DRY - by Neal Shusterman

56) Alyssa

Soapy sponge, wet washcloth, dry towel, repeat.

A pounding at the bathroom door.

“Alyssa, come on already!” says Garrett. “I gotta take a dump!”

Soapy sponge, wet washcloth, dry towel, repeat.

“Use the downstairs bathroom!”

“I can’t! Dad’s in there!”

The sponge, the washcloth, the towel. One arm, one leg at a time. I will get clean. It will just take a little effort.

Garrett pounds again. “What are you even doing in there?”

“I’m taking a shower.”

“I don’t hear the shower running.”

“Then you’re deaf.”

He’s not deaf. The shower is not on. But there’s a sponge for soaping, a washcloth for rinsing, and a towel for drying. I stand in the shower and reach over to the sink, which is half filled with warm water, like a basin in the days before homes had running water. With the water heater finally replaced, we don’t have to boil water to warm it anymore. And with our neighborhood’s water turned on for two days a week, it means we can shower. I know that. But I just can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to spray my body and watch it flow down the drain. Maybe another day. But not today. Today it’s a sponge, a washcloth, and a towel. I’m happy with that. More than happy, I’m satisfied.

“We’ll be leaving soon,” I call out to Garrett. “Are you ready to go?”

“I’m ready to use the bathroom!”

The crisis officially ended two weeks ago – just a day after Kelton, Garrett, and I were air-lifted out of the forest and dropped off at Lake Arrowhead, where the entire community had become one massive evacuation center. But only for the people who managed to get there, which wasn’t easy. We were treated for smoke inhalation. My lungs hurt for a week. They’re better now.

I dry my hair, put on a robe, and let Garrett into the bathroom, where he starts taking care of business even before I completely vacate. Typical. And yet nothing feels typical anymore. There’s a new “normal,” because our lives are punctuated by weird air pockets of the surreal.

Like when we went back to Costco. The shelves were restocked as if nothing ever happened, with a stupid sign out front that said YES, WE HAVE WATER!

But even though the store is the same, people are not. Since the return of life as we knew it, I’ve found there are four kinds of people now, all easy to spot – especially in the aisles of Costco.

There are the oblivious ones, who go about their lives like the Tap-Out was a dream that waking life has completely washed away. Maybe they got out before it got bad, or maybe they just exist in a constant state of denial. I find them hard to relate to. It’s like talking to aliens pretending to be human.

Then there are the ones like us, who lived through it and are still facing the PTSD of it all. They linger in the aisles, marveling at the sheer magnitude of products and the organization it took to get it all here, no longer taking anything for granted, and guarding their carts as if their lives depended on it.

Then there are the fulfilled ones. The people who found something in themselves they didn’t know was there. Heroes in the rough. Now they talk to strangers, look for opportunities to help. They’ve discovered they can truly be of use, and don’t want that to stop just because the crisis is over. I admire them. The Tap-Out left them with a calling they didn’t have before.

And finally there are the shadows. These are ones who move through the aisles silently, avoiding eye contact, afraid at every step that someone will recognize them and accuse them of whatever horrible, unspeakable thing they did to survive. The ones who can’t look at others because they can’t face themselves.

It’s the same at school. We all went back a couple of days ago. Even though school would have ended by now, they have to finish the year. “Healthy closure,” they said. Because a water-zombie apocalypse is not truly over until kids go back to school.

Three teachers had perished – two beloved, the third not so much, but everyone cried for him, even so. Thirty-eight students were lost – including the school’s star running back and the girl voted Most Likely to Succeed. But those weren’t the only empty chairs. There were dozens upon dozens who simply hadn’t come back, and might never come back. My friend Sofía, for one. Who knows if I’ll ever see her again.

And the shadows were there, too. Kids who are wraiths of their former selves. Hali Hartling, for instance – who kicked hard, lived large, and was always at the top of the social pyramid. Now she moves quietly through the hallways, and I suspect has completely lost her edge on the soccer field. I suppose I could have become a shadow, because I did plenty of things I am not proud of, but I made the choice to wear it not as a brand of shame, but as a badge of honor. If I’m scarred, then they’re war wounds, and I will not cower from them.

When it comes down to it, there’s nothing “normal” about our new environment, and I wonder if life will ever be the same. Will we ever be able to put the past behind us? Will the shadows find redemption? Will all the fulfilled heroes go back to their less altruistic selves? And will I ever stop having nightmares about my parents?

