Eighth-grade world studies:
Write three things you learned about the Aztecs.
In the library I learned that every 52 years Aztec priests had to stop the world from ending. They put out every torch in town and locked all the pregnant women in stone grainerys so their babies didn’t turn into demons and kept all the kids awake so they wouldn’t turn into mice. Then they took a victim (had to be a victim with zero sins) to the top of a sacred mountain called Thorn Tree Place and when certain stars (one book, NonFiction F1219.73, guessed maybe Vega, fifth brightest in the sky) passed overhead, one priest split open the prisoner’s chest and ripped out her hot wet heart while another started a fire with a drill where her heart used to be. Then they carried the burning heart fire down to the city in a bowl and lit torches with it and people wanted to burn themselves with the torches because to get burnt by the heart fire was lucky. Soon thousands of torches were lit with that one fire and the city glowed again and the world was saved for another 52 years.
Ninth-grade U.S. history:
Not to hurt feelings but that chapter you assigned? That was all “Columbus is great,” “The Indians sure loved Thanksgiving,” “Let’s brainwash everyone.” I found way better stuff at the library, for example did you know before leaving England to pick up the tobacco the slaves grew, the Englishers filled their empty ships with mud so they didn’t tip in storms? When they got to the New World (which was not new or called America, the America name came from a pickle seller guy who got famous because he lied about doing sex with natives) the Englishers dumped their mud on shore to make room for the tobacco. Guess what was in that mud? Earthworms. But earthworms had been extinct in America since the ice ages, like 10,000 years at least, so the English worms went EVERYwhere and changed the soils and the Englishers also brought other things this place had NEVER known such as: silkworms pigs dandelions grapevines goats rats measles pox and the belief that all animals and plants were put here for humans to kill and eat. There weren’t honeybees in so-called America either, so the new bees had no competiters and spread fast. One book said when families in the native kingdoms saw honeybees they cried because they knew dying wasn’t far behind.
Tenth-grade English:
You said write something “fun” we did over summer to get our “grammer mussels flexing” again, so ok, Mrs Tweedy, this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest thickest ice in the arctic. When we have melted all the ice in Greenland, just the ice in Greenland, not the north pole, not Alaska, just Greenland, Mrs Tweedy, know what happens? The oceans rise 23 feet. That drowns Miami, New York, London, and Shanghai, that’s like hop on the boat with your grandkids, Mrs Tweedy, and you’re like, do you want some snacks, and they’re like, Grandma, look underwater, there’s the statute of liberty, there’s Big Ben, there’s the dead people. Is that fun, are my grammer mussels flexing?
A bumper sticker on Mrs. Tweedy’s desk says, The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense. Her hair looks soft enough to sleep on. Seymour is expecting a reprimand; instead she says that the Environmental Awareness Club at Lakeport High went defunct a couple of years ago and how would Seymour feel about reviving it?
Out the windows, September light bends over the football field. At fifteen he’s old enough to understand that it’s not only his state of fatherlessness or his thrift store jeans or that he has to swallow sixty milligrams of buspirone every morning to keep the roar at bay: his differences run deeper. Other tenth-grade boys hunt elk or shoplift Red Bulls from Jacksons or smoke weed at the ski hill or cooperate in online battle squads. Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost = more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun’s energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he’s the only one looking.
Some nights, Eden’s Gate glowing beyond his bedroom curtain, he can almost hear dozens of colossal feedback loops churning all over the planet, rasping and grinding like great invisible millwheels in the sky.
Mrs. Tweedy taps the eraser of her pencil against her desk. “Hello? Earth to Seymour?”
He draws a tsunami rearing over a city. Stick-people run from doorways, throw themselves from windows. He prints ENVIRO-AWARENESS CLUB, TUESDAY, BREAK, ROOM 114 across the top and TOO LATE TO WAKE UP, ASSHOLES? across the bottom and Mrs. Tweedy tells him to erase ASSHOLES before she’ll make copies on the faculty copier.
