The alert came on Arrow’s fourth day at the new school. Tsunami Warning. Evacuate. Move toward higher ground. Arrow couldn’t get out of his seat fast enough. He jumped up and looked around like the water was at the doorway, about to crash in. He held his breath like the school was already submerged.
Ms. P., his English teacher, looked out the window once and then repeated his question: “Do you believe in fate or freewill?” This was supposed to lead them to Macbeth, to witches and prophecy. Ms. P. wanted them to “look into the seeds of time” but Arrow didn’t have time to look into the seeds of anything. No one in that room did.
When Ms. P moved to the corner of the class and leaned against the wall, crossing her arms casually, Arrow reluctantly sat back down. This school was mere blocks from the San Francisco Bay, that much he knew. How could he get to higher ground if no one was going to leave the classroom? They were on the second floor at least; he let that thought settle into his mind for a minute.
When the principal’s measured voice came over the loudspeaker, she told everyone to keep calm. They were getting answers from the Coast Guard, she said. And the police department was on alert.
But not God, Arrow thought. God – who would have the answers they needed – God was not being consulted.
“False alarm, I’m sure,” Ms. P. said. He wanted to believe her.
Next period – if there was one — he would move to Mr. Noll’s history class. Mr. Noll was not a good teacher – that much Arrow knew already. He kept changing his mind about everything. In Arrow’s first three days at the school, Mr. Noll had passed out an article on the founding fathers, taken it back, passed out another he never asked them to read, and gave them a quiz on a chapter in the textbook he had never assigned them to read. They had worksheets in class he never collected; Arrow watched his classmates throw their papers in the trash as soon as they walked out of the room.
At least here Ms. P. seemed to have a plan. He wished it was an evacuation plan, though.
Arrow’s phone buzzed. It was his mom. I’m at the curb get your brother and come out now Arrow got out of his seat again, put on his backpack and walked toward Ms. P in the corner.
“My mom’s here. She wants me to go. I need to get my brother, too.”
Ms. P uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, smiling. She looked like she was going to say something but then she didn’t.
“I’m serious. I gotta go.”
Ms. P had a detached form of kindness. Like she was in the room with them but not really. Like she was thinking about another segment of her life, just outside the panel. Arrow understood.
“I can’t let you go,” she said finally. You heard what the principal said. We should all stay indoors for now.”
Ms. P. started writing lines from Macbeth on the whiteboard, underlining and boxing words, making slash marks above syllables with different colored markers.
“How about we do this?” She told the class. “You tell me what makes this poetry.”
Arrow could feel the sweat on the back of his neck. The palms of his hands. His armpits.
“Where’s the poetry?” He could barely talk. “We need to get out of here.”
If Ms. P heard him, she didn’t react. She read out the passages and then answered threw out literary terms like confetti: “Imagery! Metaphor! Alliteration! Meter!”
Arrow looked around. Everyone else was on their phones – even Lucinda, the girl who volunteered to read all of Lady Macbeth’s part and said she had the “Unsex me here” soliloquy memorized. This was on Monday, Arrow’s first day. Ms. P didn’t believe Lucinda but then she got up and did it. Here she was ignoring the warning, taking pictures, posing like the tsunami was nothing. Meanwhile, Arrow couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t sit at all.
“Have a seat, Aaron.”
Not his name but no one knew him here. If they did, he could explain to them the frantic way his mom was texting him, the frantic way she explained they were moving, changing schools in the middle of the year.
Where r u? Do u have Shea?
Arrow knew she was panicking worse than he was. She taught him to panic but she was the best one at it still. Parked out there in front of the school with her car running, listening to the news, scrolling on her phone. Worry as prayer. Prayer as worry. He didn’t want her to spiral even more. She didn’t move them to California to get swallowed up by the ocean. She moved them there because it was a place they could maybe settle down and be happy.
Teacher won’t let me out, he started to text back but then deleted it to write Yeah. Coming.
Ms. P. looked vacantly at the door. She was done asking kids to find poetry. Arrow could practically see the ideas pass through her mind – like she might be considering a vocab lesson, a freewrite, a symbolism collage. Or maybe there were other thoughts. But none of them seemed to be get these kids to higher ground asap!
Maybe she was wondering why Arrow hadn’t just left already. Other kids would have left. But Arrow was new and polite and he followed the rules. Only now there were three sets of directions he was trying to follow: stay in your seat, get to higher ground, find your brother and come to the curb.
From a distance, he heard Lucinda read from her phone about tsunamis.
“So, they come from the displacement of the seafloor; you have to move the water. To move the water, you have to move the bottom of the ocean up or down.”
Even Ms. P. leaned in to listen. “Displacement of the seafloor.” She repeated slowly, enunciating each syllable. “Wow, I mean, there’s poetry in that!”
There was an attic in his mind and Arrow went there. There was an attic in his mind and he lived there when there was too much going on everywhere else.
What people saw if they saw him at all that day: new kid kinda quiet kinda fat trendy backpack expensive shoes standing in the center of the classroom cracking his knuckles. He might’ve been shifting his weight, one foot to the other to avoid the crunch of space in his mind, stuck there between storage boxes and old furniture under a sloped ceiling looking out a cracked window.
Lucinda kept going: “Looks like this warning is coming from an earthquake. The Mendocino Fault. The Mendocino Fault is a strike-slip fault where two sides of the earth slide past each other horizontally, like this.” She moved her hands to show everyone.
If two sides of the earth could slide past each other, he could slide past Ms. P. and out into the hallway. There was poetry in that, too. If Arrow could get himself to the hallway, he could get himself to the science hall and grab Shea from his biology class. If he could get Shea, they could both get to the attendance office, check out with an official off-campus pass and meet their mom waiting at the curb.
Arrow heard Ms. P. repeat the phrase “underwater landslides” twice but then he was out, standing in the hallway looking back in at the rest of them. He paused a second too long.
“Hey! Aaron!” Ms. P perked up and stepped into the hallway.
“I tried to tell you. I have to go.” Arrow almost apologized – but why? If the wave was on its way, he didn’t want his last words to be to Ms. P.
Ms. P stared at him but she didn’t speak so he turned and started walking down the hallway, down the stairs, across the quad, around the corner. Every other second he checked over his shoulder for the wall of water that surely must be building behind him. He was doing his best to outsmart the gigantic wave meant to sweep him away.
Arrow saw the metaphoric possibility in that if not the spiritual one. He would have to tell Ms. P. about it if they survived this. Looking over his shoulder for God felt futile. But to be wiped out, swept up, drowned just as his life was meant to be starting over. That was fate.
His mom wasn’t in her car, but it was running. She was pacing in front of the school and hugged both her sons as soon as they came out. They drove east away from the coast immediately, her hands shaking on the steering wheel and when the evacuation warning was called off forty minutes later, they turned around and drove back.
The next day, no one even talked about the tsunami. Ms. P. asked questions about power and blood and hands. She had moved beyond the seeds of time, and decided we could have both fate and freewill.
“Has anyone ever seen a ghost?” She wanted to know. Arrow felt his own isolation immediately – cabined, cribbed, confined – as Macbeth would say.
“Yeah,” he decided to answer.
“You have?” Ms. P walked toward Arrow’s desk. “Ooooh. Tell us!”
But Arrow never would. How could he say it?
I saw my own ghost yesterday. Didn’t you? Stuck in the swell one hundred feet high, suspended in the run-up, waiting to crash down?
Lisa Piazza is a writer, educator and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her short stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her essay on teaching during the pandemic was a finalist for the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize. She is currently an Assistant Poetry Editor for Porcupine Literary and a poetry reader for Lit Fox Books and The Los Angeles Review.