“I’m on track. I’ve switched majors three times, but I got my gen eds first. I’m actually double majoring. Not just in anthro. Finally getting into what I care about.”
“And what’s that?”
“Poli sci.”
“Seriously?” I say, blinking. I don’t know why that’s a surprise. Honestly, I don’t know what he could have said that wouldn’t have been surprising.
“Yeah, seriously. I don’t know what I want to do with it yet. Maybe international relations. Maybe I want to get more into activism, really fuck up all the Nazis in Denver, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though I don’t know. Not really.
Normally, I’d let that slide. Pretend I knew more than I did and google it, but suddenly I feel naked. Without my smartphone, without access to the knowledge of the whole world at my fingertips.
And I feel like . . . like for once, pretending is wasting time.
I blink at the snowy ground in front of me, realizing just now that my toes have gone numb. That . . . can’t be good.
But it’s not like there’s anywhere good to stop.
Not like there’s anything here but more snow, more snow, more snow.
So I say—even though asking a question of another human being, a question I could have found the answer to myself under normal circumstances, feels shockingly, startlingly vulnerable—“I didn’t . . . I thought Denver was, like, this liberal paradise.”
It’s silent for a second, and then Jonah laughs out loud. “Yeah, you want progressive, let me just point you at a city with a fuck-ton of white people in it.”
“Oh,” I say. “Huh. Yeah, good point.”
Jonah runs a hand back over his hair. He wears it big and natural, and the snow dots it with little white freckles before it melts. His fingers are chapped already—they’re flaking and a little pale. I don’t even want to know what mine look like. They’re probably cracked. Thankfully, they’re under the gloves that halfway dried overnight. If I see them bleeding, it will only make it worse.
“Let me just . . . let me put it this way. Denver votes blue. It’s liberal. It’s liberal. It’s not progressive. Denver votes to let people do whatever the hell they want to do, so they can shut up about it and live their lives and not worry about you after election day.”
I don’t say anything. I wait. I walk. I don’t want to say a thing because, for the first time, maybe in forever, I’m listening to Jonah be passionate about something. Getting a glimpse into what he really cares about, what he’s majoring in, something beyond him bullshitting tough and hitting on me.
I listen.
He says, “Because they vote for Democrats and whatever the fuck. And then the city passes legislation that bans homeless people from sleeping in public, and no one but a couple activists cares. They vote to let people smoke weed, but let every Black dude who’s been locked up for weed in the city stay locked away in jail for shit white people can do legally now. They fake like they’re progressive and then write up profiles on Nazis like what matters is their haircuts. Do you even fucking know how many Nazis there are here?”
I swallow. “I should, I guess. Nazis all over in Massachusetts too and, like, welcome to Whiteville. I’ve gone to protests and seen my cemeteries vandalized. I know about Nazis, man.”
He says, “Yeah. I guess you would, huh.”
I shrug. “Comes with the Tribe. But I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it would be worse here than a million other places.”
“It’s just that—no one cares here. No one cares. Even though all the Denver patriot militias are taking over the goddamn city. Because that would require getting up off their asses and caring about people who aren’t rich and straight and abled and white. That would require being impolite. It would require not being Apathy, the City™. Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat. “Sorry, yeah, anyway. It just gets me so furious that people think Portland and Seattle and Denver are the least racist places in the country, like it’s even physically possible for totally white-ass places to somehow be the least racist. Jesus. Anyway. Anyway. Poli sci.” Another clearing of the throat. “I’m kind of . . . I kind of get a little overly passionate. Or whatever.”
Now I bet my eyes look like a She-Ra character’s. All sparkles and sunshine. Like his did a second ago. Because my gosh, I’ve never seen him . . . never seen him care. Like this. Enough to get lost in his own head yelling about something.
It’s not what I ever expected of him.
I guess that’s not fair, because how can either of us really know enough about the other to have any expectations?
But here I am.
Surprised.
I say, “No. It’s good. To care.”
He shrugs.
“Especially when it’s something like that. That matters.”
He just kind of grunts and keeps walking.
And the snow continues to fall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHEN THE SKY CLEARS and the exhaustion sets in, we find a copse of trees to sink into and eat lunch.
Lunch is a total feast: granola! Jerky! Some cheese. I feel a little weird eating the beef and cheese together because it’s not kosher, and even though my parents don’t keep it anymore, that’s something I never felt right about. There’s a lot of mitzvot I don’t keep, like, a lot, but the kashrut stuff was too drilled into me as a little kid, I think, living near my grandparents out here. So yeah, I feel weird. Weird enough to hesitate. But preservation of life is like, NUMBER ONE and supersedes almost everything when it comes down to it, so that matters a whole lot more than not eating milk and meat together. This feels pretty preservation-of-lifey, so I tear into both.
My stomach hurts.
I twist open the last water bottle in our bag and take a long drink. “Fuck,” I whisper.
Jonah glances at it grimly and takes a swallow, Adam’s apple shifting with the effort.
His eyes linger on the water level.
I follow his gaze and say, “We could just . . . we’re surrounded by snow, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But it’s—we can’t just eat it.”
“Why not?” It comes out defensive, angry almost. I blink at myself. “Right. Sorry. Right, the hypothermia. We’ll die.” I don’t say anything else. I just take another swallow, smaller this time. Less than I want to. Less than my throat is begging me for.
Neither of us speaks for a minute, and I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: that neither of us had said that word yet: die.
And suddenly it’s a real possibility.
After taking a moment to breathe, I glance up at him and offer him the bottle.
His pupils dilate right in front of me, looking at it.
We used to play a game like that back in middle school, back when one of us learned that your pupils dilate when you look at something you want. We’d say the name of someone cute and watch everyone’s eyes. Or, if someone didn’t know about the science, we’d troll him by having him look at whoever it was we wanted to know about.
Of course, we’d always just accuse whoever we wanted of the appropriate level of pupil dilation, because like that would have ever actually worked. Like we could have actually seen the tiny physical response like that with the naked eye.