Summer ended and we reluctantly went back to school. It beat living in a school, but it was still school. I couldn’t help but wish my celebrity status got me a free pass from institutionalized education. Didn’t they used to give honorary doctorates to people who were famous enough?
Online school was reserved for those who were not inoculated; the ones who stayed home out of fear of running into Killer….or us. It was also for those kids who couldn’t afford to live under the dome and were still holed up in their fortified homes. There were also people who were scattered all over the country who chose not to live in a covered community. America had turned into isolated outposts of civilization, like the small towns in Maine that Stephen King wrote about where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Just thinking about those kids outside the dome living in splendid isolation made me nostalgic for the time we used to live in our own home, with our own space; a place where people didn’t mob us and ask painful questions about how we survived the Mclean High School Refugee Center Siege.
I wouldn’t have minded being back in school if Nemesis were there with me. She reunited with her family after our cohabitation with death, and they lived in another domed city several miles away. I could only talk to her on Skype or Facebook or text her. It was cool that I could do that after going three months without the Internet and a working cellphone, but the signal kept going down or the screen would go blank and I didn’t get to message her as much as I would have liked to. Besides, I wanted to see Nemesis instead of just talking to her. She was a lot prettier in person.
My consolation prize in all that was that I was back in Mr. Cromwell’s class. One of his emotionally charged lessons was on how we’d soon no longer have anything to fear from either the dead that walked the earth or the kind of rain that created the living dead in the first place. He began his lecture with a question. “Why do scientists think the rain will be pure again?”
A timid voice from the back of the room hesitantly asked, “Please, sir, could you not use that term?”
“What term?” Mr. Cromwell asked, puzzled.
Margaret, the class know-it-all stated, “He’s talking about the word ‘Pure’. It’s what the vaccine-free are calling themselves.”
Mr. Cromwell was clearly cross at this. His lips pressed into a thin line as he thought of what to say next. “How do you know?” he asked.
“It’s all over the internet,” Margaret said matter-of-factly. “They consider themselves free of Parasites, so their blood is pure.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake…” Mr. Cromwell spluttered in anger. “What the…why the…who do they think they are?” He balled his fists up at his sides in an effort to control himself. We got used to this treatment fairly quickly, but I guess most people are too chicken to say it to someone as tall and commanding as Mr. Cromwell. It’s not that big a deal to me because, well, it’s just words. Bullying is bullying; the same crap, different day, new location. Besides, where are we going to go if we decide not to put up with it anymore? I’m not going out there again.
The timid voice from the back popped up again. “Please, sir, I don’t want to talk about this. I’m really sorry I brought this up. Can we just go on with the lesson?”
Mr. Cromwell looked like he did not want to go on with the lesson, he wanted to discuss the injustice of discrimination and being presumed guilty before being proved innocent, but Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong aka Margaret changed the subject back to the original lecture. “We know the rain will be parasite-free again because something similar has happened before.”
“What?” squeaked the tall lanky kid next to me. “This has happened before? How could we forget about having Parasites in our rain?”
“I don’t think Margaret is referring to Parasites,” Mr. Cromwell said with a sigh. “She’s referring to something else in the atmosphere—ash.”
“That’s right,” said Margaret smugly. “It was called ‘The Year Without A Summer’”
“Well I’ve never heard of it,” said Mr. Tall and Lanky.
“Well that’s probably because it happened in 1816. And because our education system still sucks. And because you don’t read enough.”
“That’s enough, Margaret,” Mr. Cromwell admonished. She may have been a wenchbag, but at least she got us off the subject of Inoculated vs. Purebloods. I decided to keep moving things in the right direction by asking, “What do they think caused The Year Without A Summer?”
“The clue was in Mr. Cromwell’s earlier reference to ash you….” Mr. Cromwell loudly cleared his throat and fixed Margaret with a scathing look, so the insult meant for me stopped before it reached her lips. She plowed on into her lecture, happy to have the floor and everyone’s attention. “Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded in April of 1815. It was a category seven on the Volcano Explosivity Index.”
“Is that high?”
“Let me put it this way,” Margaret said in her most condescending voice. “When Mount Saint Helens blew in 1980, it was only a category five.”
Tall And Lanky was suddenly interested in this. He pulled out his phone and started searching for information. “Says here that people four thousand kilometers away could hear it, and its ash spread over a thousand kilometers away.” He continued to tap away at his screen, dredging up more and more information. “It made red, brown, and yellow snow fall in Hungary and Italy! It also says that twelve thousand people died immediately from things like lava flows, tsunamis, and rocks that flew through the sky.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed by that number?” Margaret sniffed. She didn’t like it when someone stole her spotlight. “We must have lost a hundred times that amount on the Lost Day and…Hey! You’re looking at your phone! You’re going online! You’re cheating! Mr. Cromwell, tell him that’s cheating.”
“Hey, I’m doing you all a favor. Do you really want to listen to her for the rest of the class?”
No, no we didn’t. Margaret’s glare went back and forth between Mr. Cromwell and the cheating device, but the phone won that visual tennis match when Mr. Cromwell said “I don’t care where you get your knowledge from right now as long as it’s accurate and you remember it.”
Margaret looked like she was about to have a conniption fit over that while the rest of us lunged for our phones. Soon we were looking at the same information as everyone else, more or less. “Don’t worry, Mr. Cromwell,” I said. “If it concerns us, we’ll remember it.”
Margaret flopped back in her chair, angry in her defeat. She folded her arms tightly over her chest. “You are all idiots,” she said with finality.
