CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We sit together in a lopsided triangle, sipping on room-temperature soup. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it. The quiet that exists among us is deafening, and every time I look up from my bowl there are two sets of eyes staring at me. Maeve turns to Eva, glaring, but Eva refuses to look up, for reasons I’ve yet to discern. Maybe she’s jealous.
I feel like the connector of two different friend groups. Like when it’s your birthday party and you sit at the head of the table with a dozen other kids looking toward you for guidance. You act as the bridge between the kids from your art class and the kids from your soccer team and try to make awkward conversation about how much you all love Skittles and hope that they don’t wonder what they’re doing there.
I look between Maeve and Eva, who both peer back at me expectantly. Eva looks ridiculous, three years older than me yet waiting for me to tell her what to do. I’m not sure whom I should look at—Eva or Maeve? I keep glancing between the two of them, feeling as though any time I turn my attention to one, I’m somehow offending the other.
“We’ll be fine,” I tell them both, trying to hide the fear from my voice. It still breaks, but both Maeve and Eva don’t notice, or they pretend not to. “Remember that time a raccoon got loose in the store? And you and Laurel both totally freaked out, and it tried to eat the limited edition of The Brothers Karamazov? It was a hellish ten minutes, but the raccoon ran out, and we fixed the damage it did, and everything was all right in the end.”
“Sure. I remember,” Eva murmurs, although it doesn’t really sound like she wants to at all. She purses her lips, her eyes scanning the space between me and Maeve. “Have you seen this place lately? It was bad when I was here, but now…”
Maeve just sits there grimacing, so I decide to defend the both of us. “We have the supplies.” I look toward Maeve, who just slowly nods, as if to say, We do. That is true. I wish she would look at me. I wish she would be my conversational cheerleader. But she stays silent. So I continue on alone. “It shouldn’t be that bad. I mean, easy for me to say when I’m not the one doing hard labor, but…we have the supplies, right? We can fix that hole in a week.” No one corrects me or says that we might not even have an entire week at this point.
Maeve turns to Eva, her jaw clenched. “We don’t need your help, Eva. If that’s what you’re asking.”
Her tone catches me by surprise, solemn and grating. She hasn’t been like this since I first met her, and even then it wasn’t this bad. This isn’t some wry, biting sarcasm. This is animosity, an anger that I can’t even begin to grasp. She stares at Eva, as if daring her to break, and Eva stares back, her jaw clenched. I ignore them and instead try not to think about the other things on my to-do list. I don’t have time for their weirdness right now. The windows. The roof. The front door. Maeve’s voice echoes through my head. I’ll go on a real hunting trip before The Storm comes. We didn’t even stop to think that there would be no animals to catch, even if we did have a trap.
We’re in a time crunch, a ruthless countdown that was just shortened by weeks, but I’m stuck pretending that it’s okay. I think back to an essay I wrote before I graduated from high school, about the five stages of grief. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Not always in that order, but I’m feeling the first one right now. Some part of me won’t believe that this might be how it ends. For real this time.
“We’ll be fine,” I tell Eva, trying to give Maeve’s statement a friendlier sentiment. “You don’t have to worry about us.”
She shakes her head as she looks back down at her bowl of soup. I’m feeling a lot less hungry than I was before.
“If you’re fine, then you’re fine,” she says.
This isn’t like Old Eva. The old Eva would have questioned me for longer. She would have continued talking to me until she drilled into my head that I wasn’t, in fact, fine. Old Eva would have gone on and on about acid rain and how “fine” doesn’t cut it in these situations. Old Eva would have pestered me until I admitted the truth, but New Eva seems resigned. She’s done her job, cleared her conscience.
I can’t help but wonder how Maeve feels, sitting next to me, even though it feels like we’re miles apart. If Eva weren’t here, she’d just tell me if I was being foolish or ridiculous, or she’d make fun of me like she always does. But she sits there quietly, hardly saying anything at all. She refuses to speak to Eva any more than she has to. I never took Maeve to be a jealous person, but people can be surprising in unprecedented situations.
I reach underneath the kitchen counter slowly, tentatively, until my fingers touch Maeve’s. She doesn’t squirm away. She waits, allowing me to wrap my hand around hers. I squeeze it gently as if I’m never letting go.
I turn toward Eva. “So are you back, then?”
Maeve puts down her spoon and turns to look at Eva fully, for the first time since we started our meal. “I’m sure that you can’t afford to stay very long.” Her voice is cold.
Eva nods. “Yeah, I’ve got to head home. But it’s pretty far away, so I was planning on staying the night and leaving in the morning, if that’s okay with you guys.” She looks from Maeve to me and then back to Maeve. “The trip is dangerous in the dark.”
“Where are you headed?” I ask.
“I’ve got a group of my own,” Eva replies. “It’s not much, but it’s something.”
