I felt my lips curling and tried to make my face a mask, like hers had been. This was the person I’d thought was my best friend? I was a toy for her to play with?
“Don’t make that face, Amina,” Chloe said. She always did have a read on me. “You asked for all of it, and I’m giving you all of it.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“I thought I could take you both down a peg, that’s all. Hunter, you were cute and fun to flirt with, but it didn’t take much to figure out who your dad was and how much you didn’t want people to know. Amina, you were drooling so hard for Hunter you’d do whatever I told you if it meant being close to him, so I talked you into running for student council. The plan was for both of you to lose.”
Now my face was red with both embarrassment and rage. I didn’t dare look at anyone, especially Hunter. “But that’s not what happened,” I managed to get out.
“No, because I started to actually like you.” Chloe sat cross-legged now. She was getting her confidence back, and I hated it. “Hunter still needed to go down, though. Our whole situation was getting a little too complicated.”
“Oh, so I was the lucky one,” I said. “What changed? If we were really friends, why’d you send all those fake quotes from my journal to Wyatt? Why’d you harass him, anyway? And what about Jo?”
“Slow down,” she said. “I’ll get there.”
“Get there faster,” Hunter said. “You’ve wasted enough of our time already.”
I wasn’t the only one getting angrier and angrier as Chloe talked.
“Okay, Wyatt first,” Chloe said. “At that first Eucalyptus meeting, when he told us his whole background, I was furious. He grew up with a whole community of people who loved him and who shielded him from everything hard in the world, and when one bad thing happened to him he ended up at Gardner. Boom. Still protected from everything, never had to fight for anything. It made me so angry. I wasn’t trying to be a terrible person; I just wanted him to understand how easy he’d had it, how the world was a much worse place than he knew. So I sent the books and put him on a few mailing lists.”
“Let me get this straight,” Wyatt said. “You thought you were trying to help me?”
“I did,” she said. “You seemed so oblivious. You needed to understand the full range of what’s out there.”
“The full range included some pretty horrible stuff,” he said. “You brought the worst of it right to my door. And you’re wrong that I don’t know what it means to be Black in the United States. I may have been shielded from some things, but there’s no getting away from it without avoiding all people everywhere. I’m not as naive as you think, and I don’t see what right you’d have to wake me up even if I were.”
“Way to go, Wyatt,” Jo said, and it was nice to see Wyatt smile at Jo calling him by his actual name.
“I suppose you were helping me, too, Princess?” Jo said, not even trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Outing me as a runaway to everyone in the whole school, when you were the only person who knew?”
“I mean, kind of,” she said. “You needed to get over it. And you needed to talk to someone about it who wasn’t me. I bet Amina reached out to you immediately, didn’t she? She’s a good friend, and you needed one.”
“Let me get this straight,” Jo said. “You ruined a perfectly good party to remind me of the worst period of my life, all in the hopes I would make a friend who isn’t you?”
“Well, you were about to win my game, too. Couldn’t have that.”
Was she serious? Is this what it was like to be inside Chloe’s brain? “You think this is all okay? That this is how people behave?” I asked.
“I’m not saying I was right,” Chloe said. “I’m telling you what I was thinking. You asked.”
“So let me guess. You broke up Wyatt and me because Hunter was done with you and Jo wasn’t sure she wanted to be with you.”
“Now you’re catching on.” She looked almost sad again. “Also I was mad at you. You didn’t follow the rules of your own game. I should have won.”
I’d been right—she was pissed off she’d lost. I thought she’d hidden it well, but I’d misunderstood.
“It’s all fixed, though. You two are happy again. No harm done.” What killed me was that she really believed it. I could hear it in her voice.
“Let me see if I can work out the rest,” I said. “You sent out pictures of yourself to make sure none of us suspected you.”
“Yes, but not just that.” She turned to Jo. “Those were for you.”
Jo scowled. “Why would I want to see them?”
“I wanted you to want me,” she said simply. “I didn’t know how to make it happen. That was just one thing I tried.”
“You should have tried being a real person, Princess,” Jo said. She sounded so sad. “When I felt like you were being honest, that’s when it seemed like we might be getting somewhere.”
