by Carol Snow
Gwendolyn began to sob. “I miss my dog,” she wailed.
“Her parents took it to the pound,” Henry explained. “Because dogs carry fleas, and fleas carry the Mad Plague.”
“I would have used Frontline on him,” she whimpered. “Every month. That would have gotten rid of any fleas. He could have gone on patrol with me. He was part golden retriever, part beagle, part something else—they never knew what. His name was Mabrey.”
I helped Gwendolyn over to my chair, where she curled up into a ball. “I left my friends without warning them. I could have saved them, but I didn’t. If they die, it will be all my fault.”
I said, “It might help if Henry played a song.”
She nodded, and Henry began to play, his sad melody wrapping around us like a silky blanket.
Twenty-Five
“YOU GIRLS GET a move on! Sun’s almost up, and we gotta put up all those tomatoes!”
Now there’s a string of words, coming from a screeching Mrs. Dunkle, that I never expected to start my day. Any day. But then, I never expected to live in a school bus, either. Life is full of surprises.
I sat up and whacked my forehead against the metal roof. “Ow!”
“Watch your head!” Kirsten chirped from below.
I peered over the side of my bunk. “Put the tomatoes up where?”
“Huh?” She looked up from buttoning her shirt. It was solid olive today, a big step up from the camo. Well, a step up, anyway. “Oh! Putting up means canning. We’re canning tomatoes today. Don’t worry. It’s easy.”
She unscrewed a jar of glitter powder and whisked some over her cheekbones. “Want some?”
“Sure.” I stuck my pinkie in the pot and dabbed a spot on each cheek. When putting up tomatoes, a girl needs to look her best.
* * *
A few words about my experience canning tomatoes: boiling water, slippery fingers, broken glass. Within an hour, Mrs. Dunkle excused me from my duties, which I thought was a good thing until she told me to go clean the bathrooms. All the bathrooms. With bleach.
Did you know that straight bleach can actually burn a hole in your clothes? Neither did I! I didn’t know you were supposed to dilute the bleach with water, either. By the second bathroom (there were five), my prized My Little Pony shirt was looking seriously unmagical.
The bathrooms were equally unmagical, or at least unfinished. None were painted, two lacked faucets, and one had a sign taped to the toilet that said DON’T USE THIS.
“It’s not that big a hole,” Karessa said, checking my T-shirt. She had discovered me in the bathroom off the kitchen, fighting back tears. For once, she didn’t have a small child attached to her body. Since the twins were napping, she got to can tomatoes instead. Sometimes you just get lucky.
“But it’s a hole.” I poked at it with my fingernail. “I have two shirts, and the one I like has a hole.” I’d found the T-shirt at Buffalo Exchange one Saturday when I was shopping with my mother, who was a big believer in recycled fashion. Used or not, the shirt was one of my favorites, even back when I owned more than two shirts.
Karessa leaned down to inspect the damage. “All’s you need to patch it is a little piece of white fabric.”
I shook my head. “I can’t sew.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Bonus points to me for not adding, And I can’t churn butter or work a loom, either.
She straightened up and shrugged as if to say, Not a big deal. “I can fix the shirt for you. Just give it to me in the bus tonight.”
“Seriously? Wow. Thanks.”
Now I was doubly glad for resisting my sarcastic impulse. From what I’d seen, Karessa was a genuinely nice person. As the oldest girl, she was like a second mother to the little Dunkle kids—you know, the nice mother. Karessa worked hard, she never complained, and she did exactly as she was told. So, either she was a genuinely nice person or she was a genuinely nice robot. In the bus tonight, I would listen for mechanical sounds or maybe beeping.
* * *
After lunch, Henry’s parents asked (told) me to join them upstairs in headquarters. Once again, we sat in molded plastic seats at the long laminate table. Once again, I felt like I’d been called into the principal’s office.
At the last minute, Mr. Dunkle burst into the room and claimed the head of the table. Irritation flickered over Mr. Hawking’s face, but he forced himself to nod at the other man. Mr. Hawking had apparently located a razor, though not a good one. Dark red nicks covered his smooth cheeks and shiny head.
“We need to find a place and a purpose for you in the community,” Mrs. Hawking announced.
“What community?”
“This community. Here. The compound.”
“Oh.”
“According to Mrs. Dunkle, your kitchen skills are … lacking.” Her eyes flickered to my hands, which had amassed an impressive collection of burns, one of which was starting to turn yellow.
“Whaddaya expect?” Mr. Dunkle said. “Dad gone, mom working all day, nothing but convenience foods in the freezer.”
Mrs. Hawking’s face tightened. She worked longer hours than my mother, and her pantry had always been way better stocked with snacks than mine.
Ignoring Mr. Dunkle, she continued, “And the job you did on the bathrooms … did you really not know that you’re supposed to rinse off the bleach?”
My face burned. “Um … at home we just use those premoistened wipes to clean. And a Swiffer.”
She nodded. “We don’t use premoistened wipes here. Bleach, vinegar, rags—that’s all you need. Much cheaper, much more versatile.”