It doesn’t help that the truth was almost as awful as a night terror.

Mom got knocked out during the riot at the beach. She collapsed, out cold against the hot sand. The crowd was savage. She was trampled, three of her ribs were broken. Her left lung was punctured, and she suffered a grade three concussion. She was lucky that there were still paramedics around to bring her to a hospital, or else she would have died.

Dad was arrested because he was fighting to get to Mom, and it got bundled with all the rest of the violent behavior of the mob.

Turns out they both ended up in the perfect places. The hospital was a high-priority location, so it got the first water deliveries, and county jail, being a government facility, never had its water shut off like all the municipal water districts had. Funny that jail was one of the safest places to be. It was hard on Dad, though – not knowing what happened to us, or to Mom, not to mention whatever craziness went on in there. He won’t talk about it. I don’t blame him.

They both got home before we did, and suffered their own hell waiting to find out what had become of us. But we finally got in touch with them, and they met us where the buses bringing people back from Arrowhead dropped everyone off.

It’s a moment I replay over and over again in my mind, although the memory registers more viscerally than visually. The feeling of the memory. Maybe because my eyes were too blurred by tears to see much of anything. The feeling of home in the smell of my mother’s shirt as I cried into her shoulder. The sense of safety brought by the touch of my father’s hand when he rubbed my back to comfort me, just as he did when I was little. The blanket of comfort that was carried by their voices – voices I thought I might never hear again. We all just stood there in a parking lot – I don’t even remember where – holding each other until nearly everyone else had left. I wasn’t even embarrassed. I could have stood there and held them till the end of time.

Uncle Basil’s back with us, too. Alive and well, just as we told ourselves he would be. We’re determined to start calling him Uncle Herb more, although he has his own ideas about that.

“Call me Uncle Sage,” he told us, “because I feel a whole lot wiser than before.”

I’m sorry to say that Daphne didn’t make it. He still tears up when he talks about it. I really think they loved each other. But our uncle, who had been wallowing in his misfortune for so long after losing his farm up north, isn’t wallowing anymore. He’s found a second wind in life, selling, of all things, ÁguaViva. He’s even doing a commercial for them. ÁguaViva saved my life. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade.

I join my mom in the living room to watch the news. It’s a press conference. It seems every five minutes there’s another press conference.

“The governor of Arizona just resigned,” Mom tells me. No surprise there. Everyone who had a part in shutting off the flow of the Colorado River into California is facing criminal prosecution. Officials are being indicted on everything from criminal negligence to conspiracy to commit murder.

“And,” Mom says, “they finally found the good Samaritan who saved all those people in that nursing home.”

“There were lots of good Samaritans,” I point out, thinking of the Water Angel, and the pilot who dropped water on our fire, and that rabbi and the priest who both led thousands of people on a pilgrimage to the promised land of Big Bear Lake just before fires closed in behind them, blocking the way for others.

“Yes, well, there can never be too many good-deed-doers,” Mom says.

I glance at her to see that she’s taken the bandage off her forehead. Seven stitches. They don’t look as bad as I thought they would.

At the sound of running water, I glance into the kitchen. Garrett has come downstairs and is filling Kingston’s water bowl. He does this every day now – something he never did when Kingston was actually here. Now he sets it outside every morning with food. Some days he goes off alone, riding his bike in the hills, looking for our dog.

“He’ll come back,” Garrett says. “When he thinks it’s safe, he’ll come back.”

I want to believe that. I want to believe that maybe someone else found him and has given him a new home. Dad offered to get us a new dog. “A rescue,” he said. “Maybe a dog whose owner died in the Tap-Out, and needs a family like ours.”

But Garrett won’t have it. As if taking in a new dog is some sort of admission that Kingston’s gone for good.

After Garrett fills up the bowl, he turns off the water. But then turns it on again, watching the faucet, watching the water flow down the drain. Then he turns it off. Then turns it on. Then turns it off, then on, over and over. I should be mad that he’s wasting water – after all, we still have all the same restrictions as before. No watering lawns. No frivolous use. But I’m not mad at Garrett, because I know this is not about him intentionally wasting water. It’s that he’s mesmerized by it. Not by the water itself, but by the sheer power to be able to make it flow, and make it stop with the simple flick of the wrist.

He catches me watching him and looks away, a bit red-faced, caught in his private, guilty moment.