“I’m being honest now,” Chloe said. “Does that mean you all can forgive me?”
She couldn’t be serious. “Do you even care how much you hurt us?” I asked. “I get that in some warped way you thought you were being useful some of the time, but you can’t have thought there wouldn’t be any fallout.”
“We’re going to need some time,” Wyatt said. “It’s getting late, anyway, and some of us have to get ready to travel tomorrow. How about we call it a night, and maybe we can talk when we get back, after break?”
Chloe looked at Jo. “You’ll be here over break with me, won’t you? We can talk before that?”
Jo shook her head. “Changed my mind. I’m going home with Amina.”
Chloe blinked a few times, and I could see she was trying to keep herself from crying again. Maybe she did realize how wrong she’d been. “Sure, I get it.” Her voice didn’t crack, but it lacked her usual bravado.
Wyatt, Hunter, Jo, and I headed out of the greenhouse without saying goodbye. I didn’t hear Chloe behind us; I could only assume she needed a little more time to herself. We walked back to the dorms in silence, processing what we’d just heard. I found the whole situation nearly impossible to believe. How could I have been so wrong about Chloe? How could I have thought she was my best friend here and not realized what she was doing? How could I have seen her do terrible things to other people and thought I was safe? It was arrogant of me, in a way, to think I was somehow better than the girls who followed her on Instagram and did whatever she told them.
We stopped in front of the girls’ dorm. “I guess this is it for now,” Hunter said. “Wish me luck avoiding my family.” We traded hugs, even Jo, in silent accord that we weren’t going to talk about Chloe. “Wyatt, you coming back to the boys’ dorm with me?”
Wyatt took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m going to drag Amina off for one last walk, if that’s okay.”
I squeezed back. “Fine by me. Jo, we’ll meet tomorrow to catch the bus?”
“Bright and early,” she said. “Have fun, lovebirds.”
Now that was a nickname I could live with.
Wyatt and I turned back toward the woods, agreeing without saying anything to go down our usual path, to find our tree. “You warm enough?” he asked.
The air was getting colder by the minute, but I didn’t care. “I’m fine. How about you? I bet you were outside the whole time.”
“I was. I was sure Chloe was trying to show off her survival skills by setting herself up outside. I thought maybe she’d have built a little shelter.”
“Making up for a game she didn’t win,” I said. “I see the logic.”
“I wasn’t the only one,” he said. “Jo checked out all the secret rooms from last night’s game—how funny, it was just last night, when it feels like years ago. She thought Chloe would have piggybacked on someone else’s setup.”
“And Hunter?” We’d reached the clearing now. Wyatt had his backpack and spread out a tarp on the cold ground, then layered it with towels. “You do think of e
verything, don’t you?”
“Well, I didn’t want our last night before break to go by without us spending some time together. I’m brave enough to break curfew but not brave enough to sneak into your room.”
“It’s not like they can send you home as punishment,” I said. “You’re already leaving.” But it was sweet of him to think of this. I sat down on a folded-up towel, and he sat next to me. “Tell me what Hunter did. This is the first game I won, so I want details.”
“Hunter, well . . .” Wyatt cleared his throat. I had a feeling I knew where this was going. Wyatt was a little shy when it came to talking about sex. “He went to places where they’d hung out together.”
“Nice euphemism,” I said. “Do I even want to know?”
“You can guess some,” he said. “The rest? No, you probably don’t. Jo definitely didn’t. We were talking about it on the way to the greenhouse, and it was super awkward.”
“I can’t even imagine.” I leaned my head on Wyatt’s shoulder. “What do we do now?”
“Maybe we should take some time off, give this some more thought,” he said.
I sat up straight. “What? Give what more thought?”
He laughed and pulled me back down to him. “Eucalyptus. We’ve played our games and learned a lot, but maybe we learned some things we didn’t expect. And maybe there are things we need to know that we left out.”
“Like what?” I agreed with him, but I wanted to know what he had in mind.
“Like how to work with other people, to start. How to listen, how to understand. Maybe I asked the wrong question, back at the beginning. Maybe it isn’t so much about surviving without the people we love.”
