“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.
“Butwedid. 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. Andthen 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.
