H2O (3 page)

We passed Zak's room on the way, where he and Ronnie were bickering for control of the computer. (“Why's it so slow?! Just click there,” Zak was saying, trying to grab hold of the mouse. “Just click on it!”)

In the kitchen, the radio people had moved on to discussing plants for dry, shady borders—which is a serious problem, apparently, and was not nearly as funny as the earlier part of the broadcast. Barnaby looked as if he was in a trance, staring out the kitchen window at… OK, so now the party had been totally spoiled; it was raining. None of us had noticed. Why would we? We'd been too busy laughing our heads off.

“I think you all need to sober up,” said Sarah, handing out glass after glass of water. “Leonie, can you please put the kettle on?”

“YesSarahYes,” Lee slurred, glugging her water.

Barnaby grabbed his cell phone and started jabbing at it, trying different numbers.

“
.
.
,” he said, having trouble getting through.

Then
Gardeners' Question Time
stopped. It just stopped.

Then
it
started.

“This is an emergency public service broadcast…”

“The rain—” That's all I remember hearing to begin with. “It's in the rain,” and everyone staring at the radio as if it were a TV. That's how hard we all stared at it—everyone except Barnaby, who dropped his cell and went out to try the phone in the hall.

Lee shoved the kettle on the stove and came and held my hand, the one that wasn't gripping Caspar's.

“Ru,” whispered Lee. “Do you think we're gonna die or something?”

“No!” I said.

Of
course
no one was gonna die!

My mom was out at the neighbors' barbecue.

It's in the
rain.

I felt as if I was the last person to get what was going on. I stood in that kitchen, shivering—I leaned into Caspar's body, but even that felt cold—and finally I sort of started to get it. See, for days there'd been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic—outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some new kind of disease thing, deadly, but, well, it wasn't here, was it? Not like the bird-flu thing when Simon (who was probably more worried about the birds) had gotten all worked up. So had a lot of people. (OK, so had I; it gave me nightmares.) But this? It was so…
remote
—that's the word—that we never paid any attention to it. Ronnie had tried to tell us about it, I remember that, and we had all rolled our eyes and told him to shut up, because it just seemed like another thing for Ronnie to blabber on about.

“The rain,” they kept saying on the radio. “It's in the rain.”

“I told you so,” said Ronnie, stomping down the stairs into the kitchen.

He had. He had said, “There's something in the rain.” And we'd all gone, “Yeah right! Shut up, Ronnie!” because we knew just what kind of website he'd have read that on—probably the same one that claimed the Pope had been replaced by an alien (that's why you never see his legs; they're green and spindly)—and Ronnie had gone, “No! There is! There's something
in
the rain. Look!” and tried to show us this eyewitness video thing on the Internet, but it had been taken down, which Ronnie said proved it was true.

“Shut up, Ronnie,” someone said.

Lee stared at me. “Ru,” she said. “I really am scared.”

She started crying. Other girls were too. I hugged her. I hugged my lovely best friend.

It's in the
rain
.

Saskia swept downstairs wearing one of Barnaby's shirts like a mini-dress. For a moment, she stared at the radio like we'd done. Sarah tried to hand her a glass of water, but Saskia shook her head.

“I wanna go home,” she announced.

She's such a…not a drama queen, but a… She's not even a spoiled brat. I suppose the best way to describe it is Saskia always finds a way to get what she wants. It's not even because half the boys in school drool over her… OK, ALL the boys in school (because they like her or want to be like her), pretty much all the teachers (because she's cunningly polite to them and makes a showy effort to understand whatever it is they're talking about), and a seriously shocking number of the girls (because they also like her or want to be like her) drool over Saskia, and that should be enough to explain why Saskia always gets her way, but it's not. It's something weirder and darker. Seriously, she's like a hypnotist or something, sending out invisible mind rays that zap her victims into doing whatever she wants. But not tonight, Sask! Seemed like no one else but me was even listening to her anyway because everyone was staring out the windows at the rain.

It just looked like rain normally looks. You know, drippy.

You could hear Barnaby on the phone in the hall, dialing, slamming the handset down, and redialing. He wasn't calling on a god anymore; he was just plain swearing his head off.

