Unnatural Disasters Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  All Hail the Penguin King

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  The Gray Room

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Shangri-La

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Maybe the Worst Idea I Ever Had

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  The Concept of Nirvana, as Understood by Toby Wolfowitz

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nothing Left to Burn

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow . . .

  Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from BLACK RIVER FALLS

  Buy the Book

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Hirsch

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover illustration © 2019 by Gray318

  Cover Design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-99916-9

  eISBN 978-1-328-53068-4

  v1.1218

  For Reba, with love

  All Hail the Penguin King

  One

  MAY, 2049

  THE FUNNY THING about Luke and I being at prom the night of the sixteenth was that we’d never even talked about going until a few weeks before.

  We were at the Beth watching Cannibal Creek Massacre for the hundred millionth time. It was the capper to this weeklong horror fest I’d talked my boss into putting on instead of the subtitled weepies and black-and-white American classics he usually played. I’d chosen some seriously brutal shit. Adolf Bonhoffer’s Needles Beneath My Skin. Cho Sun Pak’s Scream, My Beloved. Aguilar’s Black Suitcase, of course. I’ll be the first to admit that it was not exactly a rip-roaring success. The only person besides Luke to buy a ticket was Mr. Stahlberg, a Beth diehard ever since his wife passed away the previous spring. I was supposed to be working the concession stand, but Mr. Stahlberg always smuggled in his own snacks, so I took a seat with Luke down front.

  It had just gotten to my favorite part (Michael St. Vincent getting that arrow through his throat), but I couldn’t seem to enjoy it. I was stuck on how, when the two of us had walked into school that morning, the hallways had been draped, entrance to exit, with a candy-colored spew of prom-aganda.

  I elbowed Luke in the side. “I mean, how is prom even still a thing? We’re halfway through the twenty-first century and people are still getting all torqued up about prom? Seriously?”

  Luke shushed me.

  “What?”

  He pointed up at the screen. I turned around. Mr. Stahlberg was eight rows back and fast asleep. I scrunched down in my seat and pressed on, sotto voce.

  “All I’m saying is these people are telling themselves they’re going to have this deep, meaningful experience, when the truth is any marrow prom ever had in its bones was sucked dry over a hundred years ago. The only reason people go now is because it’s a thing you do. Their parents did it, their grandparents did it . . .”

  Luke opened his mouth, but I knew what he was going to say.

  “And don’t come at me with rites of passage and shared rituals. Calling this low-rent gropefest a ritual is an insult to good rituals.”

  Luke slid down until we were cheek to cheek. His breath was fruity and sweet from the Mike and Ikes I’d embezzled from the concession stand.

  “So?” he asked. “What would you prefer?”

  “Old-school bacchanalia. Everybody gets naked in the light of the full moon and they drink wine and dance until they completely lose their minds.”

  “Please. You hate parties. Remember Connor Albright’s birthday? We weren’t there ten minutes before you said we had to leave because his taste in music was giving you chlamydia.”

  “I’m not talking about a party. I’m talking about a transformative, communal experience. One that’s so intense you actually, like, leave your body and become one with God.”

  “This also might be a good time for me to remind you that you’re an atheist.”

  I grabbed the box of Mike and Ikes. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t have to be if we lived back before communing with God meant going to some megachurch nightmare like your mom and dad do. Seriously, Luke, it’s got its own McDonald’s franchise!”

  He snatched his candy back. “Hey, that McDonald’s is the best part of my Sunday. Oh! I love this scene.”

  One of the camp counselors grabbed a flashlight and headed out into a rainstorm alone. Instantly, the theater filled with the whispery chanting of the unseen cannibal tribe. I dug my fingers into Luke’s bicep, resisting the urge to shut my eyes. See, the thing everybody gets wrong about people who love horror is the idea that we don’t get scared. Not true. Movies I’d seen a thousand times still scared the hell out of me. In fact, sometimes it was even better when I knew what was coming. Sure, the jump scares might not have worked anymore, but jump scares weren’t horror. Seeing an awful thing coming from a thousand miles away and being utterly powerless to stop it? That was horror.

  We watched the rest of the movie straight through, huddled together, the crowns of our knees kissing. By the time sweet, virginal Alice ended up running through the jungle—clothes torn and covered in the blood of her fellow campers—I was breathless and lightheaded and my heart was going buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump. And then, BAM! Just when you think Alice is about to reach the rescue helicopter, the cannibal king explodes out of the jungle and drags her, screaming, back into the trees. The camera stays on the shaking branches as they go still, like nothing happened, like Alice was never even there. As the credits rolled, the fist that had been squeezing my heart released, leaving me a boneless puddle in my seat.

  Most people would leave then, but Luke and I always stayed. We figured that since all those gaffers and best boys worked so hard, the least we could do was read their names. When the screen went to black and the lights came up, Luke yawned and stretched, then turned to me, eyebrows raised, ready to go.

