“Not everyone in Texas has one,” he said, with an exaggerated drawl. “But if that’s what you ladies are looking for . . .”
“Does the sexism come with the accent?” Again with the sharpness. I had to get it together. I added a little drawl of my own. “Or is that just a cowboy thing?”
Thankfully Hunter seemed to get that I was joking, or trying, anyway. “That’s where ‘y’all’ comes in really handy,” he said, accent now eliminated. “Gender neutral, all-encompassing. The language of the people.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Chloe said, taking off her hat and shaking her hair out. “I kind of like being called a lady. No one back home has that much class.”
I found that hard to believe, given Chloe was probably the classiest person I’d ever met, at least appearance-wise. I wasn’t convinced people who dabbled in casual misogyny were the classiest people, though. But I didn’t feel like getting into it with people I hardly knew. My friends back home had ditched me for being too intense, having too many opinions about things they didn’t care that much about, and there was no need for me to wreck my potential friendships here before they’d even gotten off the ground. I wondered whether I should change the subject, but before I could think of a topic, Hunter had already jumped in.
“Have either of you met that girl from Game Night, the one who got all up in that guy’s face? She seemed cool.”
“She’s in my econ class,” Chloe said. “Her name’s Jo. Short for Josephine, but best to never call her that. She gave our teacher an earful.”
I was glad Hunter had asked about her; I wanted to meet her too. “We should all hang out,” I said. “But maybe not in the Rathskeller. That place was shady.”
“Wouldn’t make a bad place to hide if something terrible happened,” Hunter said. “I’d rather hang out there and hide behind a sofa than barricade a classroom door with desks.”
I’d done the same active shooter drill back in Brooksby. The Gardner student handbook had a whole section on school shootings, instructing us to memorize exit routes and find closets to hide in where the walls around them were reinforced. “Sofas can’t stop bullets all that well,” I said.
Hunter shrugged. “Bullets aren’t what’s going to get us, anyway. Do you know we’ve got less than twenty years to fix what we’ve done to the environment before we’re completely and totally screwed?”
Interesting. I, like most kids I knew, was way more worried about school shootings than the environment. And that wasn’t even taking into account my more pressing fears of anti-Semitism and complete governmental collapse. I had a vague recollection of reading something online about what Hunter was saying, and I knew that some newspapers and climate scientists were pushing for changes to terminology that would help people understand just how disastrous a time we were living in—climate crisis versus climate change, for example. But all I’d done to help so far was to quit using plastic straws. Hunter was obviously more committed.
Chloe, in contrast, was not. “That stuff is so overblown,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “We’re way more likely to get blown to bits by a nuclear bomb well before the environment does us in. Or we’ll build too many nuclear power plants because we’re so anti-coal, and the meltdowns alone will turn us into cancer-riddled walking death. Do you even know what happened in Chernobyl?”
“Are you serious right now?” Hunter asked. He seemed genuinely shocked by what she was saying. Maybe they wouldn’t be a perfect couple after all. “No one in their right mind is arguing for more nuclear power. It’s all about wind and solar energy. It’s the only way we’ll survive, and we have to change now.”
Before I could jump in, the two of them had launched into a full-on argument about whether coal really was bad for the environment. It turned out Chloe was from western Pennsylvania, and though her family had been more affected by the steel mills closing, she had a lot of sympathy for coal miners who’d lost their jobs. Maybe they weren’t really arguing—they didn’t seem angry with one another. In fact, it soon became clear they were having a good time. “Never would have pegged you for a hippie,” Chloe was saying. “And aren’t you pretty much destroying the planet with that hot mess of a sub? Aren’t cow farts, like, the greatest threat to mankind’s survival?”
“And those shoes aren’t made of leather?” Hunter shot back. “Along with however many other pairs of shoes you own?”
“You can’t even count that high,” Chloe said, but she was laughing. “Don’t forget all my handbags. Besides, I’m not the one who’s trying to reverse centuries of planetary destruction in, like, two weeks.”
I sat and watched them debate, trying to keep my mouth from hanging open. Here I was, all worried about whether I’d be too intense for them, and the two of them were battling out energy policy like it was no big deal. Their obsessions might not be entirely the same as mine, but they had obsessions, and it was so exciting to watch. For all my dread about coming here, it had never occurred to me that I might meet people who I’d want to talk to, who might share some of my concerns, or at least understand them. Could I actually be a part of this?
“Our government is going to go down in flames well before North Korea bombs us into oblivion or global warming fries us to a crisp,” I said.
Hunter and Chloe both stared at me for a minute. “It’s global heating now,” Hunter said, finally, and then the yelling began again. Only this time, I was yelling too, and I loved it.
3.
The first thing I did after classes got out that day was to go back to my dorm and look up my new friends online. I couldn’t find much on Hunter; his social media was limited and locked down, and all I could access was the occasional tagged photo of him playing soccer on someone else’s feed. He did look super cute in soccer shorts, though. No shock there.
Chloe was a whole other story. I thought about what she’d said about having a good online presence, but that turned out to be the understatement of the century. Her blog was called Chloe’s Closet, a name that struck me as childish until I clicked on her bio and saw that she had literally started it when she was a child—she’d been interested in fashion since she was ten years old. The site was basic but professional, not cutesy like the title might have indicated, and it mostly existed to direct people to her Instagram.
That’s where it became clear how massive her online following really was. Like, over a million people massive. Seriously? That many people cared what a teenage girl thought about fashion? I scrolled through the photos, and while I could see she was really talented, it was weird to think she’d amassed that kind of following even before turning eighteen. I clicked on a post of Chloe wearing the sunhat-and-flowered-dress ensemble from earlier today, assuming she’d put it up in the morning, but she’d gotten her outfit together last night and described each component of it, complete with a ton of hashtags. Thousands of people had already commented on how cute she looked and how they were going to buy every last item. I saw that it was marked as a sponsored post, and I wondered what that meant. Were the clothes free? Did she get a cut if people bought them?