As soon as I got to the top she gave me a big hug. “I’m so glad you’re here!” She turned to her group of follower-friends—I recognized her roommate Lauren among them—and told them to get out their pens. “You did bring the petition, didn’t you?”
Of course I had. Why else would I put myself through this? The girls passed it around, and in minutes I had enough signatures to get on the ballot. It had been easy, just as Chloe said.
“You going to just stand there, or are you going to sit down and hang out for a while?” Chloe patted the seat next to her, causing one of the followers to scooch down, though she didn’t look too happy about it.
Truthfully, I wanted to go back to my dorm and read, or write in my journal. I couldn’t say I didn’t like Chloe’s friends, since I’d never really spoken to any of them, but there was something about being around such uniform bland blondness that made me feel even more out of place than usual. I’d made peace with my dark, wavy/frizzy hair, my fire-hydrant body that could never pull off the kinds of delicate, willowy outfits Chloe’s crew favored, and I had no desire to change anything about myself. But that didn’t mean I wanted to stay, a bee among the flowers.
Still, they’d helped me out, and I needed to learn how to be more accepting, especially if I was entering the world of politics. “I can hang out.” I sat down next to Chloe, and she gave me a squeeze. I’d never had such affectionate friends before. “Which team is us?” I nodded at the game below.
“We’re the ones in white because we’re the home team.” She was matter-of-fact, as if this were something people just knew, which, I supposed, most people did. I’d never watched any kind of sports before, though; my parents weren’t into sports, and as a consequence Shana and I weren’t either.
I looked over at the scoreboard, where the H number was higher than the V number, though not by much. “We’re winning?”
“For the moment. We’re not very good, but the other team isn’t either. But you don’t really care about this stuff, do you?”
I was trying, but she was right. “Nope.”
“Then let’s not pretend we’re paying attention. The girls are just here because they’re already hot for some of the guys on the team, but that’s not us, right?”
For a second I wondered if she knew how I felt about Hunter. I hadn’t told her, though it would have been nice to be able to talk to her about it; I was too worried she might be into him as well, and then we’d have to deal with the fact that we both liked the same guy and he most likely was only into her. “Right,” I said.
“So let’s talk about what’s important. How did Hillel go? You’ve got all your signatures, so I assume it was okay.”
“All good.” I told her about what everyone wanted, how they didn’t all agree but how I’d realized I might actually be able to help with some of their requests. It had been a good feeling. I didn’t tell her I might have made a new friend; I wasn’t yet ready to share that.
“That’s excellent!” Chloe was so great at making me feel like I’d done a good job. I wondered whether she’d literally been a cheerleader before, whether that’s how she knew so much about sports, if she even did know a lot—I knew so little it was hard to tell. “Hunter and I have been checking in with our groups—the soccer guys all want late-night access to the dining hall so they can get snacks, and the girls want softer lighting in the bathrooms and a better system for receiving packages, since there’s no good shopping around here.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re all delusional. Your stuff is more fun because we might be able to get it done. Now we just need to wait for the next phase.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said. “Just check in with me when the list of candidates comes out and we can start to have some fun.”
I wondered whether our idea of fun was the same, but I had a feeling I knew the answer.
5.
The next day was our first official club meeting, and I had to figure out how to convince Jo and Wyatt to go along with the plan we’d developed. Chloe, Hunter, and I had agreed on it so readily I didn’t think we’d have trouble, but it seemed weirdly disrespectful that we’d made a plan without Wyatt, given that the group was his brainchild.
We met in the bunker, though thankfully this time the meeting started a lot earlier so we didn’t have to sneak around after curfew. Though we’d had no communication other than to set the time, everyone had taken it upon themselves to bring something with them, and I got a kick out of what each person brought. Wyatt and I had gone with a similar strategy: we’d hoarded snacks from the dining hall. His were mostly salty (chips, nuts, pretzels) while mine were sweet (gummy bears, M&M’s, cookies), but we’d made the obvious choice for scholarship kids who didn’t have a lot of disposable income. Chloe brought a pile of blankets and throw pillows and within ten minutes had turned the sterile bunker into a makeshift living room, though it was way more stylish than my living room at home. Hunter brought board games—Risk, Settlers of Catan, Scrabble—and I was pretty sure he’d done it to get Jo and Wyatt ready for the idea of turning the club into a gaming group, and it was so cute I wanted to make out with him. Though, to be fair, I pretty much always wanted to make out with him.
I wasn’t sure what to think about what Jo brought. At first I wasn’t even sure she was going to show up—she came later than everyone else, and she was carrying a black plastic case and a shopping bag. She didn’t apologize for being late; she just rolled in and said, “Can you all hang on a few more minutes before we get started so I can take care of this?” Without waiting for us to answer, she went back outside with both bags, and we heard a bunch of banging noises, followed by several metallic clicks.
No one wanted to be the first to even speculate about what Jo was up to, so without discussing it Hunter opened up Settlers of Catan and started explaining the rules to the rest of us, since we didn’t know how to play. He’d barely gotten through describing all the game pieces and cards when we heard the sound of a door unlocking and Jo came back in the room.
“All done,” she said, and handed each of us a shiny silver key.
