365 Days Alone Read online

I remember, at the time, wondering if Jude might have been attempting that weird breakdancing move called the ‘worm’. Whatever the reason, she was on the ground between Jacob and me, and my foot had just become way too intimate with her twinkie, and the Foxes were laughing and pointing (again, I’ll get to them later).

  Jacob (always the gentleman) immediately reached down to help my pastry-victim up. Jude, of course, slapped his hand away and got up on her own, staring at me with hate-filled eyes and wearing her—you better run because I'm about to beat the living poop out of you, biatch—look.

  So what could I do?

  I turned and ran.

  And I mean, I ran fast—away from the bandstand and the faux-Beatles and the dancing and the music and the amazingly handsome Jacob. I sprinted across the soccer field and around the baseball diamond. I scampered along the trail next to the tree-lined culvert and finally loped up the side of the hill—past the young kids playing on the boulders and heading toward the older kids smoking weed behind the rocks.

  And…Jude-the-Rude was right behind me all the time, wearing a Terminator-I'm-gonna-kill-you-grin!

  Luckily, I actually was a soccer player and pretty fast, so I managed to stay ahead of Jude, at least until I hit the rocks.

  That was my undoing.

  Dang dog.

  I hit that still steaming pile of sh*t and down I went.

  Even as I tried to scramble up, Jude-the-Rude was climbing on top of me—sitting on my chest, her legs easily pinning my arms against my sides.

  “It was an accident!” I squeaked.

  “If it was an accident,” Jude growled, “you wouldn't of run.”

  “I'm sorry…seriously,” I pleaded. “I'm really, really sorry!”

  “You really, really will be, Barbie.” And she made that hoarking sound guys make when they're about to spit a big snot-loogie to the ground.

  Only Jude-the-Rude was aiming at my mouth!

  Quickly, I turned my head to the side, squeezing my lips tightly together, knowing that I was about to experience something incredibly disgusting.

  Except that it didn’t happen.

  Because—out of nowhere—this tiny brown girl literally ran at us, launching herself at Jude and pushing her off of me and to one side.

  “Stop it!” the brown girl yelled at Jude. “You’re being nasty!” Then, amazingly, the girl moved into position, just above my head, as if to protect me.

  Jude, meanwhile, rose up from the ground slowly—all wrath and snarly-face. She had obviously swallowed her loogie when the girl had pushed her and now Jude was furious—and looking slightly sickened. Slowly, she turned to face the brown girl, who brought her skinny fists up into fighting position.

  My guardian pit bull.

  “You really don't want to get in the middle of this, Skipper,” warned Jude, shaking her head.

  (In case you don’t know, Skipper is the name of Barbie’s little sister. Get the connection?)

  “My name's not Skipper,” declared the girl, haughtily. “It's Jayalakshmi and spitting on someone like that isn't just nasty. It's administering a noxious substance and that's illegal.”

  “Big words for a little girl,” Jude sneered, taking a step toward her.

  “Yeah, well…they've got police in the park, for the concert,” said the brown girl. “You can ask them what those big words mean, if you don't understand. Here comes two of their officers now.”

  And, sure enough, two of the Lost Hills Sheriffs (our local police) were heading up from the bottom of the hill. No doubt their destination was the rocks at the top and the stoners hidden there but—lucky for me—their very nearness was still enough to send Jude slinking away.

  Meanwhile, the brown girl reached down a hand to help me up. She was a tiny thing, barely five feet if that, with skinny legs and arms like twigs. Yet, there was a strength to Jay, even then. Here was this young girl—at the time I thought she was around ten—standing up to the meanest girl in high school, while my own response had been to simply run away.

  She amazed me.

  “Th-thank you,” I stuttered.

  “You and your mom moved into the Bartley townhouse,” she said. “I live just down from you.”

  “Wh-hat? Are you new here? I haven't seen you before.”

  “I'm in your Chemistry class,” she giggled, bemused. “Five seats behind you.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed and more than a little humiliated. “I don't...uh...”

  “It's okay,” she said, still giggling. “Jacob Riker sits three behind you. I wouldn't notice me either.”

  Oh, great—everyone apparently knew about my crush on the boy-god—further humiliation.

  “I like Jacob, too,” she said, becoming serious. “He's pretty smart—for a boy.” Then she nodded to where Jude was pacing back and forth at the bottom of the hill, obviously waiting for the sheriffs to leave. “But I also hate bullies. We should probably go. Let’s walk across Argos Street. We won’t have to go past Jude that way.”

  “Thanks again,” I told her, as we headed off. “But you took a big chance. I mean, that’s Jude-the-Rude and you’re on her radar now. She’s so going to be after you now.”

  * * * *

  But—that wasn't quite true.

  Because it wasn't just the Goddess of Victory who was on Jude-the-Rude's radar now.

  It was both of us.

  And so began two years of being tripped and pushed, of being ever so careful when we opened our lockers, never quite sure of what could have been poured through the air slots, of looking around corners before we ventured down hallways, of being always prepared, always expectant of the next hit or kick that was coming our way.

