their sons and daughters home now. So, leaving only those already too sick to get out of bed, the campuses began emptying out.
Not that any dormitory anywhere would remain empty for long. Most would be turned into makeshift clinics as hospitals started running out of beds.
Had his father killed another dog? No, it was just his expression.
Coming home that other time his father had explained how, out of nowhere, a dog had dashed in front of his car. “All I could do was run over the poor thing,” he said. He had looked shocked and awed, and for a while after, whenever he caught sight of Sadie, he’d mirror her own sad-eyed long face.
This time, though, it was the flu that had his father looking shocked and awed. The flu, which was now officially the only thing anyone could think about, the only topic of conversation. In less than a week, it had knocked half the student body flat. The lives of kids in perfect health just days ago now hung in the balance. Two freshmen and one sophomore had died.
The dude flu, people called it, as more and more young adults were taken down.
“Not to scare anyone,” his father said, “but I’m not feeling so hot myself.” Cole noticed that his father’s skin looked dirty, smudged in places, as if he’d rubbed himself down with a sheet of newspaper. “I don’t have a fever but I feel like I’ve been hit over the head or something.”
“Oh my god.” Cole’s mother looked as if she’d been hit over the head pretty hard herself. “Don’t touch Cole. Go upstairs. I’ll call the doctor. Go straight to bed.”
Without a word—like a sleepwalker, or someone obeying a hypnotist—his father turned and left the room.
“Don’t go near your father. Don’t touch him.”
Why were his parents behaving like bots? His mother held her arms stiffly at her sides. She held her eyes so wide open Cole thought it must hurt. He thought of the pod people in the famous old movie whose name he couldn’t remember. The way his father had climbed the stairs. They were changing—everything was changing.
Later, people would always say how everything had happened so fast—overnight, they said. But Cole would remember the feeling of dragging a ball and chain, of days unfolding in excruciating slow motion.
“I’ll go call the doctor. Keep away from your father. Stay down here. Keep away from our room.”
“Okay, Mom, I heard you the first time.”
Cole turned on the TV. Not that he expected to find anything besides news about the flu. As he touched the remote power button, he remembered that the movie was called Invasion of the Body Snatchers and how one of his teachers had said it proved you didn’t need to show a lot of violence to make a great scary movie. But Cole thought only a Neanderthal would find a clunky old black-and-white movie like that seriously scary.
He wondered how long school would be closed. Not that he missed it. In fact, it had disgusted him that his parents had made him keep going. It had not escaped his notice that it was mostly the cooler kids whose parents had let them stay home, even if they weren’t sick. Kaleigh, for example, had been one of the first to stop coming to school. Had this not been the case, of course, Cole would not have wanted to stay home himself.
Now he just wished there were some way to delete the last time they’d seen each other.
She had caught him staring (usually he was more careful). “Why don’t you just take a picture?” Loud, on purpose, so that half the cafeteria would hear. And stupidly he had shot back: “Why would I want a picture of you?” Not fooling anyone, of course. And then Kaleigh whispered something to the other kids at her table, something that made them all go “Ooooo.”
Every day since then he had relived it, trying, at least in fantasy, to fix it. But he could never think of what to say. As usual, he couldn’t imagine what the cool response would have been. He just knew it existed: the response that instead of making her sneer would have made Kaleigh like him.
And now he wished he had had the nerve to sneak-take her picture, even though kids caught doing that got their cells confiscated. He couldn’t remember what clothes she’d been wearing that last time, but he remembered her hands. Only a short time ago he would have found