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“I will,” Ham says. “I’ll do better.” He takes his position and props up his rifle the way he should have been doing all along.
To my relief, Jackson leaves it at that and follows me down as I climb back to the ground. He’s not one for chitchat, so I don’t hang around for further conversation. I’ve got three more lunches to deliver.
“What the hell are you doing handing out lunches anyway?” Jackson has fallen into step beside me.
“Someone has to, and everyone else was busy.”
“Then you pull someone else off their job to do it. You shouldn’t waste your time on this.”
I don’t usually lose my temper with Jackson. I’ve known him since I was twelve—nine years now—when he first arrived at New Haven, which my parents owned and operated. He was a silent, surly sixteen-year-old who’d been raised in foster care in Louisville and was always getting in trouble. Nothing violent. Mostly just shoplifting, underage drinking, and joyriding. My parents had taken him in. They felt their calling was to help troubled teens, and they always had between six and twelve foster kids living with them. They believed that kindness, fresh air, and common-sense responsibility were the answers for kids who’d been lost in the system. Because the farm was such a unique situation, the kids were always given a choice and a trial period first. It wasn’t for everyone, but the ones who did stay always appreciated the farm and my parents. Social workers would check in all the time, but there were never any serious complaints. My parents’ methods didn’t always work to turn lives around—they failed as often as they succeeded—but it worked in Jackson’s case. He never turned into a nice guy, but he learned a lot and behaved himself and even stayed as a hired worker on the farm after he turned eighteen.
So he was still with us when the asteroid hit Europe five years ago, wiping out the whole continent, wreaking havoc with the environment, and decimating economies and governments around the world. After my mom and then later my dad died, Jackson and I learned to work together to keep the farm running. He might drive me crazy more than anyone else I know, but I don’t lash out at him much anymore.
Not like I used to.
“I wanted to stretch my legs,” I tell him. “I feel cooped up staying in the house all day.” It’s not an excuse. I don’t need an excuse for making my own decisions. Rather, it’s an explanation, and it’s a generous gesture since I’m giving him the chance to understand.
“Then can you at least put on more clothes?” he mutters, evidently accepting the explanation for what it is. “Those tits are a pretty big distraction.”
I like to consider myself cool and cynical and too experienced to be bothered by comments like that. But I’m not. I gasp stupidly and glance down at myself. I’m wearing a normal outfit—tank top and army-green trousers I’ve had since I was sixteen. They’re one of the few pairs of pants that still fit me. My boobs and ass have filled out since then, and with more food this year, my clothes aren’t loose anymore. My tank top does expose a lot of skin on my arms and shoulders, and the well-worn fabric is clinging resiliently to the curve of my breasts.
“Ham is only seventeen,” Jackson continues with a cold, sidelong look. “Instead of focusing on his job, what do you imagine he’s thinking about when you show up?”
“I’m wearing normal clothes, and I was just there for a minute. He wasn’t ogling me. If you want to magically materialize another shirt for me that’s comfortable in this heat, then I’ll consider it. Until then, I’ll wear what I have, and other people can be responsible for their own eyes.”
I speed up my pace. Obviously a futile gesture since Jackson’s legs are a lot longer than mine. He’s got thick brown hair that he lets grow until it’s longer than his jaw, and then he chops it all off. It’s about midlength right now, and he pushes it back from his sweaty face before he grabs for my arm, pulling me to a stop.
“What’s going on, Faith?”
I blink up at him. “What’s going on with what?”
“With you. Is there something I need to know? Why are you suddenly handing out lunches and volunteering for supply runs? Is there some reason you don’t want to be in the house?” His eyes search my face with an urgent scrutiny that’s genuinely unnerving.
It’s not prompted by personal concern, however. That much is obvious. Rather, he wants to know if something in our well-ordered world has gone askew so he can hammer it back into place.
I drop my eyes, feeling exposed and annoyed and uncomfortable. I’m usually better at keeping things to myself, but Jackson has always been freakishly observant, and he knows me just as well as I know him.
The truth is I’ve been feeling restless lately. Jittery. Trapped. I want to go somewhere. Do something. Get away for a little while.
I want something to change.
Because I have no idea what’s prompting the feeling, I also don’t know how to fix it.
Jackson can’t fix it either, so there’s no reason to admit it to him.
“Nothing is going on,” I tell him, meeting his eyes now without wavering. “I’ve got three more lunches to pass out. Don’t you have work to do?”
His lips are thin and supple and just a little too wide. They curl up in a sneer as he mutters, “Don’t distract anyone else.”
“Fuck you, Jackson.” There’s no heat in my words as I walk away from him. I used to get so mad at his cold detachment and biting comments that I’d scream at him, and once I even slapped him across the face. But I simply don’t have the energy to be angry with him anymore.
***
IN THE AFTERNOON, Icheck in on the folks baking bread in the kitchen and am pleased with their progress.
My parents were already in their forties when they had me, and they were optimistic, naive do-gooders always looking for their next mission. They built this farm as an attempt to live off the grid, so it was equipped with well water, manually pumped plumbing, and composting toilets, which gave us an advantage when infrastructure collapsed all over the United States and this area lost power and water. At New Haven, we grew wheat, ground it into flour, and baked bread for as long as I can remember, and we always had a huge vegetable garden. The layer of dust thrown up by the asteroid blocked out the sun for a whole year, cooling global temperatures and making it hard to grow anything for a while. But things are getting better. The sky is almost blue again. And we had a decent wheat harvest earlier this year, so there’s been plenty of flour for bread.
“This all looks great,” I tell Kate, who was one of the “troubled teens” my parents took in and so has been with us from the beginning. She knows almost as much about the running of the house and farm as I do. “Thanks, everyone. Great job.”
