Dear Journal,

So, Rex did ultimately come to get me for dinner after what I think was a little over 16 hours, which must have meant that he was there like super late at night last night, right? But also, who knows, because I’m not even 100% sure what time it was when he came to get me. Honestly, the whole being in a place that has no access to windows has been getting to me ever since I got thrown off my schedule. When I used to go outside and talk to Garrett every day, it was fine because then you at least knew a general time. Now, I don’t even know for sure how many days we’ve been here. It feels like weeks, but I know that can’t be right unless they’d trying to starve us out.

But anyway, Rex came and got me for dinner, and if I hadn’t been kept prisoner for who knows how long, it would have pretty much felt just totally normal. Like, it was a little weird to be going to dinner with him, but considering some of the other stuff that’s happened since the end of the world, it’s not really that weird, you know?

But anyway, we walked down to the kitchen, and I kept looking at the doors, and Rex must have seen me because he started pointing to doors and being like “your friends aren’t in there,” which was honestly super rude of him - like, if you’re going to give me any sort of hint about where people are, you shouldn’t do it in this weird guessing game format, you know? But when he skipped a couple of doors, I tried to note them in my mind so that if I ever did get out, I could maybe free the others. That was, of course, assuming that Rex wasn’t just totally lying to me, which I could totally see happening to be honest.

Anyway, when we got to the kitchen, I saw that he had all of the canned goods that we’d packed into our bags from the house, as well as what must have been a bunch more from the house because I know we definitely didn’t pack that many. Maybe he realized that even though he could never find food when he went out to scavenge, that didn’t mean that nobody else could, and he’d taken the chance to stock up. Hell, maybe they’d already gone back and gotten all the food from the house - keeping us in a room so that he could do raiding wouldn’t even be the worst thing that he’d done, after all.

So anyway, he sat down at the table and was like, we’re going to eat some dinner, but first you’re going to organize the food in the back, and I’m going to sit and watch to make sure you don’t get up to trouble. And I was kind of happy about it, because on the one hand, it meant that I didn’t have to be trapped in the room by myself anymore, but on the other hand, I had to hang out with Rex and also do inventory again. I thought I was done doing inventory when we left the coffee shop, but apparently all adults have the same ideas for ways to keep teenagers busy.

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So I organized, and he sat and talked about basically everything that popped into his head. When he started talking, I was kind of worried at first, since I figured he’d start doing the whole super villain thing of telling their whole evil plot when there’s no way you can stop them. But instead, he just started talking about his life before the bombs dropped and how much better everything was. And like, yeah, duh, he’s not the only one who has any problems, so I started tuning him out pretty quickly as I organized the food.

Whoever had owned the house really liked canning fruit, I think. Either that, or they’d just had a ton available. I thought I had eaten all the canned pears, but apparently Rex had managed to find more somewhere, and I made a mental note to come here and eat the rest if we ever had the chance to sneak out. But there were also a ton of vegetables, especially green beans, and even some kind of canned meat that I had apparently missed when we were first looking. Granted, I don’t know if I would have wanted to eat the meat anyway, because it looked kind of gray. A few of the cans of vegetables didn’t look great, either - there was even a can where the lid kind of pulled off when I was picking it up. Something told me that I shouldn’t throw it out, though, so instead I made sure to put it at the very back of the green beans so that nobody would eat it, because I don’t think that would be super good for you.

But anyway, it took what felt like an hour to get all the food moved into the kitchen and organized. And honestly, that house was probably the best thing that could have happened to the people in the power plant who weren’t being held captive. There was so much food that I doubted they would even need to go out and scavenge for a while! Which is great for the whole not starving thing, but kind of terrible for us, because it meant that there wouldn’t really be any opportunity for us to try to escape sometime soon. I just hoped that Rex would get bored of keeping us hostage soon, and then we could at least pretend to go back to kind of normal lives.

But anyway, when I was done with inventory, Rex demanded that I make him a meal, and he specifically said that he didn’t want any more eggs, which I probably wouldn’t have done anyway since it was dinner and all, you know? But I asked him what he wanted, and he said he wanted some sort of soup with meat in it. I don’t know anything about soup, journal, but I figured that I could probably figure it out because it was just like meat and vegetables in water, right?

Well, apparently not, because whatever I made was super gross. I still ate it, though, because I was half worried that Rex would send me back to my room without food just because he didn’t like what I cooked.

After he got done eating (which to his credit, he ate the soup too, and he didn’t even really complain about it, but maybe that was just because they didn’t have that much food around there for a while), he brought me back to my room, and I panicked a bit when he started to come into the room with me. But I think he saw me panic, because he just sighed and left the room instead, locking me back in.

Maybe if I can just keep looking panicked whenever he brings me back to my room, I can avoid ever having him try anything. Eventually, though, I think he’ll just get numb to the fear, though, and do whatever he wants to anyway.

Rex said he’d be back tomorrow so I could make him dinner again, so apparently this is going to be an every night thing. I think it also means that I get the most freedom out of all of us, though, so I feel like that means that I am the one who needs to come up with a plan to free everyone if Rex doesn’t get bored of keeping us captured first. I’ve never been very good at planning, but I owe it to them to try. It’s not like I don’t have the time to brainstorm, anyway.

Love,

Kayla