“Oh.” I can’t pretend that the news doesn’t hurt just a little bit, but what was I expecting? That she would come back and stay and we’d all live happily together? She’s not cool enough to cultivate the totally awesome loner vibe that I have. Used to have. “Are they as groovy as I am?”
Eva looks down at her lap. “We don’t have to talk about them.” Then she looks up, shaking her head. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m boring. You’re more interesting than I am.”
I feel the heat rising to my cheeks, and I look away. Still, some part of me senses that her words are insincere, no matter how much I might want to believe them. She’s just trying to humor me.
“I will say that Maeve certainly makes things more interesting. Things have been nonstop here recently, for better or for worse.”
I turn to glance at Maeve, who bites her tongue.
“Well, I don’t want to ruin what you’ve got going on here.”
“You could stay longer,” I offer, although with Maeve acting like this, I’m not sure that would be in any of our best interests. Why does she refuse to just play nice for a few hours? “If you wanted to, of course. I’d love to have you here.”
Eva shakes her head. “I wish I could.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Maeve interjects, her voice hard. She still doesn’t look back at me. Maybe if she looked back at me, she’d understand. Maybe if she would just talk to me, she would realize that Eva is a friend. Not an enemy. But Maeve remains oblivious, trapped in her own head.
• • •
Eva sleeps out in the living room.
Maeve and I share the bedroom. We share the mattress too, which is an exciting development, except that I’m not sleeping. I’m staring at Maeve, who is trying to pretend that she’s tired.
“Why do you hate her?” I ask.
Maeve finally gives up the act and rolls over to face me. “What?”
“Why do you hate Eva?”
“I don’t hate her,” Maeve murmurs after pausing for a couple of seconds.
All I can do is laugh. “You haven’t said more than one word to her the entire time she’s been here. You’re cold. You’re distant.”
“Because I know that she hurt you,” Maeve grumbles. But that doesn’t make any sense, because I never told Maeve that.
“That’s in the past.”
Maeve huffs, her eyes narrowing. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“But I forgave her,” I reply. “You don’t have to hold a grudge, because I’m not holding a grudge. You can’t be more upset with her than I am.”
“Yes, I can.”
Maeve rolls over once again, and I’m now looking at her back.
“Will you be nicer to her, for me?” I ask, unsure if Maeve is going to even respond.
“Liz, please don’t do this right now.” Her voice is tired and well worn.
“Just think about it, okay?”
Maeve doesn’t respond.
• • •
I can hear them whispering in the kitchen when they think I’m asleep, even though I’m sure they think they’re being super quiet and stealthy. I don’t know when Maeve was able to sneak out of the room without waking me, but I mentally add ninja to my list of things that Maeve is inexplicably good at. Still, they’re doing a good enough job that I can’t make out every word from my bed, just the important ones.
It’s odd that they’re talking, and talking without me, sneaking around in the middle of the night to talk about god knows what. Especially considering Maeve’s hostility and Eva’s reluctance to return in the first place. And maybe it makes me self-centered to think that they shouldn’t have anything to discuss without me in the room, but it’s true. What could Eva possibly have to say to someone she knows nothing about? Why wouldn’t they include me?
But as their voices rise, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something I’m missing. A dimension to this situation that I can’t even begin to understand.
“Go to hell, Eva,” Maeve snaps. Something slams down on the kitchen counter, and I’d like to think it was her hand rather than something more menacing. “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes like you did—”
The end of her sentence is too quiet to hear as wind whistles outside, muffling whatever’s going on in the kitchen.
“You don’t know—don’t pretend like you know what’s going on.”
“Then tell her. Tell her about—and how—came here to—do you think that she’d be proud of you? Do you think she’d still—?”
There are too many gaps in their conversation for me to understand what’s going on. It leaves me with more questions than answers, but I try to remember each one.
As I roll over in bed, staring at the ceiling, I try to fill in the blanks, trying to solve a puzzle that I might not want to know the answer to.
Kat Delgado
16 years old
Morristown, New Jersey
My mom swore up and down that the National Guard was going to come. That they’d fly in with choppers, guns blazing. It was like she was counting down the hours. She’d walk down the stairs and take a look at me as I watched the water swirling outside, and she’d announce her best estimate for when the government was going to show up and save us. “Just forty-eight hours!” she’d say, or sometimes she’d be more specific and say, “It’ll be only twenty-seven hours from now.” I don’t know where she was getting those numbers from. But she kept saying it because we both thought that this was something that had happened only here. Not across the entire country. Not so widespread. And we still don’t even know about the rest of the world. But as the days passed, and no one came, we started to understand. No one was coming to save us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JULY 19: BEFORE THE FIRST STORM
Thea was busy kissing her boyfriend on the living room couch, so I decided to walk to work today. She has the car keys, and I’m not eager to interrupt. It’s not far, but Mom prefers if we drive because I have a bad habit of walking with earbuds in at all times and almost getting run over by cars. I like to think that it’s worth it. Mom disagrees. Mom is away for the week, staying in upstate New York with some relatives because she needs some time away. Away from Dad. Away from us. Away from all of us. So the house is silent, except for Thea and her boyfriend, and I am alone.
