“I didn’t do this for you,” I said. It had taken me nearly fifteen minutes to decide what to eat, and while I’d settled on a noodle stir-fry, we all knew I’d be back to my normal sandwich soon.
Though Chloe and Hunter seemed to be getting along just fine, it became clear as the week went on that it was surface-level fine. Hunter and I were back on our study schedule, and he wasn’t one for gossip; all I could get him to tell me during our Tuesday-night session was that he’d learned a lot about Chloe during the game, and also outside of it. He didn’t say what he’d learned, or whether it was good or bad, but Chloe filled in the gaps for me.
“He assumed me helping Jo by ripping him off in the game was some sort of metaphor for what was happening with us in real life,” she told me as we sat on the shuttle downtown. The kickboxing bug had bitten me, and we’d agreed to start going once a week. I’d asked Wyatt if he wanted to come, but he said once was plenty and he would stick with running. His loss.
“Why would he think that?” I asked, although at this point no one could miss the energy between Chloe and Jo.
“We’ve started hanging out a little bit,” she said. “Me and Jo. Not, like, in any official way. Just once in a while.”
I had no idea what Chloe meant by “hanging out,” but if it was enough to upset Hunter, it meant that, at a minimum, she was spending more time with Jo than with him. Beyond that, I figured it was none of my business. “How’s that going? Does she talk to you? Have you learned more about her?” I’d tried as best as I could, or I thought I had, but sometimes it felt like Jo had a force-field around her. I was impressed Chloe had managed to get past it.
“She tells me some stuff, but not a lot,” Chloe admitted. “She is not the easiest person to get to know. It makes for a fun challenge, though.”
I didn’t doubt it. I felt bad for Hunter, but if Chloe and Jo were happy, then I was happy for them. And I was still waiting for Wyatt to follow up about us going out for ice cream. Maybe I’d misunderstood and he wasn’t really asking me out. Maybe he really did just want ice cream. I’d written the words “ice cream” in my journal so many times they were starting to lose their meaning. I hoped he made his move soon, before the next game.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
If the text hadn’t arrived in the middle of the night we’d all have been deafened by the sound of nearly every cell phone in school receiving it at the same time. By Thursday morning, it had become clear that just about everyone had gotten the pictures. Pictures of Chloe, pictures that were not exactly Instagram-worthy, pictures she would not want the whole school to see.
I didn’t even bother calling. I ran to Chloe’s dorm room and knocked on her door softly, not sure if she’d want to let me in, or if she’d be hysterically crying. But she answered me right away, her face dry of tears. “Chloe, I—” I didn’t even know what to say. “Are you okay?”
Her face was completely locked down. I couldn’t see anything. “I’m fine,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me. Come on, let’s get out of here so we don’t wake up Lauren.” She walked out into the hall and toward the lounge.
I followed her and sat in an overstuffed chair. “Doesn’t mean I’m not going to worry,” I said. “Tell me what I can do.”
“Nothing right now,” she said. “But maybe after I come up with a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Someone is going to pay for this,” she said, and I realized I was finally hearing what it sounded like when Chloe got angry. Her voice was low and knife-sharp, every word articulated precisely. I would not want to be the person she was angry with right now, that was for sure.
“How are you going to find out who?”
“I’ll figure it out,” she said. “It’s about to get ugly.”
I wanted to ask more questions, to know how she planned to find the person who’d sent the pictures around, or even who she’d been with, but it felt invasive to ask. “Have you talked to . . .” I let my voice trail off, hoping she’d fill in the blanks for me. “. . . whoever took them?” Chloe might be an expert photographer of herself, but even I knew she hadn’t taken those pictures. They were amateurish, badly lit, even occasionally unflattering. The opposite of Chloe’s curated approach.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about any of this. I want to deal with it myself.”
