And then he cut off the heat and electricity. But that didn’t matter. She just doubled up on her wearable blankets. She had survival skills. Her preparedness kit included lots of jerky meat sticks and tuna fish, seeds and dried fruit, and powdered milk. She could hunker down there for months. He couldn’t smoke her out.

  And then he literally tried to smoke her out. With giant burning pyramids of Nag Champa incense that he somehow blew through the ducts. But she was in the basement. Where everything was stored. Even the gas mask her mother bought in a moment of paranoia after September 11. She put that on, opened the two tiny basement windows, and waved a piece of a giant cardboard box at the smoke, wafting it toward the windows until she just became accustomed to the sickeningly sweet aroma of the stuff.

  On day twelve, he sent in the troops.

  Maya heard some voices in the backyard. She knew it was day twelve because she’d used a white rock to mark off the days with tally marks on the cinder block wall. She rushed to the tiny rectangular window at her eye level, but it was ground level for the house, and her view was mostly obscured by the stems of some budding young daffodils. Then she caught a glimpse of some Air Jordan 1 Retro Highs in University Blue tiptoeing among the tulips. A five-hundred-dollar shoe. Lucy.

  “Here we are,” said Glen, bending over to grab one of the door handles and lift it open. The basement door, from the outside, was one of those sloping metal horizontal double doors built into the ground that a person had to creak open, like the flaps of a giant picnic basket. Maya had spray-painted a skull and crossbones on them and in puerile kindergarten lettering painted Keep Out, and Glen had included repainting the basement doors as a line item in an invoice he had slipped to her yesterday #ToughLove. It also included rent, which, because she was barely seventeen, seemed illegal and desperate.

  “This is the point in the horror movie where the whole audience is telling me to run,” Lucy joked.

  Maya contemplated finding a place to hide, but it was too late. The two of them ducked down the cement stairs and found her there, gas mask dangling around her neck, giant furry sweatshirt bound to her body by crisscrossing bungee cords across her chest. Strapped to the bungees were her essential tools: two flashlights, a pocketknife, a can opener, a lighter. She shielded her eyes from the sunlight as if they had just rescued her from falling into a well. Maurice, who had been her trusty companion of the dark, barked at them.

  “Cringey. What the fuck?” Lucy asked and then said, “Oh sorry, Mr. Storm.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ve been thinking the same thing myself,” Glen said. “I’ll, um, just leave you guys to it then.” Glen trudged back up the stairs, hands in pockets, and Maya heard him think, I hope this works. I can’t put her back in that hospital, but I will, I guess.

  “Nice mustache,” Lucy called after him and then she thought at Maya, What is up with the mustache?

  “Hey. Yeah. I don’t know,” Maya said as she picked up Maurice and offered him a piece of bacon she’d pulled from the giant marsupial pocket of her Comfy.

  Crap. The girl keeps bacon in her sweatshirt. That’s fire. “Hey. So I see you have some survivalist skills,” Lucy said aloud. “Impressive.” She walked deeper into the basement and surveyed some of the contraptions Maya had built for cooking since Glen had turned off her electricity. A few logs and sticks propped up so that her old soup pot could dangle over a trio of Sterno candles from their old fondue set. In the far corner she was using her mom’s old stationary bike, previously relegated for use as a drying rack for laundry, to create a human-powered generator to try to start up her laptop. “This is good, like, Eagle Scout shit to put on the Common App.”

  “Speaking of that,” Maya said.

  “Why should we speak of that? We should never speak of it.”

  “But you are always speaking of it.”

  “I know. That’s what they’ve done to me. It’s a conspiracy.”

  “You sound crazier than me right now.”

  “Really?” Lucy asked, holding up a book called The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, and pointing to the old couch that was scattered with Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide and a copy of Walden by Henry David Thoreau. “You know Thoreau was only a mile from home and his mommy used to make his dinner, right?”

  Maya saw Lucy glance at the wall where she had been crudely ticking off the days, thinking, This is a little above my pay grade.

  “I screwed everything up. People. I screwed people up,” Maya said.

  “Huh?” said Lucy. “I mean. What?”

