Dear Journal,

While I was trying to go to sleep last night, I was thinking about Hansen and his dad again, which I guess I have been doing most nights now. Hansen went on his scavenging trip, and he was gone overnight, so they must have gone a ways, but they just came back with just a single bag. I wanted to ask why he hadn’t bothered to go back to the coffee shop to get the rest of the stuff from there, but obviously I couldn’t. Or at least I couldn’t during the day, and honestly when we got a chance to hang out, I was more focused on hearing about his trip than I was about asking why he hadn’t been back to the coffee shop.

He said his trip was good, by the way. Definitely a bonding experience between him and his dad, which he apparently super needed.

That also meant that Rex wasn’t down at breakfast for two days straight, so I didn’t get a chance to try to convince him that he should let Hansen talk to me, but it was also probably good, because I really wanted to ask him about Daniel, and if I did that, then he’s ask how I knew about that, and then I’d risk blabbing about Hansen and I meeting. As much as I wanted to know more about the Daniel situation, I didn’t want to risk not being allowed to see Hansen anymore, even in secret.

So, instead of asking Rex, I asked Garrett, which was super easy, because with Rex gone, and my mom busy with Ben, and Bryce and Jared busy with each other, I basically had no one around to ask me what I was doing during the day or ask me to help with anything. In a way, it was a kind of freeing that I hadn’t had since my mom and dad had gone on their second honeymoon and left me with my babysitter, who was all of two years older than me and couldn’t give less of a shit about what I got up to so long as I was still alive. But now, there wasn’t even anyone to check on that for a few days (not that I was planning on dying, obviously, but after what happened to Mr. Williams and Hattie, it just proves you never know anymore).

Which meant that I spent almost all of my awake hours hanging out with Garrett. He certainly wasn’t a fan of that - I think he was fine with me when I was just hanging out with him during the day, but now that I had started to even follow him inside for meals and stuff, he seemed even less happy about my being there. But like, what can he expect when he’s the only person around who will sometimes talk to me? It might be inconsistent, but it’s still something.

Anyway, like I was saying, I asked Garrett about Daniel a couple of times. The first time, he didn’t answer, and instead just got really quiet, and I assumed that he was hoping to avoid the subject, so I started talking about how we’d figured out how to make the muffins without the extra ingredients for the muffin mixes. He didn’t seem super interested in that, either, but at least he didn’t look particularly uncomfortable.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

But the next day, when I wasn’t sure if Rex would be walking up at any minute, I didn’t really think I had much of a choice other than to ask him or to ask Rex. So I asked him again, and this time he got really quiet at first, but I didn’t immediately try to fill the silence, so he started talking eventually.

He asked me how I knew about Daniel, and I was like “Hansen told me when he told me why he wasn’t speaking to me anymore,” and he was like “I was hoping that when Hansen told you that he wasn’t speaking to him anymore because of that, you’d stop speaking to me as well,” and I said that I didn’t think Rex cared if I talked to him or not. He was like “I’ve tried my best to keep Rex from even remembering that I’m alive,” and I asked why and he would want that, and he was just like “you already know that Rex killed Daniel, why would you ask me that?”

Personally, journal, while I do think it was really a dick move to send someone outside of the power plant, there was enough food and water bottles around that I don’t know if I’d say for sure that Rex killed Daniel. Plus, if we had two groups this close to each other, wasn’t it possible that there were other groups around, too? Maybe Daniel had just gone off to join his own little coffee shop group or something. But whatever, Garrett seemed so annoyed by that that I didn’t bother pushing him on it too much.

So instead, I asked him what he would do if he was elected to be in charge of the power plant for a week, because he honestly seemed to have a lot of problems with how it was run now, and I thought that maybe if he told me what he thought would be better, I could run it past Rex. Even if he didn’t like me enough to let his son hang out with me, after all, he was fine with meeting me for breakfast and chatting every day that he’s around.

But instead, Garrett just laughed again and said that you didn’t get elected to be the leader, you had to fight for it. He said that’s how Rex had gotten to be the leader, after all - he’d fought some other dude and beat him up so badly that he could barely breathe, and then he stuck him out by the river. It was a bit different than the story I’d heard about how he became the leader before, so I didn’t know really who to believe. But in all honesty, I just kind of think that Garrett is super grumpy all of the time, and he probably thinks the worst about everyone, so I don’t really believe that. Although he was admittedly right about Hansen not hating me, so who knows.

All I really know is that tomorrow, Rex should be at breakfast again, and it’s getting harder and harder to not say anything about Hansen and I meeting. Like, he always asks about my day, and there’s not that much to talk about, you know? Especially now that I’ve been talking about Garrett less because I know Garrett doesn’t like him.

If it wasn’t so late, I’d say that maybe I should get up and make some muffins or something, just so I have something to talk about in the morning. But if I get up now, it’s going to take forever to get to sleep, and I’ve been trying my best to get out of bed and sneak out of my mom’s room before she sneaks back in to get a change of clothes. Maybe someday, she’ll pay enough attention to me to notice that we’ve basically been sharing rooms. It might not happen until she gets sick of having Ben around all the time, though.

Love,

Kayla