How to Pack for the End of the World Read online

  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.

  That wasn’t real either. None of the versions I dreamed were real, because I hadn’t been anywhere near the temple when it burned. No one had been except the rabbi and a man he’d been counseling after the death of the man’s wife. They’d met in the rabbi’s office after the daily minyan ended, despite the fact that there had been arson attempts at several local synagogues in recent weeks. My mom had been at the minyan, as she had been every night since my grandfather died six months before the fire, nearly two years ago now. She’d left the temple less than half an hour before the fire started.

  The rabbi and the man he was counseling would ultimately be fine; they’d suffered mostly from smoke inhalation. But the temple itself needed a tremendous amount of repair. I’d seen pictures of the scorched sanctuary and the sooty classrooms in the newspaper. I knew it could have been worse, but all I could think about was how my mother had been there only moments before some awful man, someone they’d never caught, had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the stained-glass window that spanned the back wall of the sanctuary. She could have died. The thought of it left me breathless and sent my brain into nightmare-creation overdrive. My therapist said my subconscious had taken the images I saw and combined them with everything I was afraid of to make dreams that were worse than reality, and I was sure she was right, but that knowledge was insufficient to make the dreams stop.

  The funny thing—to the extent you could call anything surrounding these events funny—was that until the fire I’d had what I would call a complicated relationship with Judaism. Sure, I’d gone to Hebrew school for years, had a bat mitzvah and all that. But I’d never believed in the idea of God, and it struck me that lots of the world’s problems were grounded in religion. I respected that my ethnicity was Jewish, that my culture was Jewish, but religion? I wanted no part of it. I’d started complaining about going to services, even though my parents felt strongly that Shabbat was family time and insisted we all sit down for dinner on Friday nights and then go to shul together. “It’s not up for debate,” my mother would say, and though I’d look to my father for backup—many Israeli Jews, like my father, are more secular than people realize—he’d always get behind her.

  But now, in a world where synagogues were the sites of mass shootings and arson, where torch-wielding men shouted “Jews will not replace us!” and the government did nothing, I felt more Jewish than I ever had, in good ways and bad. I didn’t complain about going to services anymore, in part because we now had to go to a different temple, one that had reinforced its windows with bulletproof glass and hired full-time security guards, and there was something intensely comforting about hearing the familiar prayers every week after our usual family dinner. I realized it didn’t matter whether I believed in a higher power but not for the reasons I’d thought; the people who wanted me dead didn’t care about the complexity of my belief system. They wouldn’t be checking to see whether I’d really prayed during the silent Amidah or whether I’d let my mind wander. Judaism was my birthright, and that didn’t mean a free trip to Israel; it
meant there were people who hated me just for my existence, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  That’s when my obsession started. I’d always believed knowledge was power, so I set about empowering myself, thinking knowing more would comfort me. At first I was just reading about anti-Semitism in the world, about the Holocaust, the rise of the Third Reich, and I tried to move forward and study how Germany had come back from its dark past and reinvented itself as a more humane country. But I couldn’t help but look even further back as well, at empires and what had caused them to collapse. There was so much going on in the world, and in the United States in particular, that resembled events that had happened before, and those civilizations hadn’t always survived. I thought about how often I’d been taught that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, and I wondered whether we were in danger of becoming yet another failed democratic experiment. It was all I could think about, all I could talk about, all I could write about. I scribbled so hard in my journal my pen often ripped through the pages.

  My obsession was frustrating for everyone around me. One by one my friends backed away, some so subtly I barely noticed, others with a little more fanfare, reminding me I wasn’t the only person the temple fire had affected, but you didn’t see anyone else becoming a full-blown conspiracy theorist, did you? I didn’t think that’s where I was headed, but it didn’t matter. Friends were a distraction. There was so much I needed to know, and without them I had more time for my reading, more time to write in my journal.

  “Amina, honey, this isn’t healthy,” my mother would say, after I’d yet again woken her with my nighttime screaming.

  “You’re frightening your sister,” my father would say, when it was his turn, hoping the thought of my impact on Shana would make a difference.

  Nothing helped with the nightmares—not therapy, not drugs—but what my parents and friends and therapist and psychiatrist didn’t seem to understand was that I was okay. Maybe I wasn’t happy, but who could be happy with everything going on in the world? I was home and I was as safe as I was going to be and I had my research to do and that was really all I wanted right now. I wasn’t the one who needed to change; the country needed to change. I just needed to try to figure out how.

  My family didn’t agree. The fire had taken place while I was in eighth grade, and my parents had hoped that my obsession with history would burn out over the summer and I’d be distracted by starting high school. No such luck. My English class was reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, I’d signed up for World History so I could study World War II, and I’d expanded my daily reading to include so many political websites I got headaches and eventually had to start wearing glasses.

  “She can’t go on like this,” I heard the rebbetzen tell my parents at services one night. The new temple we’d joined had welcomed our whole congregation, even allowing our rabbi and cantor to participate in services so we felt like we were a part of things while the renovations continued. “You need to get her out of there. There’s a Jewish high school in Brookline—I can help you get her admitted.”

  I didn’t hear what my parents said in response, but they’d apparently decided the rebbetzen was right about getting me out of Brooksby but wrong about sending me to an all-Jewish school, where there was a good chance my obsessions would be shared by much of the student body. Before I knew it they’d filled out all the paperwork to get me into Gardner, a school there was no way they could have afforded without the scholarship I ultimately received.

