How to Pack for the End of the World Read online

  Dedication

  FOR EVERYONE WHO IS AFRAID,

  AND FOR EVERYONE WHO IS TRYING TO MAKE

  THE WORLD BETTER ANYWAY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Michelle Falkoff

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  Gardner Academy used to be one of the most prestigious private schools in New England, if not the whole of the United States. Its list of esteemed alumni included presidents, senators, judges, and winners of prizes and fellowships from MacArthur to Nobel. For years, acceptance to Gardner meant near-guaranteed admission to the Ivy League school of your choice, as long as your parents could pay the massive tuition checks.

  But place a bunch of kids under the not-particularly-watchful eyes of badly vetted, overpaid teachers and coaches, and before you can say “Penn State,” you’ll have exactly the scandal you’d expect. The Boston Globe broke the story of how Gardner’s administrators covered up rampant sexual abuse in both its academic and athletic programs, and the school seemed doomed to go under.

  Thanks to its enormous endowment, though, Gardner had time to weather the crisis and strategize. How could it regain the people’s trust while remaining solvent, let alone profitable? One option was to focus on the money, accepting any students who could pay, no matter the history of inappropriate behavior or limited evidence of literacy. This would keep the doors open, but the school would hardly be minting an impressive alumni class.

  Another option was to emphasize academics, seeking out the best and brightest students who would never otherwise consider private school and offering them full scholarships, burnishing Gardner’s reputation as a feeder school for the finest universities. It could create a rigorous, goal-oriented curriculum for future leaders of America, whether in politics or business, making classes available that were rarely offered even at the best of its competitors. Not only would it salvage its mission to educate the most promising young minds, it would be serving a public-interest function, satisfying the clamoring voices of alums who wanted to be proud of their school again.

  Gardner, in its infinite wisdom, chose to do both.

  Enter yours truly, Amina Hareli, scholarship student. I did not want to be here, and yet here I was, sitting on a mattress so thin I could feel the springs under my butt, watching my mom unpacking my clothes as she valiantly tried to shake out the inevitable wrinkles that had formed when I stuffed everything I owned into garbage bags. I wasn’t about to do a whole bunch of fancy folding to go someplace against my will.

  “I know you’re not going to just sit there and watch your mother do all the work,” Dad said, giving me a dark-eyed glare that I gave right back. He was better at stare-downs than I was, so I got off the crappy bed and began throwing clothes into random drawers. My little sister, Shana, took my place on the bed, only instead of sitting she jumped up and down like she was on a trampoline. The springs squeaked. I would never be able to sleep here. I was having enough trouble sleeping at home.

  “Minnie, honey, you could fold the clothes one time,” Mom said.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said, as if by reflex. She’d named me after her grandmother Minnie, but while she’d been kind enough to recognize that Minnie was a terrible name, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from using it as a nickname. “Amina” wasn’t awful; it made me the only kid in Hebrew school with the same name in both Hebrew and English, so that was a plus.

  “I’m just saying that if you set up the room nicely at the beginning, it will be easier for you to keep it clean.” Mom was a neat freak. Everything in our house had a place, and she’d tried desperately to make me into someone who lived that kind of orderly life. She even looked the part, with her tailored clothes and smooth mask of makeup and sleek dark cap of hair. I was more like my dad, all dark messy frizzed-out curls and shirts left untucked and mismatched socks. His study and my bedroom even looked alike, piles of papers and books everywhere, tucked away behind closed doors so Mom didn’t have to see how she’d failed in molding us to her will. I wouldn’t have to worry about that now, I supposed, though that might depend on my roommate.

  “Shana, stop jumping so I can make the bed,” Mom said. “Min, give me a hand.”

  I’d trained myself to live with “Min,” if only to keep the peace. I grabbed two corners of the extra-long-twin white jersey sheets we’d bought on sale at Target and acted like I cared about the difference between the fitted and cover sheets, as if this bed would ever get made again once my family left. Once we’d tucked the sheets in so tightly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to undo them, Mom draped a brightly colored patchwork comforter on top. She’d bought it for me as a present, which is to say it was the complete opposite of what I would have picked for myself. At least it was reversible, so I could flip it over as soon as she was gone and just deal with the bland pink underside. It would still be awful, though, as would all the matching stuff she’d bought to go with it: throw pillows, a desk lamp, a new journal.

