The Last Time We Met

17

One day at the end of February I walked into my history class and Mr. Mendez stopped everyone at the door to squeeze hand sanitizer onto our palms before we could enter. "Before the bell rings, I'm going to give everyone a Clorox wipe, and you're going to wipe down your desks," he told us.

He wasn't the only teacher freaked out by the news reports of California residents contracting the coronavirus. My English teacher was wearing a medical face mask. One girl had a coughing fit in the middle of Spanish class and after everyone around her recoiled, Senora Chapman told her sharply to get down to the nurse's office and call for a ride home. Anytime anyone coughed, it became a kind of joke: "It's not corona! I just swallowed the wrong way!" Signs explaining to everyone how to correctly wash their hands appeared on every bathroom door.

On the fifth of March, I got home from school to find Mom already there, sitting at the kitchen bar hunched over her laptop.

"What's going on?" I asked her, kicking off my shoes.

Her eyes beneath her messy hair looked frazzled. "Here, help me. I've got to figure out this Zoom thing so I can work from home."

"Zoom? What's Zoom? And why are you working from home?" When I bent over her shoulder, I saw a video screen of both of our faces. "Wait, is this because of corona?"

Mom heaved a sigh and sat up, stretching her back. "Yes. I mean, they told us that if we can work from home, we should. But I have to figure out this stupid thing first. It's going to be all virtual meetings. Oh, and I got a notice from your school."

"What did it say?" The school hadn't had any special announcements that morning. Just the usual, plus the new usual of a reminder to wash our hands and not come to school if we were sick.

Mom allowed me to pull the laptop toward me, and I found the settings to adjust the video and sound.

"Well, there's a confirmed case in our county, so they sent out this thing to tell us all the ways they're cleaning everything now, which is ridiculous, because if they'd been cleaning correctly before then this whole pandemic thing wouldn't be happening."

"That seems a bit extreme."

"They're covering their asses, that's what this is. Plus to warn us that they might have to close the schools down."

My hands paused on the keyboard. "You really think they'll shut down the whole school?"

"The entire school system. All the school systems in the entire state." Mom reached out and picked up a glass of wine I hadn't noticed before, and took a gulp. "I mean, if my office of twenty people is going to close down, they'll definitely need to close the schools. Germ factories."

I heard the thump of Cedric opening our front door, then double thumps as he kicked off his sneakers. He padded into the kitchen in his socks.

"Enjoy this time," Mom waggled her wine glass at him. "Things are getting crazy."

"What's getting crazy?" Cedric asked.

"The school sent home a notice that they might shut down," I told him.

"They're definitely gonna shut down," Cedric said. "My mom says the hospital's been crazy. They're trying to prepare for a pandemic and they have nothing. Somebody stole a box of masks from the storeroom. That's like, a thousand masks or something. And they've been going through a ton every day. And..."

Cedric trailed off, and I glanced up to see that he was looking at my mom. So I looked at Mom, and noticed that she had frozen. "What is it?" I asked her, bumping her elbow a little.