“So you really never played before?” John asked.
“No. Never.”
“Not anything?”
I scooped up a pebble from the road and skipped it down the asphalt. “Dad found this old football once, out behind a Walmart. We’d play catch with that sometimes.”
Up ahead, Carrie drifted toward the four of us, falling in next to John and taking his hand. “You guys up for going to the quarry?”
John said sure, but Derrick hedged. “I don’t know. I really have to do my homework and then get right to bed.”
“Shut up, Derrick,” Carrie said. “What about you, Steve? It’s just this place out to the east, like a manmade pond. We go there after games sometimes.”
I looked over my shoulder, back to where Dad lay in a deep coma at the Greens’ house, but the tug I felt toward him seemed fainter than it had before. I knew he was safe since Violet was with him. And hadn’t she said he would have wanted me to go to school if I could? Well, maybe he would want this too. Me playing baseball. Me with people my own age. Having a life a little bit like he must have had back before the Collapse.
“Yo!” Carrie called out. “Everybody! Quarry!”
We continued up the hill and then moved out to the east of town, past the fields and into the trees as night began to settle around us. After a while the path opened up into a circular clearing, the ground at the center of it falling away in rocky steps, leading down to a pool of water that was dotted with the reflections of stars that were just beginning to appear.
Everyone scattered when we got there, breaking up into smaller groups of two or three or four and finding places around the pool. One kid, the third baseman from the other team, dipped his hand into the water and pulled out a net that was filled with mason jars. He unscrewed the top off one, took a long drink of whatever was inside, then passed it around the circle.
When it came to me I dipped my nose in and caught the smell of rotten fruit and a nose-singeing tang of alcohol. Home brew. Grandpa used to trade for it sometimes when we had some salvage to spare, and he would get blisteringly drunk on it after dinner. Mom would generally lead me into the tent for a reading lesson whenever he got going.
I took a small sip, then winced. “So, how did all of you end up here?” I asked.
“We were coming north from Georgia,” Martin said from his place behind me. “And we ran into, like, this entire ex-US army regiment. Dad decided we’d go through these caves he found to get around them. Took us five days. Five days with no food. My brother” — Martin’s voice hitched, then he continued — “he was really freaking out. Cried the whole time until we found our way out. We had no idea where we were, but a few weeks later, we found Derrick and his folks. And then Jackson and his. Now here we are.”
As soon as he stopped talking, Martin stared down into the dark water, his face cloudy and distant. I knew why, of course, could tell from the millisecond stumble after he said “my brother.” It was the same one I always made after saying “my mother.” Somehow between that story and now, his brother was lost. I nudged Martin with the edge of the jar and held it out to him.
“Thanks,” he said.
Others told their stories and as they did I looked around the group, noticing things I hadn’t seen before. A long jagged scar along the forearm of the blond kid who played right field. A deep smudgelike burn mark peeking out from under the sweater of the redheaded girl sitting on the other side of me. The more I looked, the more I saw them, those telltale marks of lives lived after the Collapse. How had I not noticed them before? Was it possible that they all had lives like mine at some point until they came here?
What would have happened, I wondered, if Dad had stood up to Grandpa when I was little and insisted we leave the trail? Could we have ended up here? Would we be living in houses and going to school and cookouts and baseball games?
Would Mom still be alive?
The redheaded girl tapped my arm with a second jar of home brew that had made its way around the circle. I shook my head and she passed it along down the line.
“I’m Wendy, by the way,” she said quietly, her small fingers grazing my arm. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m—”
“Cann-on-ball!”
There was a gigantic splash that soaked all of us. When I looked up, Derrick was shooting to the surface of the churning water, in his underwear, a dopey smile on his face. Two of the mason jars sat empty where he had been sitting. Jeers came from every corner of the quarry, but they were all mixed with laughter.
“Derrick!”
“Derrick, you jerk!”
“You got us all wet!”
Derrick laughed a deep stuttering laugh and floated lazily on his back.
Wendy shook her great head full of curls and chuckled. “Love, hate. Love, hate. That’s all it ever is with him.”
“Okay!” Carrie said, rising unsteadily from John’s lap. “I think that’s our cue, babe.”
John offered me his hand. “Hey, man, good job today.”
“Thanks. You too.” Carrie dragged John up and the two of them said their good-byes and headed down the path to town with their arms around each other’s waists. Soon, other couples emerged from the woods and drifted home.
“Well,” Jackson said, “I guess we should go pull him out.”
Martin and Jackson and I stripped off our shoes, rolled our pant legs up high, and went in after Derrick. Luckily by that time he was pretty tired, so it wasn’t too hard to catch him. The trick was getting his bulk out of there and to shore while he mumbled over and over how much he loved us.
“Really, honestly, totally, you dudes are awesome. Just awesome,” he said, struggling with his pants.
After we finally got Derrick up and dressed, but before we could get him moving down the path, he lurched forward and grabbed me up into a soggy bear hug, pushing us away from the others.
“This is what it’s like, Steve,” he whispered intently only inches from my ear. His breath was heavy with the sweet cherry smell of the home brew.
“What what’s like, Derrick?”
He pulled back slightly and for a moment didn’t seem drunk at all. His eyes were clear and focused.
“This is what it’s like to have friends,” he whispered.
I stood there in the silence as a grin grew across Derrick’s face and then he fell into Wendy’s and Martin’s arms. “Home, friends! Take me to my home! And you! Wendy! Off with your pants! You too, Marty!”
He giggled as Wendy and Martin led him down the path back to town. I stood there motionless, surrounded in the rhythmic chatter of the grasshoppers and cicadas and the gentle lapping of the quarry’s water. Everything seemed to hang in perfect balance, all of it strange and welcome at the same time.
This is what it’s like to have friends.
“You okay?”
Jackson was standing in the shadows, waiting.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
We left the quarry and made our way through the woods to Jackson’s house. Before we got there, though, we slowed without a word and stopped in the park across the street. Jackson sat on one of the swings and I climbed up onto the jungle gym next to him.
To our left, the road wound out of town and away like a ribbon. The pinpricks of candlelight in the windows around us gave the neighborhood the look of a constellation come to Earth.
“So how’d you guys end up here?” I asked. “You never said.”
Jackson twisted the toe of his sneaker into the dirt. For a second I thought he hadn’t heard me. “We were in, I don’t know, Kentucky, I think, with some other families in a little tent city. Mom and Dad were out doing some hunting, and Jenny and I were by this stream downhill from the camp playing Go Fish with some cards she had made. The sun had just gone down and it was all orange and gold.” Jackson’s fingers curled tight around the swing’s chain. “That’s when we heard them coming. There were maybe fifteen of them. Twenty. They looked just like us. Maybe a little better off. They came into camp, all smiles, asking if they could have some water from the stream. Nice as could be.