I’d spent so much time wondering what it would be like for Chloe’s rage to explode that it never occurred to me that it might implode instead. Chloe was keeping her anger private. Kind of like how I’d kept my crushing on Hunter private. It made me feel like we had more in common than I thought, despite the fact that she was way less freaked out at the thought of the whole school seeing her naked than I would be. I couldn’t help imagining how I’d feel if Hunter or Wyatt saw pictures like that of me.
“What is going on inside that head of yours?” Chloe asked. “You look like you just peeled a lime and ate it like an orange.”
I hadn’t realized I’d pursed my lips and scrunched up my whole face until she said that. I made myself relax but I could feel myself turning red at the same time.
Chloe inspected me more closely. “Are you blushing right now? Is there something you want to tell me?”
I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk about Wyatt yet. I wasn’t even sure what was happening, if anything. But she knew a lot more about boys and dates and relationships than I did; it was tempting to ask for advice, even if I had no idea what I wanted to know. But now wasn’t the time. “You’re trying to change the subject,” I said. “And no. But maybe soon.”
Sooner than I thought, given that Wyatt messaged me from his computer later that night, after Chloe reassured me a million times that she was okay and that she’d come up with a plan on her own. Ice cream this weekend? No Eucalyptus—Jo’s up next but she needs more time.
Sure, I wrote back. Saturday?
That meant I just needed to get through one more day of trying not to stress about what I was pretty sure was my first date. And probably Wyatt’s too. I needed distraction.
Chloe had already warned me she’d be lying low for the rest of the week, and Hunter had skipped lunch the day the pictures came out, which convinced me he’d taken them, though I was sure he hadn’t been the one to send them around, even if he was upset with her. But did I only think that because I wanted so much for it to be true? There was no way. I decided my best option for distraction was to do a little detective work. Chloe might have wanted to handle this herself, but she shouldn’t have to.
I grabbed Hunter before class Friday morning. I might have convinced myself he wouldn’t do something to hurt Chloe that badly, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know who did. “Lunch today. You and me. No skipping out, okay?”
“With Chloe?” he asked.
“Just me.” We went to the dining hall but stayed away from our normal table, just in case; Hunter made one of his gargantuan awful subs, while I had a grilled cheese with tomato soup.
“I can’t believe I’m not getting more money for this,” Hunter said. “Another new lunch!”
“Shut it,” I told him, but secretly I was pleased. I enjoyed his teasing. “Now tell me how you’re doing, and don’t lie to me. I know you took those photos.”
Watching a freckled person blush was fascinating—the pink kind of crept around the tiny brown spots until it subsumed them. “Did Chloe tell you that? You don’t think I sent them, do you?”
I was glad he’d decided to be honest. “She didn’t tell me, and no, I don’t think you sent them. And she said she wants to deal with this herself, but I thought if you took them then maybe you’d know who sent them to everyone else.”
“No idea,” he said. “I was all up night thinking about it, hoping it wasn’t my fault, but then I looked at what got sent around and what was on my phone, and I didn’t take all the pictures. Whoever sent the text didn’t get the pictures from me.”
That complic
ated matters—I’d been thinking one of Hunter’s soccer friends had gotten hold of his phone and stolen the pictures and then sent them out, maybe as some sort of terrible joke. But if Hunter didn’t have all the pictures, that theory didn’t hold up.
“How’s Chloe doing?” Hunter asked. “She’s not answering my texts.”
“She’s on a quest for revenge, and I don’t doubt she’ll get it.”
“Neither do I,” Hunter said. “I hope she brought two shovels.”
I for one was hoping no graves would need digging. Given that Hunter seemed okay, I decided to bring up my other pressing concern. “So can I ask you a random question?”
“Anything.” He wiped a smear of mustard off his face with a brown paper napkin, and it occurred to me that I really must be over him, if he was the person I most wanted advice from right now.
“Have you and Wyatt become friends through all this Eucalyptus stuff? I know you do different sports and have different groups of friends, but do you talk? Like, about guy stuff?”
