The Rain by Virginia Bergin

hours. Max.
    I suppose the other way in which quarantine is a joke is that you can’t get it from having a sick person just breathe on you or something. It can’t get into you
through your lungs. Incredibly, I’m with the space bug on this one; before I dropped biology we did ‘the respiratory system’ and I didn’t get it either.
    To get sick from a sick person, you have to actually get the sick person’s blood on you, on your skin. Or a dead person’s? I don’t know. Who
would
know? That, like a
lot of other stuff, isn’t exactly the kind of thing anyone’s going to be in a rush to test out.
    (I mean, really, what kind of an idiot would think, ‘Hmm, I wonder if this lovely fresh apple I just picked is OK? Maybe I’ll take a great big bite and see . . .’)
    In fact, there’s plenty of stuff people don’t know (even if they say they do), so my advice would be . . . well, Simon said it on his list. Don’t do this, don’t do that.
Otherwise, basically, you’ve had it.
    To anyone living in the future my advice would be that if there’s an asteroid heading towards your planet, either blow it up when it’s NOWHERE NEAR your gravity, or
else move planets.
    Is there anything positive to add? Apart from no one is ever going to find that phone bill under your bed or make you walk anywhere ever again when it’s chucking it
down?
    Yes! IT COULD BE WORSE!
    It could be, apparently. There’s moisture in the air, isn’t there? There are teensy droplets of water everywhere. I don’t just mean when you get dew or condensation or stuff
like that; I mean really, really teensy droplets that you can’t even see. Simon showed me a picture in a newspaper once:
Dew on a damselfly
. I remember precisely which kind of wee
winged beastie it was because although I just said, ‘Oh wow, yeah,’ or something like that when Simon showed me, it was so OH WOW! YEAH! I looked it up on the internet myself after. It
was ay-may-zing! This little boggle-eyed alien-looking critter covered – COVERED – in teensy weensy globules of water.
    A while after this whole thing started, I remembered that picture. I remembered it and it made me paranoid for about five minutes . . . but then it made me understand what Simon said the
scientists had been going on about: that you’ve gotta get hit by a certain number, a certain volume, of bacteria to get got, otherwise your body
can
fight back. But what that certain
number is? You can add that to the list of things only an idiot would try to figure out.
    Drip. Drip. Drop. Dead.
    That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.
    Hold on; if there’s one thing they tried to drum into us at school – and actually there were about five million things they tried to drum into us, day in, day out – it’s
that it’s no good just repeating facts. No, for top marks it is important not just to bleat what someone else has told you, but to show that you are capable of actually thinking about what it
is you have learned.
    Sooooo . . . in conclusion . . .
    What I think, really, is that this should have been the moment in human history when teenagers should have taken over the Earth (a bit like they said cockroaches would do in the event of nuclear
war, but obviously we’re a lot nicer than cockroaches).
    Think about it: we don’t like to go outside when it’s raining; we don’t like drinking water (it’s boring); we don’t like eating fresh fruit and vegetables (because
the THEY are always going on about how we should).
    We’d have had to have got over the need to shower – but, frankly, I hadn’t used soap on my face for at least a month (since Lee read an article that said it gave you premature
wrinkles) and I can fully vouch for the cleansing properties of babywipes. The showering: we would have got over it. We would have had to. We are, actually, very capable of adapting.
    If this sounds like a joke to you, read on and think on . . . because the other thing about us teenagers is that