The first problem is that Hector Lopez drank too many Pink Lemonade Smirnoff Ices in the passenger seat of Johnny Karlsson’s mom’s 2002 Honda Odyssey before they got to the dance. It will seem like it’s not a big deal until later, when the bigger problem has revealed itself, and, down in the basement cafeteria, Hector throws up bright pink into Johnny’s open hands, which Johnny has inexplicably placed in front of Hector’s mouth. Hector will feel horrible about it for years, and the fact that everyone refers to throwing up in inopportune places as “doing a Hector,” as in, “if you don’t feel good, go to the bathroom, we don’t want anybody doing a Hector tonight,” certainly will do nothing to alleviate that guilt. But there will also be something in that moment—Johnny Karlsson’s outstretched hands, unthinking, ready to catch whatever Hector’s body needs to give him, Johnny’s eyes on Hector’s mouth—that feels almost sacred. Hector will talk about that moment in therapy, and then he will talk about it on stage during his moderately successful but altogether respectable stand-up phase: “Raise your hand if you’re gay. Okay, now raise your hand if you think you have a weirder moment-you-admitted-to-yourself-that-you-were-gay story than mine.”
The second problem is that Sarah Iverson, on her way to the bathroom, walks past Yasir Aden kissing Sarah’s best friend, Fatima Davis, in the hallway. Sarah has nursed a not-so-secret passion for Yasir since she sat behind him in freshman biology watching the way the muscles of his shoulders moved as he took notes, and thought, for the first time, that it made sense that people wanted to dig their fingers into other people’s backs, wanted to take their bodies apart with their mouths. Fatima knows this, has listened to Sarah talk about it endlessly, but still here she is, her hands on the back of Yasir’s neck, Yasir’s fingers brushing up against the side of her jaw. Sarah doesn’t even have time to feel sorry for herself before Fatima senses someone else’s presence in the hallway and draws back from Yasir. Fatima starts to say her name, but something Sarah loves about herself is her legs. They’re the reason her soccer coach describes her as a “zero to one hundred kind of girl,” and she’s down the hallway and slamming through the blue metal doors before Yasir has even turned around. The night’s greater problem will go a long way in terms of alleviating this particular issue, of Fatima and Sarah’s friendship momentarily on the rocks.
The third problem is that Bailey Evans is wearing a short dress, which she never does, and as she’s touching up her mascara, leaning over the wide bank of sinks, Karena Cheng sees the pale crosshatching of scars up Bailey’s thigh. Karena is one of those girls who is so good, so visibly loved and well cared-for, that all the other sophomores wish they could dislike her, but because she is genuinely kind and pleasant to be around, they find they can’t. She looks amazing tonight, Karena, the best of anyone. Normally, Karena is nice-looking, not stunning, but tonight her older sister has let Karena wear her dress, which is jewel-green and just the right cut, and Karena can feel that people are looking at her more, moving differently when they’re around her. Bailey, like Karena, has been loved, but Bailey has been chemically unlucky, and being happy has never come easy to her in the way that it has for most of her classmates. The same is true for Karena’s older sister, and when Karena sees Bailey’s leg she’s reminded of her sister’s arms, of the things her parents wouldn’t tell her because she was “too young,” of the way Karena’s sister cut herself so deeply once that Karena caught a glimpse of the soft red of her flesh, and decided that, for the rest of her life, all she really wanted was for the parts of the people she loved that were supposed to be inside their bodies to stay inside them.
But the real problem is this—a tornado with wind-speeds of 141 mph is bearing down across the wide flat plane of their town. Sarah, who’s standing with her back up against the school dumpster, crying off her carefully-applied eyeliner, notices that the sky has gone green just before the sirens start. Her ears pop. And then she’s inside and they’re all streaming down the steps into the basement cafeteria and the thought crosses her mind that everyone will be able to tell that she’s been crying, which is a stupid thing to think when you may be about to be swept from the Earth but what can you do, and she’s dashing past Karena who she has just enough time to think looks absolutely gorgeous, but also a bit pale, and then she hears the sound of retching somewhere nearby, but the floor is starting to tremble and so she dives underneath a table like she’s been taught to without even looking around to see who’s vomited.
It’s the noise of the tornado that Bailey will remember for the rest of her life—the roar of it above them, tearing things up, but also the sounds of her fellow students screaming and crying, someone pleading in Somali, one odd shout of laughter. And as the building shakes around them, Bailey hopes, with a fervor she’s never felt before, to live. It’s not that she’s wanted to die, but in this moment she feels a strong will to continue being alive, to see the sun rise over the ocean out the window of a taxi cab, to tattoo over her scars, to bike through green buzzing woods in the summertime, to move her body to music. She makes eye contact with Karena, who’s ended up crouched under the same table as her, and yells, “We’re going to be okay,” and Karena believes her, and she will be right to do so.