“You mean like about how into you he is?”
“What?” I almost spilled my tomato soup. How did he know?
“Oh, come on, his whole nervous twitchy asking- questions thing gets a thousand times worse around you. How have you not seen that?”
“Um, because I’m always there when he’s around me?”
Hunter tilted his head. “You have a point. Okay, Wyatt is way more twitchy around you than he is when you’re not there. He’s totally into you. You should think about it.”
Now I was the one turning red.
Hunter pointed at me and laughed. “Ha, you’ve got a thing for him too! It is so on!”
“I do not!” I protested, except why was I doing that? I’d wanted Hunter to confirm that Wyatt and I were really going on a date, and that was exactly what he was doing. “Okay, we might be going out for ice cream tomorrow.”
Hunter reached out for a high five. “That’s my girl! Best news I’ve had all day. All week. All month, really.”
“My love life is your best news? After you nailed first-quarter finals?” I had too. Grades had just come out, and I could not have been more relieved to find that our hard work had paid off.
“Sad but true,” he said. “I just wish my grades felt more important right now.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. We both knew I was asking about Chloe, and not just the pictures.
He shook his head. “I’ll get over it. There are lots of great girls at this school. I’ll just have to find one who likes me as much as Wyatt likes you.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I said. But it still felt good to hear him say it.
Wyatt and I met at the bus on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully it was sunny, though we were heading into mid-November and the weather was getting chillier by the day. Wyatt was more accustomed to being outside in the cold than I was, given that the cross-country team ran year round, so I felt pathetic when I saw he was wearing a fleece when I had on my puffer coat. “I’m such a wimp,” I said as we got on the shuttle.
“Not at all.” He rolled up his coat sleeve to show me the sweater he was wearing underneath, then rolled up the sweater sleeve to show me a flannel shirt, then rolled up the flannel sleeve to show me a long-sleeved T-shirt that looked like it was made of nylon. “It’s long underwear for outdoor runs,” he explained. “I bet I’m warmer than you are in that coat. It’s a nice coat, by the way.”
It wasn’t, but I appreciated him saying so. I would have to get me some of that long underwear too. “I can’t believe we’re getting ice cream when it’s this cold.”
“We don’t have to,” he said. “I just wanted to hang out, and I didn’t know what would be fun for us to do.” His eyes went to the floor. I’d made him feel bad, and I hadn’t meant to.
“No, ice cream is a great idea!” I said. “I just think it’s funny, that’s all.”
Not many people agreed that ice cream was a great idea; the ice-cream place was empty when we arrived, which was nice. I had time to examine all the flavors—Ben & Jerry’s, of course, since we were in Vermont, after all. “Want to sit here while we eat?” Wyatt asked. “It’s warm and quiet and we can talk.”
“That’s perfect.” I was glad he’d suggested it, since I wasn’t excited about being outside, and all I knew about other people’s post–ice cream dates was where they’d stopped to make out. I was enjoying hanging out with Wyatt, but that didn’t mean I was ready to jump to the kissing part. “So what did you think of the game?” I asked him.
He smiled, flashing me a glimpse of those crooked teeth that I was starting to find way more charming than I would have expected. “It was great! I knew you’d come up with something creative.”
“Don’t you think it got kind of . . .” I wasn’t even sure what phrase to use. “. . . weird?”
Now I got a laugh. “Sure, it got weird. But in a good way, mostly? We got to see Jo be vulnerable, we got to see just how competitive Chloe is, and we found out Hunter’s not completely her lap dog.”
I hadn’t realized Wyatt saw Hunter that way, the same way Chloe did. Was I destined to constantly be reading people wrong? “He’ll get over being annoyed at her, won’t he? I thought Chloe would be mad about losing, but she wasn’t.”
He thought about that one for a minute. “I think he will. And Chloe being mad could have gone either way. But it seems like Chloe always does that hyperintense thing and then moves on. I’d be curious to know what Jo thinks of all this.”
