By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale

“Grandmommy, tell me the story of 2020,” the little girl begged.

“Are you sure, sweetie? The story of 2020 is not for the faint of heart. I don’t know if your mom would want me to—”

“I won’t tell her you told me. I’m old enough,” she declared. It would be their secret.

“Alright, but promise me you’ll stop me if you get too scared.”

The girl crossed her heart.

“It all started in March, at your aunt’s chorus concert. We were jammed into the school cafeteria for Fine Arts Night and one of the teachers told me to get ready for virtual learning because they’d gotten a memo about it. Virtual learning, I wondered. What’s that? Someone in front of me coughed, and I remembered the coronavirus I’d been hearing so much about on the news. That evening when I got home, I got an email that they were closing schools for a week. The virtual learning had commenced. One by one, emails came in canceling sports, church, the dentist, and closing the gym and yoga. My conferences and work projects got postponed. Everything ground to a halt.”

“Ba-ba-bummmm,” the girl chimed in dramatically.

“Indeed. I thought, what a delightful opportunity to take a little break. We’d sleep in, wave at teachers through our Chromebooks. What an adventure! We could handle one week. Your mom was thrilled. She hated school. Your uncle was indifferent. He hunkered down in the dank basement like a bat. Your aunt missed school but made the best of it, running around the yard barefoot playing with birds and squirrels.”

“Like Cinderella,” the little girl said.

“Just like Cinderella. And there was singing and dancing and everyone was happy to help out. And then at the end of that one week, the school system emailed that there would be a second one just like it. A smidge of nervousness rippled through my body. Another week? Fine. We would do it. For America. So I became the cafeteria lady, the PE teacher, and the really terrible math tutor. Your mom and I took walks. Your aunt and I did yoga together. And I made your uncle leave the basement every day to ride his bike in the fresh air. Part of me wondered if he’d burst into flame when the sunlight hit him.”

“D-did he … flame?”

“He did not. Although he did blister up pretty bad one time. I started spending my nights panic-swiping.”

“Panic-wiping?”

“No, that’s what people were doing with all the toilet paper. I was panic-swiping. You know, doom-scrolling on my phone. We survived a week, then another, then another. I agreed to participate in a virtual summit of women leaders on peace in the pandemic—"

“Were you a woman leader, Grammy?”

“That is debatable, dear. It was a hard time but it was a hopeful time. We were all being our best selves. We thought if we could work hard and get through April sheltering in place, we’d still have the summer. Also, there were murder hornets. No one ever really knew how that turned out and we lived with the low-grade fear, like a dangling plot point in a movie that at any minute could contribute to the big twist at the end.”

“Murder hornets?!”

“Anything with murder in the title is a bit overdramatic, but that was 2020. Murder hornets just made sense. Then they canceled the rest of the school year, but we clung to the hope we’d still have the summer. I wrote an article sharing fun ideas for virtual happy hours. We would get through this, with each other and the power of positivity. We were coming together like the war times of yore, like Rosie the Riveter, but on Zoom. Then they canceled summer.”

“They could do that? Cancel the whole summer?” The little girl leaned forward, wide-eyed. Summer was her favorite.

“They could and they did. One by one, the summer plans died. First swim team, then vacation, then concerts, then camps. Then my book launch got postponed and that’s when I started telling people I had career blue balls.”

“What’re blue balls?” the little girl asked.

“Never mind. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten any real writing done, but I’d worked fourteen jigsaw puzzles and binged the first four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the kids. Your mother developed a crush on Spike, which explains a lot about your dad, sweetie.”

“Wasn’t your first dog named Spike, Grammy?”

“The allure of Spike spans generations, sweetie. Anyhoo, I would describe my emotional state as stabby. I became very stabby and started jogging a lot to keep from killing everyone in their sleep. Because you see, dear, I wasn’t sleeping. I spent every night scrolling, the whites of my eyes reflecting off the luminescent face of my phone, looking at daily Covid numbers and reading articles containing phrases like “death toll” and “superspreader.” I started working facts about “fomite transmission” and “antigens” into regular conversations.

“What’s a-a fomite?” she asked.

“It’s why the world ran out of wipes, dear. First the toilet paper went, then the hand sanitizer, and then the wipes. Everyone was wiping everything.”

“Ew.” The girl wrinkled her nose.

“I started to go full Jack Torrance. I couldn’t sleep, and every time I did fall asleep, I’d have nightmares about accidentally hugging someone and everyone getting mad at me.

“Mad at you for hugging? Hugging was bad?”

“In 2020 it was very bad. I was a hugger, and there was no hugging that year. I fantasized about getting sweaty in a mosh pit with friends at a bar with a 90s cover band.”

“What’s a mosh pit?”

“That’s a story for another day, but in 2020, there was no hugging and no breathing on each other. We covered our faces with masks and goggles and shields.”

“Like ninjas?”

“Like dental hygienists.”

“Who’s Jack Torrance?”

“Bad dad, rough backstory. I started to lose it and realized I hadn’t been writing. I needed to start writing again if I was going to survive this and also not take out my whole family with an axe.”

“Grammy?”

“I told you this was a scary story. Need me to stop?”

The girl narrowed her eyes, stared thoughtfully, then said, “Keep going. I can take it.”

“Right on. I put away the puzzles and started writing again, but I couldn’t write about family and parenting and tenderness; oh no, those days were gone. As I started writing, I realized I wanted to kill someone. You have to remember, honey, I was trapped in a house with teenagers.”

“My mom?”

“YEAH. Your mom. Around this time she gave herself a prison tat on her ankle. It might still be there. You should ask her about that. It was a dark time. People kept killing Black people. Society split into two factions, the masked, and the unmasked. We had to decide between continuing virtual school and suffering crippling mental health issues, or sending the kids to school and risking exposure to the virus. To cope, I started writing again, but instead of fun stories of parenting, I created fictional teenagers and put them in terrifying situations. Every day, I tortured these made up teens on my laptop. I filled their world with monsters and they never had a moment’s rest. Although they did get to leave the house, so you could say even with monsters stalking them, they were living better lives than us. And then the election came.”

“What’s an election?” the girl asked.

“Oh that’s right, honey. See, before 2020, we lived in this kind of country called a democracy. It was a wonderful place, although we took it for granted. So in the middle of the pandemic, and the lockdown, and the murder hornets, and the racism, and the virtual learning, and the death toll, everybody flew flags and put up yard signs and argued and voted. And I kept writing, because I couldn’t control what happened out there in the world, but on my laptop, these characters were my bitc—"

“Your what, Grammy?”

“My friends! My friends, sweetie. And I hung out with them when I couldn’t hang with real friends, and I dreamed about them, and talked to them, and that’s how I ended up writing a YA horror novel instead of murder.”

“Oh! Whatever happened to the murder hornets?”

“No one knows. Probably flew off with the toilet paper.”