What If Everything Is Already Ruined?

“With all this rain, we need an ark,” my mother says. She’s right, too. The water’s already coming in, our basement no longer habitable. Time is running out. I think about Edna, the lady down the street who says she’s a witch, who used to babysit me, and I pull on my Snoopy rain boots, two sizes too small after my last growth spurt. My toes crowd together, punching raw against the sides. No one wears rain boots in middle school.

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“You know,” I say, “if Edna could turn her house into a boat, we might be saved.”

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My mother looks out the window toward Edna’s. “But there wouldn’t be room for all of us,” she says matter-of-factly. “How would we choose who gets to live?”

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I think of the trolley problem, which we’ve just gone over in my gifted and talented program at school.

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It’s then that my mother notices my boots. “Where do you think you’re going?” she says, her voice sharp and stern.

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“To Edna’s,” I say. “I don’t want to die.”

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“It never used to rain like this,” my mother says, her voice now wistful. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back in time?”

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Which reminds me of the science test I failed last week, still in my backpack upstairs awaiting my mother’s signature. The last time, my mother was baffled. How are you failing science, of all things?

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If I could go back in time, would I study harder?

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“But we can’t,” I say.

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And if we drown, that science test doesn’t matter anyway. Nothing does.

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I peer out the front window and see a couple of neighbors waterskiing in the street and some kids playing Marco Polo. The bachelor who lives next to Edna paddles a kayak out of his garage. At the main cross street, people cheer on two yachts racing. Everyone looks so happy, like it’s a sunny day at the beach. Which makes me wonder: What if it is?

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I put on my rain jacket as if it will help.

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“Don’t,” my mother says, holding up her hand. Water seeps through the floorboards. “If you walk out that door, everything will be ruined.”

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I don’t know if she’s talking about the carpeting, the knickknacks in our flooded basement, or the world, in general.

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I turn the latch.

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