My earbuds are in as I half jog across the street. One thing I’ve always appreciated about the bookstore is the fact that there’s no dress code. I used to work at a local pizzeria where all the employees wore matching shirts, and by the third day of the week it smelled so strongly of smoke and garlic that I couldn’t bear it. The bookstore is much more casual. Still, I’m kicking myself for not putting on a sturdier pair of sneakers this morning, since I’ll be spending my afternoon standing behind a register.
A little bell rings above my head as I step inside. My coworker Laurel spots me from the back of the store. Eva is nowhere to be found, meaning she’s probably downstairs scarfing down the rest of her lunch.
“Can you get the register?” Laurel asks, her voice carrying throughout the tiny store. I nod and acknowledge the woman standing by the checkout.
I slide behind the front counter and plaster on my best and brightest customer-service smile, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear. I decided to give myself an impromptu haircut last night, and I’m afraid that I may have cut the front pieces a little too short.
“Would you like a bag for these?” I ask as I begin scanning the woman’s books, one by one.
“I’m fine, thanks,” the woman says, smiling back. “Save the trees.”
I want to tell her that one paper bag isn’t going to save that many trees. I want to tell her that even though she refuses the bag, the tree has already been killed and chopped into tiny pieces and turned into a bag. The journey is over for the little tree that later became this bag.
“Your total is going to be thirty-six-oh-eight,” I tell the woman, nudging the books toward her.
The woman says nothing in response as she shoves her credit card into the fancy little machine. She squints slightly and scribbles a hasty signature with her finger. Then she pauses and looks up at me, as if performing some sort of inspection. I’m suddenly very uncomfortable, so I train my eyes on a stack of Shirley Jackson books on the shelf just above her eye level.
She clears her throat, and I muster yet another customer-service smile.
“Do you go to Middlebury?”
“What?” And then I realize that she’s looking at my shirt. My shirt that very clearly reads MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE. “Oh. Yeah, I am. Next year.”
“I went there!” She beams. “Loved every second of it!”
I don’t quite know what to say, so I say, “I’m so glad.”
“You’ll love it,” the woman promises, although I’m not sure how she could be so sure. She knows absolutely nothing about me.
“I’m very excited,” I say, even though I haven’t yet figured out how I feel about leaving home. Sure, leaving high school was exciting. It was fantastic, actually, but leaving the bookstore seems a whole lot harder. Leaving home feels a whole lot harder.
“Well, congratulations,” the woman says. “College is the best four years of your life!” How depressing must her life be that the four years she spent broke and stressed were the best four of her life? I don’t think she means for the statement to sound threatening, but they cut through me like a knife.
And with that, she scoops up her books, and I’m alone with my thoughts.
• • •
At first, I don’t notice that Eva has stayed late. Sure, she normally leaves early on Mondays, but I figure that she has some extra shelving or filing or receiving to do.
I begin to wonder only when Eva asks me to shelve in the kids’ room. The kids’ room is spotless. I know this because I shelved in the kids’ room at the start of my shift. When I make my way back there, of course, I find that everything is mostly in order, with only a couple of picture books scattered on the floor. I’m offended that they would even dare to question my meticulous organization.
I pick up the books from the floor and check my watch. It’s almost seven. Closing time. Eva shouldn’t still be here, right?
But I decide, once again, not to question it and turn instead to the picture-book shelf. I sing the alphabet song a few times in my head as I put away the copies. I always joke that I forget the alphabet on a regular basis. Eva laughs, but it’s not a lie. I actually can’t tell what letter comes after which without singing through the entire alphabet song. It’s a fatal flaw…my Achilles’ heel.
It’s a few more minutes before I hear Eva call my name from the other room. There’s one picture book left, and I slide it into place before jogging back toward the front of the store.
Eva and Laurel stand side by side, a cupcake in each of their hands as I approach.
“Surprise!” Eva says.
“What?”
Laurel just laughs. “Happy almost last day!”
“Oh!” I say, like I forgot. But how could I forget? I take the cupcake in hand and pick idly at the waxy pink liner. At least the frosting-to-cake ratio is just right. The more frosting, the better. A cupcake without enough frosting isn’t even worth it.
Looking at Laurel and Eva, at their wide, beaming faces, I feel sick. In the glow of a single lit candle, I feel the warmth of the gesture radiate around me. Things are a mess right now, in the world and at home. But here, I feel safe. How can I leave this place that I love? Suddenly the cupcake feels like a hand grenade. One wrong move and everything will blow up in my face.
Eva hands me a card.
“Open it later.”
I nod. “Thanks, guys. You really didn’t have to do this.”
“We wanted to,” Laurel replies. “We’re trying to persuade you not to leave us.”
I force a half-hearted smile as I look at them. “I wish I didn’t have to.”