A bumper sticker on Mrs. Tweedy’s desk says, The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense. Her hair looks soft enough to sleep on. Seymour is expecting a reprimand; instead she says that the Environmental Awareness Club at Lakeport High went defunct a couple of years ago and how would Seymour feel about reviving it?
Out the windows, September light bends over the football field. At fifteen he’s old enough to understand that it’s not only his state of fatherlessness or his thrift store jeans or that he has to swallow sixty milligrams of buspirone every morning to keep the roar at bay: his differences run deeper. Other tenth-grade boys hunt elk or shoplift Red Bulls from Jacksons or smoke weed at the ski hill or cooperate in online battle squads. Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost = more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun’s energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he’s the only one looking.
Some nights, Eden’s Gate glowing beyond his bedroom curtain, he can almost hear dozens of colossal feedback loops churning all over the planet, rasping and grinding like great invisible millwheels in the sky.
Mrs. Tweedy taps the eraser of her pencil against her desk. “Hello? Earth to Seymour?”
* * *
He draws a tsunami rearing over a city. Stick-people run from doorways, throw themselves from windows. He prints ENVIRO-AWARENESS CLUB, TUESDAY, BREAK, ROOM 114 across the top and TOO LATE TO WAKE UP, ASSHOLES? across the bottom and Mrs. Tweedy tells him to erase ASSHOLES before she’ll make copies on the faculty copier.
The following Tuesday, eight kids show up. Seymour stands in front of the desks and reads from a crumpled sheet of notebook paper. “Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice. We’ve already killed most of the animals, and heated up the oceans, and brought carbon levels in the atmosphere to the highest point in eight hundred thousand years. Even if we stopped everything right now, like we all die today at lunch—no more cars, no more militaries, no more burgers—it’ll keep getting hotter for centuries. By the time we’re twenty-five? The amount of carbon in the air will have doubled again, which means hotter fires, bigger storms, worse floods. Corn, for example, won’t grow as well ten years from now. Ninety-five percent of what cows and chickens eat is guess what? Corn. So meat will be more expensive. Also when there’s more carbon in the air? Humans can’t think as clearly. So when we’re twenty-five, there will be way more hungry, scared, confused people stuck in traffic fleeing flooded or burning cities. Do you think we’re gonna sit in our cars solving climate problems then? Or are we gonna fist-fight and rape and eat each other?”
A junior girl says, “Did you just say rape and eat each other?”
A senior boy holds up a sheet of paper that says See-More Stool-Guy. Ha ha hilarity everywhere.
From the back Mrs. Tweedy says, “Those are some alarming predictions, Seymour, but maybe we could discuss a few steps we could take toward living more sustainably? Some actionable items within reach of a high school club?”
A sophomore named Janet wonders if they couldn’t ban plastic straws from the cafeteria and also give away reusable water bottles with the Lakeport Lion on them? They could also put, like, better posters over the recycling bins? Janet has frog patches sewn on her jean jacket and shiny black raven eyes and the ghost of a mustache on her upper lip and Seymour stands in front of the blackboard with his scrunched-up paper and the bell rings and Mrs. Tweedy says, “Next Tuesday, everybody, we’ll brainstorm more ideas,” and Seymour heads to biology.
* * *
He’s walking home from school later that day when a green Audi pulls up beside him and Janet rolls down the window. Her braces are pink and her eyes are a mix of blue and black and she has been to Seattle, Sacramento, and Park City, Utah, which was wild, they went river rafting and rock climbing and saw a porcupine climb a tree, has Seymour ever seen a porcupine?