  “Bobby. Stuff happened with Bobby. I, like, interfered, and I should have just trusted the universe. Because people are god. All of us. There is no one being who has any power to make things better.”

  “Um, okay. Good revelation. Valid. But you did not screw up. You made everything better. Bobby came clean because of you. We all know what happened. He fessed up about everything, got his community service for the vandalism. He wrote letters to get you out of the hospital. He started a blog called Soul of an Artist and he got a tattoo that says Create, to remind himself what to do with his emotions. He built a memorial in the woods. It’s a process, but he’s turning over a new leaf. Joined a million clubs. He’s doing TED Talks about bullying. Constant fixture in the wellness center. Tries to give thirty compliments a day. He’s practically Mr. Rogers.”

  “That doesn’t bring Scott back,” Maya said. The pain of losing him still caught her breath, weighed on her chest like asthma.

  “Well. I think he knows that. He has to live with that. And he’s trying. It was sort of an accident. Kind of. Come on,” Lucy said, as she uncharacteristically gave Maya an awkward hug. “We … I need you out there,” she said, pointing out the window.

  “What would be my next move?” Maya asked, sniffling a little and pointing to the crumpled paper plate she had hung on the wall, the one on which Lucy had drafted her three-step life strategy.

  “Well, have you even looked at your vision board?” she asked. Lucy pulled out her phone and flashed it at her. All the squares were still filled with Tyler. “Your next move is to get back on the horse. And by horse, I mean you. Get. Back. On. This. Horse,” she said, as she made a crude gesture with her hips to punctuate each word. And then she thought at her, Sex heals all wounds, right? It’s good for what ails you?

  “Time heals all wounds.”

  “Time’s boring,” she said, and she threw her arm around Maya and escorted her out of the basement and into the real world. “Also, do you know what day it is? I mean of course you know, because, you just know,” Lucy said.

  “I’m not going,” Maya said.

  “Please? For me?” Lucy begged.

  Participatory Democracy

  The town hall meeting was being called to order. Someone even said “Hear ye! Hear ye!” and then pounded a gavel down onto the desk.

  Participatory democracy! Lucy thought. Even Lucy, prone as she was toward nihilism, was a little in awe of the process. Then she whispered manically, “I can smell the founding fathers. Can you smell the founding fathers?” She looked at Maya, who was preparing to answer, and thought, Please don’t answer that. So Maya didn’t.

  Maya was here at the town hall, enjoying the culminating moment of her efforts to become a teen in the world (with a purpose that can get you into college!) because Lucy had come back to her house, stripped her of her wearable blanket, sprayed her with some Abercrombie perfume, and forced her hair into a ponytail, then pushed her into the Corolla.

  “I smell like the mall,” Maya had said.

  “Shut up, Cringey. We’re going.”

  It turned out that Save the Bobcats! was not just a whim, but a #movement that had carried on without her while she was distracted by her #situationship with Tyler and recovering from a #freefall.

  Tonight, in the town hall, Spencer and Sam and Chloe were already seated in the front row of seats, their notes in hand, looking up at the wood-paneled half circle of raised desks where the town council sat. They rustled their notes, eager to get it on their résumés that they had participated in the political process as active citizens and won an initiative to save wildlife.

  Flanking them on either side were some other faces Maya recognized from the coffeehouse audience. Sasha was even there. They each wore Tyler’s bobcat icon on Save the Bobcats! T-shirts expertly screen-printed by Lucy. And right behind Chloe, dressed in a button up and suit pants, holding a clipboard and whispering some last-minute strategy in her ear, was Bobby. He seemed serious and insistent and engaged, and when he heard that Maya and Lucy had snuck in the back, he turned and gave them a little salute.

  The stage was set, but the person in charge of the town hall docket must have been a hunter/angler, gun-toting, NRA-funding person, because he or she made sure the students would be last to speak. An awesome strategy in Maya’s opinion, because with each complaint brought to the coun cil … this citizen needing a variance for his toolshed, and that person complaining about his neighbor’s hedge encroaching upon his property line, and the next person wanting to build a fence, and the next person arguing for speed bumps on his street … each complaint chipped away at the chippy youngins’ enthusiasm for participatory democracy. Participatory democracy was SO Boring.

