Free H2O by Virginia Bergin

kitchen and fenced them off with chairs and the trash can. I don’t know why he didn’t just chuck it all down the sink; too splashy, I guess. Or because that would somehow feel like setting it free. So there it sat: our little poisoned sea. I hated the sight of it.
    I wanted to call my dad.
    â€œEverything’s down, Ru.” That was all Simon said. He passed me the phones anyway: the landline, his cell, my mom’s cell.
    I tried my dad; I tried Leonie. I didn’t know anyone else’s number by heart; that wouldn’t have mattered because my mom and Simon had pretty much all our relatives and most of my friends’ parents’ numbers on their phones, but there wasn’t even a dial tone. No sound at all on both their cell phones, and just a single endless beep on the landline.
    â€œWhat about email?” I said. “We can email people.”
    He gave me the laptop too. He hadn’t shut the Internet off. The Internet was down. I kept trying the laptop, the phones. I don’t know how long I tried—a long time—while the TV guy rattled on about the Tudors and Stuarts. They weren’t even on our syllabus. Nor was the Civil War, which is what the TV guy was going on about when Simon took the computer and the phones from me. I didn’t put up a fight. I was crying.
    â€œThey might be trying to get through to us too,” he said.
    He laid his cell, my mom’s cell, and the regular phone on the windowsill, in front of all the family photos. The laptop he put on the coffee table.
    â€œWe’ll try every hour,” he said.
    We did. We took turns. We ended up not even telling each other that nothing had changed.
    Sometime during the afternoon, there was a really loud bang—like an explosion, I guess—in the town. We both jumped up and ran to the kitchen window. You could see nearly the whole town from our kitchen: the castle, the church, the housing development that spread up the hill east of the river where Leonie lived.
    There were flames and smoke coming up from the High Street. A fire in the rain.
    Simon opened cans of fruit, poured out the juice, and gave one to me.
    â€œWhere do you think that is?” he asked me. “The George?”
    You could see, working it out from the rooftops, that it must have been.
    â€œSuch a shame,” muttered Simon.
    Dartbridge is jam-packed with old buildings, medieval stuff—even the dentist’s has got gnarly old beams on the ceiling. (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at them.) Probably if it had been any other old building in town, I might have thought a stupid building didn’t matter, not now, but it wasn’t any other building. I wanted to tell him that The George was where the second most amazing moment of my life had happened prior to the all-time number-one kissing amazing moment that had happened at Zak’s party. I wanted to tell him that was where Caspar had looked up at me, when he was playing his guitar, and that I had felt myself fall in love on the spot.
    We stared out at it. There were no sirens.
    I said it then: “Simon, I’m really scared.”
    He led me back into the living room. I sat in my nest; he sat on the sofa.
    â€œShould I make us something to eat?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    This is a thing to know, a thing I have learned, about what fear and grief and horror do. They mash you up from the inside out. They twist you, and they break stuff inside you. They tear stuff out. They get whole brains, whole hearts, in their hands, and they crush and crush.
    â€œCan I come and sit with you?” I asked.
    â€œYes. Of course,” he said.
    And for the first time ever, I snuggled up to Simon on the sofa.
    I thought how pleased (and shocked) my mom would be, and I cried.
    I felt so small . Littler—younger—than even before I knew Simon. I felt as tiny as Henry. Tinier. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to bawl. For my mom.
    When it