Through the pain and the dust and the dirt, a speck of a promise slips through.
“Charlie! My phone!”
“Get it!”
I hear the hope in his voice and suddenly wish I’d kept the revelation to myself. Because okay, fine, I have a phone, but, “It’s in my back pocket and I can’t move my arms. Where’s yours?”
“Hell if I know. We need yours. Okay?”
“Okay.” I coax my left arm off my face, but the space above me is tight, pushing down. Boxing me in. My arm, just below my elbow, scrapes against a sharp slice of something jutting out from overhead. Glass, I think. From the window. A jagged spike rips through the sleeve of my sweatshirt and into my flesh like the tip of a knife cutting through birthday cake. Up and down my forearm the shock goes, like it’s cut clean through my skin and tissue and gone straight to the bone. The pain sears through me and I cry out.
“What is it? What happened?”
I grit my teeth, biting down to get through the burning pain. My vision fades for a split second, making everything too bright, like a camera flash. My stomach rolls with nausea. Then just as quickly, I’m back in the dark and panting again. I can’t twist my body enough to see the damage, but I can feel the blood as it spills out and seeps into the thick cotton sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“What happened?!” Charlie shouts this time. “Answer me!”
My stomach lurches again. I might throw up. I heave.
“Ruby!”
“I cut myself. I think it’s bad.” I’m scared to touch it. I don’t want to feel how deep it is. I don’t want to feel my own muscle and bone.
Charlie’s voice rises again. “Get your phone. We need help.”
“I’m close but I can’t.” I whimper. “I can’t get it.”
“Ruby. Focus.” Every time Charlie says my name, it grounds me. “There’s literally nothing more important right now.”
I twist my body into the inches of give this space will allow me, finally managing to get the tips of my left fingers into my back pocket. “Wait!” I can feel it. “I’ve almost got it.” I push my fingers a millimeter deeper, but I can’t pull it free. “I’m trying.”
“Don’t give up, Ruby.”
My arm screams with pain, a sharp spike carving, but the extra push is enough to get my hand all the way into my pocket.
I pull my arm back, crying out as the spike cuts back through the other way. “I have it!” I shove my phone so close to my face that I can’t even see the whole thing at once. Blood drips down my hand and smears the screen. I try to wipe it clean with my chin. “It’s five o’clock.”
“Who cares what time it is? Do you have any reception?”
I swipe at my phone and dial 9-1-1. When I press the green call button, my phone sits there, doing nothing, not paying attention to me. Like a glazed-over Leo playing video games last summer on the massive sectional couch in Michael Franklin’s pool house while Mila and I texted annoyed sighs back and forth across the room.
Mila doesn’t text me anymore.
“Nothing’s happening,” I say.
“What are you trying to do?”
“I dialed nine-one-one.”
“Everyone’s doing that. Try something else.”
Right. What was I even thinking? The 9-1-1 lines have to be crammed. “I’ll call my mom.” I pull up her number and press the green call button again. And there is . . . nothing. “It’s not going through.”
“Try again.”
I do. Still nothing. “I can’t.” It feels like my failure. Like it’s my fault my phone doesn’t work after an earthquake. I never should’ve told Charlie I had it. I never should’ve given him hope.
“Crap!” He punches something and I wait, frozen, as the space around us creeks and sways. Charlie sucks in a breath. “Oof.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I hurt.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. My ribs hate me.”
I don’t like knowing Charlie’s in pain. “But your head’s fine. You aren’t concussed?”
“Concussed? Why wouldn’t you just call it a concussion?”
“Argh. I don’t know.” It’s a term they used in this junior lifeguard program I did as a kid. I was super obsessed with calling everything by the correct name because I wanted the instructors to see my dedication. So they would think I was the best. I don’t even know what I’m saying right now. “Just—are you okay? Do you have a head injury?”
“I don’t think so. Everything fell on my chest. I saw you put your hand over your head so I did the same thing.” He groans.
My own head hurts enough for me to have a possible concussion. Or a brain bleed. Is a brain bleed the same thing as a concussion? It’s likely either one could kill me. Is it a painful death? Or will I simply fall asleep and not wake up?
