I read Jenny’s note twice more before I did, lingering over each word. Tuttle cleared his throat pointedly, and I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket so I could finish my work. About an hour later, I finished the assignment and, my hand cramped into a claw, I set it on Tuttle’s desk before turning to leave.
“A moment, Mr. Quinn.”
I returned to my desk and slumped down while Tuttle took his time making a neat stack of graded papers and sliding it into a leather folder. The waiting was driving me crazy.
“Mr. Tuttle, we were just defending our—”
Tuttle held up his hand to silence me. He slipped a paper out of his folder, then crossed the room and dropped it on my desk. It was my Great Expectations quiz. Down one side of the paper was a long column of check marks and a single X. A large A was written at the top of the page.
“The question you must ask yourself, Mr. Quinn,” Tuttle intoned, towering above me, “is this: Are you a boy or a man? Human being or savage?”
Tuttle’s cool blue eyes were on me, unwavering.
“Obviously you’ve never had to make that choice before. Running around the ruins of this world as your sort of people do, you acted on instinct and self-preservation — an animal — no doubt quivering before rainstorms and amazed by fire and shiny objects. But you’re here now, Mr. Quinn, and this is civilization, so now you do have a choice. So, what do you want to be?”
Tuttle waited for an answer.
“The fact that you pause does not fill me with confidence.”
“Look, as soon as my dad is better, we’re leaving, so you don’t have to bother.”
Tuttle surprised me by folding his long body down into the cramped desk in front of me. He twisted around to face me, his knees nearly pressing into his chest. “Do you like to learn?” he asked.
“I like to read.”
Tuttle’s thin lips curled into a tight smile. “Yes. So do I. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like the world has much use for people like us, does it? No, most of the world only has time for people who can build or break things. It won’t always be that way, I think. A time will come when society, as it always has, will turn for its salvation to the learned. Now, to my surprise, you appear to be intellectually capable, but the question remains: Do you want to be one of them?”
It was a ridiculous question. Did I want to be one of the learned? I tried to think of an answer that would satisfy him, but he might as well have been asking me if I wanted to be an astronaut.
“The times we live in, Mr. Quinn, are teetering between the chaos behind us — an infancy made up of smoke and terror and withering plague — and what adulthood lies ahead for us. Wisdom? Peace? Oblivion? Whatever it is, to get there we must let go of the past. It is dead and gone. It will never return and it cannot be changed. All we have now is one another and whatever new thing we make together.”
Tuttle unfolded himself from the desk and strode to a shelf along the wall. He pulled down a small stack of books, then laid it on my desk. Mechanical Engineering. Chinese History. World Political Systems.
“If you have a desire to be more than what you are, if you want the world to be more than it is, study these in addition to your regular work. If not, please feel free to escape to a warm cocoon of petty violence and team sports.”
With that, Tuttle turned his back on me and planted himself at his desk to begin grading a new stack of papers. The books sat in front of me; I ran my fingers across their glossy covers.
This is how we got here in the first place, Grandpa would have said, sneering at the books. But then there was Dad’s voice, whispering to me that night in the plane as we watched a doomed woman and boy.
Grandpa is gone.
In my head, it sounded like a fallen leaf blowing across a grave.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thin smile grow on Tuttle’s lips as I scooped the books up into my arms, and dashed into the twilight.
EIGHTEEN
I crossed the park, balancing the stack of books in my aching hands, strangely excited to start reading them, when the Greens’ front door flew open and out walked Caleb Henry.
It was like I hit a wall.
Caleb was masked by the shadows of the porch at first, so all I could see was his tall frame in jeans, a flannel shirt, and boots. As he descended the stairs and stepped out into the yard, though, it was clear that he was smiling. He didn’t acknowledge me or make a sound as he glided up the street.
My arms went weak underneath the pile of books. My stomach churned. Of course. Where else would Will have gone after the fight?
The Greens’ door hung open. No candles had been lit yet, even though it was edging past twilight and into early evening. Inside it was gray and hushed. I set the books down by my bedroll and the neat bundle Violet had made of my old clothes and Dad’s knife while I was away. Then, once I’d checked on Dad, I crossed the room and entered the short hallway that led into the kitchen.
Marcus and Violet were sitting next to each other in the gloom at the kitchen table. Marcus was hunched over a mug, his hands clamped around it, while Violet sat back in her chair, one hand covering her mouth and chin. The shadows of the room deepened the lines on their ashen faces. I kept to the darkness of the hall and listened. “What choice do we have, Vi?”
“They can vote if they want to vote,” Violet said. “We’re not giving him up. We’re not like that, Marcus. You’re not like that.”
“But what if we fight them again and Caleb decides to come after us this time?”
Violet had no answer. Her silence hung heavy as stone.
I backed away from the door. Whatever the people of the town thought of Jenny, she was family to the Greens and maybe that protected her. It wouldn’t be the same with me or Dad. We were outsiders. Little better than vagrants, no matter how Violet tried to dress me up.
I eased back to the front room, then dropped to my knees alongside Dad’s bed. I ripped my bedroll up off the floor and began shoving it along with the rest of my supplies into my backpack. I had put that pack together a million times, but my hands were clumsy now, rushed. I reached for the rifle’s cleaning kit, but my knuckles slammed into one of the bed’s legs and a jolt of fresh pain rocketed up my arm. Finally I just stuffed everything inside and yanked the flap closed.
There on my knees, I was eye level with the stack of books Tuttle had given me. Politics. History. Science. Little pieces of a larger world.
Useless, Grandpa’s voice said deep inside me, disgusted, stronger than ever. I yanked my bag off the floor and stood up over Dad. A wave of sadness reared up. I told myself that Violet would take care of him, that if I didn’t protect them, they couldn’t protect him, but it was no use. The wave was too big and coming too fast.
How many days had it been now since Grandpa was gone? Eight? Nine? How was it possible that everything could have fallen apart so quickly? That our lives could turn over, again and again, in such a tiny packet of time? I longed for my old life, following Dad and Grandpa without question. Pack the wagon. Scan for salvage. Then make our way from landmark to landmark, a slumping mall and its rusted attendees, a parking lot cracked with yellow flowers.
I wondered if this was what it was like when the end of the world came. A sudden overturning that made every day like stepping alone into an empty room — everything you longed for, every handhold you used to pull yourself along, vanished.
My pack was heavy as I lifted it up onto my back and cinched the straps tight around my arms and middle. I threaded Dad’s knife onto my belt and checked that the rifle was loaded before hanging it over my shoulder and walking toward the door.