Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
The fire is too small. And, as it turns out, small fires aren’t that warm.
Nonetheless, everyone huddles around the meager flames while you finish up “dinner,” aka some undercooked oats made from the almost-boiling water in your single pan.
The food is just a drop in the bucket of your empty stomach, and you know you’re only going to get hungrier in the coming hours.
With all the calories you burned today, you should be eating a ten-course meal.
Instead, you’ve had the dinner of a medieval prisoner.
The recent dark has brought quiet. You thought the night here would be full of sounds.
Strange birdcalls. The rustling of small creatures in the brush.
But instead, it’s near silent and the occasional sound makes you jump.
Everyone is exhausted, but nobody wants to be the first to go into their tent alone.
You notice the small circle of your group growing tighter around your poorly built fire.
There’s a long period of time when no one says anything.
Nobody wants to be the first to say what you’re all thinking.
There’s been no sign of Silas so far.
Not even a footprint.
And it’s been twelve hours since any of you have had access to the supplemental medication that is the only salve against severe panic attacks.
If this is a test, you’re barely past the beginning and it’s likely to get much worse.
But nobody puts a voice to all this. Maybe because saying it will make it real.
Instead, when someone finally speaks, it’s for a reason that surprises you.
“You guys want to play Fear in a Hat?”
Even more surprising: It comes from Diana.
Predictably, Will scoffs.
“Oh my god. Why would we do that?”
“Yeah,” says Fran. “No offense, but the guy who came up with that game didn’t exactly have our best interests in mind.”
You and Troy are silent. But your heart rate has already increased.
“That might be true,” says Diana. “But it also might be true that we’re not going to make it back to our old lives, and we don’t really know anything about each other. Is that what you guys want? To die out here with complete strangers?”
The wind has picked up again, and all you can do is listen as it whistles in your ears and threatens to put out your hard-earned fire.
“We don’t have a hat,” you say.
“Or any more paper,” says Fran.
“That doesn’t matter,” says Diana. “Just say what was on your sheet the first time. I know you remember. C’mon. Who wants to go?”
You’ve always been bad with awkward pauses.
They make you deeply uncomfortable. So much so that you think about breaking the silence this time.
It would be easy to do. You’d just say that your paper was blank and then talk about why.
Then you’d say his name, speak that one syllable that matters.
But before you can summon the courage, someone else speaks up from across the fire.
“The total annihilation of planet Earth.”
It takes a minute for this to register.
It’s Troy, and apparently, that’s what he put on his paper.
“You mean the whole earth?” you say. “That’s what you’re afraid of?”
“Damn,” says Fran. “I picked sushi.”
“But what do you mean, exactly?” says Diana. “Like, nuclear war or something?”
Troy shakes his head.
“Climate anxiety,” he says.
“So, like, you’re afraid of the weather?” says Will.
Troy sighs.
“Well, yeah,” he says. “Weather’s a part of it.
There’s the heat waves, and storms, and droughts, and floods, and wildfires.
But then there’s the dying oceans, the millions of animals facing extinction, the refugee crisis.
And how, if we don’t do anything, it’s all going to be irreversible in five years. ”
Will doesn’t respond. Nobody says anything, in fact, for a few seconds. And this time the pause doesn’t bother you so much, since you’re still trying to add up all the things he just said.
“Sorry, I’m not supposed to do that,” says Troy.
“Do what?” says Fran.
“Obsess about the doomsday stuff. That’s what got me in trouble in the first place.”
He reaches out a stick and pokes at the fire.
“What do you mean by trouble?” says Diana.
“I got expelled,” he says. “I’m homeschooled now. It’s also why I’m here with you guys, I guess.”
The smoke blows toward him, and he turns to cough, rubbing at his left eye under his glasses.
“You got expelled?” says Fran. “That is hardcore, my friend. Why?”
When he speaks next, it’s a little on the quiet side and the wind kicks up at the same time so no one can quite hear him. But everyone inches nearer. Will puts a hand to his ear in the universal sign for louder. Troy clears his throat.
“I set a classroom on fire,” he says.
“WHAT?” says Will.
Suddenly, the cold isn’t bothering you so much. And the undersize fire is far from your mind. Everyone stares at Troy.
“It’s kind of a complicated story,” he says.
No one stops staring.
“We don’t care,” says Fran. “Please tell us how you set the school on fire!”
Troy pokes at the fire with a stick.
“Right,” he says. “Okay. Well. I guess there was this biology teacher, Mr. Shiftler. That’s probably the first thing you need to know.
He’s this old white dude with big bushy caterpillar eyebrows and a Colonel Sanders mustache.
He wore the same polo shirt in five different colors, one for each day of the week, and he used the same worksheets every year, so people just copied them and handed them down to the next class.
“His class was, like, the most useless hour of my life. Usually, I just put an earbud in and listened to podcasts while I copied down the formula for photosynthesis, and it was all good. I had some other teachers who were all right, so one bad one wasn’t the end of the world.
And I think I would have just finished out the year like that, just zoning in sixth period, but then there was this cyclone that hit. ”
“What cyclone?” asks Diana.
“Idai. You probably didn’t hear about it, because it was in southern Africa. I didn’t even pay attention at first. But it hit Malawi and Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It destroyed people’s homes and crops, and killed a thousand people right away.”
“You set someone’s class on fire because of a cyclone in Africa?” says Will.
“Let him finish!” says Fran.
Troy takes a breath.
“My dad is from Zimbabwe,” Troy says. “Originally, I mean. He came here when he was nine, but he still has lots of family back there. So for weeks after the storm hit, we saw the landslides and all the devastation on the internet, and we didn’t know where my dad’s brother was.
