CHAPTER SEVEN
They found him in his bathroom, a gun on the floor five feet away. He hadn't been to school in three days, and there was a weekend between that. Five full days of no contact, so the school called the police, and the police sent an officer. The scene didn't faze him, not the way it once had. Now that the ash was here, the sun was gone, and the temperatures were barely above freezing at high noon, suicides were common.
The students weren't surprised either. As Arthur and the gang went into their geology class for another day with a substitute, an old man as grey as this new world rambled on tangents relating to geology rather than teach it (as he was a retired college geology professor, not ever a middle school teacher and not active for five years or more). They were used to this guy now, used to the idea that their old teacher disappeared after his rant.
They didn't expect the suicide, the noteless gunshot that should've stirred his subdivision's neighbors but didn't. When they heard "suicide," they weren't surprised because that was becoming common. But people usually left notes, sometimes written on paper, sometimes written on the ash that now settled everywhere, even inside cabinets rarely opened. Wherever there was ash, there was a place to write something, a miracle in the old days that was now so commonplace that teens quit drawing obscene figures and four-letter words and kept to their studies. Their geology teacher drew nothing, wrote nothing, and said nothing. It was like the ash choked him out of this world, covered him, and caused him to disappear just like everything else.
As the students walked home, they began to think about what their world was coming to. The ash was so thick most days now that engines couldn't run properly. Furnaces acted up daily, so many people were burning fires in their fireplaces or leaving their stoves on all the time, the doors slightly open in an attempt to warm the room. The Read's were doing that now, sleeping in the kitchen, where David and Arthur pulled the family's mattresses into one mega mattress after moving the breakfast table out of the room. How long before the power was affected too or the gas lines so even this became an impossibility?
Buster's fear was different but just as terrifying of the prospect of freezing to death. What if he could no longer breathe? What if he just tried to take a breath through his triple layer of masks, couldn't, and fell over dead? What if his mother died? What if his asthma medication went away, as the cost had tripled and the supply had dwindled to almost nothing? He had so many questions, so many fears, and he, like the others understood why their teacher had said what he said, why he'd done what he'd done.
As Muffy and Francine met up in her bedroom to flip through ash-covered tabloid magazines from before the eruptions, they silently were on the same thought path. Could they kill themselves? Could this disaster ever drive them to do such a thing? They both felt this would end eventually. It had to. The eruptions would stop, the ash would clear, and life would go on. That was their thought on the situation. But what if the negativity held? The headlines about people dying in-mass were becoming so common they were now numb to them. The politicians without answers, the analysts with the same vague answers, and the protestors begging politicians and scientists to make it all stop were old too. The girls were numb. Everyone was numb.
As they flipped their magazines, and as Brain read his books, and as their other classmates went about their afternoon activities, the weight of their teacher's suicide lay on their shoulders. Their thoughts kept returning to that burning question—Would I ever kill myself? None of them had an answer yet, but they knew that when that one big thing happened that made them decide it wasn't worth it anymore, their answer would be an unargued Yes.
