The Age of Miracles Read Online Free PDF Page B

accident.
    Finally, he went upstairs to sleep, and my mother went with him.
    I sat alone in the living room for a long time, watching television, while my parents murmured together through the closed door of their bedroom. I heard my mother ask a question. My father raised his voice: “What is that supposed to mean?”
    I turned the television down and strained to hear the rest.
    “Of course I was at work,” he said. “Where the hell else would I be?”
    We were living under a new gravity, too subtle for our minds to register, but our bodies were already subject to its sway. In the weeks that followed, as the days continued to expand, quarterbacks found that footballs didn’t fly as far as they used to; home-run hitters slipped into slumps. I would find it harder and harder to kick a soccer ball across a field. Pilots would have to retrain themselves to fly. Every falling thing fell faster to the ground.
    It seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There
is
such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

5
    Two days passed. More new minutes were flooding in with every hour. Now it was Monday. There was no new news.
    I’d been hoping that school would be canceled—all the kids were. Instead, school was simply delayed. A hasty plan had been devised to push back our start time by ninety minutes, roughly the amount by which we were running behind.
    We’d been asked by the government to carry on as usual. This was not true later, obviously, but for now our leaders stood before microphones, dressed in dark suits and red ties, American-flag pins glinting from navy blue lapels. Mostly, they talked economics: Go to work, spend money, leave your cash in the banks.
    “They’re definitely not telling us everything,” said Trevor Watkins at the bus stop that Monday morning. More than half the kids who usually waited there had stayed home or left town with their families.
    I missed Hanna like a phantom limb.
    “It’s just like Area 51,” said Trevor, chewing the frayed black straps of his backpack. “They never tell the public the truth.”
    Our lives were mild back then. We were girls in sandals and sundresses, boys in board shorts and surf shirts. We were growing up in a retiree’s dream—330 days of sunshine each year—and so we celebrated whenever it rained. Catastrophe, too, like bad weather, was provoking in all of us an uneasy excitement and verve.
    From the other side of the lot came the echo of a skateboard striking the curb. I knew who it was without looking, but I wanted to look: Seth Moreno—tall and quiet and always on his own, now stepping carefully off of his skateboard and into the dirt, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he moved. I had never spoken much to Seth Moreno, though I sat behind him in math. I had perfected a way of watching him that didn’t look like I was watching.
    “Trust me,” Trevor went on. He was skinny and friendless, and his enormous green backpack was so heavy that it forced him to hunch forward, like an old man, for balance. “The government knows a lot more than they’re saying.”
    “Shut up,” said Daryl. Daryl was the new kid, the bad kid, the kid who left fourth period every day to go to the nurse’s office to swallow a dose of Ritalin. He was the kid we all tried to avoid. “No one’s listening to you, Trevor.”
    The bus stop was the hard ground where our school days