We stay in the stairwell together, silently, for a while, eventually sitting down and watching the floodwater drop inch by inch.
After maybe an hour of silence, Andrew sits bolt upright and gasps.
I’m not sure if I can handle more bad news, but I ask anyway. “What is it?”
He looks into my eyes—his are still red and puffy. “It’s Saturday.” I don’t understand what he means until he says the next part, and it feels like my chest is a pit.
“Happy birthday.”
Andrew
IT TAKES A DAY AND A HALFfor the flooding to fully recede. By that time the high school and its inhabitants have grown ripe in the November heat. Thanks for being your hot, humid self, Florida.
Daphne says the Keys rarely get hit by storms like this, but when it does happen, it’s particularly destructive. She’s right. The devastation outside the school is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The roads are cracked, large chunks sunken or pulled away entirely. Trees are bare or broken, and the bushes and shrubs are crushed beneath debris. Some buildings still stand, but many look like the half of the school that collapsed.
There’s no real order to the day anymore because the portion of the Committee that’s here is still trying to contact the other Keys. The last we heard, the folks on Key Largo are trying to regroup with their supplies, but there hasn’t been any response from the group that sheltered at the naval base yet.
It’s all overwhelming. There’s so much to do but no one seems to know where to start. I know whereIneed to start, though. I just want to get clean. It’s the only thing I feel like I can control right now.
I ask Daphne and Kelly if they’ll be okay watching the seven remaining kids for a bit and they tell me to go ahead. I find Jamie and Cara talking near the flooded school buses in the school’s parking lot.
“I’m going to wash up,” I tell Jamie. “Do you want to come with me?”
He looks surprised that I’d even ask, which, yeah, fine. I get it. But of course I’d ask him. If nothing else, the hurricane and brush with death put a pin in our argument for a bit.
“Yeah.” He turns to Cara as if he’s about to ask if she wants to come, too, but I highly doubt the showers set up by the ocean are still standing, and I doubt even more that Cara wants to see either of us in the buff on the beach—title of my Jimmy Buffett cover album.
Thankfully before he says anything she tells us to go ahead.
“What were you two gossiping about?” I ask, trying to keep my tone playful. I need some kind of normalcy again even if that means ignoring whatever issues Jamie and I have.
“The boat.”
Or, yeah, sure, let’s talk about what drove a wedge between us in the first place.
“She talked with Hickey and Daria, and they’re going to check the damage later today.”
“You can go with them if you want.” Not that I need to give him permission. I genuinely don’t know why I said that. Probably because I didn’t want to say,Guess we didn’t need to have that argument about you quitting the boat after all.Especially because that would be reductive. It’s very clear our issues are deeper than him thinking for a moment that he didn’t want to be on the boat without me.
“I don’t know.” He nods at the row of houses to our left. They’reall crushed against each other and half-buried in sand and silt. Also, I’m fairly certain they used to be on our right. “If the boat’s still there, I doubt it’s seaworthy.”
I groan.
“What?” he asks.
I can’t hold it in anymore. “I hate this entire conversation,” I say, stopping in the middle of the road. “I hate every single thing about this boring fucking conversation because we almost died and all I want is some fraction of a millisecond of normalcy but I can’t be normal around you because we just wasted the last two weeks and some odd days bickering—”
He smirks at me. “We?”
“Don’t interrupt with your salient points, I’m on a roll here. We spent weeks bickering and arguing about what we want when all I want is you and me and being normal.”
Jamie takes a step toward me, putting his hands on my arms. “That’s all I want, too.”
“Then I’m calling a truce. An armistice. I don’t want to talk about Henri, or the boat, or this place, or anything else. Just for today. Okay? I want to pretend...”
My voice trails off because I legit almost saidpretend we’re back in the cabin, just the two of us. And that would violate the cease-fire I just declared. But my desire for the quietness of the cabin is only due to the chaos of our life right now. I forgot what that chaos felt like. It was like that on the road—every day a terrifying and unknown future. But we were together, and we could make the decisions for ourselves.
“Pretend things are normal?” Jamie helps.
