We met at the creek all through September—after school, weekends. We sunned ourselves on gravel bed islands and hoped the younger kids didn’t watch us kissing. When the rainstorms finally came and the creek swelled, our islands disappeared, so we sat in Cole’s barn instead. I missed the sound of the world rushing past us, the water surging over rocks.
That spring, just after my seventeenth birthday, the government blew up the levees protecting southern Louisiana and let the area flood so that New Orleans wouldn’t. The government had stopped footing the bill for relocating people after hurricanes had destroyed so much of Florida’s coastline that they had to let Disney buy out the entire state. So just before the levees blew, the mega-corporations swooped into southern Louisiana to promote their new townships and evaluate everyone for sponsored relocation. Unlike all those poor people in China’s floodplains. Google was never going to knock on their doors offering to move them to drier parts. I kept my eyes glued to the newsfeeds because Grandpop had warned me that our farm, so close to the Mississippi River, was in a floodplain too.
At first, my dad said the government wouldn’t let our land flood, that the country needed every bit of corn it could get, because the heat and wind were hard at work turning places like Nebraska and Kansas into sand dunes, destroying farmland and cattle ranches.
But when the Mississippi started swelling, it was a choice between cities, with their people and businesses, and farmland. The farmland would have to go. Ours included.
We heard a rumor that Microsoft-Verizon, which boasted the most luxurious townships in the country, had plans to come around and evaluate everyone for relocation. “What are they going to do with a bunch of farmers?” Cole said. “They’re not going to relocate us. We don’t have anything they want.”
He took to hanging out with some older boys who itched to make someone else feel as desperate as they did. On a hot day at the creek, I saw one of them hold a little boy under the water until he stopped thrashing and then let him up just in time. At night, Cole would slip away to meet up with them—in the attic room of that girl whose parents go to town most weekends, or at that guy’s half-done house where the front is mostly bare plywood. Cole and his friends would get so drunk so fast, Cole told me, it was like someone was holding their heads underwater and their day had come full cycle.
Sometimes I’d go with him and we’d all watch feeds from different townships and talk about relocating. Or Cole would play his guitar along to the radio and change all the lyrics to swear words. Sometimes he and I would lie in the attic bed together and kiss, and wonder if we should do more than kiss, but then other times he’d be far away, staring at the ceiling, barely acknowledging the brush of my kneecap. “No one cares about this place,” Cole told me. “We don’t count for anything out here away from the big cities. We might as well be ghosts.”
Microsoft-Verizon showed up in town. They asked how many hits we usually got on our feeds. We had to tell them that we weren’t blanketed with cameras like cities were and that corn planting wasn’t all that entertaining anyway. I mentioned Cole had a solo coming up at a Woodbury Prep choir competition. They weren’t impressed.
The Mississippi went on rising. Our days were numbered.
Cole stopped playing his guitar for me. He started spending all his time with the older boys and forgot to tell me where they were going. Rare days I did run into him, he could hardly look me in the eye. I wasn’t sure how to tell him that just because Microsoft-Verizon saw reason to reject him didn’t mean I felt the same.
I holed myself up in the attic with downloaded school assignments that I ignored in favor of online stories about the Other Place. People were always posting their own made-up adventures with the Girl Queen. But I liked the original stories best, the ones Brixney had transcribed from Dylan’s famous notebook ages ago. I read about Dylan and Hunter passing into another world and wished I could do the same. What would it be like to find a lovely land, all cool greens and blues instead of the thermostat stuck on high . . .
I had posters of the Other Place tacked up on my walls, created by artists who mixed descriptions from Dylan’s stories with information we’d gotten from the people who actually lived there. Snowcaps and grasslands; swaths of forest, like farms for shade. The posters were like those old-world travel ads designed by hucksters that urged people to See the New World!
But the truth was, we couldn’t go to the Other Place. According to the stories, that other world overlapped with ours, and to visit it you had to be able to tune out our sights and sounds and tune in to the Other Place’s—an ability we had yet to evolve, except perhaps in a few rare cases like Dylan and Hunter. It wasn’t that the rest of us didn’t have vorpals. It was just that a vorpal strong enough to sense the Other Place was a rare trait, something that would crop up only when the right genes came together.