"Seriously?" she muttered, as the first real jolt hit.
But she clutched the paper tighter. Tomorrow, the power would come back. The roads would be cleared. And her fourth graders would still need to know the difference between P-waves and S-waves.
The shaking stopped. The silence returned, thick and heavy.
Somewhere in the dark, a car alarm chirped its final, dying note. Maya smiled. That was the sound of a real-world answer key.
She walked to the window. Sirens wailed in the distance. Across the street, Mr. Henderson was standing in his bathrobe, holding a single potted fern.
Maya stared at the blinking cursor on her laptop screen. The file name was a masterpiece of all-caps panic:
Maya fumbled for her phone, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it at her desk. The laptop was dark. The file was gone. No autosave. No cloud backup. Just the ghost of a PDF she’d spent three hours perfecting.
She looked around her ruined living room, then down at the quiz in her hands. She laughed—a high, hysterical sound. She had created a quiz about earthquakes, and the earth had decided to grade her first.