Sahalia sighed with irritation and got to her feet.
"Why do I have to do everything?" she complained.
"Because these guys nearly died and you didn't," Mrs. Wooly snapped.
The grammar school kids went off to the Toy section.
"Look," Mrs. Wooly told us big kids after they had gone. "The ER's not too far. I can probably walk it in a half hour to an hour. I might get a ride, which would mean I'll be back much quicker. Keep Josie hydrated and every so often ask her what year it is. What's her name? What kind of, I don't know, pop does she like? Cookies. That kind of thing."
She ran her hand through her wiry gray hair. Her gaze drifted past us, to the entrance to the store and the broken sliding-glass doors.
"And if people come, don't leave here with anyone but your parents. Promise me that. Right now, you guys are my responsibility.
"And—not that I think there is going to be—but if there's any rioting or looting or anything, you guys get all the kids together here in this pizza area, and you just stay together. Big kids on the outside and just stay together. You got me?"
Now I understood why she had sent the younger kids away. She didn't want them to hear about a riot.
"Now, Mrs. Wooly?" Jake said. "What do we do if the people from the store come?" He gestured toward the damaged bus sitting in the midst of the empty shopping carts in the entrance foyer. "They're gonna be pissed."
"You'll tell them that it was an emergency and the school board will take care of the damages."
"I can make us lunch if need be," Astrid said. "I actually know how to run the ovens in the Pizza Shack because I had a job here last summer."
I knew she'd had a job at Greenway. It had been a summer that involved a lot of superstore browsing for me.
"A hot lunch!" said Mrs. Wooly. "Now you're talking."
The little kids came back with board games.
Mrs. Wooly got ready to go.
I went to the Office Supply section and picked out an eight-dollar pen and the nicest, most expensive, executive-brand notebook on the shelf. I sat down right there and started writing. I had to get the hailstorm down while it was fresh in my memory.
I've always been a writer. Somehow, just writing something down makes anything that happens seem okay. I sit down to write, all jammed up and stressed out, and by the time I stand up, everything is in the right place again.
I like to write actual longhand, in a spiral notebook. I can't explain it, but I can think on the page in a way I can't do on a tablet. But I know that writing by hand for anything beyond a quick note is weird, seeing as we're all taught to touch-type in kindergarten.
Brayden stopped and watched me for a moment.
"Writing by hand, Geraldine?" he said with scorn. "Real quaint."
We all lined up to say good-bye to Mrs. Wooly at the entrance to the store. The sky had returned to its normal resting shade of crisp blue clear. Like my mom used to say, "Colorado skies just can't be beat."
The hail was a foot deep most everywhere. At places where there was an incline, the hail had run off somewhat, depositing itself into huge drifts.
You would think it would have been fun to play in—like the outdoors was a giant ball pit. But the big chunks of hail, they had bumps and lumps and stuff stuck inside them like rocks and twigs. They were sharp and dirty, and no one wanted to go out and play. We stayed in the store.
