100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith Page B

Mulholland’s St. Francis Dam. Like most people who lived in the canyon, I had driven past plenty of times but never actually visited the site of the disaster.
    And I had never gone anywhere alone with anyone who was a teenager and was also not Cade Hernandez.
    My atoms were all riled up, and especially sticky that day.
    At a bend in the snaking canyon road, just past the spot where San Francisquito Creek makes a ten-foot waterfall during rainy seasons, the city of Los Angeles built an impressive Art Deco–style power-generating plant.
    It was creatively named Power Plant No. 1.
    As a practice, I prefer to avoid abbreviations and to write out numbers, as opposed to using numerals. It’s one of my quirks, like calculating distances rather than time. But the plant was actually named as I have written—with the abbreviation and the numeral as well—like Sputnik 2 .
    Power Plant No. 1 was completely wiped out by a twelve-billion-gallon wall of water in 1928. Starting at the location of the dam, and continuing all the way along the Santa Clara River bed toward the Pacific Ocean, perhaps as many as one hundred electric-company employees lost their lives.
    The power plant was easily replaced, although nobody knows for certain how many irreplaceable people had been swallowed up in William Mulholland’s churning liquid knackery.
    In 1928 a group of thirty or so Native American Indians had been living on one of the large ranches below the St. Francis Dam.One month before the disaster, a medicine man hunting deer in the canyon claimed to have received a vision of the catastrophe that would befall the dam. The medicine man warned the other Indians to leave the area. The Indians left the area the day before the collapse of the dam.
    Imagine that.
    Ten years ago, during one of the wettest winters on record, a large portion of the canyon road was washed away by the flooding of the San Francisquito Creek. The ruined highway shut down for more than a year—over half a billion miles. When a new roadway was finally opened, a stretch of the old ruined blacktop next to the rebuilt Power Plant No. 1 became a sort of parking area for the very few people who, knowing anything at all about William Mulholland’s historic failure, traveled up here to see firsthand what was left of the St. Francis Dam.
    Look: Even right here in Southern California, most people had never heard of the St. Francis Dam. The majority of Southern Californians simply assumed William Mulholland must have been someone magnificent because he had such a nice road, which meandered through the wealthiest communities in Los Angeles, named for him.
    People probably would have remembered the St. Francis Dam better if its collapsing failure had caused the cancelation of an Academy Awards presentation, as opposed to just killing about five hundred innocent victims.
    Julia Bishop parked her Mustang off the highway, along the chain-link fence that surrounded Power Plant No. 1.
    â€œAre you okay?” she said. “You’ve been really quiet all day.”
    â€œUm.”
    â€œYou’re not—you know—feeling weird , are you?”
    â€œI’m okay.”

    Usually, whenever someone asked me if I felt like I was going to have a seizure, which I could tell was Julia’s underlying question, it would make me angry. But not with Julia. She could ask me anything at all and I would tell her the truth.
    And the truth was that I was nervous about being alone with Julia Bishop.
    Up to that point, Julia and I had spent time together at each other’s houses, but we’d never technically been on a date . In fact, the first catastrophic time we had been truly alone together, I was either lying facedown in a puddle of urine, blanked out on the floor of my living room, or standing on my upstairs landing, naked and wrapped in a bath towel with the pattern of a sea-foam green nautilus shell coiled directly in front of my penis.
    No wonder I