The following Tuesday, eight kids show up. Seymour stands in front of the desks and reads from a crumpled sheet of notebook paper. “Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice. We’ve already killed most of the animals, and heated up the oceans, and brought carbon levels in the atmosphere to the highest point in eight hundred thousand years. Even if we stopped everything right now, like we all die today at lunch—no more cars, no more militaries, no more burgers—it’ll keep getting hotter for centuries. By the time we’re twenty-five? The amount of carbon in the air will have doubled again, which means hotter fires, bigger storms, worse floods. Corn, for example, won’t grow as well ten years from now. Ninety-five percent of what cows and chickens eat is guess what? Corn. So meat will be more expensive. Also when there’s more carbon in the air? Humans can’t think as clearly. So when we’re twenty-five, there will be way more hungry, scared, confused people stuck in traffic fleeing flooded or burning cities. Do you think we’re gonna sit in our cars solving climate problems then? Or are we gonna fist-fight and rape and eat each other?”
A junior girl says, “Did you just say rape and eat each other?”
A senior boy holds up a sheet of paper that says See-More Stool-Guy. Ha ha hilarity everywhere.
From the back Mrs. Tweedy says, “Those are some alarming predictions, Seymour, but maybe we could discuss a few steps we could take toward living more sustainably? Some actionable items within reach of a high school club?”
A sophomore named Janet wonders if they couldn’t ban plastic straws from the cafeteria and also give away reusable water bottles with the Lakeport Lion on them? They could also put, like, better posters over the recycling bins? Janet has frog patches sewn on her jean jacket and shiny black raven eyes and the ghost of a mustache on her upper lip and Seymour stands in front of the blackboard with his scrunched-up paper and the bell rings and Mrs. Tweedy says, “Next Tuesday, everybody, we’ll brainstorm more ideas,” and Seymour heads to biology.
He’s walking home from school later that day when a green Audi pulls up beside him and Janet rolls down the window. Her braces are pink and her eyes are a mix of blue and black and she has been to Seattle, Sacramento, and Park City, Utah, which was wild, they went river rafting and rock climbing and saw a porcupine climb a tree, has Seymour ever seen a porcupine?
She offers to drive him home. Thirty-three units are in Eden’s Gate now, lining both sides of Arcady Lane, zigzagging up the hillside behind the double-wide. Mostly people from Boise, Portland, and eastern Oregon use them as vacation homes: they park boat trailers in the cul-de-sacs and drive twenty-thousand-dollar UTVs to town and hang college football flags from their balconies and on weekend nights they stand around backyard firepits laughing and urinating into the huckleberries while their kids shoot Roman candles into the stars.
“Wow,” says Janet, “you have a lot of weeds in your yard.”
“The neighbors complain about it.”
“I like it,” says Janet. “Natural.”
They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour’s, talking about Key Club, summer camp, how she wants to go to college somewhere far from her parents but not too far, you know—as though her future were a pre-plotted exponential curve arcing ever higher—and a white-haired retiree who lives in the town house next door rolls his fifty-gallon trash bin to the end of his driveway and looks at them and Janet raises a hand in greeting and the man goes inside.
“He hates us. Everyone hopes my mom will sell so they can put in new houses.”
“Seemed nice enough to me,” says Janet, and responds to a warble from her smartphone.
Seymour looks at his shoes. “Did you know that every day internet data storage emits as much carbon as all the airplanes in the world combined?”
“You’re weird,” she says, but smiles when she says it. In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight and Janet clutches his arm and takes a video as it sashays between the pools of streetlight. It moves between the half-dozen wheeled trash carts standing at the ends of the Eden’s Gate driveways, sniffing sniffing. Eventually it finds a can it likes, raises one paw, and swats it to the ground. Carefully, with a single claw, the bear drags a plump white bag out of the can’s mouth and scatters its contents across the asphalt.