Page 74 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

Is evil doingsomething? Or doingnothing?

The woman speaks, the high wind whipping her words out to sea. The trees are starting to bend, and ripples move across the surface of the pool water. There’s a storm coming. A big one.

Nature knows how to clean house. It keeps trying, doesn’t it?

Mammoth hurricanes and cyclones, raging wildfires, a pandemic that kills millions, devastating earthquakes, tsunamis. Social media. Ha ha. That’s a joke—but not really. Has anything hurt us more? Has anything unstitched the fabric of our humanity more than the things that we have devised to entertain ourselves? Humankind destroys itself with brilliant creativity, but everything comes from mother earth, even technology. There’s nothing more brutally organic than the human mind and all its diabolical inventions.

The three just stand there for a moment. They look at their feet. They are statues. Frozen on the precipice. Finally, after long moments pass, the woman kneels beside the mound at their feet a moment and bows her head as if praying. Then she rises and nods.

The two men lift the load, heaving it with all their strength over the wall. The carpet unfurls and whatever was inside disappears over the edge. The wind is too loud to hear anything—a scream, a crash—but the skein of fabric flaps in the wind like a great flag.

They pull it in and fold it up into a square.

The big man crumbles. Even over the heavy wind, his wails can be heard.

The other two stand, unmoved.

What is the greater evil?

To commit a heinous act?

Or to do nothing at all?

The truth is rarely simple.

End recording.

25

VIOLET

Violet tried not to zone out as Mr. Fieldstone talked on excitedly about the six functions of an angle—sine, cosine, tangent, co-whatever whatever. She scribbled dutifully in her notebook.

Could someone please explainwhymath? What people would ever use any of it ever again after they took the AP exam? Mr. Fieldstone was famous for saying,There is no why in math. It just is. Relish in that simplicity. Because for too few things in life is that true.

Which made no sense at all to Violet. Because that was all she ever thought about: Why? Why did she have to get her period? Every single month? Why was her skin breaking out? Why were boys all so vacant, staring only ever at their devices?

Why was everything so…hard?

She used to enjoy Mr. Fieldstone and the geeky thrill he seemed to get out of numbers. Even if she didn’t share his enthusiasm exactly, it was contagious. It reminded Violet of her dad and how excited he was about everything, especially science, especially any project she or Blake was working on. He wasintoit. He’d get this gleam, and his hands would fly when he talked about chemistry or geology,when they had to build something. And that energy made them excited, too. But then he was gone.

Her momtried; she really did. But school projects were just another stressor after Dad left them broke, alone. Sometimes it seemed like he’d taken all the joy with him. All the fun, too. But Violet never said that to her mom because she knew how much that would hurt. Her mom was fun, too, in different ways. When Violet finally accepted that her father wasn’t coming back and what everyone said about him was probably true, Mr. Fieldstone’s math joy started to make her sad. She wasn’t doing well, barely clinging to her low B.

To Violet’s right, her best friend Coral, whose jet-black hair was tipped with hot-pink this week, was leaning her cheek against her fist, and her eyes were closed. Was she sleeping? Coral was doing even worse than Violet, despite her extraordinary aptitude, and Mr. Fieldstone had gently suggested that Coral either start paying attention or drop down to Honors or even Basic. Which she could not do because Coral’s mother was the original bulldozer parent, still clinging to the idea that Coral was going to be a concert pianist, a professional soccer player, and an Ivy League student. Coral, it was pretty clear, would be none of those things.

Violet kicked her friend’s stool, and Coral sat up blinking.

“Is it over?” she said too loudly, earning a frown from Mr. Fieldstone.

“No.” Violet nodded toward the clock. Unbelievably they still had fifteen minutes to go. Had time stopped completely?

“For frack’s sake,” said Coral, who was trying to swear less since a guy she was talking to on Pop said that girls who use curse words was a turnoff for him. Which Violet thought was misogynistic and small-minded, andthatwas a major turnoff for her. But Coral was into him—though she’d never spoken to him, or even seen him on FaceTime. Sharif was a long boarder in Morocco according to his Photogram profile.Of course, he could be a housewife in Tacoma, or an incel in Miami, for all they knew. Still, it was a kind of fiction that worked for a while, since real, actual, flesh-and-blood boys seemed barely conscious—into VR or whatever girl they were talking to online or lost toRed Worldor some other game.

Mr. Fieldstone had stopped talking. Shoot. What had she missed? Now he was handing back quizzes. From the groans and heads slumped into hands, Violet deduced that things weren’t going to go well. She hustled to scribble down the last of the notes on the board since she’d missed the end of his lecture.

“Oh, fraggle,” said Coral, holding up her quiz emblazoned with a big red D.

Mr. Fieldstone handed Violet her paper. He was tall and doughy, wearing a perpetual sweater-vest in any weather, even though he was always perspiring a little. He stared at them menacingly over his round wire specs. “You can both do better.”

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