I opened my eyes in my dark bedroom, frustrated. My visions of Theodore seemed stuck on that one night. Happy reunion, dancing, looking up at the stars. He mentioned the Spanish flu, which was the most relevant to what I needed to know, and then moved on with the most foreboding thought of all time.

The worst part was that I'd had the same thought about Cedric: we would be together forever.

We'd been Facetiming every day, and almost every night as I lay in bed I thought about how badly I wanted to hold him. The tears came easily in the dark. I tried not to cry when his face appeared on my screen. I avoided talking about COVID or his mother's job. Sometimes he talked about it, and the last time I lied and said I had to go to the bathroom so I could have a panic attack without him worrying.

Getting up, I dropped the postcard back into the cigar box and paced a bit. Maybe the postcard was only good for that particular span of memories. I dug through the box, pulling out Theodore's photographs and looking at each one. Most of them were taken after the San Francisco earthquake, and I didn't especially care to go further back. Maybe the photograph of who I thought was Theodore, sitting on a bed.

I glanced at the clock before placing it down beside the cigar box and sighing.

Since school had closed two weeks ago, I had yet to leave my house. The internet was full of helpful tips on what to do with lots of free time. Eli had been spending his time making TikTok videos and sending me so many links that I finally had to download the app to appease him. Scrolling through sucked up hours of my life.

Meanwhile, Cedric's dad was Marie Kondo'ing their house and Cedric spent a lot of time pretending he was sorting through his cassettes to see which ones he was going to get rid of, but really he was just reorganizing them. First alphabetically by band name, then by color, then by release year. He posted the pictures on Instagram, though I'd already seen them from all our video calls.

As if he knew I'd been thinking of him, my phone buzzed on the desk. I flicked it open and Cedric's face appeared.

"I'm making you a mix tape," he said, without preamble.

"Really?" I grinned for a brief moment, before I realized, "I don't think I have a cassette player."

"Damnit, James."

All my music was records. I sat down on my bed and flopped back. "This sucks."

"You know what? I'll send you a cassette player. I have, like, five of them. And Dad's gonna make me throw them out. Or four of them. Maybe I can convince him to let me keep one of the Walkmans and the radio. I don't know."

"Oh, you're gonna send it to me? Like in the mail?" I rolled onto my stomach.

"Yeah."

"Are you allowed to go to the post office? You know, with the shelter-in-place order?"

"Dude, didn't you hear? The governor extended that until May first. So, yeah, they can't keep me from going to the post office. I mean, they won't know what's in the package. It could be super essential."

Cedric said something else, but my mind was stuck on May first. That was a whole month from now. A month of staring at my own walls? I didn't think I could do it.

"We're gonna have to go to the grocery store," I mused.

"I can't believe you haven't gone out yet. FYI, the grocery store is crazy. They're only letting a certain number of people in at a time, and the aisles are all one-way. No toilet paper... yesterday there wasn't any yeast. Apparently everybody's baking bread."

I stood up and headed downstairs. "Everyone including my mom."

"Seriously? I didn't think your mom cooked."

Cedric said that just as I rounded into the kitchen, where Mom was cleaning up the flour-covered counter. The warm scent of baking bread filled the air, making my stomach growl.

"I take offense to that," Mom sang.

I shrugged. "Mom cooks. She just prefers takeout."

"I prefer to let the professionals do what they're trained to do. I'm helping the economy by ordering out, didn't you know?" Mom leaned in and waved at Cedric.

"You have masks, right?" Cedric asked. "You have to wear a mask to go in the grocery store. Gloves would probably be a good idea, too."

"You're going to the grocery store?" Mom asked me.

"No, I just... Cedric said the shelter-in-place order got extended. So we'll have to go at some point." I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down.

Mom turned on the oven light and checked inside. "I ordered some masks, don't worry. I ordered some on Etsy and then one of my Facebook friends was selling some, so I bought some from her, too. We'll see which ones come in first."

"Are they the N95 masks?" I asked. "I thought those were sold out everywhere."

"No, these are just cotton. You'll like the one I found for you on Etsy. It's right up your alley."

I turned back to Cedric. "Do you have a mask?"

"Oh, I have masks. Multiple masks." Cedric tilted his screen to show a series of hooks on his wall that hadn't been there before: two strips of wood with seven hooks each, labelled Sunday through Saturday. From each hook dangled a mask.

"Whoa," I said.

"Yeah, Dad put these up. This one's mine." Cedric pointed to the top row of hooks. "These days are the days Mom works, and we have to wear these after she gets home." Those were the N95 masks, which I guessed Mrs. McKinney had gotten from the hospital. "And these ones are for any other times we go out."

"Do you go out a lot?" Mom asked. "You should try not to leave the house unless you really need to."

I heard the unspoken concern there: Cedric shouldn't go out, because his mother worked at the hospital and could be spreading COVID all over town. Wincing slightly, I hoped Cedric hadn't caught that.

"Oh, we don't really go out to any place. But I've been going for bike rides and Dad brings us to hike up at Marsh Creek, and we usually wear masks while we're hiking."

"Maybe I could meet you to hike," I said, glancing at Mom.

