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school in Reddington with an elementary school from Barton. Like everything else in those first hours, the grown-ups had to make decisions on the fly about us, and sometimes they made good decisions and sometimes they just fuckedup. But it was fine. I think the older kids kind of liked having all of those little kids around. I saw a ninth grader from the Academy meeting up with his younger sister and brother, who went to Barton Elementary School. It was really sweet.

    I found a bench against a window and tried calling the main line for the power plant, but I got nothing but busy signals. I tried my mom and dad, but I only got their voice mail recordings. Finally I stopped leaving them messages. Outside the dining hall it continued to rain and some of the branches on the pine trees moved up and down in the wind like Oriental fans. Ethan sat with me for a few minutes, but then my friend Lisa Curran found me. Lisa was one of the few girls whose families would have been there for me if things hadn’t started falling apart for us all so fucking fast. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I had Lisa. She wanted to become a country music singer and was actually a pretty good songwriter. She had a beautiful voice. Her dad was an airline pilot, and when he was gone for three and four days at a time, I used to hang out at her house a lot. Actually, I would hang out with her and her mom, who was a librarian. She was a friend, too, I guess. Their house, like my family’s, is now in the middle of the blackest black in the Exclusion Zone. They probably won’t ever see it again. Or, if they do, it won’t be for a very long time, and when they go they’ll be wearing those hazmat suits you can still see people wearing sometimes at the edge of the zone when there’s a rainstorm. They stand out there with their Geiger counters measuring how radioactive the rain is.
    Anyway, Lisa sat down next to me and so Ethan figured he could take a breather from watching out for the zombie whose parents worked at Cape Abenaki.
    “It’s probably not that bad,” Lisa said.
    I looked at her. “And you think that … why?”
    She shrugged, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. “They’re just taking precautions.”
    “Any minute now, the reactors are going to start melting down,” I said. “Or, for all we know, they already are.” I realized after I spoke—actually verbalizing what most likely was happening—that I was on the verge of seriously losing it, of seriously falling apart. It would only take a little push to move me from catatonic to hysterical. And, of course, that push was coming.
    “But probably no one’s going to die,” she murmured. Then she reminded me of something Mr. Brodard, our chemistry teacher, had talked about the year before in the environmental sciences part of our chemistry class. While people died all the time working in coal mines, it was rare for them to get killed at nuclear power plants. There had been Chernobyl, of course. But he insisted that no one had died at Fukushima Daiichi and no one had died at Three Mile Island.
    But sometimes you just know things. You really do. I don’t know if it’s instinct or intuition or we’re just connected in ways that science can’t explain. But I knew in my heart that Lisa was wrong. This time, up at Cape Abenaki, people were going to die.

    I find myself making connections between words that are usually completely ridiculous—the connections, that is. I do this a lot with Emily Dickinson’s poems.
    I can wade grief
,
    Whole pools of it,—
    You’d think it would be grief that would be the link for me or “grief” would be the word I would fixate on. Nope. That would be way too normal. It’s “pools.” I associate it with the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants. That’s where you have serious radioactivity.And then I imagine the pools of water that must have been flooding Cape Abenaki, first in the hours before the explosion and then after. In the beginning, the