Years later, Karena will fall asleep in an airport. Her twins will be almost two, and she will be on her longest business trip since they were born, and she’ll be sad and sleepy and glad for a break and guilty at her own gladness, and she’ll be entering REM on a plastic seat in Dallas-Fort Worth with a half-eaten Au Bon Pain sandwich on her lap when someone places a gentle hand on her shoulder. The hand, of course, will belong to Bailey, who Karena almost doesn’t recognize, because she has gained weight since high-school, which looks good on her, makes her face into something solid and interesting and wonderfully expressive. Bailey tells Karena that she’s on her way to a conference for dance teachers and Karena will remember that, yes, of course, Bailey was always such a beautiful dancer. Even though they weren’t friends, didn’t talk much except for the night of the dance, they will go down the terminal to the airport bar. And even though it’s only twelve-thirty p.m. and Karena hasn’t had a drink during the day in years, they will order beers and talk about their lives, and then they will text their husbands as they get on their respective planes about how nice to was to run into somebody from the past. Neither of them will mention the night of the tornado in their texts. It belongs just to them.
Back in Minnesota, years before, Sarah feels like the tornado is inside her head. Her ears are still popping, and she can’t stop opening her mouth. She’s trying to find Fatima. She’s crawling from table to table and people are shouting at her to stay put, trying to grab at her ankles to keep her under their tables, but she knows she has to get to her best friend. Fatima kissed Yasir, sure, but Fatima also let Sarah sleep at her house every weekend for a year and a half while Sarah’s parents were getting divorced. Fatima made music videos on iMovie with Sarah to all their favorite songs, and then deleted them off YouTube as soon as they realized it was very embarrassing. Fatima, who’s always been bolder than Sarah, was rude right back to the creepy male substitute teacher who told Sarah her new short haircut was “brave.” Sarah finds Fatima underneath a table she doesn’t recognize amidst all the chaos as the one where they always sit during lunch. Fatima never cries, but she is crying now.
“I’m so sorry,” she keeps saying, and Sarah wraps her long arms around Fatima and says, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I forgive you.”
For the rest of her life, Sarah will orient herself around this moment. She will always know that she is the kind of person who can forgive. In three years, Sarah and Fatima will walk down the path by the river in Berlin, where they’ve met up for the weekend while studying abroad in different European countries. Sarah will have one arm slung over Fatima’s shoulders—Fatima has always been, will always be, such a tiny person—and they will be sharing a pair of headphones, the wire only occasionally getting caught and tugging the bud out of one of their ears, and Sarah will think how glad she is that she didn’t ruin this, that she didn’t let herself let Fatima ruin it, because the two of them will be friends for the rest of their lives.
Hector has a bit going—‘bit’ used in this way not being something he’ll learn about until years later, when he’s doing standup, when he’ll realize that this practice, of coming up with little gimmicks that he overcommits to is what his humor has been ever since he was a child—about how he doesn’t sleep anywhere that’s not his bed because being asleep is a vulnerable thing, but mid-tornado, post-vomit, he makes an exception. He curls up, drunk and still-nauseous and reeling from his revelation about Johnny—Johnny’s hands, Johnny’s body, his body—and passes out underneath a table.
As a consequence, Hector will not remember much of the tornado. What he will remember is this: after, when the emergency personnel arrive (quickly—someone alerted them that there were kids at the school for the dance), they will lead the students in a silent line up out of the basement cafeteria. It will take the paramedics a while to be sure about this, but it will be true—none of the kids were killed by the tornado; the sirens went off in time. Yasir Aden was in the bathroom (everyone’s worst nightmare), and so he didn’t make it down to the cafeteria with the others; instead, he hid out in a supply closet, which kept him alive, unscathed but for an ankle broken by a falling shelf. In the first floor hallway, right near Yasir’s supply closet, Hector will learn that his school was made of cardboard and cotton candy, all of it spilling out from a hole torn in the ceiling. Hector will emerge, newly hungover, into the odd pale dusk outside, and stand in a cluster with the other students, the better to be safe from possible downed power lines and puddles. Next to Hector, Bailey Evans and Karena Cheng will be holding one another and crying, and Hector will remember this, because the two girls are so different, and he didn’t think they were friends. The kids will stand there, huddled, for a long time, waiting to be given instructions, and in that time, Hector will watch Johnny, separated from Hector by dozens of people but tall enough to be seen, teeth white and sweat beaded on his forehead, eyes open, laughing to be alive.