Dear Journal,

I can’t believe I’ve written in you this many times! In all honesty, while I was really hoping that I’d keep this up, I know every time I’ve tried to write in a journal before, I’ve kept it up for like a week, and then it got shoved into the back of my closet to eventually become ash with the rest of the world. But I guess now, it’s not like there’s that much to distract me from writing, so maybe that’s the difference? Who knows.

Hansen still isn’t talking to me. It’s super weird, because as far as I know, I don’t think I’ve done anything to piss him off. But it’s been almost two weeks now! I get thinking that I might need space for the first couple of days, but come on! I even caught up to him one day while he was walking down the hallway, and I tried to catch up with him, and he was just like “oh, super busy, gotta go” and walked into his own room! Like my dude, if you just don’t want to talk to me all of a sudden, you can just say that. Might be kind of awkward since there’s only a few people left alive, though.

But, since Hansen has been being a total douchebag to me, I’ve been hanging out with Garrett a lot. The first few days I went out there, he just looked really annoyed to see me, but now, he still doesn’t seem particularly happy about it or anything, but he also just kind of looks bored. I’d consider that great progress!

Most of the time, Garrett doesn’t feel like talking to me, so I just talk to him instead about anything and everything that pops into my head. That’s probably why he’s bored now that I think about it - he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would want to know the entirety of the mall’s layout, but that’s what he gets for not bringing up a subject first. I’m kind of starting to run out of topics, though, unless he just wants me to recite what I’ve been doing here every day, but somehow that seems like it’d be even more boring (no offense, since I know that’s what I subject you too, but in fairness, you can’t really bring up your own topics).

But sometimes, on the days when he seems even less annoyed by my presence than usual, he’ll talk to me about stuff too. He never talks about what his life was like before this or anything, but sometimes I’ll mention a place like one of the stores that I used to love going to, and he’d talk about how he had a cross country route that would pass right by it. It might not be much, but I really think that we’re starting to bond a bit. Hansen would be proud, if he was actually talking to me.

But today, Garrett seemed like he was in an alright mood, and I just asked him why Hansen was avoiding me, because if he was planning on hating me for the long term, I’d really like to know so that I could like adjust my schedule so I would be less likely to run into him in the hallway, you know? I could go back to being a complete night owl or something. But Garrett just laughed and said that Hansen didn’t hate me, it’s just that his dad is a dick, which didn’t make any sense to me, because I’ve seen way more of Rex than I have of Hansen recently. Rex has been coming down to breakfast every morning, just hanging out and talking about random adult stuff. I assumed he was always waiting for my mom, but she never really comes down for breakfast anymore.

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So I asked Garrett what he meant about Rex being a dick, and he did the stupid, mysterious “you’ll see” bullshit that guys do when they think they’re really onto something exciting. So I was like “no, we’re not doing the you’ll see bullshit, tell me what you mean,” and Garret just shrugged and was like “he doesn’t like Hansen talking to you much is all.”

Frankly, I think that’s stupid, but the only think I can think of is that maybe Rex doesn’t think I’m a good influence on him? I had some people who had to leave our friend group in high school because of that, but I think that’s really stupid because I really wasn’t the one who was the bad one in our friend group, so why would he want him to stay specifically away from me? Frankly, if anything, I think that Hansen was probably the bad influence on me - I hardly ever snuck out until he came around, after all. Then again, that was more for the shower than it was for Hansen, but he was definitely a part of it.

So I told him, well, if Rex is the one who is keeping Hansen away from me, I guess I’ll just have to ask Rex about it tomorrow when he comes down to get coffee. And Garrett just laughed really loudly and told me to tell him how that went when it was done, which I take as having permission to come back out to hang with him tomorrow, which is way more than I’ve gotten from him for quite a while, so I’m pretty excited about that!

I still have to figure out what I’m going to say to Rex, though. Since Garrett would never tell me what was actually going on, it makes it a little more difficult to come up with a list of good reasons why Hansen should be able to hang out with me. I don’t get why, when there’s so few people around here, he would worry about limiting who he could see, anyway. It’s not like Hansen doesn’t have a ton of friends - he’s friends with just about everybody in the power plant - and they can’t all be great influences. And even if they were, surely that would balance out my influence on him, right? I don’t know, I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

But also, speaking of tomorrow, I’m going to have to do a little bit of digging - it’s pretty late, and Jared and Bryce have both been sleeping on couches in the living room with me, but neither of them ever came to bed. And it’s not like they went out to scavenge or anything - even if Jared had somehow managed to get Bryce to leave on her own free will, I had seen them together when I was walking to my mom’s room to go take a shower. I don’t know if they saw me, though - they looked pretty wrapped up in each other, if you know what I mean. And when I got to my mom’s room, she still wasn’t staying in there. If Jared and Bryce don’t get back soon, I might just go and take her room - if she’s not going to sleep in her own bed, it might as well get used, and I don’t see why I should be the only one sleeping on a couch out in the open.

It’s so unfair - everyone around me is hooking up, and yet I’m not even allowed to talk to Hansen. What the fuck?

Love,

Kayla