  “I trust you’re going to adjust your attitude when you’re on your own.” Dad sat at the bare wooden desk, setting up the laptop the school had provided. I’d never had my own computer before. “I understand you want us to see you sulk to punish us, but you should at least pretend to be open-minded when it’s just you. You’ll have a much easier go of it.”

  What if I didn’t want to have an easy go of it? I was tempted to ask, but I figured they knew that already. Last year had been a nightmare, and yet I’d made it very clear that I wanted to deal with my issues at home, not at some random school I’d never even seen before. We’d been over this a million times, and yet somehow I’d still landed here. I was fine with keeping the almost-silent sulking going for a while.

  “Don’t ignore your father,” Mom said. Ugh, they were such a unit. Intellectually I knew it was better to have parents who were still together and who still got along, even loved each other, but seriously, did they have to agree about everything? Couldn’t they have debated this decision, for example, and left open the possibility that one of them might listen to my arguments for why I should have been allowed to stay home? Wouldn’t they want the family to be together if the world as we knew it was about to end?

  “I will improve my attitude,” I said, fighting the urge to use a robot voice. “In fact, I’m going to go to a pre-orientation thing. Some sort of game night. It starts in about an hour and I should probably get ready, so maybe it’s time for you to go.”

  Mom and Dad gave each other one of those looks that I knew meant they were trying to decide whether to yell at me for trying to kick them out, or to act like they believed I was going to give Gardner a shot. “We do have three or four hours’ drive ahead of us,” Mom said. My hometown, Brooksby, was in the northern suburbs of Boston, a couple of hundred miles away from Gardner, which was located in nowheresville, Vermont.

  “Can we stop for ice cream?” Shana asked. “Please please please?”

  Oh, to be ten again, to have your biggest worry be access to sugar and
not the impending collapse of civilized society. I was still mad enough at my parents to think I wouldn’t miss them, but I really would miss Shana. They’d better get her ice cream.

  In the hour before Game Night began, I loosened the sheets, flipped the comforter, organized my clothes (without folding them—I wasn’t ready to go that far), and briefly met my roommate, Brianna, who looked me up and down, checked out my Target sheets, sniffed, and asked if she could use the extra closet space. I nodded, and she ignored me until it was time for me to leave. I hadn’t even been sure I’d meant it when I told my parents I would go, but the thought of spending the night in a room with Brianna proved worse than the thought of meeting some new people, which honestly didn’t sound all that bad. And I liked games.

  “Do you want to come to Game Night?” I asked Brianna. She scrunched her nose without even looking at me and continued hanging up clothes that seemed way too fancy for school. I got the feeling she was not a scholarship student.

  According to the flyer I’d seen in the dorm, Game Night would take place at the Rathskeller. I’d looked up the word online and immediately gotten confused—the word was German and referred to basement bars located in government buildings. Gardner wasn’t German, I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a bar at a high school, and the town center was miles away.

  As it turned out, the only connection Gardner’s Rathskeller had to any real Rathskeller was its location in a basement. After Brianna turned me down I wandered over on my own to what turned out to be the rec center, heading downstairs with a crowd of other students. Gardner was a three-year institution—we’d all had our chance to either excel at or screw up our first year of high school—so I had to get used to the idea of first-, second-, and third-year students, rather than sophomores, juniors, and seniors. A group of second years had organized the event, but I figured the rest of the students filing into the basement were first years like me.

  The room was filled with couches and chairs from eras long past, and ranging in fabric from tattered basket-weave tweed to pleather. It definitely felt like a hangout for scholarship kids. I chose a faded floral-print armchair and sunk in, craning my neck to face a raised platform in the middle of the room. On it stood a pair of second years, one male and one female, both knobby-kneed, the girl nearly a foot taller than the boy, both looking far younger than I’d have expected sixteen-year-olds to look, both staring out at us with bug-eyed intensity.

  “Welcome to Gardner!” Both boy and girl clapped their hands together as they shouted their greeting in unison. They’d clearly practiced. The fact they’d needed to practice something so basic made me wonder how smart they could possibly be.

  “We know orientation doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but we thought it would be fun to do some get-to-know-you stuff first and get the party started down here at the Rat!” The girl talked through a toothy smile. “We’re going to split the room in half, and each of us will lead the first game.”

