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normal, but I had mascara zombie eyes, and where I’d had bright red lipstick on earlier, it looked like it had sort of smeared itself all over my chin; even my nose had gone Rudolf. No hope Sarah would have makeup remover, so I wet a piece of toilet paper, dabbed it in the soap, and wiped at my chin.
    It wasn’t really lipstick at all; it was my first ever full-blown kissing rash, and it stung. It really stung.
    Nothing I could do about it, so I quickly scrubbed at the mascara disaster. Their soap—which wasn’t like the soap we had at home but some organic, lentil-based, gray-green thing—was useless. It didn’t even foam up, so that was it, then: I was half black-eyed zombie, half human cherry. Mortifying. Seriously mortifying.
    â€œC’mon, get out!” shouted Caspar through the bathroom door. “Molly wants to puke!”
    Great. I had to face him knowing what the face I was facing him with looked like. We opened the door, and Molly burst in, about to be sick. Under normal friendship circumstances, it would have been our duty to stay with her—but, honestly, just listening to her made my own stomach start to heave. It was bad enough looking like a mutant in front of Caspar—I definitely did not want him to witness me spewing my guts out, so I grabbed Lee’s hand, and we went back downstairs.
    We passed Zak’s room on the way, where he and Ronnie were bickering for control of the computer. (“Why’s it so slow?! Just click there,” Zak was saying, trying to grab hold of the mouse. “Just click on it!”)
    In the kitchen, the radio people had moved on to discussing plants for dry, shady borders—which is a serious problem, apparently, and was not nearly as funny as the earlier part of the broadcast. Barnaby looked as if he was in a trance, staring out the kitchen window at… OK, so now the party had been totally spoiled; it was raining. None of us had noticed. Why would we? We’d been too busy laughing our heads off.
    â€œI think you all need to sober up,” said Sarah, handing out glass after glass of water. “Leonie, can you please put the kettle on?”
    â€œYesSarahYes,” Lee slurred, glugging her water.
    Barnaby grabbed his cell phone and started jabbing at it, trying different numbers.
    â€œ..,” he said, having trouble getting through.
    Then Gardeners’ Question Time stopped. It just stopped.
    Then it started.
    â€œThis is an emergency public service broadcast…”
    â€œThe rain—” That’s all I remember hearing to begin with. “It’s in the rain,” and everyone staring at the radio as if it were a TV. That’s how hard we all stared at it—everyone except Barnaby, who dropped his cell and went out to try the phone in the hall.
    Lee shoved the kettle on the stove and came and held my hand, the one that wasn’t gripping Caspar’s.
    â€œRu,” whispered Lee. “Do you think we’re gonna die or something?”
    â€œNo!” I said.
    Of course no one was gonna die!
    My mom was out at the neighbors’ barbecue.
    It’s in the rain.
    I felt as if I was the last person to get what was going on. I stood in that kitchen, shivering—I leaned into Caspar’s body, but even that felt cold—and finally I sort of started to get it. See, for days there’d been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic—outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some new kind of disease thing, deadly, but, well, it wasn’t here, was it? Not like the bird-flu thing when Simon (who was probably more worried about the birds) had gotten all worked up. So had a lot of people. (OK, so had I; it gave me nightmares.) But this? It was so… remote —that’s the word—that we never paid any attention to it. Ronnie had tried to tell us about it, I remember that, and we had all rolled our eyes and told him to shut