“I hope Fern is okay. Do you think we haven’t heard because the radios were damaged?”
“It’s a full moon, but we’re heading toward low tide. If the storm surge hits at high, we—”
That last one almost makes me stop dead in my tracks. We have sandbags stacked on either side of every outside door, but I’m not even sure those would stop the floodwater if we’re hit with a storm surge at high tide. We had a few hurricanes in Philly over the years, but most of them had weakened to a category one or tropical storm by the time they got that far inland. It was mainly the heavy rain we had to worry about. Once, after a pretty bad one when I was younger, the main highway through Center City was completely flooded all the way up to the overpass.
Marathon High School is a three-story building. If the water gets that high here, we might need to be on the roof—and the food that isn’t canned will be ruined. I look back toward the cafeteria. The Committee people have already thought ahead, I’m sure.
It’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. I just need Andrew to tell me he agrees, and I’ll feel a whole lot better.
“Hell no, we’re screwed,” Andrew says. But as he holds a dodgeball just out of reach while one of the kids tries to jump up to take it from him, I still can’t help but laugh.
“Can you stop torturing him?” I nod at the boy.
“This isn’t torture, it’s playing. You’re having fun, right, Frank?”
Frank is smiling and it seems like he’s about to say yes, but then he looks at me and grows solemn. All the kids in the Keys do that—well, the ones who have surviving family members don’t. But the orphans all do. And it kinda freaks me out. It’s like they can tell I’m an orphan, too. I wonder why they don’t look at Andrew that way. Maybe they sense that I already have one foot out the door. That I want to take Andrew away from here and live the rest of our lives as hermits in a cabin in the Pennsylvania woods.
Finally, Frank speaks. “How comeyoudon’t have any scars?”
I have no clue why he’s asking me that.
“Okay!” Andrew throws the dodgeball to an empty area of the gym. “Fetch, Frank.” Frank runs off after it. “I always wanted a dog.”
“What does he mean about scars?” I touch the side of my belly where I was shot. There’s a dark pink indent that hasn’t fully lightened to normal scar tissue. Not that Frank would know about it.
Andrew waves off my question. “The kid’s obsessed with them. You should have seen him asking Rocky Horror about his top surgery scars.”
“Oh!That’sNo-Filter Frank.”
“Aptly named, yes.” Andrew scans the gym, quickly counting the kids. He stops, recounts, then spins around, relaxing when he sees a kid sitting on a cot playing with a blue stuffed hippo. “But, yes, we’re going to be okay. This place was a storm shelter for the area even before the bug, so it’ll still work after.”
I nod. Once we’re past the worrying topic of a flash flood, he steps closer to me and lowers his voice.
“What about us?” he asks. “Arewegoing to be okay?”
My stomach clenches again and I shrug. “I don’t know. I wasn’t the one not talking to me.”
He sighs as No-Filter Frank returns with the ball and tries to hide it behind his back. Andrew quickly snatches it, then throws it again, and Frank is gone.
“Everyone has been saying we need to talk about it, but I think I just wasn’t ready at the time.”
“And are you now?”
Again Frank returns, and again Andrew makes quick work of throwing the ball.
“Yes, this absolutely seems like the most opportune moment we’ve had for the past two weeks.”
I laugh, but my stomach still tightens with nerves. If he’s about to break up with me, this might be the worst possible time, surrounded by people and No-Filter Frank, who is probably going to ask why I’m crying, and I’ll have no physical scars to show for it.
“I just need to know where you’re at,” Andrew says.
I don’t understand. “In what way?”
“In our lives. You were so quick to pivot away from the plan to get Henri. You’d really leave Cara with the boat crew, alone, just because you’d miss me?”
He’s trivializing it, making me feel childish. And that’s not what I was doing at all.
Frank returns, and I have a moment to gather my thoughts as he gets better at keeping the ball away from Andrew. When he finally runs off to chase it again, I speak.
