How to Pack for the End of the World

by Michelle Falkoff

  I was starting to see how the pieces fit together. “So the design classes and anatomy are about the clothes themselves, economics is about the business, and the language classes are so you can talk to the big guns. What about journalism?”

  “Everything’s happening online now,” Chloe said, “and the fact that I’m good at taking Instagram pics isn’t enough. I need to learn how to talk to people through my writing.”

  Hunter was practically drooling. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  Chloe laughed. “You have no idea. But I have to say, it’s really nice to be around people who get it. My family totally doesn’t.”

  “Mine either,” I said, though we were talking about completely different things. “They made me come here.” The words slipped out before I even had a chance to think—I hadn’t meant to share that with anyone, let alone people I’d just met.

  “Really?” Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. “I had to fight my way here, all claws out.”

  “Me too,” Hunter said. “My family was super not into it. They wanted me to stay closer to home.”

  “Where’s home?” Chloe asked.

  I hadn’t asked him this yet, I realized, and I had no idea what the answer would be. I definitely wasn’t expecting what he said. “Texas. Houston, specifically.”

  “Where’s your accent?” I sounded more skeptical than I intended.

  “Not everyone in Texas has one,” he said, with an exaggerated drawl. “But if that’s what you ladies are looking for . . .”

  “Does the sexism come with the accent?” Again with the sharpness. I had to get it together. I added a little drawl of my own. “Or is that just a cowboy thing?”

  Thankfully Hunter seemed to get that I was joking, or trying, anyway. “That’s where ‘y’all’ comes in really handy,” he said, accent now eliminated. “Gender neutral, all-encompassing. The language of the people.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Chloe said, taking off her hat and shaking her hair out. “I kind of like being called a lady. No one back home has that much class.”

  I found that hard to believe, given Chloe was probably the classiest person I’d ever met, at least appearance-wise. I wasn’t convinced people who dabbled in casual misogyny were the classiest people, though. But I didn’t feel like getting into it with people I hardly knew. My friends back home had ditched me for being too intense, having too many opinions about things they didn’t care that much about, and there was no need for me to wreck my potential friendships here before they’d even gotten off the ground. I wondered whether I should change the subject, but before I could think of a topic, Hunter had already jumped in.

  “Have either of you met that girl from Game Night, the one who got all up in that guy’s face? She seemed cool.”

  “She’s in my econ class,” Chloe said. “Her name’s Jo. Short for Josephine, but best to never call her that. She gave our teacher an earful.”

  I was glad Hunter had asked about her; I wanted to meet her too. “We should all hang out,” I said. “But maybe not in the Rathskeller. That place was shady.”

  “Wouldn’t make a bad place to hide if something terrible happened,” Hunter said. “I’d rather hang out there and hide behind a sofa than barricade a classroom door with desks.”

  I’d done the same active shooter drill back in Brooksby. The Gardner student handbook had a whole section on school shootings, instructing us to memorize exit routes and find closets to hide in where the walls around them were reinforced. “Sofas can’t stop bullets all that well,” I said.

  Hunter shrugged. “Bullets aren’t what’s going to get us, anyway. Do you know we’ve got less than twenty years to fix what we’ve done to the environment before we’re completely and totally screwed?”

  Interesting. I, like most kids I knew, was way more worried about school shootings than the environment. And that wasn’t even taking into account my more pressing fears of anti-Semitism and complete governmental collapse. I had a vague recollection of reading something online about what Hunter was saying, and I knew that some newspapers and climate scientists were pushing for changes to terminology that would help people understand just how disastrous a time we were living in—climate crisis versus climate change, for example. But all I’d done to help so far was to quit using plastic straws. Hunter was obviously more committed.

  Chloe, in contrast, was not. “That stuff is so overblown,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “We’re way more likely to get blown to bits by a nuclear bomb well before the environment does us in. Or we’ll build too many nuclear power plants because we’re so anti-coal, and the meltdowns alone will turn us into cancer-riddled walking death. Do you even know what happened in Chernobyl?”

  “Are you serious right now?” Hunter asked. He seemed genuinely shocked by what she was saying. Maybe they wouldn’t be a perfect couple after all. “No one in their right mind is arguing for more nuclear power. It’s all about wind and solar energy. It’s the only way we’ll survive, and we have to change now.”

  Before I could jump in, the two of them had launched into a full-on argument about whether coal really was bad for the environment. It turned out Chloe was from western Pennsylvania, and though her family had been more affected by the steel mills closing, she had a lot of sympathy for coal miners who’d lost their jobs. Maybe they weren’t really arguing—they didn’t seem angry with one another. In fact, it soon became clear they were having a good time. “Never would have pegged you for a hippie,” Chloe was saying. “And aren’t you pretty much destroying the planet with that hot mess of a sub? Aren’t cow farts, like, the greatest threat to mankind’s survival?”

  “And those shoes aren’t made of leather?” Hunter shot back. “Along with however many other pairs of shoes you own?”

  “You can’t even count that high,” Chloe said, but she was laughing. “Don’t forget all my handbags. Besides, I’m not the one who’s trying to reverse centuries of planetary destruction in, like, two weeks.”

