H2O by Virginia Bergin

in killer-rain die. I just meant…whatever it was I used to mean when I said stuff like that. He slapped the hat on my head, then cruelly tightened the hood of the raincoat.
    I was outraged by the horror and shame of it, but I couldn’t say anything, could I? Yes I could! I loosened the hood from my mouth and scabby chin.
    â€œWell, what are we going to do about our hands?” I said.
    I only said that to point out the pointlessness of it all, not so he’d go and get dishwashing gloves for us both.
    He dangled them in front of me.
    â€œIf you’d rather not,” he said, “we can both stay home and die of thirst.”
    I did feel that was somewhat unnecessarily brutal, but I put the awful gloves on and retightened the hood of the raincoat. The less you could see of my face, the less likely it’d be that someone would recognize me—with any luck. Simon handed me Mom’s massive umbrella.
    â€œI’m not putting it up,” I mumbled through the raincoat.
    â€œRight,” said Simon. “But if I say you need to, you do it.”
    â€œâ€™K,” I mumbled.
    We marched back out the gate, and he opened the trunk of the car and handed me the shopping bags; you know, those big “green” long-lasting ones people use—“because they fit so well in the back of a car,” Ronnie said, meaning there was nothing eco about them.
    â€œSo you do what I say, when I say, young lady.”
    â€œYes,” I said. It came out all loud and wobbly, so it sounded about a micro-millimeter off a yee-haa yes…but, truth is, I was scared.
    It was baking hot, and I was sweating by the time we’d walked about three steps. When we got to the alleyway that led from right by our house into town, I was sweating even more—and I got more scared.
    What you might need to know at this point is that Dartbridge is basically the hippie capital of the universe. It is drowning in tie-dye and organic vegetables. People walk barefoot through the streets not because they are poor, but because they want a closer connection to the Earth (despite the fact that there’s a ton of asphalt on top of it). Even the graffiti, which looks kind of cool, is hippie; this squiggly symbol for peace gets spray-painted everywhere. Dartbridge, Ronnie said, was “a place so laid-back it was practically comatose.”
    Below the alarms and the sirens and the car horns, you could hear…not just shouts and screams, but the sound of things—glass—smashing.
    â€œIs it a riot?” I asked.
    I’d seen stuff like that on TV before. It happened in other countries mainly, but also in the UK when people were annoyed about stuff the government was doing—which Ronnie said would happen a lot more often if people knew what was really going on.
    â€œA riot in Dartbridge? I don’t think so,” said Simon. “People are just panicking a little, I guess.”
    We didn’t go the way we’d usually go, straight into town via the library parking lot. Simon went to the right, along the back road, South Street. Fine by me, because I didn’t want to go anywhere near The George. Not so fine was…there was a guy slumped up against a wall. He looked as if he’d just fallen asleep there, like a drunk guy might, snoozing in the sun.
    â€œDon’t look,” said Simon, but I did.
    He wasn’t snoozing. His face was all bloody, and his eyes were gone, holes where they should have been. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what birds do, peck out the pieces that are easiest to get their beaks into. Nice.
    In all my life, up until the day before, I’d never seen a dead person. Not counting the parking-lot people—which I didn’t like to do, because I hadn’t actually seen them die, had I? Like Caspar, it had to be possible that they’d be OK—I’d now seen four dead bodies. Four .
    Ha ha ha. That’s pretty funny, huh? Do