“I said I wanna go home,” Saskia re-announced.

“Whatever,” someone said.

She stormed into the hall to try to get the phone from Barnaby, and Zak bounded down the stairs, Molly drifting down after him, looking sick as a dog.

“The Internet's down!” Zak said. “Like the WHOLE of the Web just crashed.”

“Told you so,” murmured Ronnie.

“It's probably just a local thing,” said Sarah.

Ronnie shook his head in that way that he did to look like he knew stuff no one else did. Molly heaved again, and Sarah looked at her in panic.

“It's the punch, Mom. She just had too much punch,” said Zak.

People kind of nodded sheepishly, same way you would if someone else's parents had caught us.

“Barnaby,” Sarah called, rummaging in a cupboard, “do we have any coffee?”

Coffee. Even then, even at that moment, I thought that was kind of random. Like that would solve everything. Barnaby wandered in from the hall. He looked…grim. That'd be the word.
Grim
.

“I can't get through,” he said. “To
anyone
,” he added, looking straight at Sarah like she'd know who that
anyone
was.

You could hear Saskia back out in the hall; she had the phone to herself then, and was dialing and redialing and swearing her head off too.

“DO. WE. HAVE. ANY. COFFEE?” Sarah asked Barnaby.

That seemed to sort of snap him out of it—and a lot of other people too. Girls who'd been crying (because girls are allowed to under extreme circumstances) stopped; boys who'd looked like they were going to cry got a grip. For a moment, it was just all so normal. A bunch of late-night people getting late-night snacks and drinks. Barnaby found some ancient coffee beans in the freezer and started pulverizing them in an electric grinder. Zak sawed into a loaf of their heavy-duty homemade bread. He handed the slices to Sarah, who put them into a wire thing to toast them on the top of the stove. I got mugs out; Leonie got teaspoons; other people got other stuff, all the stuff you need: teapot, sugar, knives, jams, plates, butter, milk.

I saw Caspar edging away from us all. I saw Caspar staring mournfully out the kitchen window.

I went to him.

“It's OK,” I whispered, hoping the darkness by the kitchen door would hide the hideous mess my face was in so we could share a romantic moment.

“No it's not,” he said. “That's my MP3 player out there.”

He pointed at his jeans, out on the grass, getting rained on.

“
this,” he whispered.

“Caspar!”

I was so stupid. I whispered it, so no one noticed.

“Chill, Rubybaby,” he whispered back and kissed me.

I don't know whether that kiss was meant to shut me up, but it did. Even with all the freaky horribleness of it all, I still had the hots for him, and I still couldn't believe that we'd actually kissed—and in front of everyone, which basically meant that as far as the glass mountain of being cool was concerned, I had now developed spider-sucker climbing powers and had effortlessly scaled to the top. Best not to blow it now by blurting, “Ooo! Caspar! No! Zak's dad said we really shouldn't!” at the top of my voice.

He unlocked the door. He grabbed a towel. He held it over his head. He dashed out. I saw him do that. I saw him go out, barefoot in the rain in Barnaby's kaftan. He dashed back in again. Slipped the lock back shut. Dumped the towel.

No one else had noticed. And me? I dunno what I thought was going to happen, like he'd just go up in a puff of green smoke or something. He didn't. He rummaged in his jeans, pulled out his phone and his MP3, wiped them on his kaftan, and waved them at me, grinning.

I felt like an idiot.

“Cool!” I whispered. I didn't know what else to say or do, so I gave him this quick, casual peck on the lips and went back to the snack making, so I'd look like
I
was cool and hadn't even thought about angst-ing about anything. Tea! I had to make tea! I had to make a whole lot of tea right now! But the tea was made! OK! I had to casually butter toast …That was good, that was better…casually buttering toast.

Barnaby switched the coffee grinder off. It made a racket, that thing. That was fine, because it meant you couldn't hear the radio. It was also why no one had heard Caspar.

He was sort of groaning, but not like a Molly pukey groan. It was some other kind of groan. He stepped out of the darkness by the kitchen door.

“
,” he said, scratching at his head, at his face.