“What’s this?” Chloe asked.
“I put a hasp closing on the door. Come look.” Jo led us back into the hallway and, sure enough, she’d secured what looked like two metal flaps across the door, and then she showed us how they could be held together with a padlock, for which we now each had keys. “I wanted this to be a space we could trust. Now we’re the only ones who can use it.”
Wyatt looked a little panicked. “What if someone else wanted to come in? It’s not really ours.”
“You’re the one who scoped the place out,” Jo said. “Did you run into anyone? Did it seem like anyone had been using it, or cared that you were bringing in chairs, water?”
“No,” he admitted. “It was filthy, too. I scrubbed the place down before I even sent out the invites.”
“Good job, Mr. Clean. I think we’re safe.” Jo locked and unlocked the door and we all went back inside and sat down, not even bothering with chairs anymore. Chloe’s blankets and pillows were enough to make us feel at home.
I wasn’t sure whether I felt more or less secure now that I knew we were the only ones with access to the room, but I supposed I’d figure it out in time. I was intrigued by the fact that Jo had come up with the idea and bought the supplies and brought the tools and made it happen, all of which were way beyond anything I’d ever have come up with. The real question was why. I’d have to add it to the list of things I wanted to learn about Jo.
In the meantime, we let Hunter keep explaining the rules of the game, and we played until we got the hang of it. The three of us weren’t the only competitive members of this club; Jo was, unshockingly, fierce, though I was surprised how into the game she was; she got so intense she even dropped the sarcastic nicknames. Even gentle, enthusiastic Wyatt wasn’t above shouting “That gives me longest road!” when he’d made a good trade.
We played well together, which made it easy to transition into a conversation about where the club was headed. Hunter was some sort of genius.
“So I was thinking, now that we’ve got this club and all, that maybe we’d want to combine some of the things we’re into,” I said. “I know some of us were into talking about different kinds of survival strategies, and some people were more about getting to know each other and having fun, but why not do both? We could describe some of the things we’re afraid of, and then we could make up games to help us learn how to deal with them.”
I could tell I had Wyatt from the minute I said “survival strategies,” but Jo was frowning. I’d have to do more to convince her. “We’d make it a real competition,” I said. “We’d keep track of who won each game, and maybe there could be a prize at the end or something.”
Now I had her attention. “What would the games be like? What would the rules be?”
We hadn’t gotten that far in our lunch talks. “I don’t know. Could be anything, I guess. Maybe Wyatt could be in charge of that—this was all his idea. Thank you for that, by the way.” I didn’t want him to think I was trying to take over.
“No problem,” he said. “This is terrific. I already have so many thoughts about what we could do!”
“And the exclamation marks are back,” Jo said.
“I don’t think there was ever any stopping them,” Hunter said, and gave Wyatt a friendly punch on the arm.
“I just get excited,” Wyatt said. “But seriously, I’m happy to go first. I could even plan something for next week—I’m going to want to go outside, so we should do it while the weather’s still good.”
Glad I wasn’t the only one worried about the Vermont winter, though intellectually I knew it was unlikely to be all that much worse than winter back home. “I’m in if everyone else is.”
“Can I request that we do one thing first?” Chloe asked. “We haven’t come up with a name for ourselves yet. We’re not really cool enough to just call ourselves The Club.”
Wyatt clapped his hands. “I was totally thinking about this! What if we called ourselves the Post-Apocalyptic Survivalist Society?”
“That’s quite a mouthful, Shaggy,” Jo said.
“The acronym would be PASS, though,” Hunter said. “That’s not so bad.”
“It’s not the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard,” Chloe said. “Let’s see if we can do better.”
This coming from the person behind Chloe’s Closet, I thought, but was smart enough not to say. “How about the Hunger Gamers?” I asked.
Jo groaned. “Ugh, terrible jokes again.”
“The Gardner Rebuilding Society?” I suggested.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Hunter said. “How about Team Survival?”
“Too basic,” Jo said.
“How about the Pyrophytic Association?” Wyatt asked, which earned him blank stares from the rest of us. “Pyrophytic plants need fire to survive, whether it’s so their seeds can grow, or so they can resprout, or—”
“You realize we’ll sound like we want to set fire to stuff, right?” Chloe asked. “Besides, I thought we’d agreed we were going metaphorical when it came to survival.”
“What about Phoenix instead of Pyrophytic?” Hunter asked. “That gets at the fire and rebirth stuff.”
“It’s so overdone, though,” I said. I didn’t want us to be a cliché. Not before we’d even gotten going.
“I’ve got it!” Wyatt said. “The Eucalyptus Society. Eucalyptus plants are pyrophytic in lots of different ways, but they’ve also got a million uses, including as biofuels and bug repellent and food and so much other stuff I can’t even remember. They’d be super useful in a real apocalypse. Also they’re pretty and they smell good.” He tried not to direct this last part at Chloe, but we all knew what he was up to.
“That’s not bad, actually,” she said. “It’s not really easy to shorthand, though.”
“You can live without a nickname, Princess,” Jo said.
I was surprised to hear her stick up for the name, but if it was good enough for her, I was in. “That sounds great, Wyatt.”
