Susan Pfeffer - This World We Live In

I don’t know how I feel about them staying. It still hurts me to look at Dad looking at them, seeing the pride and love in his eyes. It’s not like he looks at Matt or Jon or me any differently. Even Syl gets that same look. He loves all of us.

But he should love us more. He just should. We’re his children, not Alex and Julie.

But then I see Alex and Julie together, talking quietly, playing chess, and I know that if people had seen Matt with Jon or me, pre-Syl Matt, that is, they would have fallen in love with us the way Dad has with Alex and Julie. If it had been Matt and Jon and me and we didn’t have any parents, any family except each other, and people had reached out, included us in their families, it would have meant everything to us. It would have meant survival.

If I had to guess, I’d say Alex is going to move on, but he’ll let Julie stay with Dad and Lisa. Lisa’s counting on it, and now with Mom on her side I think the pressure will be too great for Alex. Especially with food coming in.

It wouldn’t be too bad if Julie stayed. She wouldn’t exactly be Baby Rachel, but I’ve adjusted to Syl, more or less. I could adjust to Julie.

Anyway, that’s what I told myself as I cleaned Mrs. Nesbitt’s kitchen and thought about how much my life has changed in just a single week.

I started out alone at Mrs. Nesbitt’s, which I liked, since it gave me more of a chance to feel sorry for myself. Just call me Cinderella Evans.

But then the wicked stepsisters (Syl and Julie) came over to help clean, which I don’t remember happening in Cinderella. What made it even worse is they’re both dynamos. When you’re alone in a freezing cold house, mopping and moping, you can take your time. But when there are two other people and they’re actually working, you have to pick up your pace and accomplish something.

So I was relieved when Alex showed up about an hour later. “I thought I’d go scavenge houses,” he said. “Miranda, would you mind coming along? You know the area and I don’t.”

Mind? Breaking into houses with the last living boy in America I’m not related to versus scrubbing every inch of a kitchen floor?

“No, that’s okay. I’ll go,” I said.

“Good,” Alex said. “Thank you.”

When other people say things like that, simple things like “good” and “thank you,” they smile. Alex didn’t smile. Alex never smiles. He says “please” and “thank you” and “may I,” but he never smiles.

I wonder if he used to before.

We went back to the house, told Mom where we were going, got bags and bikes, and rode off, leaving Syl and Julie to clean and polish. Alex may not have smiled, but I sure did.

“I’ve been going to houses closer to town,” I told him as we began. “More suburby places, lots of houses near each other. I’ve been doing pretty well there.”

“Let’s try more isolated,” Alex said. “Farmhouses. Cabins in the woods.”

That annoyed me. He asked me along since I know the area. Then he rejected my suggestion about where to look.

I have a big brother, thank you. I don’t need the last living boy in America to treat me like a dumb kid sister.

“We’ll do better in the suburbs,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked. “If you haven’t tried the country?”

For a moment I considered turning around and going back to Mrs. Nesbitt’s. Let Alex get lost on his own, since he was so determined to bike vast distances for no good reason whatsoever.

But it’s the middle of June, the temperature had to be close to sixty, and if you really concentrated, you could kind of make out the sun. And even if Alex was the most annoying, last living boy in America, he still was the last living boy in America. (I should come up with initials for that: LLBA or something.)

“All right,” I said. “You want country, we’ll try country.” I began biking a little faster than him, taking the lead. We rode along at a steady pace while I tried to decide how far we should go to satisfy him.

I’d like to say I didn’t know where we were going, but that wouldn’t be true. I had a flash of “I’ll show him” when I turned onto Hadder’s Road, and then made the left onto Murray, the back road to the high school.

We were there in fifteen minutes. The mound of bodies. Only in the month since I’d been there, the temperature’s gone above freezing, the snow has melted, and the bodies have started to decompose.

It was awful. The stench was unbearable, even outdoors. The bodies were bloated, the faces unrecognizable. As bad as my nightmares have been, the reality is far worse. And it had been my choice to go there, to punish Alex for going against my advice.

“I wondered where all the bodies were,” he said like he wondered where Mom hid the Christmas presents.

“I know people there,” I said. “Friends of mine are in that pile.”

Alex stopped his bike and bowed his head in prayer, which made me feel even worse. Especially since the sight and the smell sickened me and all I wanted to do was get as far away as possible.

“It’s hard to lose friends,” he said.

I figured that meant we could start biking again. “Have you lost friends, too?” I asked.

“Everyone has,” he said.

I thought that was a pretty lousy answer. He could have consoled me for my losses or he could have told me about his, but to point out the whole world is a rotten stinking mass of death didn’t make me feel any better.

And I resent being told the whole world is a rotten stinking mass of death. Every night Mom turns on the radio and gets stations from Pittsburgh and Nashville and Atlanta, and we get to hear, every single night, about their rotten stinking masses of death.

So I didn’t need Alex to point out that everyone on earth has lost friends.

The one good thing about getting mad was it made me bike even faster. This time, though, I paid attention to where we made our turns and what roads we were on. I had no desire to get lost with this particular LLBA.

One of us would spot a farmhouse, and we’d check it for signs of life—more carefully than I had in the past because it’s warmer and there’s a chance people inside weren’t using their woodstoves. But the first three we went to were empty. The only problem was they were empty inside as well. We took half a bar of soap and a quarter tube of toothpaste and not much more.

I considered resisting saying “I told you so” but gave in to the temptation. “I didn’t think we’d do so well out here,” I said. “People in the country stayed on longer, so they used up all their stuff.”

“You never know,” he said, which I took to mean “Shut up, you stupid girl.”

I wonder what Cinderella would have done with a wicked stepbrother.

We did better with house number four: a summer cabin you couldn’t see from the road. Most likely no one had used it the year before, so whatever was there was two years old. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to soap and paper towels. And because it was a summer house, there was lots of summer house reading. I grabbed a dozen paperback mysteries for Mom and some romances for Lisa and Syl.

“I’m sorry there are no Latin books for you,” I said.

“I’m sorry we can’t eat books,” he said.

If Alex knew how to smile, maybe he would have smiled then, and I would have known it was a joke and smiled back. But he doesn’t and he didn’t and I didn’t.

We kept biking up that road, stopping at a couple more cabins, but mostly finding more of the same. One house, miraculously, had a half box of disposable diapers. Syl and I have been the diaper service since Gabriel’s arrival, and even a dozen disposables looked like treasure.