Prepper

Chapter 4

Hunter watched a couple of student council members stick a prom poster to the wall in the cafeteria. Glitter fell off every time they tugged it between themselves, creating a sparkly cloud that drifted to the tile floor beneath them. Hunter wondered if they even noticed. If they did, they wouldn't care.

"Do you think they used enough glitter?" he asked Ashley when she sat down beside him with their lunch trays.

"It distracts from the price," Ashley said. Tickets were seventy-five dollars.

"Mom might give you money," Hunter said. The Kellers didn't have much but Mom always tried to manage school fees. Ashley and Hunter had usually been able to go on little field trips like to the planetarium and stuff. They wouldn't have been able to afford the middle school trip to Washington D.C. but the government had been shut down when Ashley's year was supposed to go and then Hunter had skipped eighth grade so it didn't matter anyway.

He took a bite of his hamburger. Ridgeway still had hamburgers, even though ground beef wasn't cheap anymore. They had fries too, and fresh vegetables which probably cost a fortune. The Kellers were lucky to go there. Central was getting so crappy kids were dropping out and somebody, probably those drop outs, had spray painted "do not pass go - ridgeway got there first" on the overpass near Maspeth Street. They'd pasted up a ton of Monopoly money too.

"I'm not going to prom," Ashley said.

"What? Why not? I bet you'd go if Jake Parker asked you," Hunter teased, watching his sister blush.

"Yes. I would also go if Sarah-Lynn asked me, and that is just about as likely." Ashley smiled and started in on her salad.

Ashley wasn't out to their mother about liking boys and also girls but it wasn't because Mom wouldn't be okay with it. Hunter liked to think Mom would be okay with it. It was more because Ashley and Mom didn't talk. Mom didn't talk about that sort of thing anyway except in a propagate-the-species or watch-out-for-pervs kind of way. Ashley had answered all of Hunter's sex questions when he was little and the questions didn't matter, but now that he was older and sex questions were starting to matter, he asked Google.

Hunter wrapped a couple of cookies in a napkin and tucked them into his backpack. Ashley did the same to some baby carrots. The Kellers had always taken food home with them from the cafeteria but the other day, for the first time, Hunter had seen some other kids doing it too.

"I guess you can't really go to prom by yourself," Hunter said, zipping his backpack.

"No. I'm not that cool."

"I'll say," Hunter said, and grinned when Ashley swatted him with the school newspaper, Tiger Print. Nobody read it, but the journalism classes put out an issue every month anyway. Ashley dropped the paper by his tray and Hunter picked it up. Jake Parker's blackout hit was the front-page story of the April edition. It was already legendary. Hunter was proud he'd seen it live. He was proud even to go to school with Jake Parker, who was definitely going to be picked in the first round of the MLB draft next year, if the world didn't end. He'd probably be picked first.

The rest of the paper was mostly crap about clubs and classes. On the real news, people were finally starting to freak out. CNN was producing programming about Cuba's Special Period, MSNBC was running features on the '70s Oil Crisis and Fox was airing so much borrowed footage of the LA Riots that gun sales were spiking even faster than gasoline, like people couldn't tell the difference between actual news and tape from the '90s.

Of course "actual news" was so subjective on some channels now that a lot of people had no idea what was going on at all. Hunter tried to tell them. He used a nickname that made him seem older and posted comments on dozens of articles trying to explain what was happening, citing sources, connecting dots, but nobody wanted to know. Most adults didn't even care. What was scarier than the apathy though, was the stupidity. It was amazing how stupid adults were, the things they believed. Literally there were people out there who thought the earth was flat and that their political opponents ate babies. Hunter couldn't turn in a paper without three different sources for each main point but adults with voting rights couldn't be bothered to do three clicks worth of research. It was horrifying.