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  Actually, there is a huge need for it in this story, and a lot of swearing did happen, but out of respect for my mom, I will not write those words. If, like me, you curse all the time anyway, you can go ahead and add your own swear words, but I hope you’ll understand why I can’t.

  I’ll write something beautiful instead. I’ll write “.” For my mom.

  “Oh ! Oh ! Oh !” Barnaby kept going.

  (The thing is, Zak’s parents were always into some pagan-y religious thing or another, so it’s possible that Barnaby really was calling on some specific god and wasn’t just generally ranting.)

  He locked the kitchen door.

  “You’re frightening them,” said Zak’s mom, Sarah, but Barnaby wasn’t listening. He closed every window in the kitchen, and when he’d finished doing that, he started closing all the other windows.

  You could hear him, banging around all over the house.

  We weren’t frightened at all. It was a little weird, but the hardest thing was not to get the giggles—although in my case I had nothing to laugh about, now there wasn’t even any water to cover me. I did my best with dish towels. All our stuff, everyone’s stuff, was in the barn.

  “Mom, what’s going on?” said Zak.

  “We’re not really sure,” said Sarah. “Someone Barnaby knows called him and—”

  Thump, thump, thump—bang!—thump, thump, thump, went Barnaby upstairs.

  “Mom?” said Zak.

  Bang! Thump, thump, thump. Barnaby came back down the stairs.

  “You’d better ask your dad,” said Sarah.

  See now, that was kind of weird, wasn’t it? Zak didn’t normally call his mom “Mom”; Sarah didn’t normally call Barnaby “your dad.” If I didn’t know Zak was practically immune to a whole lot of stuff that really bothered other people—like being embarrassed by your parents—I would have thought he was freaking out too. But his parents did crazy stuff all the time, and everyone knew they did, and usually no one laughed about it much because everyone understood what Zak had to deal with…and also because Sarah and Barnaby were so kind to us.

  This latest crazy thing, whatever it was, it was just bad timing, party-wise.

  “Turn the radio on,” Barnaby told Zak.

  “Dad?” said Zak, but he turned it on anyway.

  They didn’t have a TV. Zak’s parents didn’t even have a digital radio; they had the old-fashioned crackly kind. Guess what was on?

  Gardeners’ Question Time.

  They were discussing the best methods of tackling blight on roses.

  Someone lost it and giggled. The giggling, it spread.

  “This isn’t right,” said Barnaby quietly. “It should be the news.”

  I laughed too; it was impossible not to crack up with Mrs. Fotheringay-Flytrap describing the spots on her Rambling Rector rose…but you want to know something weird? While I certainly wouldn’t in a million years have thought, Oh no! This must mean the world as we know it is about to end, I kind of knew it wasn’t right too. I didn’t know what was supposed to be on, but I knew Gardeners’ Question Time shouldn’t have been. My mom LOVED that program and listened to it every Sunday—every Sunday. Not on a Saturday night. Never on a Saturday night. Not exactly scary, though, was it?

  “Go and put your clothes on!” Sarah snapped at us.

  I shivered. Caspar hugged me close. Leonie grabbed my hand.

  Sarah never snapped at us.

  “They’re in the barn,” said Saskia—in a really horrible way, like Sarah was stupid.

  “Take ours, then,” said Sarah. “Take whatever you want. Just get dressed.”

  Someone muttered something and headed for the kitchen door.

  “Don’t go outside,” said Barnaby. Loudly, angrily. “You do NOT go outside.”

  We shuffled out of the room, the whole herd of us. On the stairs, someone cracked up, and we all had to make a mad dash for Zak’s parents’ bedroom so we could laugh our heads off in private, without hurting their feelings.

  “What the is up with your parents, man?” said Caspar.

  “Got me, dude,” said Zak. But he didn’t sound OK; he still didn’t sound OK. “C’mon,” he said to Ronnie—my techie-est friend—and they went off to Zak’s room.

  The rest of us, we played dress-up with Zak’s parents’ clothes. It was so funny we forgot all the weirdness. Caspar pulled on a kaftan.

