It wasn’t hard to hear the sarcasm, and yet the meth chemist beamed. “Exactly.”
“We’d need some way to protect people from guys like him,” the redhead said. “I’m going to be a lawyer someday. I’m all about making rules and making sure they’re fair. Put me on Team Survival.” He’d somehow gotten even cuter while he was talking.
“What about your family, your friends?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you be lonely?”
He shrugged. “Making friends is easy. And my family sucks. I’d miss my brother, but not enough to want to die. I’d be fine.”
“You and me both,” I said, though I was only referring to the family part. I’d miss Shana, but I wasn’t about to give up trying to save the world for her.
The redhead gave me a high five. “Team Survival!”
From there the remaining kids weighed in. Only a few were on Team Death, nearly all girls. This was more likely a matter of honesty than true gender difference; the scared twelve-year-old was probably the bravest person in the room, given his willingness to say what I was sure many others were thinking.
Everyone else felt they had value when it came to rebuilding society, but their reasons varied so radically we might as well have been having different conversations. The meth chemist wasn’t alone in wanting to run a black market food-hoarding enterprise, which helped identify some of the kids who’d gotten kicked out of other schools, but the obvious scholarship students weren’t much better. Their reasons to survive were equally gratuitous, even if they knew how to make them sound virtuous. “The world is going to need great art,” said a boy wearing conspicuously paint-spattered clothes. “Wasn’t it Churchill who refused to cut funding for the arts during wartime because he said that’s what they were fighting for?”
The wiry girl snorted. “Snopes debunked that one like ten years ago, Picasso.” She already intimidated me, but in a way that also kind of made me want to hang out with her.
“Someone will have to rebuild the tech,” said a girl so pale and stooped it wasn’t hard to picture her hunched over the glowing screen of her laptop, forever.
“Not necessarily,” said the fashion influencer.
I wasn’t expecting that. Not from her, anyway.
“Tech as we understand it now isn’t something we need,” she said. “It’s just something nice to have. We’ll need to go back to first principles when it’s gone, to think about skills. Hunting, gathering, gardening.”
“Sewing,” said the redhead.
Crap. He’d probably noticed the influencer was gorgeous, with her hair like a box of Honey-Nut Cheerios come to life, and clothes that fit her body perfectly. I was going to hate her, I was sure of it.
“Sewing, sure,” she agreed. “But leadership too. From really smart people.” I thought she’d be looking at the redhead, but instead she was looking at me.
“Nerds, you mean,” said the meth chemist.
The influencer rolled her eyes, and I laughed despite myself.
“Nerds will save the world,” said the wiry girl. “I bet some lawyer nerd your dad paid off got you out of whatever trouble landed you here.”
The meth chemist stood up. He wasn’t all that tall, but he was broad, and since the wiry girl was sitting down, he towered over her. “What makes you think I didn’t get in because I’m smart?”
The wiry girl jumped up so fast I barely saw it happen, and she got right in his face. They were about the same height now that she was standing, so she could look him directly in the eye. And she spoke so quietly he practically had to lean in to hear her. We all leaned in too, because she was definitely about to say something good.
“First of all, you opened your mouth,” she said. “Second, you’re wearing fake glasses and that ridiculous sweater but you’re jacked underneath, and while it’s not impossible for a scholarship student to have that kind of time to spend at the gym, it’s not common. It’s like you’re trying to play a smart person rather than actually being one.”
The meth chemist’s mouth had fallen open. He couldn’t even bring himself to interrupt.
“Third, and I’m sure our resident fashionista can back my play here”—she nodded at the influencer—“your watch alone could cover tuition for at least a semester.” She paused, as if giving him time to answer, but he seemed as mesmerized as we all were.
“Not to mention the shoes,” said the fashion maven. “Prada penny loafers. Every new scholarship student’s go-to footwear.”
The wiry girl nodded. “You could have found the other losers to go drink or get high or whatever you think is more worth doing than hanging out with nerds like us, and yet here you are. Because you know”—and here her voice got even lower, even quieter—“that if you go out with those people, or back to your room alone, the drugs are going to call to you. You’re a rich kid, so what was it? Coke? Fentanyl? Mama’s Percocet? You haven’t been off long, but you promised you’d stay clean, didn’t you?”
The meth chemist was no longer making eye contact. The wiry girl reached out one finger and placed it under his chin, lifting his head back up to be level with hers. He still didn’t speak, but now it was more like he couldn’t. Instead he tried, and failed, to keep his nose from twitching.
“Cocaine, then,” the wiry girl said. “That’s a tough one to kick. You did good.” She sounded like she meant it, too; her finger moved away from his chin to gently stroke his cheek.
But the spell broke. The meth chemist shrugged her hand away. “Screw you. All of you.” He turned around and walked off.
“Guess making friends won’t be as easy for me as it will be for you, Prince Harry,” the wiry girl said to the redhead. “Maybe you can give me some tips.”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said, and he might as well have been speaking for all of us.
I had to get to know her. She might be the only thing that could make Gardner interesting.
2.
The nightmare wasn’t the same every time. Sometimes it started with me and my family sitting at Friday-night services at our synagogue, Temple Emanuel. I’d be listening to the cantor sing, staring at the Hebrew words above the ark that translated to “Know Before Whom You Stand.” The bronze fixture that held the ner tamid, the eternal light, hung right above the ark, and I could see the tiny fire blazing in it. And then the fire blazed more brightly, and then it wasn’t contained by the fixture, and before I had time to realize what was happening, the walls had caught fire and the screaming began.
That wasn’t real, though.
In another dream my family wasn’t there; it was me and my friends, in one of the classrooms across the hall from the sanctuary, waiting for the rabbi’s wife to come and begin our Hebrew school class. Until high school started I’d gone three times a week, despite my protests. The rebbetzen was never late, so even in the dream I knew something was wrong. In this version I smelled the smoke before I ever saw the flames, and I ran to the door only to find it locked from the outside, the handle so hot it singed my fingers. It was only when one of the boys kicked it down that we saw fire everywhere, with no path for us to escape.