An (Updated) History of the Modern World

It was an early September afternoon, the air stagnant with rare New England humidity, when the girl came to the island. She arrived with her father, the physician, from Boston. She was the first child ever allowed. An exception, The Council said, as they blew the conch shell like a horn, signaling the boat’s arrival. The new doctor was desperately needed; Dr. Potswitch had passed suddenly a week earlier, and the midwife was on the brink of exhaustion, between a salmonella outbreak from imported poultry, a set of newborn twins who decided to make an early appearance, and a pesky cough she’d caught.

We were curious, gathering at the water’s edge, our backpacks at our feet. School had let out minutes earlier, and we’d traveled as a pack from the one-story brick structure on Main Street, cutting across The Garden’s pristine velvet lawn and zigzagging around deep red rose bushes and purple hydrangeas. The young ones scrambled to keep up, urged on by their siblings.

The boat came twice a week to bring supplies—medicine for the clinic, meats and non-native produce, items our mothers and fathers had checked off on their weekly mailers—and to export lobsters and other rare seafood the elders harvested off our shores. A single pearl from the world’s diminishing oyster population could be bartered for nearly any urgent provision we needed. There were seasonal items that arrived on the boat too: in October, Halloween candies. In February, chocolate hearts. In the warmer months, sunscreen and bug spray.

Only rarely did the boat bring a new person, carefully vetted and approved by The Council. Someone who was needed. Always an adult: a pharmacist, an engineer, a carpenter. But never an outsider child. The island had rules.

The girl looked the same as us, we were disappointed to discover. Tall and lanky, small budding breasts. Freckles like some of us had across the bridge of our noses. She also smelled like us, her hair damp with sea spray.

Why are you smelling me? she asked. She stared at the ground. Up close her skin was pale, like beach sand.

What is your name? we replied.

But she moved away too quickly to respond, following her father into the town hall, where they were to be processed and frisked, the small bag of personal items they’d been allowed to bring carefully examined. We heard the shocked murmurs from outside the door, from where we unabashedly pressed our ears. Something found, something hidden. A sale-phone, they said. Sewn into the lining of the girl’s bag.

Won’t work here anyway, an elder muttered.

We raised our eyebrows while mouthing the foreign phrase. Testing it out. Sale-phone. A phone to sell things to people, one of the older kids declared, and a smidge of distrust appeared toward these newcomers. The Council had phones in their homes, but no one else.

There were rules to follow. Things not allowed on the island. It was why we existed like this, why the elders had come to the island over sixty years earlier. Society had grown too corrupt, too dangerous, the elders said. People were lost.

At school we learned about the larger world we’d left, the one whose gray-tinged mountains we could barely glimpse, on a clear day, from the top of the Porter-Smith Lighthouse. We had American History and Ancient Greek History and History of the Modern World. We had other subjects too: Algebra and Geometry. English. Latin and Chemistry. In the amphitheater, under the tutelage of the librarian, Mrs. Brenner, we performed annual plays the elders had written years earlier: the fall production of Christopher Columbus: Discoverer, the winter production of Merry, Merry Christmas! We learned how to make papier-mâché smoking volcanoes in the science lab. And we read, together, the classics. Gone With the Wind. Nineteen Eighty-Four. To Kill a Mockingbird. Lord of the Flies. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Why are you learning all this if you can never leave, sighed Hannah, the freckle-faced new girl. In her white shirt she looked washed-out. She still wouldn’t completely meet our gaze.

We can leave, we told her. We just can’t ever come back. Those were the rules.

But what happens if you do come back? she challenged.

We told her about Michael Potswitch. He left at age nineteen but three years later appeared on a dinghy fifty feet from our shoreline, begging for forgiveness. The sea was choppy that day, and we gathered at the beach to watch as he lurched in the swell, his pleas loud and clear before fading.

That was likely the beginning of Dr. Potswitch’s decline, the elders now noted.

