She had a point, but that didn’t change the fact that nothing had happened to Jo, though neither she nor Hunter seemed convinced when I mentioned it. “Just because we don’t know about anything doesn’t mean nothing’s happened,” Hunter said. “She’s not exactly all about full disclosure.”
That was also true. “You’re right. Maybe I’m just trying to find someone to blame and I picked the easiest person.” I remembered how quick I’d been to write off Ken, though the more I got to know him through student council, the less likely it seemed that he could pull off something like this. He wasn’t as bad as I’d thought he would be, but his party-boy shtick wasn’t just shtick. And besides, now that he’d gotten on student council, he had what he wanted. Was there anyone else? Someone I was missing? Could Bri have been so angry at me that it spread to my friends? She did have access to my journal.
“Just because Jo’s the easiest person doesn’t mean we need to jump to that conclusion,” Chloe said. “Besides, whoever did this had to have tons of connections, and that doesn’t scream Jo to me.”
“She knows more people than we realize,” I pointed out. “Remember Krav Maga?”
“Sure,” Chloe said. “But how would she get your journal? How would she get in your room?”
That was a good point. It’s not like she was secretly friends with Bri. I didn’t think so, anyway.
“How about we put this aside for a while and start talking about what’s really important?” Chloe said.
“Like your game?” I asked, and Hunter groaned.
“What could be more important than that?” She grinned. “It’s going to be epic!”
I had no doubt she was right. Unless Wyatt and I still weren’t talking, in which case it was going to be a complete nightmare. Either way, I’d find out soon enough.
14.
I tried not to think too much about who was behind the awful things that had happened as I powered my way through finals, but I couldn’t help it. I’d designed my curriculum to learn about politics and fascism and the ways single nefarious individuals could destroy social structures, which made it impossible to use schoolwork as an escape from reality. The parallels were so obvious as to make me feel not just stupid but like a terrible person—I hadn’t given the thought of Chloe’s photos or Hunter’s interview takedown or Wyatt’s books my full attention until the bad stuff started happening to me. For someone who’d been raised on the slogan “Never Forget,” I sure had forgotten a lot of lessons very quickly.
Much as I would have liked to think I was learning something from all the negativity swirling around me, I knew my second quarter would not be nearly as successful as my first. Studying felt impossible. I checked my texts constantly to see whether Wyatt had gone to pick up the journal, though I hadn’t yet gone so far as to check myself, in case we ended up there at the same time and I ruined everything. Again.
It was a relief when finals ended and Chloe summoned us to the bunker Saturday morning. I knew whatever she had planned would be elaborate and encompassing and likely ridiculous in some way. As awkward as it would be to see Wyatt when I didn’t know whether he’d read the journal, it was better than sitting around moping.
As usual, the game designer sat in the middle—that meant Chloe—and the rest of us sat on the floor facing her. Normally I’d have curled up with Wyatt, but he’d come early and chosen a spot backed up against a shelf, with an empty pillow next to him. As if I’d have gone over there not knowing whether he was still angry. Maybe we didn’t know each other as well as I thought. I studiously avoided eye contact and sat between Hunter and Jo.
“Okay, everyone, I think you all know that I’m not nearly as worried about the end of the world as the rest of you,” Chloe began. “I’ve indulged all your apocalyptic scary talk because I like the games, and I like all of you, but I for one have had it with the doom and gloom. Yes, there’s been some crap happening, but we’ve got to move past it. I hope we can agree that I got the worst of it, and if I can deal, then the rest of you can too. So this game is going to be less about how to survive and more about what survival means to us. What kind of world do we want to live in, once we’ve gotten past the worst of it? Who are we going to be when we’ve started over? For this game, I’m going to give everyone a chance to show what they can do to make life worth living after the apocalypse.”
I hoped Chloe would take the collective groan in the good-natured spirit I was sure we all intended it. “Please don’t tell me we’re going to have to make our own clothes or something,” Hunter said.
