Every day when we wake up in Hazel’s bed, our phones let out a collective beep in symphony. It is always the same message: Excessive Heat Warning. Degrees of up to 100 reported across the valley, cooling centers available around the city. Do not go outside. Do not stand in direct sunlight. If you do not take precautions immediately, then you will—and we stop reading by this point because it’s stupid.
“Do not go outside,” Hazel mimics in a gruff voice, her best impression of her father.
MJ laughs. “Do not sweat.”
“Do not breathe,” I say and we all giggle, pressing our socked feet to each other’s thighs in the small space of Hazel’s double bed. Our phones beep again a minute later, this time with a message telling us about a poor air quality alert, but we ignore that one because it’s the same shit again, too.
We wake Carina up by each calling her one after another for five minutes straight until she finally picks up her phone on MJ’s twelfth call—What!—and then she shows up thirty minutes later at the door of Hazel’s house, a fine sheen of sweat on every part of her skin and wearing a half open backpack, the same one she’s had since middle school. She grits out through her teeth, “Will you let me inside already,” and we move to make space for her to throw her bag on the floor and then lay down with it, letting the cool tile soothe her hot skin. Five minutes after Carina arrives and while we are eating mint Oreos out of the half-empty packet in the pantry for breakfast, Hazel’s mother wakes up and screams at us about not being at school. And where are your parents? She asks the rest of us, her gaze ending on me with such vitriol I shrink into my hoodie, pulling on the drawstrings hard so it closes over my face.
“Go, go away,” she tells us, pushing us out of the kitchen. Carina tries to stuff a sleeve of mint Oreos into her pockets, but half of them break and the other half fall to the floor. “Go to school!” Hazel’s mother yells out the front door, shoving her daughter out last. “And—Hazel!—don’t come back here until I see a written note from your teachers that you showed up.” Then the door slams.
We go to school because there’s little else to do and we want to get the note for Hazel, even though MJ could easily forge it. We show up when the bell rings for lunch to start and we meet Ginger at the gates. Where the fuck have you guys been! She batters us with questions like she always does when she decides not to skip school with us but then acts jealous anyway. “Here,” Carina says, pulling out a crushed Oreo from her jeans pocket, “you want one?” And Ginger makes an annoyed huff and hits it out of Carina’s hand and to the floor. “Hey! That was my last one! You bitch!”
Halfway through lunch we notice the sky starts to go orange, all of it, no clouds in sight. Hazel says it’s from the wildfires up north, where her grandparents live. It smells like smoke, like the nights I went camping as a kid and ate a butane-tinged dinner. We all squint upward, trying to name an object close to the sky’s new color. A basketball. Ew no, what the fuck? It’s more like Cheeto dust. Wrong. I think it kind of looks like turmeric. What’s that? Nevermind. As a rule, we only care about the fires when they happen in our town, which is a gamble and could happen at any time. Last year, MJ’s neighborhood caught on fire and her cat got out and they never saw it again, but the wildfires didn’t reach her house, only her neighbor’s neighbor who lost everything, including the expensive camping set they had just bought to take to Yosemite.
“Take a picture of me with the sky,” Ginger says and we do. She throws up a peace sign, her body baked in orange light, and then posts it on her Instagram with the caption: I love summer!!!!!! The rest of the school day gets canceled because the administration deems the air unsafe to breathe, but the weather is so hot we need to go somewhere inside, so we hop the fence into the backyard of Carina’s dad’s house where there’s a pool shed with air conditioning and a mini fridge.
“We’re living in a nightmare,” Carina says, her body floating evenly on the surface of the pool while the rest of us watch from behind the cold safety of the poolhouse’s sliding glass doors. She looks up at the orange, the red at the corners. “Do you think this is what Mars looks like?”
“I think this is what California looks like,” MJ replies.
“Ha ha,” I say.
“I think this is what our kids will see, all day, every day, when they’re our age,” Hazel says.
“Kids!” Ginger exclaims, laughter ripping out of her. “Kids! I’m never having kids, not if the sky’s still orange.”
“Maybe it’ll be back to blue by then,” Carina says, eyes closed. “Maybe it’ll even be green.”
By mid-afternoon, a soft sprinkle of ash starts floating down from the sky. It paints a thin, gray layer on top of everything: the roof of the poolhouse, the open can of beer Ginger didn’t finish, the sharp red hood of Carina’s father’s convertible parked in the driveway, the pool water. Sandy swirls of ash sink beneath the surface, slowly, and remind me of how much I loved piling Nestle’s chocolate powder on top of milk when I was a kid, not pushing the spoon down to mix it all together but slightly dipping into the powder pile and slightly dipping into the milk for a mouthful of texture to eat. The grainy cocoa coating in between my teeth, the milk making it moist enough to swallow.
“Is this what war looks like?” Hazel asks, seemingly out of nowhere, but we were all thinking about it anyway. We always are, in the back of our brains, at the dinner table or right before we go to sleep at night. We think of Gaza. We think of Ukraine. We think of Ferguson. We think of Vietnam, the clouds of black smoke in the documentary we had to watch in history class last week. We think of our parents saying, there has always been war. We think of our parents saying, there has always been tragedy, as they watch the tragedy parsed out to them in consumable bites on MSNBC with only enough opinion sprinkled in to add flavor, not choice or resistance. We think about the worlds between us and violence, though we see the pictures on our phones every day, the burning bodies, the dead children with their mouths hanging open, the bombs and the drones that every single person our parents vote for will send out.
Hazel asks this question, but we all know the answer is yes, and we all know what she is really saying: At least we’re not dead, which doesn’t feel so comforting when we know someone, somewhere is dying all of the time, that we just have to watch it happen, that we just have to wait until the orange sky is over and then wait again until it comes back. There will be no blue, not for our children. There is already no blue for us.
I take a sip of Ginger’s left-out beer. A small pile of ash coats my tongue. I crunch it between my molars, thinking that if I concentrate hard enough it might taste like chocolate.
“I don’t think I’ll ever have kids either,” I say, watching ash fall to the deep end of the swimming pool. It lands silently at the bottom of the water, no noise, no movement, nothing. I turn to Carina, who watches the water ripple as well, her face troubled with thoughts, and I ask: “Do you have another beer?”
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Teal Ivy Hall is a New England area writer, crybaby, and sometimes artist. Her work has been featured in HAD, Open Ceilings, and a few other publications, but mostly on her mother’s refrigerator. You can find her at tealivyhall.com.