  I sat and watched them debate, trying to keep my mouth from hanging open. Here I was, all worried about whether I’d be too intense for them, and the two of them were battling out energy policy like it was no big deal. Their obsessions might not be entirely the same as mine, but they had obsessions, and it was so exciting to watch. For all my dread about coming here, it had never occurred to me that I might meet people who I’d want to talk to, who might share some of my concerns, or at least understand them. Could I actually be a part of this?

  “Our government is going to go down in flames well before North Korea bombs us into oblivion or global warming fries us to a crisp,” I said.

  Hunter and Chloe both stared at me for a minute. “It’s global heating now,” Hunter said, finally, and then the yelling began again. Only this time, I was yelling too, and I loved it.

  3.

  The first thing I did after classes got out that day was to go back to my dorm and look up my new friends online. I couldn’t find much on Hunter; his social media was limited and locked down, and all I could access was the occasional tagged photo of him playing soccer on someone else’s feed. He did look super cute in soccer shorts, though. No shock there.

  Chloe was a whole other story. I thought about what she’d said about having a good online presence, but that turned out to be the understatement of the century. Her blog was called Chloe’s Closet, a name that struck me as childish until I clicked on her bio and saw that she had literally started it when she was a child—she’d been interested in fashion since she was ten years old. The site was basic but professional, not cutesy like the title might have indicated, and it mostly existed to direct people to her Instagram.

  That’s where it became clear how massive her online following really was. Like, over a million people massive. Seriously? That many people cared what a teenage girl thought about fashion? I scrolled through the photos, and while I could see she was really talented, it was weird to think she’d amassed that kind of following even
before turning eighteen. I clicked on a post of Chloe wearing the sunhat-and-flowered-dress ensemble from earlier today, assuming she’d put it up in the morning, but she’d gotten her outfit together last night and described each component of it, complete with a ton of hashtags. Thousands of people had already commented on how cute she looked and how they were going to buy every last item. I saw that it was marked as a sponsored post, and I wondered what that meant. Were the clothes free? Did she get a cut if people bought them?

  Apparently I could ask her if I ever got up the nerve to be that nosy, because somehow Chloe and I were becoming friends. The three of us had exchanged cell phone numbers at lunch and had agreed to meet the next day as well. Dinner was more complicated; Hunter was obliged to sit at a table with the soccer team as a kind of bonding activity, and Chloe had promised to hang out with her roommate, in whom I had less than no interest. That was fine, though; I needed alone time, and besides, at least once a week I wouldn’t be eating in the dining hall anyway. Friday nights were reserved for Shabbat dinners with Gardner’s Hillel group.

  I’d had high hopes for making friends with some of the other Jewish kids at school, who I assumed would share some of my fears about the rise of anti-Semitism. But from the very first Friday night I spent at Hillel, it was clear to me the kids at Gardner were nothing like my former friends back home. They were mostly from New York and Los Angeles, and I could tell few of them were scholarship kids, though my guess was that the misbehavior that got them sent here might have been as simple as not making the kinds of grades their parents expected. They were sophisticated in ways I was not, telling stories of bar and bat mitzvahs that sounded more like that MTV show about wealthy sixteen-year-olds. Their parents had hired aging rock stars to perform at their parties; mine had rented out the basement floor of our temple and put my sister in charge of making a playlist on her phone. They were fashionable and beautifully dressed and I was scared to talk to them. In some ways, they reminded me of Chloe. I supposed I should give them a chance; they’d invited me to hang out with them after dinner, but I really just wanted to go to my dorm room and be by myself for a while. Being around them made me miss my family, especially Shana, and I thought maybe I should call home. I could always hang out next week.

  When I got back to my room, there was a note taped to my door.

  Dear AMINA,

  Would you rather spend three years at Gardner studying on your own? Or would you rather hang out with some like-minded people, have some fun, and add an extracurricular to your college transcript at the same time? If you’re on Team Fun, then find the most secret, safe place on campus and meet there next Saturday at midnight and we can get started.

  Hope to see you there!

  I had no idea what to make of this. I put all thoughts of a family phone call out of my mind and read the note over and over again, trying to figure out what was going on. Did Gardner have a secret society? If so, why would I be invited? Maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was just some sad, desperate person who needed friends. But why make it a game, then? And why such a hard game? I had no idea what the most secret safe place on campus was. Although I was reminded of the conversation Hunter, Chloe, and I had had at lunch, about how the Rathskeller would not be the safest place to hide if something bad were to happen. Was this Hunter’s way of showing that he’d known that already? Or perhaps Chloe calling his bluff?

  I debated whether to check in with them. The note hadn’t specified that I had to keep it secret, though it seemed implied. I had some time to think, anyway, and I decided to use it. Maybe one of them would bring it up.

