Dear Journal,

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but my mom is getting even weirder. Also, sorry, but I didn’t write yesterday. Jared and I went out on a scouting mission (he’s started to call them the raids, but that seems so stupid to me - like, who are we raiding?? The air??) and we wanted to go farther than we had before, so we were gone like most of the day. On the plus side, we did find something that we think was like a dollar store or something, because there was a little bit of food mixed with a little bit of junk. But there were some unopened cans, so that made my mom really happy! There were even a couple of bottles of water, but not very many, and honestly, we drank like half of them on the way back. I know that totally throws a wrench in any rationing my mom was trying to do, but also, she didn’t have those bottles yet, so I don’t think it counts for anything, and plus we felt like we deserved a treat for being the first ones to come back with anything from a scouting mission for a while. I definitely want to go back out to some of the farther away places and maybe even spend the night somewhere so we can go super far, but my mom is really against the latter idea. I don’t know what she thinks will happen - as far as I can tell, there weren’t even any animals that survived the blast, so like, yeah, it wouldn’t be the best sleeping conditions, but it can’t be that dangerous or anything. But you know how moms are, no matter what you say, they won’t change their minds once they’ve made a decision. She is at least okay with me going out to a slightly farther scouting mission again, but only if I bring Jared along, which is really lame, but I can understand wanting to make sure someone’s there in case this turns into an all out zombie situation or something.

I’d much rather bring Bryce along than Jared, though. Bryce is really cool, actually! We’ve been talking more over the last few days, which is good, because before that, she was mainly only talking with Hattie and my mom and occasionally Jared. Apparently, she always thought my friends and I were bitches, so she didn’t want anything to do with us, and while I’m not going to say that’s not totally true, I think that’s pretty stupid when you’re in the middle of the apocalypse. My friends aren’t even here, and everyone at school knew that they were actually the bitchy ones, and I was the cool friendly one of the group, right??

But anyway, I think Bryce and I are starting to become kind of friends as we talk more. Which is great - us girls have got to stick together, after all! Plus, it’s nice to have someone my age to be able to talk with besides Jared, who doesn’t understand why it’s a problem that my hair is greasy or that I don’t want to wear the same like two shirts every day. I don’t think Bryce really gets it either, to be honest, but at least she’s better at pretending to get it than Jared is.

But as much as I would rather take Bryce out on missions with me than Jared, it’s never going to happen. Or at least probably never - I guess we’ve got forever to figure it out! But she said on one of the first nights that I asked her to go out with us that she would rather die, so I feel like that’s a pretty firm no, and I’m not going to ask again unless she tells me otherwise. Granted, maybe she just didn’t want to go with us because Jared was there. I can totally get that - at one point, I thought he was growing on me, but the longer we’ve been in this coffee shop together, the more annoying he seems to get. Like, we’re already in the end of the world, so no, I don’t want to talk about dungeons and dragons. He and I can be friends when he learns to appreciate some more interesting hobbies.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

But anyway, like I was going to say, I feel like my mom has been getting even crazier. You know how she found that helmet and wouldn’t take it off? Yeah, she still hasn’t taken it off! At this point, it feels like it’d be weird to see her with it off. But then yesterday, sometime while we were out on our scouting mission, she decided to change clothes. Which, honestly, it was about time, because she’d been wearing her disgusting work outfit forever, and while I don’t think any of us smelled very good at this point, she smelled worse than half of the corpses we ran into. But instead of just changing into one of the t-shirts we’d found like a normal person, she decided to take one of the shirts and tear out the sleeves so that it now looked like one of those muscle shirts that guys wear to the gym when they’re trying to get attention. But obviously, she wasn’t muscular enough for her to look like that - she just looked like someone who’d gotten stuck in a paper shredder or something. Plus, she still had her bra on underneath, which thank god, but also, it’s just one of those stereotypical old lady ones that’s covered with stains from god knows what. It’s so embarrassing! I’m just glad that, if she has to go through something like this, she did it now when there’s like seven people in the world - while it’s still embarrassing, it’s hard for it to really be that embarrassing when I’m pretty sure half the people here have seen me changing at some point. There’s really not a lot of privacy in a coffee shop, after all. Plus, no one wants to change in the bathrooms anymore - once the water stopped running, those got way too smelly way too fast.

I’m not sure what the sudden change means for my mom, though. At first, I was worried that that was her way of giving up, and pretty soon she’d be a completely different person altogether. But now, I don’t think that - it feels more like she’s using it to cope, like I did whenever my friends and I got to go to the mall after school. And while I’m glad she’s coping with everything that’s happened, I can’t help but feel kind of frustrated, you know? Like, yeah, she lost her husband that she often didn’t get along with, and her coffee shop isn’t really a coffee shop anymore, but she still at least has her coffee shop. What do I have left to cope with? My friends are dead, the mall is gone, and I can’t even look at the fucking internet because that’s not there anymore. All I have left to do is go wander around a burned up world and look at a bunch of dead bodies, which is really not helping me with anything. And part of me wants to just yell at my mom and tell her to get over her own bullshit and help me, but another stronger part knows that even if she went right back to my regular mom again, there’s not really anything she could do to help me.

I need coffee. At least that’s the one thing that we seem to have plenty of around here. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Love,

Kayla