How could they not know how useless it all was?
“Lunch,” Marcus announced a couple hours later, stretching his back. “You ready, Stephen? I bet Vi has something good for us.”
“Maybe I’ll keep going,” I said, thinking of the house’s awful stillness. “Is that okay?”
“You should come and eat.”
“I’m fine, really. It’s just… it’s good to be doing something. You know?”
Marcus looked over at Sam, who just shrugged. “Kid wants to work.”
“All right,” Marcus said. “But not too much longer.”
I handed Marcus my bags of carrots and he and Sam followed the others back toward the house. Once they were gone, I clapped the dirt off my hands, cut through the fields, and wound through the neighborhood’s unfamiliar streets.
I ended up at the spur of a road leading down a hill, the same one the kids had streamed down earlier on their way to school. I looked over my shoulder: No one was around. I pulled the scrap of jerky from my pocket and chewed on it as I followed the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, there was a black parking lot, cut up into little slips with fading yellow paint. A low building, surrounded by a neatly trimmed yard that stretched behind it, was backed by a hill dotted with one large sycamore. Just behind a sidewalk that ringed the building there was an old sign that said in large black letters: SETTLER’S LANDING HIGH SCHOOL.
I kept close to the school’s beige walls as I passed. Like all the buildings in the neighborhood, it was neat and well maintained, the brick foundation without a crack. The grass around it was short and free of weeds, and I found discarded kids’ things here and there on the ground. A jump rope. A broken colored pencil. I took what I could and kept going.
I walked around the school, looking in the windows as I went. Inside there were empty classrooms filled with abandoned desks and chairs. I made it around to the back of the school, found a lone window, and peeked inside.
Desks and chairs sat in six neat rows far below. There was a kid at each desk, pencil in hand, leaning over a stack of papers and writing intently. The rows were broken up by age, the youngest in the front, oldest in the back. Jackson and his friends sat together toward the rear. Will Henry sat on the opposite side of the room behind them, dozing, surrounded by twins, two pale, greasy boys who reminded me of slugs, and a giant redheaded boy with a grove of acne covering his face.
All the rows faced a black chalkboard and a long wooden desk to my right. Sitting at the desk was a tall, thin man with steel-rimmed glasses, wearing a black suit that was a bit too tight and made him look like a scarecrow. He scanned the room, watching the quietly writing students.
“Freaky, huh?”
I whirled around, dropping my hand to the hilt of Dad’s knife.
Jenny Tan lounged against the big sycamore behind me, wearing a green army jacket with a red star on the sleeve. She had a large pad of paper spread on her lap and a line of colored pencils in the grass next to her.
“You gonna stab me with that thing, or what?”
Suddenly feeling foolish, I jerked my hand away from the knife.
“So,” she said. “You’re the spy.”
“I’m no spy,” I said. “We’re salvagers.”
“Salvagers,” she said, tilting her head against the tree trunk and studying me. “Never actually met one of you before. You travel around, right?” She nodded her head out toward the trees and the edge of town. “Out in the great beyond?”
I nodded. Jenny watched me a moment longer, then took a pencil off the ground and started drawing. She looked past me into the window of the school and then down again. I watched as she erased a line and redrew it, then smudged it with her thumb. Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. Her hair, loose and tangled, framed her face like a deep shadow. I kept thinking of the hurricane she had been the night before, amazed at how she seemed like someone completely different now.
“How come you don’t go to school with the rest of them?” I asked.
“And listen to Tuttle go blah-blah-blah-blah about history and math and the poetry of English guys who have been dead for a thousand years? No thanks. Only reason anybody goes is because it’s what their parents remember doing when they were kids, so they’re doomed to repeat it.” Jenny looked up at me. Her eyes were deep brown and seemingly flecked with gold, like a hawk’s. “Sounds kind of dumb, huh?”
I shrugged. “Guess so.”
Jenny glanced down at my hand. “No dumber than reaching for a weapon every time you see a Chinese girl.”
She sprang it like a bear trap. I scrambled for something to say, but when I opened my mouth, no words came.
“What? Your folks tell you to expect horns and a tail or something?”
“No. I—”
Jenny’s grin grew wider, about to burst into a laugh. “Relax,” she said. “I’m just messing with you. Hey, I’d probably reach for a knife if I saw me too.”
A rumble came from inside the school. I turned to the window and saw the students were pushing back from their desks and stampeding toward the double doors at the back of the classroom.
“Uh-oh. Here comes the flood.” Jenny tore the drawing out of her pad, crumpled it up, and tossed it to the ground. As she stood up and stretched, her Red Army jacket lifted, revealing a scar that was thick as a trench and curled across her middle and around her back.
“I don’t know. Maybe I will go back to school on Monday,” she said, letting the statement hang in the air for a moment before turning and giving me a quick look. “It’s been a while since I annoyed Tuttle. Maybe I’ll see ya around, tough guy.”
Jenny gathered her things, then strode away on bare feet down the hill, just missing the torrent of bodies that roared into the playground outside the school. I turned to escape before they could reach me, stopping only to snatch Jenny’s crumpled drawing off the ground, then dashing into the forest.
I tromped through the brush, not looking where I was going, simply trying to escape the strangeness of the day. She was right — I had never actually seen a Chinese person up close before, let alone talked to one. These were the people the United States had been at war with? The people who’d released P11 and killed millions? After the plague had passed and the Chinese troops had invaded, there’d been years of vicious fights between them and the survivors. My family had fled San Diego a year before I was born, though, so we mostly kept out of it. Still, we couldn’t help but see the spreading aftermath.
Grandpa said the Chinese were subhuman. Savage, ugly, and vicious. But if that’s true, I wondered, how come when I look at Jenny, that’s not what I see?
I skimmed the edges of backyards as I went deeper into the woods. The neat lines of the houses were just visible through the trees, which were hanging over thick grass and vegetable patches. I thought again of the treasures Violet had laid out in that cabinet of hers. Drugs. Priceless medical instruments.
I wondered: How is it possible that while we had nothing, these people are here with all of this?
A twist of anger made me stop to catch my breath. The forest shifted around me in the wind. Something small skittered through dry leaves. Grandpa had told me a hundred times that life wasn’t fair and that expecting it to be was for fools.
These people got lucky. That’s all. It can’t last. All that matters is that I have to be ready when Dad gets better so we can get on track again. We need supplies and things to trade.
But what?