Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,15

Galloway lawn in the direction of the academic quad.

He sighed theatrically, lagging behind. “All right.”

“You won’t regret it. I swear.”

When we got to Lombardy 207, we saw written across the board in neat, bold letters:

POLO CLUB

Marty turned to me, eyes wide behind his glasses. “Polo?” he spluttered.

“That was my reaction, too.”

“The sort with—horses?”

“That was my reaction, too!”

Before Marty could adequately translate the exasperation on his face into words, Zach grabbed a piece of crumbling chalk and wrote a question that knocked everyone’s breath away.

What is ‘going away’?

And a second.

Where do we ‘go’ when we ‘go away’?

“We suspect, we speculate, we hear rumors,” Zach said, gesticulating at the front of the room, the same Zach whose hair had brushed against my forehead. He wore a shirt that read: Earth Science Rocks, which nearly killed me. “But we don’t know for sure. Polo Club is about knowledge. We’re not going to be like F.L.Y. We’re not going to demonstrate, or write editorial letters. We’re not going to go on hunger strikes in Galloway. We’re not even going to be an official organization. Our first rule is discretion. And the first thing we need is a plan of escape, a fail-safe—”

“You can’t be serious,” a blond boy near the front said. “What are we even talking about? Even if we could get out—I mean—we’re quarantined for a reason. You want to get more kids sick?”

“Houston all over again,” someone else muttered, and there were murmurs of assent.

“We’re out in the middle of nowheresville, Vermont,” Zach said, his splash-blue eyes searching for a friendly face, resting briefly on mine. I winked, and he blushed slightly. “As long as we don’t go near other people we’ll be fine,” he continued. “Look, what I’m saying is—there are fourteen of us here. The woods are nearby. We could survive with fourteen people. Organize ourselves. Make shelters. Gather fruit. Hunt. Fish. God knows what else.”

“I heard the guards at the main gate have guns,” Marty said into my ear.

If I made it through the guards at the main gate, stowed away in the trunk of a car, the way Jane did to bypass a Vanguard checkpoint in Firewalkers—which I’d read in lieu of Faulkner the other day—then hiked through the woods, down the highways, across state lines, back to my home in Richmond, Virginia, would I knock on a worn door with flaking red paint, listen to the steps echo from inside as the wood of the porch creaked beneath me only to have a strange woman open the door, holding a child in her arms? I tried to picture her face and drew a blank. But I could hear the gentle currents of her voice, the swell of her laughter. I had no idea what she was saying, but sometimes, when it got quiet, and I was alone, going for a run, I could hear her, Mom, though I could never make out her words. I knew nostalgia wasn’t good, wasn’t healthy. Digging up the past was like digging up the dead, and my NAAP score had singled me out as a kid who left what’s buried in the ground where it belonged, high-performing and well-adjusted, like everyone else here, and so I was rewarded with a campus full of castles and stained-glass windows while kids who got diagnosed in their later years, kids who were “troubled,” kids who remembered their parents, rumor had it, were packed into improvised mass recovery clinics in Wyoming where they entered tertiary stage within a few scant years of diagnosis.

I had long given up on the possibility of hearing—actually hearing—Mom again.

“How many of us know how to do any of that at all?” said Grace, meaning hunting, fishing, evading bears. “I mean, gosh, I’ve always loved nature, I’ve always had what you call a green thumb and everything, flowers budding, plants sprouting, but what about everyone else?” Grace was completely sincere. We had twentieth-century American lit together, where the fact that she hadn’t done any of the readings did not dissuade her from volunteering her opinion on issues ranging from Atticus’s parenting philosophy to Carver’s use of color in passages of great and terrible middle-American sadness (i.e., his whole canon). She was also the captain of the girl’s rugby team and had more muscle mass in her left arm than I had in my whole body.

“But that’s exactly the point.” Zach bit his lip. A note of desperation had entered his voice. “It’s a fail-safe. There are books on this sort