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

was actually a millionaire or that he’d invented something important for NASA and taught science only for the love of teaching. He was my favorite teacher that year. I knew he liked me, too.
    He set up a question-and-answer box that day so that we could ask anonymous questions about what was happening.
    “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” he said as he collected our scraps of paper in a converted Kleenex box.
    This was the same box we had used on the day they separated the girls from the boys, and the nurse came to tell the girls about our futures. “Something very special is going to happen to you,” she had said slowly, like a fortune teller reading palms. “It comes from the Greek word for
month,
because it’s going to happen once a month, just like the lunar cycle.” Only Tammy Smith and Michelle O’Connor had sat apart, shifting knowingly in their seats, their bodies already in tune with the moon.
    Now Mr. Jensen reached into the box and pulled out a question. He unfolded the piece of paper with great care: “ ‘Is it true,’ he read, ‘that a scientist predicted that the world would end today?’ ”
    “Nostradamus wasn’t exactly a scientist,” said Mr. Jensen. He had evidently heard the rumor circulating the halls. “You all know that no one can predict the future. No one can say what will happen tomorrow, much less five hundred years from now.”
    The school bell buzzed. But we all stayed put on our lab stools. The lunch bell was out of sync with us now.
    Outside, the sky remained bright. Sunlight was pouring in through the windows, catching on the rows of clean beakers and clean test tubes, glittering like wineglasses on the shelves.
    Mr. Jensen pulled another question from the box. Someone asked if the slowing might be caused by pollution.
    This question seemed to depress him. “We don’t know yet why this is happening,” he said.
    He took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He paused near the fish tank, empty since September, when the filtration system abruptly stopped working. It happened on a weekend. We had returned Monday morning to find five fish floating like leaves on the surface. You could see the blood beneath the scales on their little bodies. The water looked clear to our eyes, but it had turned toxic for fish.
    “Human activity has done a lot of damage to this planet,” said Mr. Jensen as we continued to work on our sundials. “Humans are responsible for global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, and for the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species. But it’s too early to say yet if we’ve caused this change, too.”
    Before the end of the period, Mr. Jensen updated our solar system wall, where outer space was neatly represented by six yards of black butcher paper and nine butcher-paper planets. There was also a sun on our map and a tinfoil moon. Scattered in the corners were rainbow-colored pushpins that stood in for all the planets we had not yet discovered. There were supposed to be thousands of them out there. Millions, maybe. It still astounds me, how little we knew about the universe.
    On the sign above the earth, Mr. Jensen replaced
24 Hours
with
25:37,
but he wrote the new figure on a Post-it note so we could update it if we needed to.
    Classrooms were half empty all day or, depending on your outlook, half full. Dozens of desks stood unused, attendance sheets went largely unchecked. It was as if certain kids really had been sucked up from the earth to the heavens, the way some Christians were expecting, leaving the rest of us behind, we the children of scientists and atheists and the simply less devout.
    Our teachers discouraged us from following the news during class, but one kid had a radio and we all had cell phones.
    The first outbreaks of gravity sickness were already popping up around the globe. Hundreds of people were experiencing symptoms of dizziness, faintness, and fatigue. In P. E., some kids