“Works for me,” Hunter said. “Looks like we are now the founding members of the Eucalyptus Society.”
“Eucalyptus it is!” Chloe said. I guess she’d found a way to make it a little shorter.
I was surprised at how much I was looking forward to Wyatt’s game. He was so enthusiastic about everything it was hard to imagine it not being fun, even if being outside was not my favorite thing. My parents had had to crowbar me out of the house, bribing me into learning how to ride a bike when I was a little kid and then bribing me into teaching Shana how to ride hers when I was older. In truth, they didn’t have to bribe me for long once Shana came along. Lots of people find their younger sisters annoying, but not me—I’d always wanted a sibling, and I knew my parents wanted more kids too. It took me years after Shana was born to figure out that my mom had had two miscarriages before Shana arrived; I just remembered a couple of times when I’d been sent to my grandmother’s house because Dad told me Mom was sad.
“You’d like this club,” I told Shana, during my weekly family phone call. “You’d probably win all the games. Especially the outdoor ones.”
“Games like kickball?” she asked.
Sometimes I had to remind myself how much younger than me Shana was. “Maybe,” I said. “But maybe a little harder.”
“Tell me about your new friends!”
I could tell she really wanted to know, but I wasn’t sure how to describe any of them. Shana was one of those ten-year-old girls who thought boys were gross, so I wasn’t about to tell her I had a crush on Hunter. I’d already sent her to Chloe’s Instagram, and she’d informed me that she preferred my red sneakers to Chloe’s fancy shoes. And how was I supposed to explain Jo? Jo, who seemed to be cultivating a kind of scary look on purpose, with her cropped, bleached hair that emphasized her cheekbones but clashed with her skin tone. Every time I saw her she was wearing the same thing: black jeans and a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket and black Docs with rainbow laces on one side and purple laces on the other. I was pretty sure the laces meant she wasn’t straight but I didn’t know much else; Brooksby was a pretty retrograde town when it came to gay rights, though we did have a Gay-Straight Alliance that had the best bake sales. But none of that would be relevant to Shana.
I decided to keep it basic. “They’re really nice. Maybe someday you’ll come visit and you can meet them all.”
I could practically hear her jumping up and down over the phone. “That would be so great!” She reminded me of Wyatt.
I told Shana she could tell Mom and Dad everything I told her and got off the phone, hoping it would be an effective strategy to help me avoid talking to them myself. I wasn’t angry anymore; I’d only been here a few weeks but it was already clear they’d been right to send me. I just didn’t want them to know that yet. Stubbornness is a Hareli hallmark.
It was nice to have the game to look forward to, given that the week itself was a nightmare. I had a quiz in Algebra II on Monday, a paper due for my English class on Wednesday, endless Chinese phrases to learn, and a European History project to finalize with Hunter by Friday. At least I got to work with him, though I was having trouble convincing him that we should choose fascism as our topic.
“It’s so broad,” he said. “Can’t we narrow it even a little?”
“Of course we can narrow it,” I said, “but we have to start somewhere, don’t we?”
“If we’re starting broad, why not socialism? It’s totally relevant now, especially with everything going on in politics. Aren’t you, like, obsessed with that?”
Seriously, he was cute but he could also be kind of dense. Yes, I was obsessed with politics, which was why I was also obsessed with fascism. Socialism was a misunderstood word that had been bad and was now neutral for a lot of people; fascism was still awful, and yet we seemed to be creeping closer and closer
to it every day. How did he not see that?
I took a deep breath and thought about how to answer. I didn’t want to antagonize him, and not just because of my crush; he was becoming my friend, and I wasn’t about to lose a friend over a school project. I had to make this about something other than my own feelings. “I think fascism generally will be easier to research because it’s less complicated,” I said. “Socialism has all this negative stuff attached to it, and if we’re going to compare European socialism to what’s happening in America right now, we’re going to have to do a lot of explaining. If we look at Italian fascism around World War One and what’s happening in America, we’ll have an easier time making the comparison.”
He was already nodding before I said the word “easier.” I’d figured out what made Hunter tick: he wanted to take on hard topics but find ways to make them simple. A useful skill for lawyers, based on what I’d seen on television—juries didn’t exactly know much about law, and yet somehow they were in charge of deciding whether people were guilty.
Convincing Hunter to pick the topic I wanted felt like such a huge victory it completely made up for the rest of the week. I ended up telling Tamara about it at services Friday night, which she immediately and correctly translated into me having a crush on Hunter. In a way, it was a relief that someone finally knew. Not talking about him was just about impossible, but I couldn’t tell anyone in the group. “Now we’re in this club together, so I’ll get to see him even more,” I told Tamara, realizing only after I said it that we’d never talked about whether the club was a secret. It probably wasn’t, though I didn’t know what I’d do if she said she wanted to join, or if she told other people. I liked having a friend who wasn’t connected to the group, someone who was just for me. I’d never had that before.
“Does he know you’re into him?” Tamara asked.
I shook my head.
“Are you going to tell him?”
I stared at her. “Why would I ever do that? It could ruin everything.”
How to Pack for the End of the World Page 6