  “Ohhm!” he said, doing this prayer thing with his hands.

  I laughed so hard I almost—

  “I need to pee,” I remembered.

  Lee followed me to the bathroom. I went first. I had to—I was bursting. Then Lee went while I surveyed myself in the mirror: . So much for the model look. The big, baggy hippie dress was the least of it. My lips, which felt puffy-bruised and tingling from the kissing, looked kind of normal, but I had mascara zombie eyes, and where I’d had bright red lipstick on earlier, it looked like it had sort of smeared itself all over my chin; even my nose had gone Rudolf. No hope Sarah would have makeup remover, so I wet a piece of toilet paper, dabbed it in the soap, and wiped at my chin.

  It wasn’t really lipstick at all; it was my first ever full-blown kissing rash, and it stung. It really stung.

  Nothing I could do about it, so I quickly scrubbed at the mascara disaster. Their soap—which wasn’t like the soap we had at home but some organic, lentil-based, gray-green thing—was useless. It didn’t even foam up, so that was it, then: I was half black-eyed zombie, half human cherry. Mortifying. Seriously mortifying.

  “C’mon, get out!” shouted Caspar through the bathroom door. “Molly wants to puke!”

  Great. I had to face him knowing what the face I was facing him with looked like. We opened the door, and Molly burst in, about to be sick. Under normal friendship circumstances, it would have been our duty to stay with her—but, honestly, just listening to her made my own stomach start to heave. It was bad enough looking like a mutant in front of Caspar—I definitely did not want him to witness me spewing my guts out, so I grabbed Lee’s hand, and we went back downstairs.

  We passed Zak’s room on the way, where he and Ronnie were bickering for control of the computer. (“Why’s it so slow?! Just click there,” Zak was saying, trying to grab hold of the mouse. “Just click on it!”)

  In the kitchen, the radio people had moved on to discussing plants for dry, shady borders—which is a serious problem, apparently, and was not nearly as funny as the earlier part of the broadcast. Barnaby looked as if he was in a trance, staring out the kitchen window at… OK, so now the party had been totally spoiled; it was raining. None of us had noticed. Why would we? We’d been too busy laughing our heads off.

  “I think you all need to sober up,” said Sarah, handing out glass after glass of water. “Leonie, can you please put the kettle on?”

  “YesSarahYes,” Lee slurred, glugging her water.

  Barnaby grabbed his cell phone and started jabbing at it, trying different numbers.

  “. . ,” he said, having trouble getting through.

  Then Gardeners’ Question Time stopped. It just stopped.

  Then it started.

  “This is an emergency public service broadcast…”

  “The rain—” That’s all I remember hearing to begin with. “It’s in the rain,” and everyone staring at the radio as if it were a TV. That’s how hard we all stared at it—everyone except Barnaby, who dropped his cell and went out to try the phone in the hall.

  Lee shoved the kettle on the stove and came and held my hand, the one that wasn’t gripping Caspar’s.

  “Ru,” whispered Lee. “Do you think we’re gonna die or something?”

  “No!” I said.

  Of course no one was gonna die!

  My mom was out at the neighbors’ barbecue.

  It’s in the rain.

  I felt
as if I was the last person to get what was going on. I stood in that kitchen, shivering—I leaned into Caspar’s body, but even that felt cold—and finally I sort of started to get it. See, for days there’d been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic—outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some new kind of disease thing, deadly, but, well, it wasn’t here, was it? Not like the bird-flu thing when Simon (who was probably more worried about the birds) had gotten all worked up. So had a lot of people. (OK, so had I; it gave me nightmares.) But this? It was so…remote—that’s the word—that we never paid any attention to it. Ronnie had tried to tell us about it, I remember that, and we had all rolled our eyes and told him to shut up, because it just seemed like another thing for Ronnie to blabber on about.

  “The rain,” they kept saying on the radio. “It’s in the rain.”

  “I told you so,” said Ronnie, stomping down the stairs into the kitchen.

