Nobody will ever believe Celeste when she tells them, much later, that she was thinking about earthquakes at the moment when the Big One finally came.
Specifically, she’s thinking about the word terremoto, which she learned just this week in AP Spanish, and which is so much better and scarier than the English word, sounding almost like the thing itself as it trembles your tongue. This is the kind of stuff Celeste thinks about all the time, only ever speaking the thoughts to her mom, who appreciates nerdy things, and to Nicky, who appreciates everything.
There’s an attic room at the top of Celeste’s family’s house that’s almost too small to stand in. Technically it’s storage, but Celeste claimed it last year to get some space from her parents, wedging her stuff in the corners, making it cute with piles of thrift-store pillows. Ursa takes up half the floor space lying down, wiry quills of her black fur stuck in the rug for good, since nobody ever wants to drag the vacuum upstairs. The two of them are alone up there—Celeste doing Spanish homework, Ursa lying in her usual watchful mound—when the shaking starts. Right before, the house was so quiet that they could hear the kitchen clock ticking all the way downstairs. No wind, which is strange up here on the hill, where the wind can tear up trees and Pride flags.
This one isn’t at all like the quakes Celeste has felt before, little bumps that woke her up, no more consequential than if they’d happened in a dream. Instead there’s a tangible stillness, then a weird second or two of faint vibration in her skin. The dog lifts her head sharply, as if alert to some intruder—and then a jolt, the slap of a giant hand, and the house seems to slide across the street and back again. Celeste is knocked back onto the pillows. Then the bed lurches, dumping her on the floor the instant she starts to scream. Everything blurs, but she scrambles to her knees, gasping “Fuck fuck fuck,” clutching the carpet, her mouth filling with blood. Ursa’s barking her head off, her huge body swaying. Above them, the bookcase starts to lean and rattle. Some old advice pops into Celeste’s brain, and she drags the dog under the desk just as the photos and records and books start cascading off the shelves. Her Jupiter lamp pinballs across the room and bursts into shards. Downstairs, there’s a terrible chorus of clanging and pounding, shattering glass—then a long, blistery shriek that will turn out to be the noise of a seam splitting open down the center of the stairs.
Celeste squeezes her eyes shut and buries her face in Ursa’s fur. She tries to think of what to do, how to save their lives, but instead she can’t stop thinking about how pissed she is at Nicky. If he’d showed up at the library after school like they’d planned, she’d be there with him instead of here, alone. But he stood her up again—in fact, she didn’t even see him at lunch, and he hasn’t returned her texts all day. Celeste knows why he’s acting this way, but that doesn’t make it easier.
Finally the house stops shaking, but Celeste’s body doesn’t. Her eyes burn; her heart’s a hammer. Her tongue swells and bleeds. The air is thick with white dust, and there’s a gravelly sifting noise and the sound of something heavy tumbling down the stairs. Ursa’s panting, soaked with drool, her claws sunk in the rug. Celeste forces her trembling hand to stroke the dog’s head. She’s afraid to move—maybe the house could crumble with one wrong step—but she’s suffered through enough drills, as mandatory as math at San Francisco schools, to know that it’s better to get outside for the aftershocks. She manages to find her feet, Ursa scrambling to her side.
They tiptoe through the mess. Celeste grips Ursa’s collar and steadies herself on the wall. At least the little box of her room seems basically intact, if not the precious stuff inside. Amazing garage sale turntable smashed flat in the corner. Big geode from Joshua Tree pulverized in sparkly bits. And her gorgeous
Mars Pioneer—a delicate, painstakingly half built model of the shuttle that will launch in May. It’d been perched carefully on her otherwise messy desk, a project started with Nicky that languished in recent weeks, since everything with him got so weird. Today there was a test flight of the
Pioneer heat-shield system—they were supposed to watch it together at the library, but Nicky ghosted her. Now all Celeste can see of the model is a cracked wing pinned under a pile of books. She feels desperate to rescue it, maybe to gather a bag of stuff, or even check the rest of the house, but then there’s another little jolt—
We have to get out NOW.
Her backpack’s by the door with her diabetes bag inside, Ursa’s harness tangled on top, so she clips the dog in, grabs the backpack, and runs. At the stairs, they recoil: A jagged maw runs all the way from top to bottom, the wood and plaster split open. The dust in the air is heavier now, and there’s a chemical smell, maybe the stinking guts of the stairs or something worse. Celeste covers her mouth with her sweater and tightens the leash. Ursa’s too big and clumsy for this, but she’d jump through fire for Celeste, so they climb down as fast as they can, the dog clambering ahead, her paw pads catching on the splintered wood.
Outside, Celeste gasps for breath with a feeling of relief that lasts about a millisecond. She’s always thought the shaking itself would be the freakiest part of a big quake, but it turns out the sounds are worse: car alarms blaring, terrified shouts hanging in the sky. Sirens already wail in the distance, too, and they won’t go away for days, endlessly approaching and retreating. Ursa wildly sniffs the air, her black eyes wide and wet. There’s a weird yellow haze, but at least it feels slightly safer out here, with neighbors trickling onto the street. Mrs. Toy stumbles out of the house next door in tears. She hugs Celeste, babbling about her parents, and says when it’s safe, she’ll go inside for some almond cookies, which Celeste remembers eating with tea, eons ago, on Mrs. Toy’s plastic-covered couch. One of the neighbor nannies rushes up to them clutching a baby, distracting Mrs. Toy long enough for Celeste to sneak away and plant herself on the curb.
Her head’s a little swimmy, her mouth still tasting of metal. She fumbles in her bag for her phone. No service. She stares at the useless screen. Her mom and dad are both at work, or maybe heading home already, stuck on the road? A car is one of the safer places, Celeste remembers from some YouTube video, but then she also remembers a video from the ’89 quake—those cars tumbling into the broken gulf of the freeway in Oakland. Thinking of that makes her want to vomit into the gutter, so instead she thinks about Nicky.
Where could he be? The fact that she doesn’t know is infuriating and strange. Not very long ago, the likelihood of the two of them being apart after school was basically zero. The few hours before dinner were always theirs together. They did homework, hung out reading in coffee shops, pretended to shop for shoes, listened to music at Celeste’s—rarely at Nicky’s, not since he moved in with his grandparents last year. Ever since the move, things haven’t been the same, but it’s only in the past couple of weeks, with Nicky stuck in such a shitty mess, that Celeste has started to worry about losing him altogether. Each time it takes him longer than a minute to text her back, she starts to panic. Now she scrolls through her photos just to look at him for a second, their goofy selfies with his wild grin, the thick brows she helps him wax into perfect crescent moons. She figures if there had to be a giant earthquake, at least one upside is that everyone might be too distracted to bother with Nicky’s shitty mess anymore. Maybe it will all just slip away in the chaos.
Copyright © 2026 by Susie Nadler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