“Well class, now that you’re all plugged in to the facts, can someone tell me, what was the knock-on effect of so much ash in the air?”
I wasn’t looking at my phone but I was the first person to speak up. “It created a barrier that blocked out the sun.”
Margaret jumped back in the game with a rolling torrent of facts. “The lack of sunlight led to unseasonably cold temperatures which led to a lack of vegetation which led to famine. Rivers froze to the point that boats could no longer deliver what little sustenance there was left, the price of food skyrocketed so they couldn’t afford to feed task animals like horses. That meant they couldn’t rely on that form of transport either and…”
I knew Margaret was talking in a steady stream to stop anyone else from interrupting, but it didn’t keep Tall and Lanky from butting in with, “Staple foods like corn and other grains exploded in price. Oats alone were eight times more expensive than the year before. Most people sold off their livestock by the fall of 1816 and there were stories of people so desperate, they made bread out of straw and sawdust.”
“What?” squeaked an attractive brunette from behind me. “You can’t really live off of straw and sawdust, can you?”
My mind automatically went back to the time we were starving to death on the roof of the refugee center and I thought, “Yes. Yes you can.” One look at Mr. Cromwell’s eyes confirmed that he was back up on the roof with me.
“It says here that they estimate about eighty thousand people died from the resulting famine.” The striking Brunette from behind tapped the screen on her phone with her long red nails as she said, “I know that doesn’t mean much to you,” she grumbled at Margaret, “But you have to remember that there weren’t as many people on earth back then. When John over there said that twelve thousand people died immediately from the volcano blast, that was almost the entire population of the province.”
Anger flashed in Margaret’s eyes. It was obvious she was conjuring up some acidic retort, but the rest of the class was up and running with all the little factoids they could find on their phones. They randomly shouted out their discoveries with things like, “There was frost all the way through mid August in Europe and North America!” and “The high for the Fourth of July in Savannah Georgia was forty-six Fahrenheit!”
Mr. Cromwell stepped in and took over before things got too far out of control. “Okay, I think we’re getting a bit off-topic here. Can anyone tell me how this relates to our current problem?”
Everyone started looking down and tapping at their screens again, but I didn’t need to look at a website for that answer. I raised my hand at the same time as Margaret. Mr. Cromwell picked me. “The ash couldn’t stay in the air forever. It eventually settled and things were back to normal by the next year. Lake Vostok could no longer empty it’s parasite-filled contents into the atmosphere and what went up will come down until all we have left is a more pure…sorry, I mean we’ll probably be back to parasite-free rain by next year.”
This perked up the mood quite a bit. “Finally, an end to the Rain of Terror!” laughed Tall and Lanky. Everyone else groaned at the bad pun.
Mr. Cromwell changed the direction of the conversation by asking, “Can anyone tell me the positive effects of The Year Without A Summer?
“What do you mean?” asked the brunette from behind. “What good can come from cold and starvation?”
“How about the invention of the precursor to the bicycle?” We were all out of ideas at that point, so we let Margaret talk. “They say that ‘Necessity is the Mother of invention,’ right? Well, if you can’t afford to feed your livestock and you can’t rely on them for transport, you need something self-propelling to get around. The Year Without A Summer inspired Karl Draus to invent the prototype of the modern bicycle in Germany.”
“Okay, that’s kind of cool…” Tall and Lanky started to say, but Margaret cut him off with a curt look.
“I’m not finished. The lack of food in America’s North East forced the migration of thousands to the Midwest. They discovered a fertile land just ripe for cultivation that we still rely on today.” I hoped Margaret was finished with her ideas. I didn’t care if she was right; she was too arrogant and annoying to be worth listening to. I’d rather read this stuff off the Internet than listen to her pretentious voice.
My prayers were answered when Mr. Cromwell interrupted her lecture with, “I believe Monica has something to add.”
We all turned around in our seats and faced Monica. I guess that was the name of the nervous girl with the timid voice that objected to using the term “pure.” Margaret narrows her eyes at Monica in an attempt to quiet her with her glare, but Monica was not deterred. “The Year Without A Summer is responsible for my favorite book of all time….” she said with a sincere smile. “…Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.”
“And how do you figure that?” Mr. Cromwell asked encouragingly.
“Well, Switzerland suffered the same conditions as the rest of the world. The cold forced Mary Shelly, Lord Byron, and some other guy…”
“John Polidoi. The other guy’s name is John Polidoi. Doesn’t your phone tell you that?” snapped Margaret. I don’t know what her beef was with Monica, but I was tired of her and couldn’t help myself.
“Shut up, Margaret!” I hissed.
Mr. Cromwell pretended he couldn’t hear me and gently asked Monica to go on.
“Okay, John Polidoi,” said Monica with less confidence than before. “They had to spend most of their summer vacation indoors because it was so cold. They held a contest to entertain themselves while they were shut in. The winner would be whoever wrote the scariest story. Because of this the other guy, I mean Polidoi, wrote The Vampyre, Lord Byron wrote the long-form poem The Darkness, and Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein.”
“The proper title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” Margaret said tartly. “I thought that someone who professed to love the story as much as you do would know that.”
This time the whole class yelled, “Shut up, Margaret!” together.
Mr. Cromwell barked, “That’s enough!” He secured Margaret with a solid stare before turning to the rest of the class. “I would like to have a word with you. The rest of you are dismissed.”
I was relieved to get out of there, but before I dashed out the door I couldn’t help but hear Mr. Cromwell admonishing Margaret. “If you continue to verbally attack your classmates, I’ll have to move you again. You’re starting to run out of teachers willing to take you. May I suggest you try online learning?”