  “You can’t do this,” I told them. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “You can’t live like this,” Mom said. “The nightmares alone . . .”

  “We can’t live like this,” Dad said. “And Shana can’t either.”

  Even my sister was against me? It was too much. “I’ll miss you,” she had said. “But I don’t want you to be so sad.”

  “I’m not sad!” I wasn’t sad; I was furious. All the time. It felt kind of nice to have something tangible to be angry at, and so I spent the rest of my time in Brooksby raging at my parents for sending me away, even as I tried to rein in my obsessiveness, just to show them I could. I’d resolved to hate this place, to try to get home as quickly as possible, but even my few hours at Game Night had made me wonder whether maybe I should give Gardner a shot. Maybe there was more for me to learn here than there was at home.

  One thing was for sure, though; being at Gardner was not going to automatically stop my nightmares. I woke up on the first day of classes to Brianna shaking my shoulder so hard my teeth rattled. “What is wrong with you?” she asked. “Is this going to be a thing every night? Because this is totally not okay.”

  I felt tears drying on my cheeks. It had been a variation of the classroom dream this time, which made sense given that classes started today. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can fix this.” That was only sort of true, but I’d brought all my prescriptions with me, and I’d try them all again if there was any chance they’d help.

  “You better,” Brianna said.

  I hadn’t exactly won the roommate lottery.

  But to my surprise, I soon discovered I had won the class schedule lottery. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone who wanted to be a lawyer would probably take the same kinds of classes I did, but the first person I saw in my first class the day after orientation (Intro to Political Science) was the red-haired guy. To my even greater surprise, he recognized me immediately. “You busted me at Assassin!” he said, and took the seat right in back of me, which guaranteed I’d spend the whole year self-conscious. I learned his name was Hunter Fredericks from roll call; when he turned up in my class on the American Revolution and sat in front of me I learned the freckles that dotted his face also covered the back of his neck. And when we got assigned to be partners for our European History class and had to move our desks together I learned he smelled green—some combination of mint and grass, maybe—and I knew I was doomed.

  We didn’t have all our classes together—he was taking Spanish, while I was taking Chinese, and I was in a higher-level math class than he was—but we did have the same lunch period. “Save me a seat!” he said, and I watched him head straight for the sandwich station. It took me less time to make my peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-whole-wheat-toast than it did for him to put together a massive and truly disgusting-looking roast beef sub, complete with four different kinds of cheese and every condiment in the world. “What?” he asked, when he saw me eyeballing the mess on his tray. “I haven’t even put the potato chips in it yet.”

  “I don’t even know where to start,” I said, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore; his eyes had wandered to some vantage point behind my head, and his mouth had gone slack. I turned around, and in less than a second I knew exactly how things were going to go.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Game Night crew!” It was the fashion influencer, because of course it was. She was wearing a flowered sundress as if she were headed to a garden party, her Honey-Nut-Cheerios hair bundled under a floppy sun hat. I, in contrast, was wearing my usual uniform of black leggings, plaid shirt, and red Converse, and I wondered whether the fact that I’d noticed her outfit meant I was starting to care more about my appearance, like my mother always told me I should. Somehow I doubted it.

  Hunter couldn’t stop staring, and his obvious admiration was a huge downer. Since he didn’t seem capable of speech, I’d have to take over. “Come sit,” I said. “I’ll scooch.”

  The girl didn’t hesitate for a minute, plunking her Instagram-ready salad down on the table in front of her. “It’s so great I ran into you guys! I was afraid I’d have to sit with my roommate. She kept me up all night talking about how much we were going to love it here—her brother graduated already—and honestly I’m exhausted.”

  “You don’t look exhausted,” Hunter said, which was true, and also enraging. “But we’ll do our best to keep you awake. I’m Hunter.”

  “I’m Chloe,” she said, and smiled so we could see her mou
thful of almost-perfect white teeth. Her bottom two teeth had a teeny overlap that even I had to admit was adorable. This lunch was turning out to be a disaster. The two of them were just going to stare at each other until little cartoon hearts started dancing around their heads.

  But then Chloe turned to me. “And you are?”

  “Amina,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I waited for her to give me the up-and-down look I’d expect from someone who clearly cared about fashion as much as she did, but to her credit, her eyes stayed on my face.

  “Nice to meet you too,” she said. “How are your classes so far?”

  From there things got easier. Hunter and I took turns telling her what we were discovering about our shared schedule; we agreed that our poli sci class was sure to be the favorite, given that our teacher was a former State Department official who’d quit after the latest election. I admitted how nervous I was about taking a Chinese class and showed them the vocabulary flash cards I expected to be carrying around with me until graduation. “What about you?” I asked. “Do we have any classes together in the afternoon, maybe?”

  “I’m going to guess no,” Chloe said. “My schedule is super specialized—I’m taking an intro course in 3-D design, and it’s got a geometry add-on, plus anatomy, economics, journalism, Italian, and French.”

  One of the things I had to admit (grudgingly) was exciting about Gardner was how many classes were available. The school was committed to preparing us for whatever our future career plans might include, though I had no idea what that meant for the non-scholarship kids. Chloe’s schedule sounded kind of all over the place, but she seemed to have a plan. “When you say specialized . . .”

  She laughed, and I noticed her lipstick hadn’t so much as smudged, even though she’d made it most of the way through her salad while Hunter and I geeked out over our classes. “I want to start my own clothing line. I’ve already got a pretty good internet presence, so now I need to go next-level and learn more about the business. The major players are all still in Europe.”