  He had. He had said, “There’s something in the rain.” And we’d all gone, “Yeah right! Shut up, Ronnie!” because we knew just what kind of website he’d have read that on—probably the same one that claimed the Pope had been replaced by an alien (that’s why you never see his legs; they’re green and spindly)—and Ronnie had gone, “No! There is! There’s something in the rain. Look!” and tried to show us this eyewitness video thing on the Internet, but it had been taken down, which Ronnie said proved it was true.

  “Shut up, Ronnie,” someone said.

  Lee stared at me. “Ru,” she said. “I really am scared.”

  She started crying. Other girls were too. I hugged her. I hugged my lovely best friend.

  It’s in the rain.

  Saskia swept downstairs wearing one of Barnaby’s shirts like a mini-dress. For a moment, she stared at the radio like we’d done. Sarah tried to hand her a glass of water, but Saskia shook her head.

  “I wanna go home,” she announced.

  She’s such a…not a drama queen, but a… She’s not even a spoiled brat. I suppose the best way to describe it is Saskia always finds a way to get what she wants. It’s not even because half the boys in school drool over her… OK, ALL the boys in school (because they like her or want to be like her), pretty much all the teachers (because she’s cunningly polite to them and makes a showy effort to understand whatever it is they’re talking about), and a seriously shocking number of the girls (because they also like her or want to be like her) drool over Saskia, and that should be enough to explain why Saskia always gets her way, but it’s not. It’s something weirder and darker. Seriously, she’s like a hypnotist or something, sending out invisible mind rays that zap her victims into doing whatever she wants. But not tonight, Sask! Seemed like no one else but me was even listening to her anyway because everyone was staring out the windows at the rain.

  It just looked like rain normally looks. You know, drippy.

  You could hear Barnaby on the phone in the hall, dialing, slamming the handset down, and redialing. He wasn’t calling on a god anymore; he was just plain swearing his head off.

  “I said I wanna go home,” Saskia re-announced.

  “Whatever,” someone said.

  She stormed into the hall to try to get the phone from Barnaby, and Zak bounded down the stairs, Molly drifting down after him, looking sick as a dog.

  “The Internet’s down!” Zak said. “Like the WHOLE of the Web just crashed.”

  “Told you so,” murmured Ronnie.

  “It’s probably just a local thing,” said Sarah.

  Ronnie shook his head in that way that he did to look like he knew stuff no one else did. Molly heaved again, and Sarah looked at her in panic.

  “It’s the punch, Mom. She just had too much punch,” said Zak.

  People kind of nodded sheepishly, same way you would if someone else’s parents had caught us.

  “Barnaby,” Sarah called, rummaging in a cupboard, “do we have any coffee?”

  Coffee. Even then, even at that moment, I thought that was kind of random. Like that would solve everything. Barnaby wandered in from the hall. He looked…grim. That’d be the word. Grim.

  “I can’t get through,” he said. “To anyone,” he added, looking straight at Sarah like she’d know who that anyone was.

  You could hear Saskia back out in the hall; she had the phone to herself then, and was dialing and redialing and swearing her head off too.

  “DO. WE. HAVE. ANY. COFFEE?” Sarah asked Barnaby.

  That seemed to sort of snap him out of it—and a lot of other people too. Girls who’d been crying (because girls are allowed to under extreme circumstances) stopped; boys who’d looked like they were going to cry got a grip. For a moment, it was just all so normal. A bunch of late-night people getting late-night snacks and drinks. Barnaby found some ancient coffee beans in the freezer and started pulverizing them in an electric grinder. Zak sawed into a loaf of their heavy-duty homemade bread. He handed the slices to Sarah, who put them into a wire thing to toast them on the top of the stove. I got mugs out; Leonie got teaspoons; other people got other stuff, all the stuff you need: teapot, sugar, knives, jams, plates, butter, milk.

  I saw Caspar edging away from us all. I saw Caspar staring mournfully out the kitchen window.

  I went to him.

  “It’s OK,” I whispered, hoping the darkness by the kitchen door would hide the hideous mess my face was in so we could share a romantic moment.