“Ready to go?” I ask him.

“I’ve thought about it,” Garrett says, “and I decided I’m not gonna go.”

“You sure?” I ask him. “You might regret it later.”

“Yeah, I might,” he admits, “but I’m sure.”

He leaves so he doesn’t have to talk about it anymore. I’m not going to pressure him. If he doesn’t want to come, he doesn’t have to. So it will just be me and Kelton.

And a few minutes later, Kelton arrives, barging in unannounced, which has become a fairly normal occurrence. He’s actually been crashing on the couch here some nights. He’s got his reasons, and they’re all good ones. I don’t mind him around.

“Turn on the TV!” Kelton insists.

“Already on,” I point out.

“You’ve gotta see this!” He grabs the remote and switches around until he lands on a different news station … and on the screen is a face I thought I’d never see again.

We’re looking at none other than Henry Not-Roycroft, being interviewed by a reporter. Henry, larger than life on my TV. I always thought “jaw dropping” was figurative – but my jaw actually does drop.

“Oh, look,” says my mom, “this is what I was talking about – that’s the good Samaritan.”

The caption reads Henry Groyne.

“Groyne? His last name is Groyne?”

Henry speaks proudly. “I just did what anyone would do.”

“Not everyone would run into a burning building with nothing but a towel over his head to rescue people,” says the reporter.

“That was in Tustin!” I yell at the TV. “He was nowhere near Tustin!”

“Shush!” Mom says. “I want to hear this.”

On screen Henry shrugs, like he hasn’t just taken credit for something he couldn’t possibly have done. “In this life, you see what must be accomplished, weigh your options, and then embrace the opportunity.”

“But why did you wait so long to come forward?”

“It’s not about me. It’s about the people I saved.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I shout.

“It gets worse,” says Kelton, who must have already seen this on another station.

Now the report cuts back to the studio, where the anchor smiles for the camera and says, “Henry is an eighth grader at Access Alternative Middle School, proving that you’re never too young to be a hero!”

“What? He’s a WHAT? He’s in eighth grade?”

“He does look a bit old for his age, though,” Mom says, cheerfully oblivious.

There isn’t even a word for how utterly speechless I feel. “He said he was driving since he was thirteen…”

“Yeah,” says Kelton, “which was, like, three months ago.”

My mom looks at us as if we just arrived from Mars. “What are you two talking about?”

And since neither of us wants to spiral down the rabbit hole of this particular madness, we excuse ourselves and go outside.

Kelton and I grumble and moan about it, trying to filter our whole experience with Henry through this new lens, and decide it’s not worth it. So we end up laughing about it, and choose to move on.

And pretty soon, Kelton will be moving on too, one way or another. There’s a big FOR SALE sign on Kelton’s lawn – a lawn that you can actually see now, since the security gate was rammed down during the not-so-neighborly neighbor attack.

“How are things?” I ask him. I know it’s a loaded question.

“Good,” Kelton says. “I’m breathing. That’s a thing. And it’s good.” There’s a silence that lingers between us, but it means something now. What, I’m not sure.

Kelton’s parents are splitting up. He says it was inevitable. He almost seems relieved. His mom already moved out and took an apartment a few miles away.

“My mom wants me to live with her,” Kelton tells me.

“Do you want to?”

“Well, it’s either that or go with my dad to live with his sister in Idaho.”

“The one with all the cats?”

“Yeah.” He looks off toward his house. I can’t imagine what it must be like staying there now. How could you cook in that kitchen with the memory of what happened there? How could you sit at that table? It makes sense that they’re selling – although I don’t know how much luck they’ll have. Too many homes have FOR SALE signs now.

“My dad got rid of all the guns,” Kelton tells me. “He didn’t sell them – he destroyed them. Every last one. Part of his way of mourning Brady, I guess. I don’t think he’ll touch one for the rest of his life.”

I think to my own brief ballistic history, right after those men attacked us in the woods – how I took Kelton’s pistol, and how I was fully prepared to use it. How I almost did use it to end our lives. I don’t even know what happened to the gun after that. I hope it was destroyed, too.

“Anyway, I’ll stay with my dad until he heads to Idaho,” Kelton tells me. “He kind of needs me more than my mom does right now. It might not look it, but my mom’s the strong one.”

I nod. “I get that.”