Chloe made finger guns at Hunter and then laughed at the expression of panic on his face, mirrored on everyone else’s. “Just kidding. No sewing, I promise. But you’re on the right track. Let me do the setup first, okay?”
Hunter gave her a finger gun right back.
“All right. Where to begin?” She paused. “In the town where I grew up, it was all about steel. More than half the people worked for the same steel mill, and when it shut down, the town might as well have shut down too.” This was as personal as I’d ever heard Chloe. The bunker was so quiet I could hear everyone breathing.
“Everyone said new jobs would come once there was agreement about what kind of energy to invest in—wind, solar, nuclear—but there never was a consensus, and there never were any new jobs. So my family stayed broke, and my dad kept on ranting. Wind and solar power were too expensive and weather-dependent. Nuclear power could destroy us all. I knew in some ways he was full of crap, but that didn’t keep me from freaking out about nuclear plant meltdowns, and it wasn’t a big leap from there to being terrified of nuclear power, and nuclear weapons.
“So: our game is about living in a post-nuclear world, and by post-nuclear, I mean post–nuclear apocalypse. We’ve still got power and all that, but the air quality is no good, so we can’t go outside.”
I glanced at Wyatt—he would be miserable. He grimaced but didn’t look back at me.
Jo noticed Wyatt’s look too. “The wind chill is like twenty below,” she said. “Staying inside won’t kill you.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not a stickler for rules, as you know,” Chloe said. “I’m not going to make you stay inside the whole time. I just mean that all the game stuff will be taking place indoors.”
“The woods are still yours, Romeo,” Jo said.
So she knew about our walks, but she didn’t know that we weren’t speaking. Maybe Chloe and Hunter were right, and Jo had nothing to do with any of the bad stuff. But why wouldn’t Chloe have told her? Could Jo be pretending not to know?
“Here’s how this is going to work,” Chloe said. “There are two parts to each game, but the winner is the person who does the best job overall. The first category is shelter: each person has to find an indoor space and then stock and decorate it.”
“Decorate it? Seriously?” Hunter asked.
“Yup. This game is about thriving after the apocalypse, not just surviving. The best combo is what matters, so if you kill it on the stocking part and you don’t bother to decorate, you lose. Are we clear?”
We nodded. I loved that Chloe had designed a game best suited to herself, even though she couldn’t win. It was such a Chloe thing to do.
“Second part: a progressive party. We’ll each show off our decorations and people can vote on which theme they like best.”
I raised my hand. “Are we talking about a party for the five of us, or something bigger?”
“I had something bigger in mind,” Chloe said, “but if you want to make it all sad and private, that’s your prerogative.”
“Is there going to be drinking at this party?” Jo asked. “Because if that’s what we’re talking about, I’m out. I don’t care if other people do that, but that’s not happening in my room.” I had no idea Jo had such strong feelings about alcohol.
“Doesn’t have to be,” Chloe said. “People can do that in the other rooms, if they want.”
Jo nodded. That was enough to satisfy her.
<
br /> “So, are you in?” Did Chloe sound a little nervous? How odd—that wasn’t like her.
“I am,” Wyatt said, though with less enthusiasm than we were used to. “I’ve never planned a party. It’ll be fun.”
Hunter gave the thumbs-up, and Jo and I said we were in as well.
“Excellent!” Chloe clapped her hands. “You’ve got a day and a half: the party is Sunday night, because most people are taking off on Monday and Tuesday.”
“You’ll do the inviting, right?” I asked. If it were up to me it would be the five of us, the student council, and Hillel, and I wasn’t sure how well those groups would mix. Although getting Ken and Jo back together could be entertaining.
“Working on the invite list as we speak,” Chloe said.
Now I had to figure out what, exactly, I was going to do next.
