Radiation Children

8

"I was losing the race anyway," he said with a shrug, dodging Heidi's desperate grab for her towel. "What's up?" 

"See that girl over there?" I gestured to the girl in the black tankini. "Do you know her?" 

"Alyssa? I've seen her around school."

"Do you like her?" Heidi asked. 

"What, like as a friend?" James put his hands on his hips and turned to stare at Alyssa. I snorted; he was about as subtle as Alyssa. She saluted him when she caught him looking. He waved back and said, "She's got a nice smile." 

"I think she's into you," I told him. I reached down into my backpack and pulled out a bottle of sunblock. "You should invite her to come to Rookie's with us. Tell her to bring her friend, too, if she wants." 

James smiled. His smiles were bright and sweet, making his freckled, slightly-burned nose crinkle upwards and his eyes squint tight. Those smiles were not the half-smirks of guys who knew how to talk smooth or the tiny grins girls who knew the language of flirtation offered, but rather the smiles of a kid in a candy store: excited, hopeful, silly. 

James-smiles were my favorite smiles.

"Do you think she'd want to hear my theory on aliens abducting government officials in the Bermuda Triangle?" 

Heidi nearly choked on the swig of water she'd just taken. I tossed him the bottle of sunblock and said, "Only one way to find out." 

He dropped his now-soaking towel on Heidi's belly, who screeched, "Don't you dare give me your pool germs!" after him as he jogged to meet Alyssa on the poolside. 

I didn't realize it then, but that was safe. I didn't realize it then, with Luis Fonsi's Despacito blaring on the stereo over the pool, with the kids yelling "wall ball!" behind us as the tennis balls rattled the fence, with the little kids splashing each other in the shallow end, with Heidi muttering "That idiot is gonna blow it if he doesn't shut up about aliens," with Markus coming up to me asking whether or not I had brought any potato chips in my bag because I was the responsible one who brought all the snacks, with the college girls sunning themselves dark, with plans to go to Rookie's and the smell of chlorine and nylon swimsuits...but all that was the very definition of safety. No one was scared of Allison Corporalki's bioterrorist group or nukes or lost families or cannibals or little sisters who get shot in the shoulder in dilapidated Walmarts. 

We were only scared of asking out the people we liked, scared of getting sunburned, scared of starting junior year. Scared and excited and wild-happy. 

We were safe and we all took it for granted. 

* * * 

I staggered out of Walmart with Lucia bleeding in my arms. She wasn't crying or screaming, just gulping down the sulfur-thick air, wide eyes glazed over with shock. Her lips trembled.

I didn't make it very far. 

Cannibals stumbled out behind me and a car flipped upside down mere yards from what used to be the entrance to Walmart was the closest thing I could find to a hiding spot. My knees were close to giving out and I had gone dizzy and I needed a plan, an idea, something, anything. 

Everything happened in snapshots: Lucia bleeding on the pockmarked asphalt, leaned up against the car, trembling. Me peeling off my sweaty shirt and pressing it into the wound behind her shoulder because that was what I had seen in movies and TV shows and those were all I had to go on. Humanoid creatures banging on cars around us, searching, smelling like decay, pressing close. A very gray sky, a hot breeze, the stench dried blood and sweet decay of corpses from the parking lot, the taste of tears in my mouth.