In my family, we saved money on cleaning products by not cleaning very often. But then, the Hawkings used a cleaning service. They weren’t exactly bleach experts, either.
“In any event,” Mr. Hawking said, “there must be some way you can make yourself useful. Do you have any experience with, say, carpentry?”
“You mean like, building stuff?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“How about sewing?”
“No.”
“Knitting?”
“Definitely no.”
“Gardening?”
Mrs. Hawking answered that one for me. “Kadence said she kept pulling out the seedlings along with the weeds.”
I gritted my teeth. First Kadence threatens to impale me with an arrow, and now this. Just when I thought we were becoming pals. She was the most treacherous eight-year-old I had ever met.
“Have you ever hunted?” Mr. Hawking asked. “Or fished?”
I shook my head.
“Beekeeping?” He looked doubtful.
“I read a book about it!” Points for not adding, when I was imprisoned underground. “But … not really.”
“What about gutting deer? Or tanning hides?” Mr. Hawking said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Mrs. Hawking sighed—twice. The first time it was quiet and involuntary, the second loud enough to let me know that she found me completely useless. In case I hadn’t noticed. “There must be something you can do.”
“I can draw. And … I’m pretty good at algebra.” There must be other stuff, but that was all I could come up with.
Mr. Dunkle leaned forward. “You know what good those skills will do in the new world? Zero.”
The Hawkings exchanged a look.
“I volunteered at an art camp last summer,” I said. “So maybe I could work with the kids. Teach them some stuff about art or maybe help them catch up on their schoolwork.”
Mr. Dunkle perked up at that one. “Babysitting!”
“Not exactly. What I had in mind was—”
“That might free up Karessa a bit.” He was nodding. “Give her more of a chance to help out her mother. This one”—he pointed at me—“could take over changing the diapers and giving the little kids their baths.”
I said, “I meant helping out with the older kids. I’ve done some babysitting i
n my neighborhood, but they’re all out of diapers. And at camp we weren’t allowed to touch anyone. Like, at all. So I’ve never—”
“Fine,” Mrs. Hawking said. “From now on, Daisy’s in charge of the twins.”
Mr. Hawking scowled at Mr. Dunkle and cleared his throat, which was clearly intended as a statement of some kind. When the bearded blond man didn’t react, Mr. Hawking said, “You can go tell your wife.”
After Mr. Dunkle left, I stood up, my brain swirling. Sassy, the girl twin, was adorable, but how was I going to control her demonic little brother?
Mr. Hawking did that throat-clearing thing again, directed at me this time. As I am not fluent in Ahem, I was semigrateful when his wife translated. “Daisy. Please sit.”
Mrs. Hawking had always had a severe look about her, with that narrow face and perpetually pursed mouth. Now her cheeks were even more sunken, and there were circles under her eyes. She had taken to wearing bobby pins in an effort to control her hair.
I braced myself for yet another speech about my general uselessness. Instead, this:
“My great-grandparents came to America from Italy.”
“Right.” I knew that already.
“They arrived with no money, no English, and few connections. Their lives were hard, and their children’s lives were hard, and their children’s children’s.”
Here I lost track of the generations. All I knew about Henry’s mother was that both parents died when she was young, and she wound up living with a distant aunt. Henry said this was why she was so focused on worst-case scenarios: Because when she was a kid, anything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Mrs. Hawking blinked several times, trying to find the right words. “What we want you to know, Daisy, is that our reservations about you have nothing to do with your ethnicity. We do not condone any kind of prejudice, and we have raised our son to judge people by who they are and not where they came from.”
“Isn’t it better not to judge anyone at all?” I said.
Mr. Hawking cleared his throat.
“You should go find the twins,” Mrs. Hawking said.
Twenty-Six
IF ONLY I’D stayed best friends with Jennifer Park, I wouldn’t even be here.
Jennifer Park and I met on the first day of first grade. By October, we’d discovered that we both loved Polly Pockets, which was enough to cement a bond that continued through junior high school—even when Jennifer informed me that Polly Pockets were no longer cool and that we should focus our attention on Bath & Body Works scented lotions instead. The summer after eighth grade, we were busy planning our first day of high school—what to wear and what to smell like—when Jennifer’s father destroyed our cherry-blossom-scented future by getting a job in New York.
It was worse for Jennifer (as she reminded me repeatedly). Our junior high fed into several different high schools, but at least I’d know a few people in ninth grade. (Whether or not I wanted to know them was a different story.) But Jennifer, stuck on the other side of the country, would be all alone.
Henry was in several of my freshman classes, but I didn’t notice him at first because I pretty much kept my eyes on my notebook or my cuticles or the ground. About a month into the year, our AP Human Geography teacher assigned a group project, and Henry and I were put together, along with two other students. The assignment was called The Last Place on Earth. We were to imagine that modern society had been wiped out by rising water levels and a string of violent storms and that a small group was left to create a new civilization in one of several locations. The point was to think about how a place influences the culture that springs up around it. Anyway, I was hoping for Australian Undersea Colony, but our group got Nevada Waterfront instead.