“What is the question, then?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I want to take some time and find out. It might take the rest of the school year, but we need to deal with everything that’s happened so far anyway. We need to think about forgiveness, what that means to us, when it’s possible and when it isn’t. Maybe that’s more important than planning for the end of the world. Maybe it isn’t. But we need to answer some of those questions for ourselves. Then we can decide whether we want to keep this going.”
He was right. We’d been so fixated on managing big-picture problems that we hadn’t yet learned how to deal with the day-to-day complexities of being ourselves, being part of our communities, our relationships. I was pretty sure that was what he meant. “When you say ‘this’ . . .” I held my breath.
“Just the group.” He took my hand and then turned it over, stroking my palm. “I don’t want to give you up. Not if you still want me.”
“Of course I still want you.” I hated the idea he’d ever doubt it, and I wanted to make sure he knew that. “Is it kissing time yet?”
I didn’t wait for an answer, just reached for him so he’d know I didn’t want to let him go.
18.
And so it was we found ourselves the following fall, addressing the new first-year class, scholarship students and rich kids and everyone in between, from the floor of the Rathskeller on Game Night. We replaced the awkward boy and girl who’d scared us with their intensity and their wide eyes and their teeth, though it was possible we were even scarier, given how many of us there were. We’d had the rest of the school year and the summer as well to think about our friendships and Eucalyptus and what forgiveness meant to us, whether love mattered more than survival or whether that was even the right question. We’d each come to our own conclusions, and here we were together, in front of the other students. All five of us.
After the games were over, after we’d watched the new students play Assassin and Truth or Dare, we turned the floor over to Wyatt. He’d spent a long time trying to come up with a new way to ask his question, a new way to identify kindred spirits for the reimagined version of Eucalyptus we planned to start, a group less concerned with what we put in our go-bags and more about how to use cooperation and empathy to prevent the things we were so scared of from happening. We’d be more about acting—protesting, canvassing, volunteering—and less about reacting, which meant we wanted to know different things about the students who might become our fellow club members and friends.
Wyatt had let his hair grow back, which made me happy, and he pulled at one of his curls as he stepped forward to speak. “If you thought it was possible the world could end in your lifetime,” he began, “how far would you be willing to go to prevent it?”
He stepped back, and we waited to hear the answers.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to everyone who helped this book come into the world. Particular thanks to everyone at HarperCollins, especially Elizabeth Lynch, who was very patient with what turned out to be a much more complicated drafting process than I’d anticipated. Thanks to Renée Cafiero, Christina MacDonald, and Tania Bissell for their copy editing and proofreading expertise and to Corina Lupp and Ben Fearnley for such a striking and appropriate cover. Both Jocelyn Davies and Christopher Hernandez were tremendously helpful in working through some of the ideas in this book with me while they were at HarperCollins as well. Thanks also to Richard Abate and Rachel Lee at 3Arts Entertainment and to Julia Borcherts and Dana Kaye at Kaye Publicity, who I didn’t get a chance to thank last time around.
Thanks to everyone who helped with the writing process—I might put the words on the page by myself, but every other part of writing is a team effort for me. Thanks to Ragdale for providing a home away from home where I could be as productive as possible. Thanks once again to all the organizations that have provided community both online and off; I am writing these acknowledgments during the COVID-19 lockdown, and I value all of you more than you could possibly know. Thanks to everyone who read early drafts of this book, including Katherine Bell, Jessica Chiarella, Rachel DeWoskin, Marissa Falkoff, Sarah Lawsky, Elisa Lee, Brian Shelden, Judy Jane Smith, Brandon Trissler, Rebecca Johns Trissler, and Beth Wetmore. Thanks also to friends and family who continue to provide love and support: Nami Mun, the Dowagers, the Peabody High crew, my parents, my brother and sister, my future in-laws, and especially Brian. I didn’t see you coming, but I’m so glad you’re here.
About the Author
Photo by Oliver Klink
MICHELLE FALKOFF is the author of Questions I Want to Ask You, Pushing Perfect, and Playlist for the Dead. Her fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, Double-Take, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently serves as director of communication and legal reasoning at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Visit her online at www.michellefalkoff.com.
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HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
HOW TO PACK FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2020 by Michelle Falkoff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-268028-0
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268026-6
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How to Pack for the End of the World Page 23