  “At the original Bacchanalia in Rome,” I said, “they used to go so insane for Bacchus that they’d tear live bulls apart with their bare hands and drink their blood.”

  “So you’re saying you’d be okay with prom if it involved the slaughtering of livestock?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Luke smiled, which made his eyes go all twinkly. He kissed me; then we rolled out of our seats and headed up the aisle. Mr. Stahlberg was slumped over, snoring gently. I nudged his shoulder.

  “Hey. Mr. Stahlberg. Movie’s over.”

  His snowy brows twitched and then his eyes slowly opened. He looked like a little kid for a second, fresh from a nap. He sat up and rubbed at his stubbly face.

  “I take it that movie was your doing, Lucy?”

  “Pretty, awesome, right?”
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  “It was terrible.”

  “How do you know? You slept through the whole thing!”

  “I saw enough.” He wagged his finger at me. “Amanda would have given you a piece of her mind if she’d been here. She would have instructed you on the classics.”

  I was pretty sure he was right, given that instructing me on the classics was exactly what Amanda Stahlberg had done the last time I’d seen her, roughly six months before a bout of skin cancer finally caught up to her. She was horrified when I admitted that I found Jane Austen kind of boring. Amanda was a retired English professor, so when she got going on books, it was like God calling down from on high. When she was done with me I went to the library and checked out every Austen they had.

  I took Mr. Stahlberg’s hand. “I would’ve liked that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “So would I.”

  I helped him up and the three of us went to the lobby. Luke and Mr. Stahlberg chatted while I changed and did closing—shutting down the projector, taking out the trash, putting the day’s skimpy take in the safe. By the time I was done it was nearly eight o’clock. The three of us stepped out of the air-conditioned chill of the theater and onto the sidewalk, where we were struck by a wall of steamy heat. Sundown had taken the edge off our hundred-degree day, our third that spring, but it still had a little punch to it.

  “I hear the highways are melting again in Arizona,” Mr. Stahlberg said. “Imagine that. Black rivers flowing through Phoenix. They’ll need kayaks instead of cars. Kayaks with hulls of steel.”

  Luke said, “There’ll be wildfires in California again.”

  “If there’s anything left to burn.”

  Mr. Stahlberg fanned himself, distressingly red-faced and sweaty after only thirty seconds outside. Luke asked him where he’d parked and he explained that his car had died earlier that day, forcing him to walk. He protested when I said we’d give him a ride home, but all I had to do was curl my arm around his and he gave in. Luke’s car was in a lot a few blocks away, so we joined the Friday night shoppers as they strolled along Main Street sipping at tall, icy concoctions from Bethany Square.

  “So,” I said. “Tell us about your prom night, Mr. Stahlberg.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “I haven’t thought about prom in years. The spring of 1984! Wonderful night. I was dating a poet named Sophie at the time and we went with her cousin Jim and this magnificently stupid girl he was dating. We must have smoked a metric ton of pot beforehand. My God, we laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Let’s see, I was in a blue tuxedo and Sophie was wearing black leather . . .”

  * * *

  Luke still had some time before his curfew after we dropped off Mr. Stahlberg, so we headed up to Bethany Ridge. The welcome center parking lot was deserted. We took a spot with a good view of the lights from town and sat on the hood of his car. It was cooler at the top of the mountain. Pine-scented breezes blew across my bare arms, raising tiny goose bumps. Luke’s phone pinged. He laughed as the blue/gray light of the screen washed over him.

  “What?”

  “Carter got ahold of Mom’s phone again,” he said. “He’s become really invested in keeping me updated on Greg’s adventures. Greg’s the pet goldfish.”

  “Goldfish have adventures?”

  “They involve swimming in circles and pooping, apparently.”

  Luke tap-tap-tapped to his little brother. I flopped onto my back and looked up at the stars. Insects were chitter-chattering around us, a sound that immediately morphed into Cannibal Creek’s whispery theme. I entertained myself by turning every snapped twig and fallen branch out in the woods into the tread of a blood-thirsty murderer, every gust of wind into the breath of some nightmarish elder god brought back to life to spread madness and ruin across the countryside. I could see it all so clearly that I got the dull edge of a thrill, a pitter-pat in my chest, a squirt of adrenaline. I swear, if someone had put a camera in my hand right then, I could’ve put Aquilar herself to shame.

  After a while Luke leaned back, phone face-down on his chest. I drew his arm around me and snuggled in close. He smelled like soap and boy.

  “I had this dream last night that we were in Antarctica surrounded by a horde of penguins.”

  “There are penguins left in Antarctica?”

  “There were in my dream,” I said. “They were all squawking and flapping their little penguin arms.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “They were just excited because earlier that day they’d made you their king.”

  “Were you the queen?”

  “No, you had a penguin queen. Her name was Emily. I was jealous at first but then I realized you two were actually really good together.”

  Luke kissed the top of my head. “That’s very mature of you. So does this mean Antarctica is on the list now?”