In our free time we played music on our boom boxes and danced under the stars. We rode bikes to the candy store and got Bazooka gum for five cents apiece. We checked out books from the library and paid overdue fees if we kept them too long. The young ones tagged one another with chants of eeny meeny miny moe. The older ones kissed and stuck hands up shirts when the elders weren’t around. We went to the game room to play pool and ping-pong. Candy Land and Go Fish. Monopoly and Parcheesi. Scrabble. Pac-Man on the solo arcade machine. We lounged on mustard-colored beanbags and sat Indian style on the linoleum floor, chatting away for hours.

This is all so boring, sniffed Hannah. She sat alone in the corner of the game room, if she bothered to come at all. We didn’t pay her much attention. Her newness had worn off and underneath she was weird. She often did strange, sudden movements with her body, jerking her arms left and right, clapping her hands together. Like a cheerleader without a cheer.

One day Hannah helped herself to our cassettes, rifling through the collection. Why don’t you have any music beyond the eighties? she asked.

We shrugged, not wanting to admit we’d never realized. Like what?

Like where-do-I-begin, she replied. Backstreet Boys. Radiohead. Lady Gaga. Four Chairs. Jay-Z. North Kardashian. Ed Sheeran. Popsicle. Harper Beckham. Eminem. Taylor Swift.

M&M’s? a young one repeated.

Once in a while, the outside world came to get a glimpse of us. They approached on the south side, where the water was calmer, adjacent to the protective sea ridge that fanned from the northwest side. They arrived in crowded boats, binoculars hanging from their necks and curious plastic devices pointed at us. The elders would hurry to the statue of Bestia, our island God, whose vision had first come to one of the Founding Council Members in a seven-night dream. As the elders quickly draped a large tarp over Bestia’s torso, protecting it from prying eyes, Old Man Sully and Mr. Cranger would hop into the motorboat to chase away the outsiders. Sully spewed warnings and occasional profanity through a megaphone while Mr. Cranger shook his lawn shears in a threatening fashion. Sometimes Sully’s young grandson would accompany them, proudly armed with his water gun and puffing his chest until the ripples nearly caused him to fall overboard.

It’s pointless to put a stop to the tourists, Hannah said, meeting our gaze for a few long seconds. You’re all over the internet. Everyone already knows about you guys, anyway.

What’s the internet? we asked.

She rolled her eyes.

During the next full moon, we held Dr. Potswitch’s burial. In preparation, the elders knitted a quilt, and we gathered materials from the ground: leaves, rocks, flower petals. When the sun set, the whole town traveled to the water’s edge and watched as The Council lay down Dr. Potswitch’s embalmed body into an empty rowboat. We scattered our offerings on top as Mrs. Potswitch said her goodbye, gently covering her husband with the quilt. Mrs. Brenner handed out song booklets, though most elders already knew “Song of the Dead” by heart. We began the chorus as Old Man Sully and other volunteers formed a trio of rowboats around the doctor’s, ushering him far out to sea where they tipped the boat. They returned with only the quilt.

Did you just feed him to the sharks? Hannah asked, her voice trembling. When she turned toward the moonlight, her eyes had a wildness to them.

Silently, and one by one, we followed Mrs. Potwitsch as she began the Path of Sorrow. Wearing her husband’s quilt around her shoulders like a cape, she slowly walked in the direction of town, past Pete’s Farm and his pasture of cattle and pigs, and toward Main Street, where she shuffled past Anna’s Bakery and Mr. Martin’s Milk & More. She looped through the town center, pausing to kiss the foot of the statue of Bestia, and then doubled back toward her home. We trailed behind at a respectful distance, stopping when she approached her house. The final few steps—to her front door—Mrs. Potswitch had to make alone. After she entered the house, she hung the quilt from her front window.

During the Seven Days of Mourning, the island was quiet. No unnecessary talking. These were the rules. It was difficult for the little ones, so we had to shush them, or take them to the uninhabited east side of the island, where the grass grew long, where they could run around for a couple of hours and shout into the wind that blew out to the sea. School was suspended, and there was nothing but time and sky and earth.