The first thing that had to happen was finding an actual space. Obviously the bunker was off-limits, but I didn’t imagine I’d be the only one who’d be trolling the underground tunnels for empty rooms. There was no shortage of options, both on the lowest level and the one above it, where lots of students had already figured out where to go to be alone. That basement level was a possibility, but it wasn’t the best one, not if I wanted some real privacy. I dug out the map I’d drawn of the lowest level back when I’d had to track down the bunker. September seemed like such a long time ago, but we’d only just finished the first half of the year. How was it possible for so little time to have passed and yet feel like forever?
My map, I saw as soon as I looked at it more carefully, was terrible. But then I remembered that some of the others had located the bunker by looking at blueprints they’d found online or in the library. I texted Hunter to see if he still had his and crossed my fingers that he didn’t get all hyper-competitive on me and tell me to go find the blueprints myself.
He wasn’t like that, though. Here you go, he wrote, with the blueprints attached.
I opened the file on my laptop and blew it up so I could read the details. There weren’t a whole lot of rooms on that lowest level, which the blueprints called the subbasement, but there were a few spaces that appeared to be closets or storage rooms, and it seemed worth checking them out. That was how I found myself wandering around the dark, dusty subbasement on Saturday night, looking at blueprints on my phone and trying to find a space bigger than six square feet that could serve as both nuclear shelter and party room. How had Chloe convinced us this was a good idea?
After confirming that more than half the spaces I’d found on the map were tiny closets, I finally stumbled on a more promising room. The door was locked but it wiggled when I pushed on it, which made me think the lock was weak. I twisted the knob and thrust my shoulder at it a bunch of times as if I were a cop on some bad TV show, and to my surprise, the lock gave way. I fell into a room just a little bit smaller than the bunker. A cloud of dust swirled around me, turning my sweatshirt and leggings a uniform shade of gray and blurring my vision.
Once I was able to see, it became clear I’d have my work cut out for me to get this room both shelter- and party-ready in under a day. It was full of empty cardboard boxes that had deteriorated over the years, having been divested of their contents long ago. Some of them still had legible text that told me they’d held mostly cleaning products and paper goods; this had been some sort of central storage space, but not for decades. It smelled awful, musty with some underlying scent I didn’t recognize until I discovered the bodies of several dead mice.
Other than the boxes and the rodents and the dirt, the room was empty, and it seemed perfect. It was at least as protected as the actual shelter, which I could use as a model for how to set up the space. I just had to claim it as mine and get to work, so I took out the Sharpie and Post-its I’d brought, wrote my name on a Post-it, and stuck it on the door. Then it was back to my room for the world’s longest and most thorough shower before I wrote up my game plan.
Sleep was not an option, but then again, sleep had been nearly impossible lately, between finals and obsessing about Wyatt, so that was nothing new. I spent the whole night cleaning my party room, throwing everything out so the room was a blank canvas that I cleaned and then painted. I wasn’t much of an artist, so I kept it simple, but I wanted the space to remind people there was an outside world, even if we weren’t supposed to be part of it anymore. I painted the floor green and the walls and the ceiling blue, and I found some leftover fake turf in one of the storage rooms under the gym and decided it wasn’t stealing to use it for a school project, and then convinced myself I could make the case for this being a school project. I painted clouds on the ceiling along with an enormous yellow sun, trees and flowers on three of the walls, and a sandy beach leading to an ocean on the remaining one and set out cheap beach chairs in front of it. The gym storage locker also had lots of equipment, so I liberated a volleyball and a net—I could always return them later. I got some canned goods and bottles of water so it looked like I was really trying to care about the survival side of things, and then I brought a ton of potato chips and powdered juice mix to serve at the party, figuring the enterprising degenerates could spike it and I didn’t have to be in charge of finding booze.
When I was done, I did a slow turn around the center of the room to observe my handiwork. I’d done a good job, I thought; I’d found a beanbag chair that could serve as a bed if Chloe insisted on the room being truly functional, and while the artsy kids would find no competition from me, the space looked bright and reminiscent of the outdoors. I’d taken a dank, musty subbasement storage room and made it feel like spring. I might not have this game in the bag, but I was in the running.