“You and me both. I’ve tried to get to know her a little, but she’s such a closed book.”
“Yeah, I’m only starting to be less scared of her,” Wyatt admitted. “She’s pretty intimidating. But I think deep down she likes us, and she wants us to like her.”
“I can’t imagine what her game will be like.” It was terrifying to think about.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking, staying at the ice-cream place so long we ended up getting seconds just so the staff wouldn’t be annoyed. I learned more about Wyatt’s crazy family situation; he’d recently met his dad’s parents for the first time and found out they were full-on preppers.
“Dad joined this group called Another Voice of Warning. He said it was just a Mormon prepper group, but they have this awful Facebook page that makes them look like white nationalists, you know? That’s not what the Mormons I know are like.” Now he was the one sounding sad. “I didn’t want to point out to him that he has a Black kid, even if I was raised in a ‘colorblind’ household.”
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was my mom’s idea,” he said. “Which she has since come to regret, big time. But she had this idea of us all growing up in a post-racial environment, as if we didn’t notice ourselves that not everyone on the commune looked the same, as if my brother and sister and I weren’t treated differently at the library or when we went shopping. There’s no way to pretend race doesn’t exist in this country, though someone here thinks I need even more lessons.”
He’d never mentioned the mysterious book deliveries to me directly before, and I’d never felt it appropriate to ask. “What’s going on with that?”
“There’s been a bunch of messed up stuff.” He told me about the books, a shipment of literature and essays from Black writers that included James Baldwin, bell hooks, Ta Nehisi-Coates, Roxane Gay, and Ibram X. Kendi. “There was a gift card, and all it said was ‘Those who don’t understand the past are doomed to repeat it.’”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “The real quote is ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’” I said. “It wasn’t a Jewish person who said it, but Jewish people talk about it a lot.”
“I know,” Wyatt said. “I have to admit, I wondered at first if maybe you’d sent the books. You’re the only Jewish person I know here.”
That might explain why he’d never mentioned the books at Eucalyptus meetings. “You know I didn’t, righ
t?”
He kicked me under the table, but not hard. “Of course you didn’t! I never really thought so. I was running through possibilities, you know? And besides, you’d never have done the rest of it.”
“There’s more?” This was starting to sound scary.
“Just a little. I don’t know if it’s the same person, but right around when the books showed up I noticed I was starting to get a lot of what I thought was spam. I’ve had an email address for a long time but I’ve barely used it, so at first I thought it was because the account was getting more exercise, you know? But it wasn’t regular spam—someone had signed me up for a bunch of websites and mailing lists. Some of them are actually pretty good and I stayed subscribed—there’s a website called Very Smart Brothas that’s great—but some of them are awful. Have you ever heard of 4chan?”
Oh, I’d heard of 4chan.
“I started getting notifications of threads from white supremacist message boards. I’d assume that the person who signed me up was just super racist, but combined with all this other stuff?”
“It’s like someone’s trying to give you an education,” I said. “By exposing you to the best and worst of what the world has to offer.”
He nodded grimly. “As if I didn’t already know about those books. And yeah, maybe I’m not up on the latest online trolling platforms and all that, but why would anyone care? Why would they want me to have to deal with so much hate?”
“I’m so sorry, Wyatt.” I reached over and placed my hand over his, like I had so briefly back in the library, but this time I left it there.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “I blocked the worst of it, kept the good stuff, and tried to look at the books as a harmless prank.”
“It’s good that you can do that,” I said. “Chloe’s trying too, though Hunter’s having a harder time.”
Wyatt looked puzzled. “Did something happen to Chloe and Hunter?”
“There was that article about Hunter in the school paper, and now there’s the pictures.” When his face didn’t change, I realized he’d never seen them. Which made some sense, since he didn’t have a phone, and he barely checked his messages.
How to Pack for the End of the World Page 15