  But though it was annoying and frustrating and—on occasion—more than a little painful, we survived together.

  Best friends forever—Jayalakshmi, the Goddess of Victory, and Kaylee-the-Pure.

  JOURNAL ENTRY #2

  Sorry, I didn't get much writing done yesterday. And I guess that I still haven't told you exactly what happened. It’s just that it was kind of hard, you know.

  Writing about my mom.

  Jay says that sometimes you just got to cry it out—then get back to work.

  So—crying is over. Now, back to work.

  Here are the facts, as we know them.

  1. Everyone is gone.

  (Jay and I can't find anyone anywhere. We walked all the way around our neighborhood. It took us an hour to make the circle and we didn't see a single person.)

  2. We have no internet. No t.v. No electricity. No phones. Not even batteries work anymore.

  (Everything’s gone dead and we don't know why. Last night was very dark and very scary. I found us some candles and we lit them, but then we thought someone bad might find us by the light, so we blew them out and just sat in the dark instead. No one bad came, of course—because there is no one there.)

  3. It's very, very quiet.

  (Every once in a while Jay and I think we hear a car in the distance, moving along the 101 Freeway, but we don't know if that's just our wishful thinking. Other than those maybe-car noises...nothing.)

  4. Actually, it's not really ‘quiet’.

  (It’s strange how loud other noises are becoming—birds chirping and tweeting everywhere—sounds like that. We hear dogs barking, too. And the coyotes howled so much last night. I don't know if they caught something and were celebrating, or if they were singing their confused song just like us.)

  5. It's been 24 hours…just me and Jay, and we're so very, very scared!

  * * * *

  Now, here's what happened yesterday morning, when we woke up to find that our whole world had changed.

  It started out like any other sleepover morning—except that this was the day after Halloween.

  Jay and I got up late, probably around ten, but we weren't really sure because the clocks and our phones weren’t working. That was kind of weird, but we didn’t really think anything of it—mostly because we both used the toi
let and it worked just fine. So, if the toilet was working, we just figured Agoura Hills simply had a power outage.

  (By the way, I don't quite understand why the toilets and taps are still working when there's no electricity, but Jay says that it has something to do with water pressure. She says that they'll probably work for a little while longer and then it will get disgusting.)

  Of course, neither Jay nor I knew yet that the internet was gone. We just figured that, sometime during the night, the power went out and our phones lost their charges.

  As simple as that.

  We were, however—very wrong.

  * * * *

  And I have to tell you here that it feels really weird not to be able to check out our social feeds. I mean, it’s certainly happened before. Sometimes the power goes out in Agoura Hills and you have to go all ‘pioneer’ for a few hours.

  Except that this power outage hasn’t been for a few hours.

  And I think that the power might never come back on.

  Which is really terrifying.

  * * * *

  Anyway, while Jay went down to the kitchen and got us ‘un-toasted’ Pop-Tarts and orange juice for breakfast, I went and knocked on my mom's bedroom door. There was no answer and—when I entered her room—I was surprised to find that she was already gone and hadn't left me a note.

  Which wasn’t like my mom.

  See, she’s kind of anal about always keeping in touch. Even when I'm over at Jay's just a few doors down, I still have to text her, so that she knows where I am and doesn't worry.

  * * * *

  I eventually found my mom’s purse on the kitchen counter.

  Her wallet was in one of the purse's pockets, along with her cellphone; her house keys were in a different pocket.

  That confused me.

  It just didn’t make any sense. My mom would never leave the house without her keys—or her purse—or her phone.

  And my mother is an early riser, usually getting up around 7 a.m. So, that had to mean that sometime between 7 and 10 a.m. (when Jay and I got up), my mom left her keys, her wallet, her purse, her phone—and her daughter—and simply walked out of the house.

  * * * *

  It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that it took so long for Jay and I to figure out what had really happened. I guess you could say that our excuse was that we simply didn’t take my mother’s disappearance seriously.

  Instead of getting worried like we really should have, being the self-absorbed teenagers we kind of are, we decided instead to walk down to the high school and catch the Beach Bus down to Zuma Beach in Malibu. The bus doesn’t usually run this late in the year, but there’s a big Maritime Festival going on all along the coast and the county scheduled a special Beach Bus just for the event.

  Lucky for us.

  At least, that’s what we thought at the time.

  Ultimately, Jay and I figured that Mom was probably out talking to one of the neighbors and had simply forgotten her promise to chauffeur us to Zuma. So, with our swimsuits in our bags and my watercolors and sketchbook tucked safely under my arm—I wrote out a note to my mom and stuck it on the fridge.

  Then—Jay and I headed down to Agoura High to catch the Beach Bus to Zuma and, hopefully, an ‘accidental’ encounter with the boy-god I loved.

  JACOB RIKER, THE BOY I WAS DESTINED TO MARRY

  I think I fell in love with Jacob the first time I saw him.

  9th grade—the first day of school.

  The bell had just rung and we were coming out of homeroom. I turned left, while everyone else turned right. One of the custodians had left a ladder in the hallway and, not thinking, I ducked to go under it.

