She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam."
"No way," I said. "You wouldn't --"
"I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more than fair."
I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?"
"We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble --"
Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off.
Then the world changed forever.
We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively -- earthquake. My first inclination, as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us.
Earthquakes are eerily quiet -- at first, anyway -- but this wasn't quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the Bay.