Free H2O by Virginia Bergin Page B

sound of the radio, with the TV going as well. Then he hit a crackly station playing that “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” song and turned it off.
    â€œI’ll try later,” he said, looking all anxiously at me.
    â€œIt’s OK,” I said. “I get it. It’s really bad, isn’t it?”
    But I didn’t really get it. I think I thought… I dunno, that Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men had all gone home—because you would, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be with your family to check that they were OK and stuff, or help them or just be sad like we were if they weren’t OK and you couldn’t help them.
    Thinking that made me choke up. Thinking that made me think how my mom was upstairs and—
    â€œShould I turn the TV off as well, Ru?” Simon asked.
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s fine.”
    â€œIt’s fine.” Can you ever imagine such a stupid thing to say?
    Nothing was fine.
    If you’re reading this, you know what they were saying on TV and on the radio. Unless you were some kind of really strict hippie, without even a radio…or a nun or a monk? I’ll bet they’re not allowed TVs, not even for educational purposes, just in case they’re tempted to switch channels, watch wannabe talent shows, and spend the collection money or whatever voting on rip-off rate phone lines. (Like I did.) (I don’t even really watch those programs, not really.) (I was bored.) (It was almost an accident.) (The guy looked like Caspar.) (Mom and Simon were out.) (Every time.) (Including when I also voted for that girl.) (She kept crying and stuff, and not realizing she was brilliant, so I practically had to give her a vote—even though I knew there was zero chance she would win.)
    (The phone bill—which I cunningly, scaredly intercepted—is still under my bed.)
    I am going to write it down anyway, what was said about the rain. I am going to write down everything I know about what was happening, because maybe someone should…and because maybe I need a break from thinking about what that was like: me and Simon in the living room, and my mom and my Henry upstairs dead.

THE RUBY MORRIS KILLER RAIN SUMMARY
    So, this is the Ruby Morris Killer Rain Summary. This is what they said on the TV and the radio. This is what I heard, plus what Simon told me he’d heard, plus the things Simon figured out all by himself…plus a little of the stuff that I got to know and hear about after. This is, I think, as much as anyone knows.
    To begin with, they said they didn’t know— really know, for sure—what was causing it, but some people—not just any people, scientists—thought it had to do with the asteroid. That when it had been blown to smithereens, it had made kind of a mess. Tons and tons and tons and tons of rocky mess. After a while—like, nearly seven years—the mess got to Earth. It got sucked here by gravity and— Pop! Pop! Pop!— the mess of rocks got into the Earth’s atmosphere, making a really gorgeous firework display that you could see pretty much everywhere on Earth—except boring old Dartbridge, where it was cloudy and no one got to see a thing. A few big chunks did fall to Earth, and before there was no one left alive to fight about it, some of the scientists and politicians were having a big argument about what exactly had happened to those pieces of asteroid. I don’t suppose it really matters. You see, the rest of the mess had been blown into even tinier smithereens of dust that got spread around, all over the sky.
    Everyone knew about the dust. It was the dust that made the sunsets everyone had been ooh-ing and ahh-ing about, the kind of heavenly sunset there’d been on the night of Zak’s party. Yup, doom was written right across the sky and everyone was going, “Ooo! Isn’t that lovely?” and probably taking pictures