H2O by Virginia Bergin Page B

hand.
    When I was small, when we first came here, when I first went out anywhere on my own with Simon (which wasn’t for a long time), he’d try to get me to hold his hand to cross the road. I wouldn’t do it. I’d fold my arms and march across the road alone. If you’d told me one day I’d cross the High Street in broad daylight holding his hand…I wouldn’t have believed you for a second.
    I held his hand so tight.
    There. That’s a thing I’ve said for my mom. And for Simon.
    But honestly—and this is the weird thing—it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The riot, I mean. Yes, it was like nothing you’d ever seen (well, certainly not in Dartbridge); there were people running around and smashing windows and stealing stuff and shouting at each other (plus alarms going off), but what you realized in about ten seconds is that although it’s really scary and about as far from anything normal you would ever expect to see—especially in the hippie capital of the entire universe—no one is paying any attention to you at all. Everyone is just doing their own thing; they couldn’t care less about you…unless you tried to take their TV or their tennis shoes or their bags of food or something, I bet. (So that was fine by me, because it wasn’t like anyone in the middle of a riot was going to see me holding “Daddy’s” hand and stop and say, “Ruby?! Oh my! What ARE you wearing?!”)
    Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably spent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies, everyone , had gone nuts. If it had been organized by the school, it would have been what they called a “group activity,” which meant you weren’t allowed to just stick with your friends, but you had to actually “participate” with the sorts of people you’d really rather die —I must stop saying that—than participate with.
    We cut back down, onto the hospital road, which was jammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.
    I guess we’d gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.
    You know how a supermarket parking lot normally is? Everyone circling around like pizza-eating vultures just to try to park one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn’t like that at all. Cars were parked all over—not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or honking and tooting to get out. Only dead cars, abandoned cars—and car alarms, going on and on.
    â€œCome on,” said Simon, dragging me through it.
    Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around, so that wasn’t unusual. You didn’t really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in—not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but the actual doors were gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.
    Do I even need to say that there was no one at the registers, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff, but lots of mad, crazy, what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a cart full of toilet paper, two women with a cart full of washing detergent, a kid lugging a basketful of ketchup and cake frosting.
    Sounds like crazy fun, huh?
    Simon and I, we wandered into all this, and it was obvious, right away, that we’d come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles, realizing how bad it was. Where the fruit and