"I don't think that's a good idea. Maybe once all this blows over," she said.

"But Cedric said the shelter-in-place is until May first!" I heard the hysteria in my voice and sucked in another breath.

"Hey, it's okay, James," Cedric started.

"Calm down, it isn't the end of the world," Mom said at the same time.

But now that I'd let some of the panic out, the rest wanted to follow. It all rushed out of me, so fast I dropped my phone on the counter. "May first is a month away! And what about school? Are we even going back to school? And what about prom? Prom's supposed to be at the beginning of May. Are we still going to have prom?"

I gulped in air, and staggered back until I hit one of the stools, then sat down. Mom was saying something, but I could barely hear her over the pounding in my ears. My chest hurt. I pushed at it with the heel of my hand. My heart was beating too fast. So fast that it was skipping beats. "I think I'm having a heart attack," I wheezed.

"It's just a panic attack," Mom said, approaching me. She stopped for a second, and peered at something on the counter. My phone. Cedric. "He'll call you back." She touched the screen, which went dark.

"No, I need to talk to Cedric," I said, my voice suddenly loud.

"James, I want you to breathe."

"I can't breathe! Didn't you hear me? I'm having a heart attack!"

Mom pulled out her own phone.

"Are you calling 911?" I demanded.

"No," she said, and put the phone down in front of me. There was a weird purple shape on the screen that was slowly expanding then contracting. "I downloaded this meditation app. Try to breathe in as it gets bigger, then breathe out as it gets smaller. Okay?"

She pushed the hair out of my face and I swatted her hands away. "My heart is doing something weird," I stressed. I tried to stand up but then felt dizzy and sat back down. "I'm having a heart attack."

"Just try breathing with the app, okay? It'll help slow your heart down."

I gaped at her. She smiled back encouragingly. Without anything else to focus on, I looked at the screen. The first few times, I couldn't breathe in for as long as the shape expanded. But watching it grow and shrink was oddly calming, and my heart tripped back into a slower rhythm.

"Good," Mom said after a couple of minutes. "You're doing good. Just keep on like that. Maybe you should join me for my yoga classes in the morning. I think that would help with your anxiety."

I ignored her and kept breathing. Mom got up at the crack of dawn to do her yoga practice for an hour and a half. She'd been doing it for years, and it seemed to be the one part of her daily schedule that she refused to give up. Now that I could barely sleep, I woke up to hear whatever weird Tibetan singing bowls or digeridoo music she played during her practice.

"It would probably be good for you to have some kind of a schedule. It helps to keep things feeling more normal."

"What would feel normal is if we could go back to school," I muttered. "What would feel normal is if I could see Cedric. For real, not on my phone."

Sighing out a deep breath, I rested my head down on my arms on the countertop. My head felt heavy. Everything felt heavy. I wanted to run out of the house, but at the same time I worried that if I went outside I'd somehow contract coronavirus. Goddamn Cedric was going all over the place. Riding his bike! Going on hikes! What was he thinking?

Mom returned to my side and rubbed her hand along my shoulders. "I know this is hard. It's hard for everyone. You just have to know that this isn't going to last forever."

"It feels like it's lasted forever already."

With a chuckle, Mom said, "You're right about that. Come on, honey. I can't have you losing it. You're the calm, collected one in this household."

At that I lifted my head, and the tears that had been building behind my closed eyes fell, even though I was smiling a little. "You seem to be a lot more calm than me about all of this."

"Well, I have been drinking more," she said, and we both laughed. She wiped at my cheeks and kissed my head. "You have a lot more at stake, I suppose. You have a boyfriend, and it's your senior year, and things are just very strange right now."

"Yeah."

"Okay, so let's try this: tomorrow we'll do some yoga together in the morning. Don't give me that look, I have some beginner yoga videos that I'm supposed to review for work and since I'm not a yoga beginner, I wasn't exactly sure how I'd really be able to do that. So you doing yoga with me will actually help me out, okay? And then we can both have oatmeal lattes for breakfast—"

"Oatmeal lattes?" I scrunched up my face. I wasn't a huge fan of coffee, or oatmeal.

"I got the recipe off Pinterest. It's like breakfast, and a morning coffee. Oh, come on, it'll be fun to try it. I also have to try that whipped coffee recipe that's on the TikToks—"

"Wait, you're on TikTok, too?"

Mom and I stared at each other across the kitchen. "You didn't tell me you were on the TikToks."

"Please don't call it 'The TikToks'."

"Well, you're eighteen, I suppose." Mom turned to peer at the bread in the oven again. "Anyway, we can have a fun day together tomorrow. Try something different! In between my morning Zoom calls and our staff meeting this afternoon."

I nodded. "Sure." I wasn't entirely sure, but I was ready for something different. Scooping up my phone, already dialing Cedric's number, I called over my shoulder as I headed upstairs, "Call me down when the bread is ready for eating!"

___

Did you make bread during the quarantine/lockdown?  After someone donated a bunch of flour to the library (yes, I'm serious - basically they ordered 10 pounds of flour online and didn't realize how much that was, and so offered the rest to us!), I attempted a yeastless bread.  It didn't come out very good...