leave Michaela’s side.
    “I guess he was some kind of psychic or something,” she said.
    You could still see the stretch marks on my T-shirt from the bus stop.
    “Hey,” she said, looking around. “Where’s Hanna?”
    “Utah,” I said. I could barely say the words. “Her whole family left right away.”
    I pictured dozens of cousins sleeping in cars in the Utah desert, encircling a giant grain silo.
    “Holy crap,” said Michaela. “Like forever?”
    “I think so.”
    “Weird,” she said.
    Then Michaela asked to copy my history homework.
    “I didn’t think we’d have school today,” she said. “So I didn’t do it.”
    But I knew Michaela had stopped doing her homework earlier that year. She was developing a different set of skills. There was a lot to learn about the care of hair and skin. There was a proper way to hold a cigarette. A girl wasn’t born knowing how to give a hand job. I let her see my work whenever she asked.
    In science, we made new sundials to replace the ones we’d made the first week of school. I was glad to be sitting in a classroom full of kids who had none of them been at the bus stop.
    “Adaptation is a necessary part of nature,” said Mr. Jensen after he handed out the new calibrations. He was folding and unfolding his hands as he talked. “This is all perfectly natural.”
    We were struggling to jam toothpicks into mounds of wet clay. The trick was to insert the toothpick at exactly the right angle. It was already clear that most of our sundials would tell a useless, sloppy sort of time.
    “Think of the dinosaurs,” he continued. “They died out because they couldn’t adapt to a changed environment.”
    Mr. Jensen had a ponytail and a beard. He wore a lot of tie-dye. He rode a bike to school, and it was rumored that he cooked his meals on the Bunsen burners in the back of the classroom and slept in a sleeping bag under his desk. He wore hiking boots to school every day. He looked like he could live for many months in the desert with only a compass and a pocketknife and a canteen.
    “But of course,” he added, clasping his hands together, “we’re very different from the dinosaurs.” I could tell he was hoping not to scare us, but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.
    Competing rumors held that Mr. Jensen