Was Beelzebub punishing us? We were probably reading too much into a song. Into all of this. We weren’t at war. We weren’t dying of anything. Maybe we all had the same bug. We were sick, that was it. Nothing bad happened, minus the explosion that made everyone…
Skeet outdid himself. That was it. That was all. Skeet was a master at the pyrotechnics. He was a master of the over-the-top game. We were fine.
We belted out “Bohemian Rhapsody”[76] like life depended on it. We even air guitared. And danced until we all puked from dizziness. Because we had a bug. That was all. A bug.
We dug for more and more music. It was hard to find something from this decade. But when we did, we rocked it hard. “Thriller” was appropriate. Even if we weren’t exactly zombies, we were as close as we could get to the walking dead.
Chapter Forty-Nine
No one could stop complaining. Everyone was bitching and bitching about anything and everything. It smelled in here. The food was awful. Why didn’t we risk it and open the door? What was the point? We were all probably going to die anyway. That was the consensus. Apathy. I had heard of it when it came to the Hogs, but to life? But we had it. We were apathetic.
We talked about whether or not government officials had been whisked away to Mount Weather. If there was a designated survivor in place. It was funny thinking about that. We spent so much time practicing for drills under our desks. Making bomb shelters under the ground. Making sure we had supplies to last us days, months, years, until it was safe to go outside after the fallout. But how do we know it’s safe? We don’t test thermonuclear weapons on each other. We do it in the sea—or underground. We don’t know the effects. How do we know Mount Weather will even work? They could all die.
We weren’t talking. We were sitting on our own cots, staring at everyone but not saying a word. We were going to snap. We didn’t have that much longer in here.
What the hell would we find after that?
-
To-Do List:
Slap Astrid across the face.
-
To-Do List:
Chapter Fifty
“Shut the hell up, you wanker. Your voice is, like, so bloody annoying,” she said. Her British accent was like a caricature at that point.
Everybody was getting on everybody else’s nerves.
I was glad I slapped her across the face. But after I did, I noticed that her beauty mark was gone. I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want my head chewed off. I rubbed my palm. I slapped her harder than I’d been aiming to. But I did notice a brown mass on my middle finger. It wasn’t there before I slapped her.
She coughed again in her hand, and blood smeared on her palm.
“Astrid,” I said, getting down on my knees in front of her.
She spat on me, and a tooth flew out of her mouth and onto my dress.
“Oh, I don’t feel so good,” she said, leaning on Max.
I picked up her tooth and held it in front of her.
She laughed, taking it from me. “Did you know the tooth fairy teaches us to sell our body parts for money?” she said, throwing the tooth across the room.
“What happened to your mole?” I asked, straining to point out her flawless face.
She touched the spot where her mole once was. “It fell off,” she said.
“Is that normal? Because that doesn’t sound normal.”
She sighed, kicked at my legs, and sat beside me and whispered, “It wasn’t real.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t real, okay?”
“Again, what?” I asked.
“I was discovered in a department store—”
“By one of those you-can-be-a-supermodel-if-you-pay-me-a hundred-bucks people?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“Sure.”
“Hey, Cindy Crawford was discovered picking corn, so anything’s possible.”
“So the mole was fake?” I ask, poking at her face with my finger where the mole once was.
“Yeah, it was fake, and I prefer the term ‘beauty mark.’”
“Call it what you want; it’s still a mole. Witches have moles. Are you a witch?” I asked, laughing.
“Not a witch, but you’re one with a B.”
“Nice comeback,” I said. “So why the mole?”
“It was chocolate.”
“What?”
“I was eating a chocolate bar, and a piece of chocolate got stuck to my upper lip. My mum was with me, and she didn’t tell me until it was over, but the damage was already done. The talent scout was super into Cindy and wanted another one just like her, beauty mark—”
“Mole.”
“Beauty mark and all.”
My stomach hurt from laughing so hard. “So you had to keep up the charade?”
“Every day since I was discovered in that department store.”
“Every day you get up and put on a fake… beauty mark?”
“Every day.”
“Tedious.”
She nodded.
My mind was blown. To go that far for “beauty.” I mean, I got it; it was a trademark look. Cindy Crawford wouldn’t be Cindy Crawford without her mole. Madonna wouldn’t be Madonna either.
“Now it won’t be so tedious,” I said. “Be you. Embrace the demolition.”
She laughed. “I can’t. It’s my trademark.”
“You’re a good actress,” I said.
She shook her head.
“Yeah, I’m being honest. I’ve seen everything that you’ve been in.”
“That’s sweet,” she said.
“Why are you such a bitch?” I asked, something in me snapping.
“What? You can’t talk to me like that.”
“Oh, please forgive me for speaking the truth to you. I forgot that you live in a different world where people sugarcoat everything for you,” I said. “Wait, didn’t I already say this to you? No, no, even if I did, it still applies.”
“Words cannot describe how unfathomably little I care about this—or you,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I’m not saying I hate you, but if you were on fire and I had water, I would drink it.”
“Go to hell, you ingrate hick from Arkansas,” she said, pronouncing Arkansas like “Ar-Can-Saw” in a southern twang that was so overly exaggerated that only a two-bit actor from Hollywood by way of London, England, could have mustered it.
I screamed at her. And she screamed back at me.
“Go to Arkansas, they said. It will be fun, they said. Well, they lied,” she said, crossing her arms.
“I know aid workers who don’t take their lives as seriously as you do,” I said, glaring at her.
“Ugh, you are—”
“I am what?”
“Why are you two fighting? You were getting along so well,” Freddy said, sitting down beside me on the cot next to Astrid’s.
“She started it,” I said, remembering a solid elementary school comeback.
“Oh, how lovely,” she said, snapping her fingers at Max for help getting up off the cot.
“Leave my sister alone,” Terrence said, leaving out the word step.