The party was scheduled to start Sunday night at nine, after the dorm parents had shut themselves away but before our formal curfew. We’d all sent our locations to Chloe so she could put together a map for people to follow; the five of us would meet in the bunker at eight so we could do a tour first, before all the students came and trashed our hard work.
It hadn’t occurred to me that we should dress up in some way that signaled what our room would be like, but as soon as I saw everyone else I sensed I’d missed an opportunity. Chloe wore a short dress made entirely out of silver sequins; she looked like a disco ball personified, which made perfect sense when she showed us her room, one of the abandoned bathrooms on the second level that had a big lounge-type area with half-length mirrors on one of the walls. She’d covered every square inch of space with silver: mirrored tiles on the floor, silver wallpaper covering the stalls so you couldn’t even see there were toilets behind them, silver boxes covering the sinks to create a shelf where she arranged drinks in silver plastic cups and silver-foil-wrapped kisses in silver bowls. And of course she’d hung a disco ball from the ceiling, which made the whole room twinkle.
Chloe twirled in the center, her dress creating even more glitter, though that might also have been because she was throwing glitter around as she spun. By the time she was done we were all sparkling, and I was pretty sure she’d gotten some in my nose. “What do you think?” she asked.
Hunter peered more closely at the shelf. “I think you’ll get through this party, but I don’t see you surviving five minutes past it. There’s no food besides chocolate. There isn’t even a bed.”
Chloe was having none of it. “Well, if I can’t win my own contest, then I’m not really obliged to play fair, am I? Come on, admit it—this place is fabulous.”
“I can admit it no problem,” Wyatt said. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
He was such a good sport. We all acknowledged her design acumen and how high a bar she’d set.
I was next, since my room wasn’t that far from Chloe’s. I had to admit the space looked kind of rookie next to the sophistication of Chloe’s disco palace. “It’s very . . . cheerful,” Jo said. “Way to be an apocalyptic Pollyanna.”
I couldn’t even get offended; apocalyptic Pollyanna was what I’d been going for. I checked to see if I could get a r
ead on Chloe, but her face was impassive; she was taking her role as judge seriously. Hunter, on the other hand, couldn’t hide the fact that he was giving my volleyball setup the side-eye, which I didn’t appreciate. I’d left a blanket at the foot of one of the trees, hoping Wyatt would notice I’d tried to paint our spot, but he didn’t say anything. So I wasn’t going to win, and I hadn’t even managed to get a reaction from Wyatt. I felt like a failure.
Hunter, unshockingly, had chosen a hidden storage space behind the locker room for the boys’ soccer team. I should have known his plan the minute I saw he was wearing his soccer uniform. As soon as I walked in I understood the look he’d given my volleyball net: he’d also raided the athletic department’s storage units, and had created a mini-golf course. He hadn’t done much with the décor, so I had him there, but his mini-golf game looked like a lot more fun than my sad volleyball court. He’d also used the AstroTurf to create the putt-putt holes, and he’d made one of those windmills you had to shoot the ball through to try and get a hole in one, though I noted (only to myself) that it wasn’t mechanized. It was cute, but he wouldn’t win either.
That left Wyatt and Jo. “Who wants to go next?” Chloe asked. “I’m looking to be blown away here.”
“Not sure I can do that, but I can go,” Wyatt said.
I couldn’t imagine what Wyatt would do. He was the most outdoorsy person I knew, and this was the most indoorsy game ever. He was screwed. His clothes didn’t give much away, other than that he was wearing a lot of layers—a hoodie over a flannel over a T-shirt, which seemed like overkill.
Wyatt led us out of the gym and into the campus chapel, where the Hillel services were held. It was a beautiful building, though I hadn’t thought of it that way before, with gleaming wooden pews and stained-glass windows. Hunter’s and Chloe’s voices echoed as they joked about Wyatt taking us to church, but to his credit he ignored them and led us to a staircase hidden behind the dais, one I’d never noticed before.
How to Pack for the End of the World Page 19