I started reading about it. And some articles were saying that this wasn’t a place where tropical cyclones usually hit.
And it was probably climate change that was responsible for how bad it was.
The storms were getting lethal and their paths were changing.
And it wasn’t even the fault of Zimbabweans! They didn’t release much carbon at all.
“But we did. We do. We’re second on the list of the biggest carbon emitters. Us. And now my uncle was missing, and my dad’s home country was all messed up. And after that, I sort of stopped sleeping.”
The fire starts to flicker out, and Fran tosses a handful of broken sticks into it.
“I stayed up every night watching climate scientists on YouTube and reading about how there’s more natural disasters these days, and millions of people are killed by them each year.
I looked at pictures, and I read about all the inaction from our leaders.
And then one day, I was in biology class and I was taking a quiz on vestigial structures that I had already taken the week before, and I wasn’t sleeping at night, and I just took out my earbud and said:
“‘Why aren’t we learning about climate change in here, Mr. Shiftler?’
“At the time, Mr. Shiftler was going through some boxes. My guy was about to retire and he was doing his packing on our time. The day before, he had unboxed this hideous model of the solar system made of Styrofoam and pipe cleaners and hung it right over his desk like a trophy.
“‘Finish your quiz, Troy,’ he said in his usual bored voice.
“So I said: ‘I’m not in the mood today.’
“And before I really knew what I was doing, I threw my paper on the ground, and I said, ‘Vestigial. Having become functionless in the course of evolution.’
“He looked at me, like, kind of surprised I actually knew the material, even though I always did. So I added:
“‘Like this class.’
“And then I stood up on my chair because I saw someone do it in a movie once and I said, ‘Wake up, everybody! People are dying in Zimbabwe right now!’
“It wasn’t a great line, really. Most of my classmates probably don’t know where Zimbabwe is on a map. But it was all I could think to say.
“‘Get down from there, Troy!’ said Mr. Shiftler, and I saw him start to come out from behind his desk and walk toward mine.
“‘There are brush fires in Australia!’ I yelled. ‘Our children are going to be scavengers in a barren landscape! This is serious!’
“He started tugging at my shirt.
“‘Next Monday I’m holding a climate walkout,’ I said. ‘And we won’t come back to science class until we get some climate-change education! Who’s with me?!’
“Nobody stood up, guys. Most people were laughing at me.
Maybe they thought I was being funny, like, just ragging on old Mr. Shiftler.
Finally, he pulled me down from my chair and took me out into the hallway, where he told me that global warming was a liberal hoax and if I did my own research, I would figure that out. And then I got detention.
“I spent the next week making pamphlets and memes and setting up a booth in the cafeteria. I handed out stuff and told everyone about the walkout. But when Monday came, I marched at noon out to the football field where we had decided to meet, and realized I was all alone. There wasn’t a single other person there.
Just me. And I lay down on the field, and I looked up at the clouds and thought about everything I had been reading.
“About how we had this small window to make things right, and about this scientist I heard on a podcast who said that we don’t have any wisdom as a species.
That we’re intelligent and we know how to make iPhones and stuff, but we’re not wise enough to save ourselves.
And whether or not we survived was going to depend on if people could get wiser.
“And then I felt so pissed off and lonely and frustrated because I wasn’t that wise myself and it seemed like nobody was going to ever listen to me.
And that it was probably going to take us too long to get wise.
We’d all be dead first. So I marched back in the school, and into Mr. Shiftler’s class, and I took out a lighter.
This lighter, in fact, and I reached up and held the flame to the bottom of the Styrofoam planet Earth hanging from his model.
“Shiftler screamed at me, but I just kept it there, because I thought maybe if everyone saw the Earth literally on fire, they might finally get what I was saying.
But maybe because of the old enamel paint, the thing burst into flames in, like, a second.
Just like: whoosh! There was a lot of fire, and before Mr. Shiftler could get up on a chair to grab the thing, it burned through the pipe cleaner and spread to Mercury, which was even more flammable somehow.
“People were screaming at that point, and while they were running for the door, the whole solar system fell from the ceiling and landed on a pile of old boxes he’d been packing. Those went up too, and someone pulled the fire alarm, and I don’t remember much of what happened next.”
“Oh my god,” says Diana.
“But it caused thirty thousand dollars of damage,” Troy says. “Which came out of my college fund. And I was never allowed back in that school again.”
“Oh my god,” Will says.
“And to keep from facing charges and being sent to this school for troubled kids, I’ve been going to therapy ever since.
It was my therapist who suggested this trip, actually.
She said: ‘Troy, you’re always talking about protecting the environment—why don’t you actually get out in nature and experience the beauty of what’s still here?
’ So here I am. In nature. And I have to tell you guys, my therapist was right that it has helped in one way.
Yesterday, I was worried about the total annihilation of the earth.
But tonight, I’m kind of just worried about the annihilation of us. ”
The fire is dying, and there isn’t any more wood. You didn’t gather enough because of course you didn’t.
“I just wish I could go back sometimes,” he says.
“To school?” you say.
Troy shakes his head.
“No. To before all of this. I went years without knowing anything about the planet’s temperature.
I was oblivious. There’s this day I can remember, before the cyclone and everything else, where I took Turbo to the dog park on a Saturday.
It was the one he likes with the little dog pirate ship to play on.
And I ran around with him for hours, chucking tennis balls with the launcher until he was so worn out, he slept on the floor in the car on the way home.
Then I got fast food, fed him some french fries, and watched Shark Week in my room until midnight. And that was maybe it.”
“Maybe what?” you ask.
But you already know what he’s going to say, so you wait patiently while he stares into the fire, then looks up with a sad smile and says:
“The last good day.”