“Don’t worry,” Sam says with a laugh. “We’ve done this a million times. Right, James?”
“Nobody’s safe out here in the wastelands,” James says in his creepy voice.
“That’s right,” Sam says to play along. He looks at me. “We should really be worried about what’s out there. Better cuddle up, and keep each other safe,” he whispers playfully. He leans in and kisses me on the cheek.
James winces. “Ew. Not in the fort!”
“It was just the cheek!”
I break out with laughter, then go quiet again. “Do you hear that?” I pause to listen. “I hear rain.”
“Acid rain,” James corrects me.
I look at Sam and sigh. “I’m gonna have to walk home in that.”
“Or you can stay the night,” he says through a smirk.
“Sam.”
James points the flashlight at our faces. “Mom says to tell her if Julie ever stays past midnight.”
“You would do that to me?” Sam asks, looking hurt. “My own brother?”
“She said she’d give me ten dollars.”
“So you’re taking bribes now, eh,” Sam says. “What if I gave you fifteen?”
“Mom said you’d make an offer. She says she’s willing to match anything, plus tickets to the Rockets game.”
Sam and I look at each other. He shrugs. “She’s good.”
“Let’s focus,” James says, looking out through the opening of the fort for signs of trespassers. “We need to figure out what the aliens have done with the others they kidnapped.”
“I thought we were hiding from the zombie apocalypse,” Sam says.
“… That the aliens started. Duh,” James says, rolling his eyes. He repositions his arms, holding the flashlight like a light saber. “We need to hurry and get the ingredients for the antidote. We can’t lose any more men.” Behind us lays the body of Mr. Bear wrapped inside a pillowcase. Together, we had to make the hard decision of putting him down before the virus spread to the rest of us.
“Oh. You mean—this antidote?” Sam holds up a glass vial that looks a lot like his bottle of cologne.
James lowers his light saber slowly. His voice darkens. “You’ve had that all along … while one of our men was infected?”
“Been in my pocket the entire time.”
“You traitor.”
“Worse,” Sam says. “I’m the alien.”
James narrows his eyes. “I knew it.”
I gasp as James throws himself onto Sam, pulling down the fort with him. The sheets fall over me, covering my face, and then rise again in the air before they shift and fall into flakes of snow as the scene changes around me.
I am sitting in Sam’s car with my door open. We are parked across the street from the Reed College campus. The ground is covered with leaves and a thin layer of snow. Sam opens his door and walks around to my side of the car. He squats down to look at me, and offers a hand.
“Come on, Julie. Let’s check it out,” he says. “We drove all the way here.”
“I said we don’t need to. It’s already starting to snow. We should go.”
“I’d hardly call this snow,” Sam says.
“Let’s just go, Sam,” I say again, and face the front of the car, ready to leave.
“I thought you wanted to look around the campus? I mean, isn’t that why we drove four hours?”
“I only wanted to get a sense of the place. And I got it.”
“From the seat of my car?” He rests a hand on the roof, and looks down. “I don’t get it. You were so excited when you planned this. Now you want to leave already.”
“It’s nothing. I want to check out downtown before everything closes. Let’s go,” I say.
“Julie…” Sam says. He gives me the look that means he knows me too well. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
I cross my arms and sigh. “I don’t know. What if I hate it? It already doesn’t look like anything from the pictures. I’m underwhelmed.”
“But you haven’t even seen all of it yet.”
“What if it’s worse?” I point out at a redbrick building that resembles a barn near an empty field. “Look, that’s straight out of Ellensburg.”
“You’re not giving your dream school a fair shot, Jules,” Sam says. He stands and glances around at the people walking by. “Don’t you want to at least talk to some students? Ask them questions about what it’s like here, about the social life and stuff?”
“Not really,” I say. “What if they’re all a bunch of rich elite snobs who keep asking me what my parents do for a living?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
I take a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know, Sam … There’s this air about the city that’s—what’s the word?” I pause to think. “Pretentious.”
“I thought you liked pretentious,” Sam says.
I give him a look.
“Kidding.” He smiles. “So now you don’t like Portland at all, I see.”
“Overrated. As far as I can tell.”
Sam sighs, and then squats down to my level again. His voice softens. “You’re scared about leaving your mom, aren’t you?” he says.
“I don’t want her to be alone,” I say. “My dad already left, so maybe I should take a year or two off and work at the bookstore. Mr. Lee said he’d promote me to an assistant manager.”
“Is that what your mom would want?” Sam asks.
I don’t say anything.