  “You crazy?!”

  Shocked, I looked down to find a wonderfully masculine hand was actually touching me! And that hand was attached to an amazingly, good-looking ‘surfer-god’.

  “It's bad luck to walk under a ladder, Katie,” my rescuer grinned, showing off his extremely white and very straight teeth.

  Now, I wish that I could tell you that I thanked my surfer-god for his superstitious gentlemanliness but—in reality—the words that came out of my mouth were actually something more along the lines of…

  “...uh-bah-tank-to.”

  And then the ‘Adonis-who-was-Jacob’ gave my arm a gentle squeeze before he turned and walked off.

  I, of course—was in teenage girl heaven.

  Jacob Riker had not just touched me, he had shown that he had cared.

  That—could it be possible—he might even like me?!

  Now, it's also true that I was completely ignoring the fact that Jacob had just called me ‘Katie’ instead of Kaylee. No, as far as I was concerned, it was the first day of school and the boy of my dreams, while not exactly saying my name…had come pretty darn close.

  Which meant that I was in love!

  * * * *

  A little about Jacob...

  Brown hair, athletic build, eyes that icy blue that gave me a little shiver each time they aimed my way. He spent most of his free time either playing football for the Agoura High Chargers or surfing down at Zuma Beach.

  How did I know this?

  I am ashamed to say that—after that first meeting—I began to stalk him.

  Not crazy-lady—about to stick a knife in his back stalking—but showing up wherever he was, hoping that he would somehow take notice and actually talk to me. And it would have had to have been him talking to me, because there was no way on earth that I would ever have been brave enough to initiate a complete, actual conversation with the boy of my dreams.

  No, I was way too immature. All I could do was love him from afar.

  And, of course, casually pop up wherever he went.

  Trying to appear cool and unaffected when the boy I so desperately cared for inevitably turned his attention away from me and toward some ‘nasty-skank-surfer-chick’.

  (And why did those girls always have to be so pretty—with sun-bleached hair that looked so good blowing in the wind, and tans like butterscotch that made the sand on their legs sparkle like little diamonds?)

  So, you have to understand—it wasn’t that I didn't take my mom's disappearance seriously that first day. It was just that I loved Jacob Riker and I was 16 and the Beach Bus was coming and I'd left a note so, really, who would have noticed that there was no one else left in the world?

  That the world as we knew it had just ended?

  We certainly didn't.

  JOURNAL ENTRY #3

  Jay and I waited for the Beach Bus in front of Agoura High for over two hours before we finally got a clue.

  Perhaps if we hadn't been binging on leftover Halloween candy and gossiping about school (more fun without the education part) and boys (Jacob) and the Foxes (I'll get to them eventually), we would have been much quicker to notice that there was no one around.

  In fact, it must have been the fourth time we walked down to the corner to peek up Argos Street to see if the bus was coming—that we finally saw ‘it’.

  “Look over there…up near Thousand Oaks Boulevard,” I said to Jay. “That car. It's stopped right in the middle of the road.”

  “Has it always been there? I didn't hear an accident, did you?” asked Jay.

  “I'm not sure. I don’t think so.”

  Confused and a little worried, we began to slowly walk toward the car.

  “Well, this is weird,” said Jay.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Is it just me or has there been no traffic since we came outside?”

  I turned in a circle, looking back down Driver Avenue, then up Argos Street, and finally across Chumash Park to Medea Valley Drive. Sure enough, I couldn't see any movement at all.

  “There aren’t any cars anywhere—except the parked ones and that one in the middle of the road. Come to think of it, I don't see any people moving about anywhere either.”

  “Okay, this is getting, like “Walking Dead”-weird,” said Jay, cocking her head like a bird, “because
I'm not hearing any traffic from the 101 either.”

  Where we live in Agoura Hills, our townhouse complex is close to the 101 Freeway. And because our particular townhouses are on a bit of a hill, the noise from the freeway traffic is a constant buzz and whirr.

  The only times we don’t hear the traffic is when...

  “Fire!!”

  True Southern California girls, our heads started whipping about, searching for the signs that we both knew way too well—the smoke, the snow-like ash drifting casually toward the ground, the acidity in the air making it difficult to breathe, the dark, billowing clouds as they slowly swallowed up the sky.

  But yesterday morning—like today—the sky wasn't just clear. It was bright blue. In fact, it was more clear and more lovely than Jay and I have ever seen it in our smog-filled Los Angeles-suburb lives.

  “I don't think it's a fire,” I finally concluded.

  “Then how come we don't hear any traffic?” asked Jay. “It doesn't make any sense otherwise.”

  “Well, when the terrorists attacked New York in 2001, my mom said that they closed down the airports and some of the roads. She said that it was really quiet then. Maybe there's been, like a terrorist attack somewhere. People could be in their homes, watching the news on t.v…maybe on CNN or Fox or something.”

  “Well, if they are,” said Jay, “then that means that the power is probably back on. So, maybe we should go back and charge our phones up before we go down to Zuma. We can always catch a later bus if nothing has happened. Or your mom will be back and she can drive us.”