Hannah came with us when we went to the east side. She kept to herself, just watching from her perch on the wall of rocks, which our parents had begun building as a pastime years earlier, when they, too, were young and sought sanctuary here. There had been more deaths then, before the weekly mailers began and the ability to obtain antibiotics and supplies. Hannah’s face had become reddened, raw from the wind. All the newcomers’ faces were like that for the first few months.

On the eighth morning, as school resumed, Hannah hastily approached us on the asphalt. She held open our Modern History textbook, her hands shaking.

There are whole decades missing, she informed us, her eyes darting around to ensure no elders could hear. This doesn’t tell the whole story, or even, like, the correct story. Life didn’t stop in the eighties, just because your grandparents or great-grandparents or whoever came to this island. This island is like, like, stuck in time. I mean, you have electricity so you’re not totally Podunk, but do you realize that there is so much more out there? Like that thing called “the internet”? There’s so much more that happened after these pages. So much more stuff out there, she said, jutting her chin toward the sea.

And she began telling us.

We were reluctant, at first, to pay attention. Her words were strange and made us a little uncomfortable. But she didn’t stop talking, as if the week of silent mourning had created a too-full balloon of unspoken words she needed to expel. She didn’t stop to even take a breath, her face turning redder than usual.

Life beyond the island is awesome, she said. Boys marry boys and girls marry girls—you can do what you want. We’ve had a Black president and, in the coastal states, a woman president. Robots perform entire surgeries. Scientists have altered genes to cure cancer. You can talk to someone on the other side of the world in less than a second. Cars run on sunshine instead of gas. We just diverted a threatening asteroid.

We were drawn in. We couldn’t help it. Her words were strange, yes, but also magical and wondrous.

The bell rang, signaling the start of the school day, but we walked so slowly into the building, hanging on to Hannah’s words—now firing off in a maddening whisper—that the teacher reprimanded us to hurry.

That day none of us could pay attention to the lessons at hand. Instead, we looked at one another, and out the window. We felt different, changed. Like a piece of ourselves had drifted away, to somewhere else. Somewhere bigger. Somewhere better.

It was nine-year-old Andrew’s idea: create an updated History of the Modern World textbook. Despite being young, he was a talented artist and could draw as well as any thirteen- or fourteen-year-old. He couldn’t write the text, though. He still didn’t know how to spell many words, so he needed help.

And that was how the project began. We met on the east side of the island every day after school to work on the book. Hannah continued to talk, and we wrote and drew.

There were two pandemics, she told us. One called Covid and one called Khosta.

People became millionaires on something called YouTube. And then TikTok. And then Zenith.

You can buy a ticket to the moon.

Some countries use currency that exists only on the internet.

They cloned a sheep named Dolly. And then a cat named Betty. A dog named Mando.

We discovered alien life forms.

Terrorists attacked us—took down the World Trade Center, dispersed biological warfare.

There’s artificial intelligence, which is like a super smart computer that keeps getting smarter. It’s so smart it’s taken over most people’s jobs, but my dad says people are now dumber because of it.

Our country divided. Our world divided, too, like a math equation you can’t solve.

Drugs became legal and then illegal and then legal and who can keep up; people just do what they want, anyway.

Racism persists, even in gene-tech utopian towns, where they try to make everyone look the same.

People use the internet for sex.

Why do you do that? one of the young ones interrupted to ask Hannah, when she suddenly moved her body in a now familiar spastic pattern.

It’s an old TikTok dance, she replied, and taught us how to do it.

Some nights we didn’t sleep, consumed by her words. The elders saw our tired, drawn faces and sent us to see Hannah’s dad. We were nervous, wondering if he would realize what we were up to. But he simply looked us up and down, and then outside the window, where the nights were getting longer and darker. Lack of vitamin D, he declared. Seasonal affective disorder. He was pleased to see we weren’t all already on vitamin D supplements. Hannah—and her friends—had been on them for years, he mused.

Hannah and her friends also had their own personal phones, Hannah revealed to us one day. But they didn’t use them like phones. Instead, they functioned like tiny computers, for internet browsing and playing games. For sending one another text messages. Snapchats. Pictures. Old-school YouTube videos and TikTok dances. Zenith zings. Nude pictures. Sexual messages that erased the moment after they were read.

