“You’re funny,” said the alpha, and nudged her with a muscular shoulder. Playful.
His name was James. He didn’t go by Jim.
“Hilarious,” said Sukey, passing the joint to Juice.
“You know, a survival home for chaos time? Ours is in Washington,” said another yacht kid. He had a flouncy bandanna tied around his neck.
A really bad idea. Fashion-wise, he seemed to be their equivalent of Low.
“State, not district. Obviously,” he added.
“Ours is in Oregon,” said James. “Huge solar array. Looks like fucking Ivanpah. Eleven backup generators.”
Juice had no idea what they were talking about, but that had never stopped him.
“No, yeah. Eleven seems like overkill,” he said.
James cocked his head, patient but wise.
“With engineering on compounds, redundancy is key,” he explained. “It’s about multiple points of failure. Integrated system design.”
“No offense,” I said, “but we don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Speak for yourself,” objected Sukey.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “OK, Sukey. Educate me.”
“Hey, Jack!” she called. “You want dessert? Come over here! These guys brought s’mores!”
Classic deflection. I had to hand it to her.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Jack, a bit plaintive.
“Just pee in the ocean, little man,” said James. “The ocean’s large. It may not be able to beat that plummeting pH, but your piss it can handle.”
Jack shook his head, shy.
He’d read a book about scary animals. When you peed in open water, a spiny fish might crawl up the stream of pee and burrow into your penis. A river fish in the Amazon, and possibly mythic, but he’d read the book when he was eight and I suspected he might be recalling it.
“I’ll take him,” I said, and rose to be a big sister.
“It’s number two,” whispered Jack urgently, as we headed up into the dunes.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll get the toilet paper.”
Back in the pavilion, pawing through our supplies by the small light of a lantern, I overheard some talk around the bonfire.
“I heard Missy T.’s compound is in Germany,” one yacht kid said to another. “That big bunker under a mountain? A Cold War deal built by the Soviets?”
“Vivos. It’s got its own train station.”
“Hardened against a close-range nuclear blast.”
“The nuclear threat. So quaint.”
“It’s like, if only. Right?”
“The climate deal makes nukes look kind of sweet. Like being scared of cannons.”
“Slingshots.”
“A Hyksos recurve bow.”
“Canaanite sickle-swords.”
I wasn’t up on my Canaanites. Maybe I’d google later.
“They’ve got a DNA vault. Does yours have a vault?”
“Nah. But it does have a seed bank. Non-hybrid.”
“Missy. Man. We’ll never see her ass again. Planes won’t be flying, by that time. Even her daddy’s Falcon 900.”
“Bye-bye, air-traffic control. Bye-bye, Missy.”
“Too bad. Man. Missy gives excellent head.”
“You got that right. Shee-yit.”
I had to keep these guys away from Jack.
BUT IT WAS only at nighttime, relaxed by a strain called the Oracle—which retailed at eight hundred bucks an ounce, James said—that the yacht kids discussed their families’ preparations for the end-times.
By day they played beach volleyball. For hours. They never seemed to get tired of it, and they had genuine talent. I could picture the girls performing in the Summer Olympics, their shining bodies camera bait. Sometimes they took breaks to fool around in the dunes or lie out—I’d thought that practice vanished back in the twentieth, but the yacht kids didn’t care about skin cancer. If they lived long enough to get a bunch of melanomas, they figured, they’d bust out the champagne.
There were two girls and four boys. Their numbers were smaller than ours, but they made up for it in raw personal strength. All of us put together as one team couldn’t beat them. Couldn’t touch them, even.
We made a joke out of it. Our only face-saving option.
At regular intervals they checked in with their parents, fawning. I heard the kid with the neck bandanna compliment his mother on a nasty purple-and-orange sarong.
The parents were their insurance policy, James said. Diplomatic relations had to be maintained.
“But I mean, even if you acted like jerks, they wouldn’t, like, abandon you,” said Jen, on night two.
The yacht parents had appeared in the late morning, sat drinking in a state of soft paralysis—not unlike our own parents’—until the sun went down, then left again to have a nightcap on the deck. A three-person galley staff had served them lunch and dinner on the beach, plus mixed drinks from a portable bar.
The yacht, I’d noticed on a walk down the beach, bore the gold-lettered name Cobra. She wasn’t rented, like the great house, but owned outright by James’s father—a “VC,” as he put it.
That stood for venture capitalist, Terry annoyingly informed us as though we didn’t know.
I mean, I didn’t know, technically, but it did ring a bell.
James’s mother was missing in action. Probably she was alive, but eyes glazed over when you asked. The father had a third trophy wife, four years older than James. She was a model, said a yacht girl named Tess.
I’d packed Jack off to bed, where he lay next to Shel, reading with his headlamp on at the far end of the pavilion. Frog and Toad Are Friends, his favorite book. His second favorite series was George and Martha. A pair of kindly hippos. Platonically devoted to each other.
He could read much more advanced books—books without any pictures at all—and liked those too. But he was nostalgic for his old standbys.
“You’d still be their kids,” pressed Jen. “What, they’re going to leave you outside the walls to drown when the floodwaters come up?”
“It’s about interpersonal capital,” said James. “We prefer not to squander it. What you want is straight A’s. You want a perfect record. Unblemished. You want to maintain a 4.0.”
Sukey was sitting on one side of him, Jen on the other. I sat across from all three of them, neutral as Switzerland. Personally, I felt no urge to hook up with James. He was handsome enough, or whatever, but he reminded me of margarine. Sneakers that were still stiff from the store. Maybe a roll of thick, bleached paper towels.
“But how do you pull it off?” asked Sukey. “I mean. The drugs. The sex. Just for starters. You get stoned. You get laid. Does that get you a 4.0, in Southern California?”
“Well. Those are coping strategies,” said James.
He always had an answer.
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” added Tess. “May I have the bong?”
“Henry IV, Part 1,” said James, passing it over. “Act 5, Scene 4. Falstaff.”
“A common misquote,” said the neckerchief guy. “Sorry, Tess. ‘The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.’ Lines 3085–3086.”