All Year in a Summer

I still cannot think about what Michelle accomplished without thinking about what we did to her in the fourth grade. I see her on the newsscreen nearly every day, being thanked for righting our wrongs and putting broken things back together yadda yadda yadda and I remember how we just tormented her incessantly at Oak Wood Elementary School.

You see, Michelle was the only one of us who still believed in snow. We'd been living in heat year round for years, in bubbles of air conditioning carefully insulated from the sun's ever-intensifying rage. We went to school from our homes, looking at screens of teachers who told us about a history of seasons that none of us believed in. For years, people lived in a craze of seasons and ever-heating summers until they began to migrate far north and settle in the bubbles. Many died and countries and entire ways of life were nullified. But before that, there had been seasons. Four of them. In many parts of the world, my teacher said. I thought that was science fiction. But the teacher explained that people used to celebrate the snow by building sculptures with it or by "sledding". That seasons could cause strife or they could bring people together. Teacher desperately taught us that the world as we knew it could burn up if we continued to live the way in which we were living. They taught us to treat each other kindly and to treat the earth kindly, teaching from programs that were also desperate to undo the problems that humanity had caused.

But of course we were awful to each other, and to the world. How could we believe that things used to freeze, when all around us was melting or burning away?

But Michelle would click a button to raise a hand in class, she would talk incessantly about "global warming" and "climate crisis" and we told her to just shut up.

Then, one year, the heat seemed to let up for a month or so. The weather people said it was a freak blip in the world, but that we would eventually return to our regularly scheduled plan of suffocating heat.

But it continued to get colder. And one day, the weather people even looked surprised announcing the oncoming SNOWSTORM. It was unbelievable. And so we simply refused to believe it. We stayed in our bubbles and went to school. But one day, in class, Michelle announced that she was going to go outside during the snowstorm, that she was going to build a snowman, whatever that was. She was going on and on about it as per usual and would not stop. I was so tired of it. "She's going to burn up," said my friend Lola. "I know," I responded.

The day arrived. And it was cold, alright, I will admit. No rays of sun shone into our bubble. But no snow all school day. And then, near dinner time, it began to flurry. Lola called me on my Talki. I answered and she said "Let's seal up Michelle's door so that she can't get outside. Serves her right for exaggerating how bad this would be." So we put on our coats, the ones we only had in case of air conditioning malfunction, and walked to Michelle's bubble. We placed a padlock on the outside of the doorflap and sealed the rest with superglue.

What we hadn't realized was that Michelle was already outside, reveling in the snow. As we returned home, it began to snow harder and harder, and we became cold and afraid, finally watching the snow pile up and the wind howl outside from the cold comfort of our bubbles. We hadn't realized that Michelle was now stuck in a blizzard, until her parents later had to call the police and begin a manhunt for the shivering and sobbing child.

But serves us right. Because she continued to research the weather and seasons. She continued to work on a cure for the heat. She lobbied governments and protested the overuse of air conditioning systems that she argued contributed to "global warming". She eventually engineered a device that could be placed over the bubble and refine harmful substances from the air that contributed to pollution and global warming. She worked on engineering cooling devices and educating the public. She started organizations and programs. She gained a cult following and continued to research at the university level. Eventually, she was able to reverse so much damage that we began to see a bubble-free future. A future where we could actually know our neighbors, beyond screens and calls.

And Lola and I, well, we walked with heads hung low in shame. We had kids and sent them to schools that were open in public. We went for walks and grew plants. We began to learn about the world around us and to explore the harm that we had done to it in the past. We began to think about the pain that we had inflicted upon both the natural world and our peers, and we were ashamed and afraid. And maybe it was not the healthiest motivating force, but we began to work towards a future in which the planet was something that we cherished, something that we had a relationship with and not merely something that we used for profit.

We went on marches and we learned new methods of driving and cooking and cooling that were healthier for the planet. We joined programs and groups that had been inspired by Michelle and embarrassingly, we bragged that we had gone to school with her. It felt like a means of paying penance for the guilt that had followed us into our adults lives. Our adult lives that were lived in a world far from the cattiness of our youth.

One day, we went to a rally being led by Michelle. And in the middle of her speech, she raised her head at a small angle and locked eyes with me. She looked confused briefly, then smiled wide, her teeth white as falling snow.