To depict this concept in our book, we drew a boy and girl having sex in a small rectangular box, and then a cloud of smoke next to it. Poof! added one of the younger kids in graffiti-type font.

The pages filled up quickly as Hannah continued to divulge:

Cities like Jakarta and Bangkok are now underwater.

People sell kids and women for sex on the internet.

There was a second Holocaust.

Fresh water is scarce and rationed in parts of the world.

Killer robots are on the rise.

There are so many school shootings that private schools now use bulletproof uniforms.

Polar bears and emperor penguins are extinct.

World War III will happen imminently, but they’ve also been saying that for the past sixteen and a half years.

Our heads hurt, our brains expanded and retracted, tides of information ebbing and flowing. Our hands hurt from writing. Our palms were smudged with ink. Our fingernails were dirtied from hiding the book each day in the rocks. Our hearts hurt.

We wanted to know if the elders knew. If The Council knew, even bits and pieces. But we couldn’t ask them. We were sworn to secrecy, to island secrecy. All of us—even those who were supposed to watch Hannah and report back to The Council—had taken the oath. We’d pricked our fingers with sea glass and sucked the droplets from one another. If we broke island code, Bestia would be angry. The last time a kid broke island secrecy, Bestia unleashed a terrible hurricane on us, flooding our streets and washing away nearly all the houses south of Plum Lane.

The only thing we could do was finish the book.

In December, as the temperatures dropped into the low twenties, we were forced to move inside, to the game room, to continue our work. Each night, we carefully wrapped the book in cowhide from Pete’s Farm and gave it to one of the young ones to place in the rocks. Our hiding spot. If the rocks iced over, we hammered at them with ice picks until we could pry them loose.

Hannah had long since stopped sharing new information, as if she’d run out of things to say. She often looked out the window with her eyes glazed over, deep in thought. Let’s start a new project, she suggested one day. We ignored her, filling out bubble letters, shading in illustrations.

What year did North Korea secretly clone a human being again? asked one of the younger kids. He was on fact-check duty that day. It was a newly created position, necessitated by Hannah’s growing listlessness.

I don’t remember, she replied, as she tried to play checkers against herself.

What year did internet get created? asked another.

You mean “the internet,” she replied. But she didn’t answer the question.

Hannah—we need to finish, we reminded her.

Like usual, she turned to stare out the window. Snow had begun to fall: thick, powdery flakes, the first of the season. A slow, wistful smile spread across her face. The overall rawness of her skin had faded, and in its place were two flushed cheeks. Let’s have a snowball fight, she declared.

But the book, we cried, annoyed.

It’s just a book, Hannah said.

The young ones did a TikTok dance in response, one she’d taught them months earlier.

Give it a rest, she chided.

YOLO, someone else replied.

Amid Hannah’s waning interest, we hastily finished the book. It was as done as it could be, with a few remaining blank pages. For the first time in months, we found ourselves with blocks of free time after school. But instead of playing together outside in the growing mountains of snow, we retreated, alone, to our houses. When Hannah knocked at our doors holding the pack of UNO cards she’d retrieved from the empty game room, we didn’t answer. Instead, we sat with our thoughts, which felt heavy, confusing. Eventually we withdrew to our bedroom windows to peer across the street at one another. We pressed our noses against the cool glass, imagining it was our own individual computer screen. We performed TikTok dances for one another. Zenith zings. We pretended to be in our own video games, shooting through the glass and then turning to our mirrors to shoot at our reflections. As the hours passed late into the night, we performed stripteases.

The young ones held up small, rectangular pieces of cardboard they’d colored with black markers—replicas of vintage iPhones. Click, they mouthed and pretended to take pictures.

One early January morning, at the start of the winter term, Hannah didn’t show up at school.

Is she sick? the teacher asked.

We shrugged.

Hm. Her father didn’t tell me, the teacher pondered. Maybe she’s running late.

We shrugged again.