  “No it’s not,” he said. “That’s my MP3 player out there.”

  He pointed at his jeans, out on the grass, getting rained on.

  “ this,” he whispered.

  “Caspar!”

  I was so stupid. I whispered it, so no one noticed.

  “Chill, Rubybaby,” he whispered back and kissed me.

  I don’t know whether that kiss was meant to shut me up, but it did. Even with all the freaky horribleness of it all, I still had the hots for him, and I still couldn’t believe that we’d actually kissed—and in front of everyone, which basically meant that as far as the glass mountain of being cool was concerned, I had now developed spider-sucker climbing powers and had effortlessly scaled to the top. Best not to blow it now by blurting, “Ooo! Caspar! No! Zak’s dad said we really shouldn’t!” at the top of my voice.

  He unlocked the door. He grabbed a towel. He held it over his head. He dashed out. I saw him do that. I saw him go out, barefoot in the rain in Barnaby’s kaftan. He dashed back in again. Slipped the lock back shut. Dumped the towel.

  No one else had noticed. And me? I dunno what I thought was going to happen, like he’d just go up in a puff of green smoke or something. He didn’t. He rummaged in his jeans, pulled out his phone and his MP3, wiped them on his kaftan, and waved them at me, grinning.

  I felt like an idiot.

  “Cool!” I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say or do, so I gave him this quick, casual peck on the lips and went back to the snack making, so I’d look like I was cool and hadn’t even thought about angst-ing about anything. Tea! I had to make tea! I had to make a whole lot of tea right now! But the tea was made! OK! I had to casually butter toast …That was good, that was better…casually buttering toast.

  Barnaby switched the coffee grinder off. It made a racket, that thing. That was fine, because it meant you couldn’t hear the radio. It was also why no one had heard Caspar.

  He was sort of groaning, but not like a Molly pukey groan. It was some other kind of groan. He stepped out of the darkness by the kitchen door.

  “,” he said, scratching at his head, at his face.

  He looked at his fingertips, at the blood and pieces of torn-up skin that coated them. There was blood running down—not tons of it, but trickles and smears—from his scalp, from his face—where there were sores, red marks, like burns, but bleeding. He looked like one of those gory Jesus pictures, minus the crown of thorns. Wher
ever the rain had touched him, wherever it had seeped through the towel, there was blood…even his shoulders, even his chest. Soaking through the kaftan. His naked feet looked like he’d walked a mile on broken glass.

  Saskia flounced back into the room and screamed.

  Sarah rushed over to Caspar—“Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!” said Barnaby—and she hesitated.

  It’s the first thing you do when someone is hurt, isn’t it? You go to help them. Even if they’re in a really disgusting mess and the sight of all that blood makes you feel like you’re going to throw up or pass out, you go to help them.

  “It might be contagious,” said Barnaby.

  So here’s the thing; I suppose I could say this later or not say it at all. That’s how much difference it made. As I said, Barnaby and Sarah were very, very good to us: dream parents, totally chill (and nightmare parents because of being off the scale in terms of embarrassment). Thing was, as Simon pointed out to me when I was going on about how awesome they were one day, they could afford to be. I huffed on about it, but I knew, annoyingly, he was right. Zak’s parents never seemed to work; they never seemed to have to do anything but fiddle about in the garden or show up to naked yoga classes (oh yes!)…and the reason Zak’s parents could spend all day growing weirdly shaped organic cauliflowers and doing dog pose naked (DO NOT imagine this!) was because they were rich. They were old-school rich; probably they’d started stashing cash the day coins were invented. Zak’s godfather was some kind of lord. His uncle was another kind of lord and sat in the House of Lords. His grandma had been a lady with a capital L, not a small one like everyone else’s grandma.

  Barnaby and Sarah “knew people.” That’s what the other parents said, and like the whole grandma deal, it didn’t mean they knew people the same way everyone else did. It meant the kind of people they knew owned the country or ran it or both. Someone Barnaby “knew” had called him and warned him. How many other people got a warning?

  But this is not a Hollywood movie. The warning counted for zilch.