  Maya could read their thoughts and by 9:00 P.M. knew that most of the teens were considering just bailing before they even got to the bobcats. They had homework after all and hadn’t known that they could have just brought their laptops with them. They had assumed, as they usually do, that this would be all about them. They didn’t realize they’d have to share the limelight.

  Finally, the gavel dropped and Ordinance 582a was called to vote.

  “We now turn to the consideration of Ordinance 582a in which the county of Bucks would establish an open season on lynx rufus, the common bobcat. Do we have any cause for opposition?”

  Chloe, who wore her bobcat T-shirt beneath a perfectly tailored taupe blazer (#dressforsuccess), stirred herself awake, uncrossed her legs, straightened her glasses, and stood. Using Robert’s Rules of Order, she said, “On behalf of Save the Bobcats, I move to reject the ordinance and offer this petition signed by six thousand residents of Bucks County.”

  “The chair recognizes … what’s your name, dear?”

  “Um. Chloe,” Chloe said. “Chloe Turner.”

  “The chair recognizes Chloe Turner.”

  “Mr. Mayor and esteemed members of the council. We at Save the Bobcats believe this ordinance has no positive outcomes for the county.”

  A heckler in the back row wearing a plaid shirt sneered and sighed and said “Bullshit” beneath his breath.

  “Continue, Ms. Turner,” said Randy McBride. Mayor McBride was one of those work hard / play hard kinds of white male patriarchs who had the courage to shave his head once he started losing his hair. The shiny crystal ball pate was so Mr. Clean mystical, it made it difficult to know whose side he was on. He seemed to be floating above it all like a genie.

  Maya could read his mind, though, and knew that he was only ever on one side. The side of getting reelected. As Chloe rattled off the numbers she’d garnered from the park service that proved that the bobcat recovery was not so robust that we needed to start shooting them for sport—and in fact bobcats could still be considered endangered by most calculations—Randy was dreaming up red and blue bar graphs and pie charts in his head and remembering how the previous mayor had partitioned the county into districts that would always play out in the Republicans’ favor. #gerrymandering …

  If he wanted reelection he had to side with the red. The trick was figuring out how this issue would play with the white women. Dammit. How would the old blue-haired biddies who were tired of their recliner-sitting, beer-swilling Republican boomer husbands come out on this issue? Animals were tricky to play. What was it W. C. Fields said about show business? Never work with children or animals. What we got here is a one-two children-animal punch.

  “Thank you, Ms. Turner.” Randy McBride interrupted her before she was finished, thinking, Damn. She eighteen? And then added patronizingly, “You sure seem to have done your homework, dear. Love what they’re doing over at that New Town High. Go Bobcats. Do we have a rebuttal?”

  Chloe blushed and sat down, feeling for the first time the insidious power of a true dismissal from the grown-up patriarchy. Greta Thunberg would not sit down. She would finish. I’m weak. I wish I could. Maya knew she had a whole anecdote prepared about what had happened in Wisconsin. As soon as they lifted the ban on hunting the barely recovered wolf population in Wisconsin, the hunters slaughtered them. In two weeks, they killed a third of the wolf population, sometimes even hanging themselves out of helicopters with machine guns to kill as many wolves as possible in one fell swoop. They had to rescind the ordinance just two weeks after they passed it, so that the wolves wouldn’t plummet right back into extinction. Do we want that to happen to bobcats? Chloe thought.

  She tried to stand back up but something about the way Randy talked to her made her legs physically weak and she plopped back into her chair, defeated. Spencer and Sam patted her shoulders and assured her she’d done great. Bobby gave her an encouraging fist bump. Maya thought about somehow sending Chloe the strength to regroup and stand up again, but she reminded herself she was no longer in the business of saving Bobcats. She had to let this play out on its own, which was a little nerve-wracking, because how it would play out was that Donny Johnstone would stand up. Donny was the heckler wearing the plaid shirt.