The teacher eyed the clock, putting off the pronoun quiz as long as she could. Finally, a half hour later, the teacher passed out the quiz and No. 2 pencils. Putting on her wool peacoat, she said, I will be back shortly. Until then, Nathan is in charge.

Nathan, a fifteen-year-old, grinned in a bit of a wicked way.

But the teacher returned before we could get into any real mischief. She flung open the door, her face ashen. A strong gust of wind nearly blew the papers off our desks.

Children, she simply said.

It was the first time a child had died in our island’s history. Old Man Sully found her on the east side of the island, at the base of the rocks where we hid the book.

She musta been playing hooky, Mr. Cranger surmised. Musta tried to climb them rocks and slipped.

The crack on her head released a river of blood, a bright red current pitted against the white snow. The town bottled it, now in pink liquid form, and gave it to her father. It was the way of the island—a piece of the deceased will garner future goodwill. Mrs. Potswitch had received the drool from her dead husband’s mouth.

What was Hannah doing on the east side, the elders wanted to know.

I don’t understand why she went there, wailed her father, grief lacing his words.

Why was she there and not at school? asked The Council.

We shrugged, wondering the same thing. Had she gone to get the book? In passing, we subtly shook our heads to communicate the message: no, no elders had mentioned the book.

Still safe in its spot, reported one of the young ones, to our relief. We’d sent him to check.

But still—she had been there. At the base of the rocks where we hid the book. It was the start of the winter term. Perhaps Hannah had gone to collect the book to bring it to school, to finally share with the teacher and the elders. Or perhaps she’d gone to throw the book away, toss it in the ocean.

Outwardly, we were divided in opinion, though secretly many worried it had been the latter.

When the rowboat took Hannah out to sea, we covered our eyes. The Seven Days of Mourning became Eight, an additional day to signify the tremendous loss. We visited the east side, placing flowers at the Blood River Base, and when the elders weren’t there, we pried the book out of the rocks, handling it as if it were a sacred object.

We took a piece of leather and carved the title: An (Updated) History of the Modern World.

Dedicated to Hannah, we wrote on the first page.

On the blank pages in the back of the book, one of us had an idea to make an old-school Facebook tribute page, like Hannah had told us about. We passed the book back and forth, adding entries.

OMG I can’t believe it

IMO u are were the most exciting thing that ever happened 2 me. 2 us.

Don’t worry, Bestia will protect u

Remember when Old Man Sully thought ur name was Shannah?

ILY

U were so pale and weird but then u were just weird (which I liked)

I’ll never forget when u threw a water balloon at me. I forgive u, even though it hurt a lot.

FIMH ♥︎

I miss the way u chew your ur nails.

I will remember our first kiss 4-ever

U had the most rizz

You are were r so pretty.

I was the 1 who put gum on ur seat (sorry, lol)

Life was different wth u here.

FWIW I wanted to marry u

TTYL I hope!!!

Remember when Charlie called u a bully and you clocked him? LOL That was LOLOL.

UR dead IRL??—NO! Give me a sign u r still here, pls?? Say sike rn

JSYK we loved u even if we didn’t love everything u told us.

Hannah’s father returned, heartbroken, to Boston, and we welcomed a new doctor. He was young and healthy and arrived with his pregnant wife.

The winter melted away, and spring showers muddied the flowers we continued to leave at Blood River. We still retrieved the book nearly every day, at times just to touch it and remember Hannah. We recounted stories about her and in them she grew prettier and smarter and more popular than she had been IRL in real life. Sometimes we used the book to settle arguments we had, like which country was the first to give birth in space (not China but rather Japan), and what year did the dollar collapse (2029, not 2019).

As the weeks passed, we came to the consensus that Hannah’s intention had been to present the book to the elders. And so, when the annual spring art fair came around, we felt obliged to carry out her last wish.