  The following week flew by in a whirlwind of classes and homework and lunches with Chloe and Hunter, who’d fallen into a routine of finding topics to fight about ranging from the trivial to the serious and everything in between. It was hilarious to watch them argue about whether rap and country went well together; I didn’t really listen to either, but Hunter was obsessed with rap/country collaborations, whereas Chloe thought they should always be kept separate. “There’s a reason Taylor Swift didn’t start bringing rappers into the mix until she was all pop, all the time,” Chloe said, at which point Hunter got out his cell phone and played a clip of her doing a jokey rap with T-Pain from way back that had all of us laughing so hard people started coming up to our table to see what was so funny.

  I tended to have opinions about the more serious topics, like when they debated whether you could separate art from the artist. Chloe thought the artist was completely irrelevant, but I didn’t. “I had to stop watching one of my favorite TV shows when I found out the star was a rapist,” I said. “I couldn’t pretend he was someone else anymore. And I tried to watch this comedian I used to love and his act just comes across so different now, like all his pro-woman stuff was just a way to get access.”

  Hunter’s eyes got all sparkly, and even though I’d only known him a short time I already had a sense of what was coming. I was in trouble. “All the examples you just gave are for people who you liked and then found out were awful,” he said. “What about people everyone always knew were awful? Do they count?”

  “What do you mean?” Chloe asked.

  “Well, we know Amina’s a big reader,” he said. I’d told them about growing up a huge bookworm and how that basically hadn’t changed at all, though now I read different stuff. “I bet you liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when you were little, didn’t you? What about Matilda? That’s, like, bookworm candy.”

  My real Roald Dahl favorite was “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” but I didn’t see the need to argue details. “Sure, I’m a fan.”

  “You know Roald Dahl was a massive anti-Semite, right?” His eyes were super wide now, reminding me of the boy who’d asked the apocalypse question at Game Night.

  “That sounds familiar,” I admitted.

  “Did you stop reading him?”

  “I didn’t have to,” I said. “I grew up.”

  “Okay, fine. What if Ms. Cavanaugh assigns us T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound? You going to just refuse to read? What about other kinds of art? Are you going to stop going to museums?”

  Now Chloe looked interested. “No more Picasso?” she asked. “Why stop at art? What about music? And what do we do about Michael Jackson?”

  They both watched as I tried to come up with an answer. Hunter was onto something, but it wasn’t everything. “Okay, fine, I hadn’t really thought about the older stuff. But there’s a difference between people who did horrible stuff way before I was even alive, people who are dead now, and people who were doing bad things at the same time as they were making the art I like—books, movies, whatever. It doesn’t feel like the same kind of betrayal, you know?”

  Chloe nodded, but I hadn’t convinced Hunter. “Just because the standards were different back then doesn’t mean what they were doing wasn’t wrong,” he said. “Is it really okay to let them off the hook just because they didn’t know better? As if being anti-Semitic or horrible to other people was ever really okay?”

  “You have a point,” I said. “You’re going to be a really good lawyer.”

  He grinned. “If I even get into college. I’m going to have to find some extracurriculars, and soon.”

  Funny that he’d bring up extracurriculars. Was that some sort of hint? Had he sent the note? Was he waiting for me to figure it out? I watched his face but it was as open as it always was. Chloe hadn’t responded either, except to say that extracurriculars were the least of her worries. “Speaking of which, I have to go,” she said. “Did you know there’s an amazing greenhouse on campus? It’s perfect for photo shoots. I’ll join the Garden Club to get access if I have to, but I am fully taking that place over.”

  I didn’t doubt it for a second.

  The breakneck pace of those early days of school made me realize succeeding at Gardner would be a lot harder than succeeding at my old high school. I had an astonishing amount of work to do in every single one of my classes, and I was already wondering
whether taking Chinese rather than sticking with Spanish was a mistake. I’d been half kidding about walking around with flash cards initially, but now I was deathly serious—I brought them everywhere and reviewed them constantly.

  The good news was that my teachers were all pretty great. They might have ended up at Gardner because they’d made mistakes or bad choices or were too stubborn to leave when things got bad, but that meant we had teachers with interesting backgrounds who were committed to making sure the students who cared got the best possible education. Sure, that meant a ton of work, but that had already turned into weekly study dates with Hunter, so I couldn’t complain.

  The bad news was that I had no idea how I was going to do academically, which meant I was going to have to build up my résumé with more than just classes. Which meant I didn’t have the option of ignoring that note. I needed to join a club of some kind, and I didn’t care what it was.

  Except I’d run out of time to figure out where to go. I’d planned to come straight home from services and dinner Friday night and get to work, but I was exhausted from a week of studying, and I fell asleep before I could even start to plan my research. I’d have to find the place on Saturday.

  I hoped there was time.

  I started early, bringing my journal and a pen to the dining hall, where I drank cup after cup of sweet, milky tea and worked through the options. The safest place on campus depended on what kind of bad thing might be happening, and given that we were at a school, I immediately went back to thinking about shootings. But the safest place in a school shooting was relative, and there wasn’t always time to get picky—the note’s phrasing indicated there was a specific place to go, so the event probably was something that came with some notice. Could it be a biohazard, in which case I’d be looking for a nurse’s office? That wouldn’t necessarily be safe; it would just be obvious, which didn’t seem right. We had to be looking for someplace that was completely blocked off from physical harm of any kind.