  “Mr. Mayor, I would like you to consider Exhibit A,” he said, walking around the town hall passing out a packet of eight-and-a-half by eleven printer paper filled with photographs. On the front was a picture of a mountain lion in California attacking a backpacker. The next page showed a picture of someone’s driveway with garbage strewn about. An obviously photoshopped bobcat stood at an impossible angle in the middle of the garbage. The last photo showed a bunch of hunters in King’s Pub toasting together to the day’s kill. “What you see here is evidence of my three points. Bobcats are dangerous. Bobcats are a menace. And hunting bobcats will boost the local economy. I rest my case.”

  Someone in the audience let out a yeehaw, and Spencer stood up and said, “But that’s a mountain li…”

  “Do we have a motion to take it to a vote?” Randy asked.

  “Aye,” said one of the council members.

  “All in favor of passing Ordinance 582a, thereby creating an open hunting season for the lynx rufus?”

  Three Republican council members raised their hands, of course. And the other three Green Party liberals shook their dowdy, unkempt, undyed, and graying heads. (The liberals might have more success if they pressed their shirts, got some good haircuts … used some product, Maya thought.) Maya and Lucy had this thought at the exact same time. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, Lucy thought. “Clothes make the man,” Maya said back.

  “All opposed?” the chair asked.

  The three liberals raised their unmanicured hands.

  All eyes were on Randy McBride. The mayor, still feeling uneasy about it, you could tell, shook his head in apology to the right, as he reluctantly raised his hand in opposition to the ordinance. Kids and animals, he thought. It was a one-two punch. The gavel came down. And it was law. Ordinance 582a was defeated! Open season on bobcats was canceled.

  The human Bobcats rejoiced! Chloe and Sasha jumped up and down, while Sam and Spencer hit each other in an overly aggressive high five. Bobby cried. But this time, they were tears of joy.

  The Gen X townspeople seemed unfazed by the victory. They hailed from a whole generation of apathetic Stacy-and-Glens: deer-in-headlights underachievers, whose inertia may have ushered in the end of the world. Maybe that was harsh, Maya thought to herself. Anyway, they didn’t celebrate, and Maya watched them curiously as they packed their legal pads into their briefcases, talking among themselves about asparagus being on sale at the Walmart this week.

  “Cringe! You did it!” Lucy said, hugging her. “You saved the bobcats!”

  “We did, right? Look at those T-shirts, Luc. They’re dope.”

  She joined the little huddle of the club she’d created and thanked Sam and Spencer before their moms took them out for ice cream. She hugged Bobby for a long time and could tell that something inside him had shifted for good.

  I’m so so so so sorry, he thought, and he let himself cry.

  Then as she was just standing there minding her own business and doing her own thing, she felt the invisible pulsating waves of the umami force just emanating right at her.

  She turned around and there Tyler stood holding a bunch of gerbera daisies.

  Maya physically shook off the umami like a dog shaking off a bath, took a deep breath, and graciously accepted his flowers. “What are you doing here?”

  “You said we could still be friends. What is friendship for if not to celebrate each other’s success?”

  Maya leaned into the umami and whispered in his ear, “You really think we can just be friends?”

  “I mean. Yeah, there’s like a ton of sexual tension, but we can just ride it out, engaging in cute innocuous banter like we’re on a sitcom, teasing it out seemingly endlessly until the show jumps the shark and the producers need us to finally come together to save the ratings.”

  “Like Pam and Jim?”

  “Exactly like Pam and Jim.”

  “I like it,” Maya said. “Except maybe not in Scranton.”

  Album Therapy

  A week later, Lucy was “popping up” in Stacy’s record store.

  With Terry the librarian’s help and the funds from the poker game, Lucy was able to rebrand. Her Etsy store went from Gilding the Monster to Monster Paint to just Paint. Terry’s market research indicated that she should punch things up brand-wise and delete as many syllables as possible, so, Paint. It embodied Lucy’s process but also evoked the idea of color and everything that represents: Art, Inclusivity, Sustainability, Hope. What’s more hopeful than a fresh coat of paint?

 

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