We sit down on my lawn, looking across the street at the Kiblers, who are “supervising” their kids as they play maim-the-sibling or some similar game in the street. Kelton and I will be leaving in about twenty minutes, when my dad gets back, because he’s driving us – but knowing him, he’ll be late, what with all the new business. Before the Tap-Out, he was struggling, but now the insurance biz has seen a fresh surge. Suddenly everyone wants disaster insurance. Go figure.

“We’re not making money off of people’s misfortunes,” my father is constantly reminding himself, and us. “We’re protecting people from future misfortunes.”

As we wait on my lawn – which is still brown, and will never be spray-painted green – Kelton turns to me and asks me a question.

“So, like, what are we?” he asks.

I shrug. “Survivors,” I tell him.

“No, I mean what are we to each other?”

“Oh, that.”

This feels like it should be an awkward conversation, and yet it’s not awkward at all – which makes me realize exactly what we are to each other.

“We’re old friends who’ve known each other for, like, a hundred years,” I tell him. “It’s just that ninety-five of them happened in one week.”

Kelton smiles. “I like that.”

But then his smile fades. His eyes seem to be looking far off, past the Kiblers’ feral children. Past our neighborhood entirely. His eyes become moist.

“I killed people, Alyssa…”

I’ve been waiting for him to say something about that. Waiting for two weeks. I’m glad he finally said it, so I can tell him what I’ve wanted to all this time. “You did what you had to do, and that’s all. We all did what we had to do, and that’s the end of it. Besides, the forest burned, Kelton. There’s nothing left, so no one’s ever going to know.”

“But I know.”

“So do I … and you know what? I forgive you.” Then I add, “I forgive you for that more than I forgive you for the thing with the drone.”

That makes him smile again. “Your priorities are way out of whack, Miss Morrow.”

I lean over sideways and bump his shoulder. He bumps me back. Then he looks at me for a moment, pondering. Considering.

“Three years from now,” he says, “when you break up with your first college boyfriend, you’ll call me and I’ll stay up all night talking you through it.”

“Possibly,” I admit. And then I say, “Seven years from now, when your first computer start-up company goes belly up, we’ll go out that night. I’ll make you laugh, and keep you from getting too drunk, and convince you to get to work on your second tech start-up.”

“Possibly,” he admits. “And twelve years from now, you’ll call to tell me that you want me to be the godfather to your first kid.”

“Possibly,” I concede. “And twenty years from now, we’ll all go on vacation together, and our spouses, or whatever, will get jealous that we’re spending too much time talking to each other, and they’ll run off together.”

“Possibly,” he concludes. “And thirty years from now, when you’re running for reelection, and I’ve made my third fortune, I’ll take you dancing, and it’ll be all over the tabloids.” And then he adds, “Of course, they’ll be holographic by then.”

I have to laugh. “Of course they will.”

He smiles at me. “And then maybe we can ask again, what we are to each other?”

I hold out my hand to shake. “It’s a date.”

But instead of shaking it, he takes my hand and kisses it, like someone who is actually charming. And I think, Yeah, he might get to charming one of these days.

“Wow,” he says. “I finally have a date with Alyssa Morrow. I can die happy.”

We both laugh, and it feels comfortable. It feels real. And it makes me feel a little sad that we might not get to dance together for thirty years.

Dad pulls up, amazingly, on time.

“You both ready to go?” he asks.

“Never been more ready,” I tell him.

You see, just yesterday when I got home from school, my mom looked at me strangely – which she’s been doing a lot of lately – but this time there was a clear reason. “I just got the oddest call,” Mom said. “There’s this girl at a burn unit way out at Foothill Hospital … and the weird thing is … she gave your name as her emergency contact. I think they might have the wrong Alyssa Morrow.”

I know for a fact that there are five Alyssa Morrows in California. I know for a fact that they found the right one. And it doesn’t surprise me that Jacqui kicked the fire’s ass.

Kelton opens the car door for me, but trips on the curb as he does – which is perfect. In fact, I’d have it no other way. We get in and set out on our familiar, unfamiliar street and head off into a world where fresh roots are already growing deep in the fertile ruins of what used to be.

Wasn’t it Jacqui who told us the human body is sixty percent water? Well, now I know what the rest is. The rest is dust, the rest is ash, it’s sorrow and it’s grief… But above all that, in spite of all that, binding us together … is hope. And joy. And a wellspring of all the things that still might be.