  I looked around, trying to figure out if there was a side I wanted to be on, but how could I tell in a basement full of strangers? Any one of them could be my future best friend or someone I would completely despise. Back home I knew who my friends were, or had been; I’d been hanging out with the same group of girls since kindergarten, expanding the group only slightly once middle school started and we met kids from the other public schools. Here I had no one, so I just stayed where I was. Worst-case scenario I could always take a nap.

  Maybe forty kids had shown up of the hundred or so in the first-year class, so we ended up in groups of twenty. The first game wasn’t much of a game at all; it was more of an icebreaker. We had to introduce ourselves, say where we were from, and then say something unusual about ourselves. After the first few people spoke I could tell we were all trying to figure out who the scholarship kids were, but it wasn’t as easy to tell as you’d think. The intros went by so fast I couldn’t keep track of anyone’s names, so I was grateful for anything memorable. My group included an extremely good-looking Asian boy wearing glasses and an argyle sweater who claimed the TV show Breaking Bad had inspired a love of chemistry; a girl with upsettingly perfect hair who was some sort of internet fashion influencer; and a too-pale boy who appeared to be twelve years old who was, in fact, twelve years old.

  The introductions got everyone talking, so they served their purpose, even if their more lingering lesson was to teach us to be skeptical of one another. (I, for one, had convinced myself the chemist was here for cooking meth.) Our next game was a round of Assassin, in which one person is designated the killer and has to murder the other players by winking at them without getting caught in the act. From this I learned quickly that (a) Gardner students were as aggressivley competitive as one might expect, and (b) a very cute red-haired freckled boy’s gentle smile belied his ability to decimate the population. I took him down, but it was less about my ability to solve mysteries and more about the fact that I was staring at him the whole time. Still, I liked the fact that I’d been the first person to win something here. I could tell people were impressed.

  After a few more rounds of Assassin people got bored, and several first years wandered off, presumably to find more interesting things to do. People tossed around ideas for more games, and eventually we settled on a round of Would You Rather. I stuck around, even though I’d always hated that game.

  The game started as it usually did, with gross questions (“Would you rather eat worms or maggots?”) quickly devolving into sexual questions (“Would you rather sleep with your best friend’s significant other or your middle school principal?”) I held back and watched as my fellow classmates revealed their preferences for worms and friendship betrayal. This game was the worst.

  Once people ran out of questions that were both gross and sexual, the room fell quiet for a moment. “Can I ask one?” a boy asked. His skin, eyes, and hair were all nearly the same shade of light brown, and he had an intense look on his face. I had a feeling his question would be neither gross nor sexual. “If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, would you rather die along with your friends and family and everyone you’ve ever known, or live among strangers to rebuild civilization?” The boy’s eyes widened as he spoke, flirting with the line between curious and creepy, inching a toe past and then pulling back. He must have been stewing over his phrasing the whole time we’d been playing.

  Finally, a question I was interested in hearing the answer to. Given how I was feeling about my parents these days I was pretty sure I knew where I was at, but more information couldn’t hurt. “How’s the world going to end?” I asked.

  “She speaks!” the red-haired assassin said, and I hated myself for blushing.

  “Will there still be technology?” asked a wiry girl with short, bleached-out hair.

  “How can you be sure we wouldn’t know anyone?” asked the terrified twelve-year-old.

  “Is it, like, the Rapture or something? Where everything would be exactly the same but the people would be gone?” This from the meth chemist.

  “I’m not sure it matters how things end,” the shaggy-haired boy said, “but I can make it interesting, I guess. Let’s say plague. The survivors are immune but there are few enough that the power grid goes down. No power, no internet. Not enough people to keep the world moving as it has been, though we would work together to bring it back.” He flushed red. “Guess I’ve told you where I’m at.”

  The twelve-year-old immediately said, “I’d want to die.” He looked like he wanted to die right now.

  “I’d live for sure!” shouted the meth chemist. “I’d go steal an Escalade and then raid the grocery store for all the food and water. Then I’d charge people so much money I’d be the richest person alive.”

  “Because Walter White over here would definitely be the only one to think of that,” said the wiry girl. “Yeah, you’re a real genius.”

  It wasn’t hard to hear the sarcasm, and yet the meth chemist beamed. “Exactly.”

&nb
sp; “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.