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

got out of running the mile by clutching their stomachs, complaining of nausea and mysterious pains. “I can’t help it,” they’d say. “It’s the sickness.”
    The teachers pretended not to worry. But at lunch, they all watched the news in the teachers’ lounge. We could see their expressions as they watched, their tired eyes, their wrinkled foreheads, the naked fear in their faces.
    I didn’t see Seth Moreno again until fifth period. We had math together. His assigned seat was directly in front of mine, and I looked forward every day to being near him. I knew everything about the back of that head—the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.
    We never talked to each other. I had never even said his name out loud, not even to Hanna. “Come on,” she used to whisper in the dark of my living room, both of us curled deep inside sleeping bags. “There must be
someone,
” she’d say. But I’d always shake my head and lie. “Nope,” I’d whisper back. “There’s no one.”
    For weeks I’d been hoping that Seth might look my way, but not today. I was too embarrassed about what had happened that morning.
    Mrs. Pinksy was trying to make a lesson out of the slowing. On the chalkboard, she’d written the Daily Math Brain Teaser:
The length of a day on earth has increased by ninety minutes in two
days. Assuming a steady rate of increase, how long would a day on earth be two days from now? What about three days from now? A week?
    “Do we have to do this?” asked Adam Jacobson, slouching in his chair. He was always asking this question.
    “The only thing you
have
to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky. This was one of her favorite sayings. “Everything else is a choice.”
    Mrs. Pinsky was morbid and intimidating. If ever a kid got the hiccups in her class, she called the kid up to her desk. By the time you reached the front of the classroom, the hiccups were always gone; it was as sure a cure as any other sudden fright.
    “Don’t just write the answer, show your work,” she said, walking up and down the aisles, the folds of her orange dress swishing against the chrome-colored legs of our chairs. “And no guesswork. Use your algebra.”
    The walls of her classroom were lined with encouraging posters: never say never, expect the unexpected, the impossible is possible.
    Mrs. Pinsky called a few of us up to the board to show our answers. Seth and I were among the chosen, and we stood side by side, transcribing our work from our notebooks to the board. I remember being aware of his right arm beside me, stretching up to write his answers, his numbers slanting down and to the right as his chalk scraped the board. The hard brown carpet felt worn out beneath my feet. Thirty years worth of sixth-graders had worked out solutions in these exact same spots.
    Seth clapped two erasers together. The dust made him sneeze. Even his sneeze was endearing. He had wonderful hands. You could see the strength in his wrists, right in the veins, and in the tendons that traversed the backs of his hands. Seth’s mother was at home, dying. But here Seth was, growing stronger every day.
    As I checked my work, I noticed that Seth’s answer was wrong, and I felt a sharp protective stab for him. I wanted to fix it or say something, but he’d already dropped his chalk in the tray and was walking back to his seat.
    Through the open windows of the classroom, we heard the screech of a fire truck racing away somewhere. A moment later, a second one set off in the same direction. But these were the ordinary sounds of our school days. There was a fire station across the street. Sirens rang out all day. The sounds had bothered me at first, all the emergencies of strangers, but I’d grown used to them. We all had.
    The shift in the air was barely perceptible at first: a fading. It was the feeling you get when a cloud moves across the