“This bubble must to be lapping over.”
“Overlapping.”
“Yes. Over-lapping,” he said. “The small bubble must be over the lap of the big bubble.”
I tried again, but I squeezed too hard.
“Too big! Too big,” J.Lo said, and now his wonton hand was forcing back a laugh, which honked out around the edges like he had an invisible trumpet.
“C’mon,” I said, “it can’t be that funny. I’m really trying, here.”
“Yes…snnrx…yesss. I am sorry,” he said, hopping up and down. “It is only that you have not written ‘Gratuity’ now, but instead a rude word for ‘elbow.’”
“The Boov have a rude word for ‘elbow’?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a very advanced race.”
“You see? I am saying.”
“Anyway.” I sighed and put the baster down. “YOU have no room to laugh, that’s all. I’m not doing any worse with Boovish than you did with English.”
“Get off of the car,” J.Lo huffed. “I am an English superstar.”
“Uh-uh. There’s no comparison. ‘Gratuity’ in written Boovish has seventeen different bubbles that all have to be the right size and in the right place. ‘J.Lo’ in written English only has three letters, and you still spelled it ‘M—smiley face—pound sign.’”
Thunder cracked again. It was kind of all bark and no bite now. It was drizzling so lightly that we were actually sitting on top of the car. I slid off the roof and looked over the edge of the building to the falling floodwaters below. It made me think of someone else who’d found himself on a high place after the rain stopped.
“I told you,” said J.Lo as he joined me. “Was not a ‘smiley face.’ Was a ‘five.’”
“You know,” I said, “we have a story in the Bible about a flood. God tells this guy named Noah to build a boat big enough for his family and two of every animal on Earth. Then it rains for forty days and nights.”
“Huhn. This is very interesting,” said J.Lo. “The Boov have a religion story about a girl who keeps all the animals into a big jar of water for when there is a year of no rain.”
“Do they make it through the year okay?”
“No. She forgets to punch the airholes and they die of asphyxiation.”
“Ah.”
Soon it would be dry enough to leave. The water had dropped, leaving a dark bathtub ring on every building in the city. The clouds were even breaking up, and needles of sunlight poked through. It was also perfectly possible to see the Gorg’s big purple ship again.
And I wondered what it was like for Noah, thinking the rain had stopped and the worst was over, but no—he still had a family and about a million animals to lead down a mountain. And he had to find a place to live, and build shelter, and start the whole world over again.
“When I was a little girl,” I said, sitting down, “the wallpaper in my room had pictures of the Noah story.”
“Pictures of forty nights of raining?”
“Well, no,” I said. Now that I thought about it, that wallpaper didn’t show any rain at all. Wasn’t rain the whole point? “No, it had cute pictures of Noah’s ark. His boat. Adorable little zebras and elephants and things. It’s a popular story for little kids, I guess because of the animals.”
“Little people like the animals,” said J.Lo, nodding and folding his hands. “Is true with the Boov as well.”
“You know what’s weird, though? It’s weird that the ark would be such a kids’ story, you know? I mean, it’s…really a story about death. Every person who isn’t in Noah’s family? They die. Every animal, apart from the two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It’s the worst tragedy ever,” I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest. I’d been speaking too fast without breathing, and I sucked down air before speaking again.
“What the hell,” I said, “pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?”
J.Lo understood me well enough by now not to answer. So I looked off to the west in silence, and saw a thousand miles of hopeless wasteland before we reached Arizona, with only a terrible new purple god to watch over it
J.Lo’s hand was on my shoulder suddenly, and he said, “Rainbow.”
I looked up. First at him and then at the sky where he was pointing.
“A doubled rainbow,” he said. “These are lucky. I have been missing rainbows. On Boovworld we had them alls the time.”
It was a perfect, bright, unbroken rainbow stretching over the western horizon like a door. It was so beautiful it looked fake. Above it was another, fainter one in reverse, and I exhaled and thought, Of course. Of course there’s a rainbow. ’Bout time. We sat and looked at it for ten minutes. I stared until I couldn’t stand sitting still any longer.
I hopped up. “We should go. Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s safe to go now?”
J.Lo looked at me funny. He probably wondered why I was smiling.
“Yes. I am thinking it is. Safe. Safe for going.”
“We have a lot of ground to cover, after all,” I said, bounding back to the car. “It’ll be at least a few days before we get to Arizona. And once we’re there, we have to help everyone get rid of the Gorg. Or the Takers. Whatever you want to call them.”
“Get…get rid of—?”
“We’ll do it,” I said, looking J.Lo square in the face. “I think we will. But I’ll…we’ll…y’know—need your help, maybe.”
“Yes. Okay, then.”
The sun was really coming through now, and birds were beginning to test the air. A cool breeze that smelled like pennies brushed my face. We got back in the car, and I hopped it down through the construction, landing again and again on an extra-thick cushion of whatever it was that made Slushious float. Each time we dropped to a lower story, my stomach leaped like I had a rabbit in me. At least once I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. And when we reached the surface of the great big wading pool that was Florida, I turned west, speeding into a beautiful day that seemed more and more like a promise.
“I’m sorry, but it’s still pulling to the left,” I said as I drove Slushious through a really nowhere part of Texas. J.Lo had made a new fin out of the side of a green Dumpster, but it wasn’t adjusted right.