Wait. What if I fall asleep and don’t wake up?
“Is your head okay, Ruby?”
“I don’t know. It hurts.” I press at the pain.
“How bad?”
“Bad. But not like my arm.”
“Is it bleeding?”
“My arm or my head?”
“Both. Either. You tell me.”
“My arm is bleeding. Underneath my elbow.”
“Is it gushing blood?”
“More like oozing.”
He coughs. “You should apply pressure to try to stop the bleeding.”
Thinking about the seep of blood makes me light-headed. Foggy. If I could just shut my eyes for a second . . .
“Ruby!” Charlie’s shout is an electric jolt of energy to my brain. “Can you get your arm out of your sweatshirt sleeve so you can wrap it around your cut and use it to apply pressure?”
“I’ll try.” I wiggle. I’m like a worm. No arms. No legs. Rolling a millimeter in either direction, trying to avoid every sharp thing as I ease my arm out of the sleeve. It feels like hours pass, but I finally get it. “It’s off.”
“Okay. You need to wrap as much of it as you can as tight as you can around your arm. But don’t make it so tight that you cut off your circulation.”
“Are you a Boy Scout?”
“Hell no.”
I laugh, letting go of my worry long enough to free my right hand and wrap the sleeve around my left arm. I pull it tighter by using my teeth. I grunt through each step, all of it so much effort in this limited space.
“Got it.”
“Good. Good job, Ruby.”
A small laugh escapes my lips.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I imagined you talking to your dog just then, like, Good dog, Ruby.”
“Well, Ruby would dig us the hell out of this mess, that’s for damn sure.”
“I wish Ruby was here.”
“Me too.”
“So now what?”
“We wait.”
“For how long?”
“Who knows? Until it stops. Until we get help.”
I feel like we’re talking about two different things now. The bleeding and this nightmare.
“And then I can untie it?”
“When it stops, yes.” He sounds so calm. Like someone trained to deliver bad news without any emotion. How did he get this way? “It’ll be okay, Ruby. Now can you try your phone again?”
I pull my phone back to my face with my free hand. Press the redial button. Absolutely zero happens. “Nothing. It won’t dial out.”
“Text?”
I type out a text to my mom with my right thumb: I’m trapped at the Suds and Surf laundromat on Belmont. None of those words looks real.
My phone waits and waits and waits. “It won’t go through.”
“Can you get online?”
I try that. The swirly gray ball at the top of the screen whips around and around, struggling to load. It’s hopeless. Everything is down. Everyone is unreachable.
No phone calls. No texts.
But then my phone dings with an emergency alert from the California Earthquake Warning System.
7.8-magnitude quake. 4:31 p.m. PST San Andreas fault line. Severe damage.
My vision blurs. All I see is 7.8-magnitude.
My heart stops in my chest. I think of my house. Of my mom. My school. My friends. Are they okay?
“Charlie,” I whisper. “It was a seven point eight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
The worst earthquake I’ve ever experienced was probably a high magnitude 4, and it barely broke a couple of glasses in our cupboard. So when you figure each additional point is something like thirty times more energy, I’m pretty sure a magnitude 7.8 is “The Big One.”
Charlie’s clearly done the same math.
“Can you try your phone again?” His voice sounds different. Like hope has left it. Reality has sunk in.
I call my mom again. Text her. Still nothing. I can only hope she’s okay and she’ll get my messages eventually. “I’ll keep trying.”
Something suddenly pops. I flinch. Hit my head. Another pop. And another. Three times. Then a sizzle. The sound seems like it’s coming from outside. Away from us, but still close enough to hear.
“What was that?” I say.
“My best guess would be a downed power line.”
“It’s outside, right?” I think of the toppled washing machines. The water that surely leaked out. This isn’t a good place to be near downed power lines thrashing around like out-of-control garden hoses.
“Definitely outside. Pretend it’s fireworks.”
Fireworks. “I like fireworks.” They remind me of the day I met Leo. I do what Charlie tells me. I close my eyes and pretend.