The art fair was held each May at the town hall. Everyone on the island participated and spent months preparing. At school we made elaborate group projects: Long, connected strands of construction paper, like DNA helixes. A five-inch ball made entirely of gum we’d chewed. A miniature metal playground with a seesaw and swing set. We made individual artwork, too: oil paintings, short stories written on toilet paper, multicolored braided bracelets. The Council worked on a group poem, which they transcribed onto a scroll, and Old Man Sully whittled a small wooden rowboat. Mrs. Potswitch made a picture collage of her husband and son in the shape of a teardrop. The new town doctor and his wife baked a heart cake, cleverly hiding a ticking watch inside.

The night before the fair, we had one of the young ones slip through the town hall’s doggy door and place the book on a table in the center of the main room, alongside the other exhibits of importance.

When we arrived the next morning, the fair was curiously quiet. At first, it seemed like no one had come. The first room was empty, the bagel platter untouched. The tub of cream cheese smooth, its butter knife still shiny. The popular pile of crossword puzzles Mr. Rosso always created remained in a neat, orderly stack. The touch-me-putty exhibit without fingerprints or indentations. The second room was the same, the sculptures and paintings forlorn, the ticking heart cake intact. When we got to the third room—the main one—it was so packed that the temperature was raised by several degrees, and we immediately began sweating. The elders and The Council were crowded around the table in the middle of the room, bent over one of the exhibits. As we edged closer, we realized it was our exhibit: An (Updated) History of the Modern World. The room was eerily silent, the only sound the periodic turning of pages. For a moment, it reminded us of how Hannah had eventually run out of words. How there had been nothing more to say. Or nothing more she wanted to say.

They were so focused on the book they didn’t hear us.

We backed out as quickly as we could, stumbling over one another as we exited the building. One of the young ones threw up in a bush. We waited outside with our stomachs twisted like a knotty tree. What were the elders going to think? The Council?

Finally, the door opened, and Mrs. Brenner stepped out, her fingers clutching the book as tightly as the bun wound on top of her head. The door swung firmly shut behind her and did not open again. Mrs. Brenner nodded almost imperceptibly as she marched past in a crisp tailored skirt and blazer, her “C” pin, for Council Member, glinting in the sun. One of us followed her, and then one of us followed that one, and soon we were all striding down Main Street single file. Past Anna’s Bakery and the smell of freshly baked muffins wafting from the propped-open door. Past Mr. Martin’s Milk & More food shop and his cat napping in the front window. Past the statue of Bestia. Finally, we arrived at the library, shuffling in one by one. Mrs. Brenner waited until we’d all entered before she advanced down the lower stairs, to the basement level—the overflow room. It was small, dark. A single bulb in the middle of the room cast a faded yellow hue. We huddled in a group at the base of the stairs, trembling, as Mrs. Brenner slowly ran her finger along the stacks of books, our textbook tucked under one arm.

Suspense, thriller, mystery, she muttered to herself.

We held our breath.

Historical fiction, historical nonfiction, she continued.

Our hearts thumped in our chests. One of the young ones licked his lips, a nervous habit.

Romance, science fiction … she trailed off.

Sweat pooled on our chests and under our armpits, dampening our shirts.

Western … Ah, here it is: dystopian fiction, Mrs. Brenner declared, and then she swiftly inserted our book onto the shelf.

Dystopian fiction? one of us repeated, puzzled.

Means it’s not real, another of us replied.

A sigh of relief traveled raggedly, haltingly, through us. Silently, we made our way back up the stairs. We started off slow, plodding, even heavy-footed—the realization still feeling untrustworthy—but by the time we reached the top we were skipping, our feet light. Sailing through the main library room, we flung open the door to the outside where it was sunny and bright.

We spilled out from the path onto the lawn at The Garden, frolicking in the warm, reassuring glow of overhead rays. We threw sticks and kicked rocks. Pulled blades of grass. Examined the budding rose bushes, careful not to prick our fingers. Lounging on our backs, we found animals and objects in the occasional clouds. A sea turtle here, a boat anchor there. A penguin morphing into Bestia. One of the young ones picked up a stray feather blowing his way and tucked it behind his ear. Another promptly began chasing him, patting his mouth with his palm in quick succession to create a whooping sound. In the distance Mr. Cranger stood with his lawn shears and a new bag of seed, waiting for us to finish.