Debbie Dent wore pastel pink to work on the day the world went straight to hell.

That morning she’d come by the coffee shop where I worked, batting her fake eyelashes and bragging about her lavish Bora Bora vacation with her stinking rich husband. I remember wondering who even goes to Bora Bora anymore these days and cringing when she stage-whispered that Lord, she didn’t know what she’d do if she had to eke out a living scraping up people’s crumbs and leftovers for a living every day.

The thing is, Debbie and I, we used to be friends when we were kids. That is, until one day, Debbie got mad at something or another I did to her doll and sent her big brother to beat me up. I was nine and he was eleven, but I did karate, so when he punched me in the gut, I tripped him and kicked him in the teeth. That’s how we wound up as petty rivals all though middle and high school. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Still holding a grudge, from time to time, she’d come into the café to spitefully strut her stuff and I would laugh a little bitterly on the inside.

Going on five years after throwing shade at me from her high horse in the café that last morning, Debbie’s pastel pink has turned a mottled yellow-green and become covered with moss. It’s the same moss that coats patches of her skin and has turned the sclerae of her eyes green.

That day, the virulent green had swept across the planet with lightning speed, infecting forty percent of the world’s population, turning them into mindless freaks. They were harmless, mostly, so we left them alone, letting them live like beasts out in the wild. Sometimes, though, they become either violent or weird like Debbie, who from time to time, comes all the way down to my street from 57th Avenue. She wanders around and sniffs at the air around my house for hours.

It’s nearly noon and she’s out there shuffling about. Any second now, I’m expecting her to lift a leg and pee on the shrubs by the front gate. She does that every single time. The padlock on the gate is new. She stares at it in confusion then looks up to the window where I’m watching her from with a semi-blank expression on her moss-ridden face. I wonder if she can see me. I wonder what she’s thinking. If she’s thinking.

There’s a sound behind me. I dropped the curtain and turned to my fourteen-year-old daughter, Katie. She’s wearing an old pair of faded jeans and a tatty old sweater that’s starting to unravel at the shirttail.

“She still out there?”

I nod.

Katie grimaces.

“Hey,” I probe. “I heard you moaning in your sleep. Did you have a bad dream?”

She’s seen a lot of weird stuff a kid her age shouldn’t have to. It makes me worry about her sometimes.

Katie shrugs, then bends to scratch at the tattered knee of her jeans. “I was dreaming about school.”

“School, huh?” I murmur.

People once gathered in places like that. Not so much anymore. Like most kids today, Katie does her learning in a virtual classroom from her laptop at home. She never leaves the house unaccompanied and isn’t allowed to go anywhere there’s a crowd. All she knows about high school and stuff like cheerleading, track meets, and homecoming dances is what she’s seen in movies and what I’ve told her of my own hazy memories of that time in my life.

Katie straightens, lifts the edge of the curtain, and peeks out the window. She inclines her head downward into Debbie Dent’s general direction. “What if,” she murmured. “What if we all become like her someday?”

I swallow hard and make a small discomfited noise in my throat. I can’t even open my stupid mouth allay my own child’s fear because I don’t have the answer. No one does.

Katie, though, she’s smart as a whip and resilient as heck. She notices my silent distress and she drops the edge of the curtain, swiftly changing the subject.

“You know, Mom,” she laughs a little, edging closer and leaning to wrap her slender, brown arms around my waist. “In my dream,” she looks up and flashes me her customary, crooked little grin.

“Everybody was dancing. It was so weird.”