“We need to meet at my house,” a girl named Danica said. “Because I’ve got tennis every day after school and my church group on Wednesdays and cello on Thursdays and…” Bottom line: Danica was a busy and important person, and we needed to work around her busy and important schedule. Two whole weeks went by before Danica committed to a time and date, but when I showed up at her house, her mother told me I must be mistaken: Danica was at an informational session for students planning to spend their summer building houses in Costa Rica.
I showed Danica’s mother the text message confirming the meeting, and she said that Danica must have sent another text after that. Which she didn’t, but whatever. (I did have a brand-new text from Jennifer Park in New York: I made cheer!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I was about to call Peter to come back and get me when a black Expedition pulled up in front of Danica’s house and a slight, dark-haired guy with intense black eyes got out of the passenger seat.
“She’s not here,” I told him.
“Let me guess. Church? Tennis? ASB? Cello? Mandarin? Mixed martial arts? Soup kitchen? Greyhound rescue? Any of those?”
“Something better.” I found myself smiling.
The driver’s door opened, and a severe-looking woman in a black pantsuit walked around the car. I gave her a cordial smile. She did not smile back.
Henry looked up, still thinking. “Danica’s planning her senate run. Or donating a kidney. Or curing Ebola.”
I mimed hitting something with a hammer.
“She’s building something?”
I nodded.
“Furniture?”
I shook my head.
“A house?”
I swirled my hand to indicate he was on the right track but needed to take it further.
“Multiple houses?”
I nodded.
He frowned with concentration. And then: “In one of those tropical places so that it’s like a vacation but it looks good on a college application?”
“Yes!” We high-fived. We laughed. And then I immediately felt embarrassed because I do not normally high-five strangers. Or anyone. Plus, his mother was there, and she still wasn’t smiling.
“Meeting’s canceled,” Henry explained.
“We should just go ahead without her,” I said. “This thing is due on Friday. We can go to my house.”
Another car pulled up, and we told the fourth member, a guy, our new plan.
“Your parents will be there?” Henry’s mother asked me.
“My mom should be home, yeah.”
She offered to drive the other two of us, so we all piled into the big black vehicle. An awkward silence filled the car. When we pulled up in front of my house—blue paint peeling, white trim dirty, wooden roof warped, grass overgrown—it occurred to me that maybe I should have waited for someone else to volunteer a house.
“I’ll call you when I’m done,” Henry told his mother. But she got out of the car and followed us up the cracked walkway. “She likes to meet people’s parents before I go over to their houses,” Henry explained, blushing slightly. At once, I felt more embarrassed for him than I did for myself.
When I pushed open the front door, his mother gawked at the loose knob. “The house was unlocked?”
“My mother and brother are home.”
The nostrils on her pointy nose flared.
My mother and Peter were in the kitchen—a nice homey scene, except my mom was sorting broken glass and my brother wasn’t wearing pants. His boxers were patterned with pink flamingos, which made it even worse. But it didn’t matter what these people thought, I decided on the spot. We were group partners, nothing more. After Friday, we’d probably never speak to one another again.
“Um, Mom, this is, um…” I had no idea what Henry’s last name was.
“I’m Henry’s mother.” So I still didn’t know what his last name was. “I like to meet the parents of my son’s friends.” Her eyes swept the kitchen. (Figuratively, of course. The kitchen hadn’t been swept literally in weeks. Maybe months.)
My mother held out her hand and beamed. “Elise.”
Mrs. Hawking (I know her name now, of course) stared at the hand but didn’t move. It was beyond awkward. Finally, she said, “I believe you have a glass shard stuck to
your palm.”
It went downhill from there. Mrs. Hawking asked about hazardous household products (as if Henry were a toddler who might guzzle Drano), smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, neighborhood predators, and guns.
“Of course I don’t have a gun!” my mother said, giving the responsible answer at last.
“When stored and handled properly, firearms can be a crucial component to a home security plan,” Mrs. Hawking responded.
I really thought she was going to make Henry leave, and I was going to be stuck doing the entire project with just the fourth group member, who barely spoke and whose name I can’t even remember, but finally Henry’s mother told him she would be back in an hour. She left my house without touching anything.
I thought there was no way we would be able to finish the project in an hour, but fully formed ideas about starting a new civilization poured out of Henry’s head at a rate that, in retrospect, I should have found suspicious. He talked about how living in a desert climate near the ocean would affect irrigation, harvest rituals, family structures, housing styles, art, music, folklore, nutrition, and more. Much, much more. I scribbled down notes. The fourth group member lounged on the couch and asked about snacks. (It was the first time he had said anything at all.) I suggested he check our freezer for burritos, and he disappeared into the kitchen.
Henry took a break from talking about siestas in oceanfront Nevada. (“Thanks to the ocean, average temperatures would be significantly cooler than they are now, of course, but the UV rays at that latitude would still be hazardous, especially if you take into account a damaged ozone layer, a population of primarily European ancestry, and the disruption of sunblock manufacturing. So, it would make sense for the population to go home for several hours in the middle of each day, which would in turn affect meal, social, and mating rituals.”)
“My mother is overprotective,” he said as soon as we were alone.