  I turned on my side and slipped my hand in between the buttons of his shirt.

  “Well, you are their king.”

  Luke kissed me again, and the next thing I knew it was nearly an hour later and we’d gone from the hood of the car to the back seat and were all jumbled up in a knot of tingling limbs and bare, sweaty skin. The air was humid, the windows steamed white. I reached between the front seats to pull a pen and our trip journal out of the glove box. I’d read somewhere that most people traveled to Antarctica by sailing from Tierra del Fuego, so I flipped pages until I got to South America, then wrote Antarctica at the bottom in bright green ink. Beside it I drew a penguin army hoisting Luke into the air, along with a speech bubble that read ALL HAIL THE PENGUIN KING! I sat there awhile staring at the words, tracing their peaks and contours, giddy. In less than six months, everyone we knew would be conquering freshman dorms while we’d be conquering the world.

  Luke nibbled at my shoulder. I put the notebook away. I didn’t really have a curfew, but Luke’s parents were fanatical about his (as they were about many, many things), so it wouldn’t be long before we’d have to head back down the mountain. He traced a lazy fingertip down my arm, raising even more goose bumps.

  “Hey. Weaver.”

  “Hmm.”

  He leaned in close, and his warm candy breath filled my ear. “You wanna go to prom with me?”

  I laughed. “Damn, Vaughn, I thought you’d never ask.”

  Two

  THE DAY OF PROM was a typical Saturday. Dad and I were hanging out in the living room while my Aunt Carol tore through our house with a vacuum and a mop, cleaning with a vengeance that was frightening to behold. She’d already done her and my Aunt Bernadette’s house earlier that morning, but now that she was into her second trimester, her nesting instinct was too much for one household to contain.

  I had a few hours before Luke got there, so I hunkered down on the couch with a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and my laptop, intending to cross a few items off my Things to Do Before Luke and I Flee Bethany list. Currently occupying the number one spot? Find Dad a soulmate. Why did I have to do this, you ask? Because in the history of dads there was no dad quite as filled with the spirit of dadness as good ol’ Roger Weaver. Case in point: At that very moment, was he taking advantage of his God-given weekend by relaxing with a good book? Maybe watching a favorite movie? No! He was doing what he did every weekend: speed-drinking coffee while hunched over his computer trying to sort through his clients’ accounting conundrums, the ones he hadn’t gotten to during the actual workweek. Later on he’d probably mow the lawn, hit the grocery store, and re-tar the driveway.

  Sure, he had his Scrabble nights with Carol and Bernie and his movie nights with me and Luke, but what was going to happen when Luke and I left in the fall and Carol and Bernie had their baby? I had nightmare visions of him standing in the kitchen after work, suit rumpled, his face gray in the light of the microwave as he made himself one of those single-serving cups of mac and cheese. After his sad little dinner he’d pad up through an empty house and lie in bed, staring into the dark, surrounded by a silence so enormous it was like an ocean h
e’d fallen into. If nothing changed, he’d descend deeper and deeper and deeper until the pressure of all that quiet crushed him like a soda can.

  We knew he’d never do it himself, so Luke and I had started a secret account for him on a dating site. For his profile pic I’d chosen one that Bernie had taken a couple of years earlier when we’d all spent the Fourth of July weekend at Rehoboth Beach. He was windblown and grinning, wearing this pale blue shirt that really made his eyes pop. He looked smart and kind and a little goofy. Dad to a T. All that was left was to complete his profile!

  “Hey, Dad. What would you say is your favorite food?”

  “My favorite food? Why?”

  “It’s, uh, for a report. For school.”

  He stopped typing and looked over the edge of the screen. “Your school wants you to do a report on my favorite food?”

  We were on dangerous ground. He was clearly suspicious. I figured my best play was sheer audacity. I scooped a chip out of the bag and popped it into my mouth.

  “Yeah, and not just that. They also want to know”—I checked my screen—“your favorite books and TV shows. Also, what you do on a typical Friday night.”

  “Well, thank God your teachers aren’t wasting your time on trigonometry or physics.”

  “Ha. Yeah, pretty sure they have worse senioritis than we do. So? Favorite food?”

  “I dunno,” he said, returning to his spreadsheets. “Pizza?”

  Pizza? It had the benefit of being true, but there was no way something as pedestrian as pizza was going to attract the kind of woman Dad deserved. Pizza was going to get us a newly divorced real estate agent who lived in a sad little condo and watched soft-focus romantic comedies in her spare time. Dad needed someone earthy, but worldly, too. An artist, maybe, or an importer-exporter with a slightly shady past. But if I wanted to reel in someone like that, I had to find the right bait. It took nearly an hour of hunting around on foodie websites before I found what I was looking for—tarantulas fried in garlic. That was it! Using it as my inspiration, I fabricated a tale about the year Dad spent backpacking through Southeast Asia after college and how he’d become a huge fan of the dish after trying it at a back-alley food stall in Thailand.