Free H2O by Virginia Bergin Page A

was dark, Simon did make some food.
    â€œI’m going to make a stew,” he said.
    He made stews when we went camping. “Comfort food” was what he called it. They were horrible—and, as I once pointed out, if we went on the kind of vacations everyone else got to go on, you wouldn’t need comforting. Even my mom had laughed.
    â€œDo you want me to help?” I asked.
    You can imagine how often I would have voluntarily helped Simon make one of his hideous stews, but I sat and peeled vegetables. I didn’t want to be away from him.
    Normally, even on a campsite, he’d drain and wash the kidney beans or whatever, but now he slopped the whole can into the pot.
    â€œWon’t that taste disgusting?” I said.
    â€œNo choice, Ru,” he said. “I’ll spice it up with something.”
    He had his back to me as he opened the cupboard where the herbs and spices were. He rummaged, opening unlabeled jars and sniffing, and his head turned a little. I saw tears on his cheek; one slid down, and I saw him lick it from his lips.
    â€œI could kill for a cup of tea,” he said, turning back to the stovetop to dump random stuff into the pot and stir it. He wiped his face on his sleeve.
    I saw the list he had left on the table:
    THINK
    I went to the freezer. I got the ice cubes and popped them into the kettle. It didn’t look like enough, so I chipped off ice from inside the freezer, crammed that—my hands numbed dead with cold—into the kettle.
    I plugged the kettle in and flicked it on.
    â€œEarl Grey, peppermint, or black?” I asked. Like my mom would ask.
    It took three boils to make it. All that ice and just enough for one cup. Simon chose Earl Grey. We both knew why; that’s what my mom liked.
    The stew was horrible. Simon stopped me from pouring salt all over it and onto the baked potato that went with.
    â€œIt’s dehydrating,” he said. “And it’s bad for you, anyway.”
    I gave him a look.
    â€œIt’s what your mother would say.”
    I couldn’t really eat it. I mean, you wouldn’t really want to, but I sort of knew I must be hungry, even if I didn’t feel it.
    â€œShe’d also say, eat up,” said Simon.
    â€œI can’t,” I said.
    From the looks of his plate, he couldn’t either.
    â€œSimon, are we going to die?”
    He didn’t answer for a while, then he laid his knife and fork down. He said, “I don’t know.”
    That was how we came to turn the TV back on, to find out. He said if it upset me, I should just say so, immediately, and he’d turn it off. I knew what he was expecting—the same thing I was expecting: hospital shots of people dying, the TV people going on and on about it. In a way, what there was instead was worse. I just didn’t realize it at first.
    The scary pictures had gone, so had Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men. Everyone had gone. Instead, there were just words on the screen and someone reading them. For a second, I thought it was some kind of documentary thing, the sort of thing that bores me stupid, until Simon flipped through the rest of the channels. They either came up blank fuzz or showed the same thing: EMERGENCY PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCAST. But it was different from the first one. Were we having ANOTHER emergency?
    (No, we weren’t. It was just what they should have told us in the first place, but I’ll get to that.)
    You know what Simon said? “If only we had satellite…”
    Know what I nearly said? “Like I asked!”
    I had. I’d asked about a million times if we could at least just get a package with the music channels, said it would help me learn guitar. It might have.
    He got the radio then, plugged it in and crept across the dial—yes, that’s right: about the only thing we had in common with Zak’s family was we weren’t even allowed a digital radio. It was crazy making, the