Dry

by Neal Shusterman

They’re saying LA’s water commissioner could be brought up on criminal charges.” “Why don’t they do something about it instead of spending time blaming people?”

Alyssa and I just shared a canteen. Considering the saliva exchange involved, that’s almost like kissing.

Endearing 😂

Which is worse, I wonder – watching everyone you know fall into that ravine, or shaking their reality with such force that it ruins them.

This isn’t just a screw-up, I realize. It’s an Event. Events bypass anger, straight to damage control.

He doesn’t suffer fools lightly – and to him anyone who expects others to solve their problems is a fool.

THREE DAYS TO ANIMAL

Good one

Sometimes being the hero means going down with the ship.

a nervous habit she’s developed when things get tense at our house. Early dinner means she can get to bed early and end an undesirable day.

Since I was a child, I always knew when my parents were having crypto-arguments in front of me because they start over-emphasizing words.

😂

“I’m fine, Kelton,” she says. “Just tired.” And I know her definition of “tired” can fill volumes.

The writing’s sarcasm level is so on point 😍

As far as authority is concerned, calm people quietly dying is a lot easier to deal with than angry people fighting for their lives.

just because I’m offering to stay overnight in your house, don’t get any ideas about me getting ideas.”

😂 This is so well written

And I’m scared to the bone, because right now I can’t tell if I’m looking into the eyes of sheep, or wolves.

“The more we keep to civilization, the more likely that people will be civilized,”

The magazine, Kelton had called it. I look at it. Think hard about it. It represents everything that I hate about the world. But this isn’t the same world it was yesterday.

Charity decides to ask herself the contrarian questions of the world, because unique questions will always yield unique answers.

The ringtones of cell phones. There are dozens of them lying in the sand around us, creating an eerie eight-bit symphony. The lost calls of a thousand souls.

“Is that a body?” And I know that whatever it is, I’ve had enough. It’s more than not wanting to know. I don’t even want to know the depth of the things I don’t want to know.

It’s a powerful feeling – daring the universe to end you. We all know that sensation. It’s that feeling you get when you think for just a split second about steering into oncoming traffic. Or jumping off a balcony. Or playing Russian roulette with the revolver that your father thinks you don’t know about. It’s not like you’d actually do any of those things, but the feeling is there, like a wind at your back on the edge of a cliff, gently urging you. What if… What if… It’s what my psychiatrist, better known as Dr. Quack, called the Call of the Void.

my backpack – also Hello Kitty, because, okay, I’ve got a thing for Hello Kitty. It’s a guilty pleasure, kind of like the macho biker dude who secretly wears women’s underwear.

✌️

Not only is it a recipe for disaster, it’s a recipe with half the ingredients missing.

If f-bombs were nukes, we’d have wiped out the planet.

As they say in the Old Testament, there was much consternation and gnashing of teeth.

There’s this thing that happens with a mob. It’s called “deindividuation.” It’s the kind of thing that happens when a cop puts on a uniform, or when you wear a pair of sunglasses so people can’t quite see your eyes. It’s like you slip out of your normal self – and it makes you feel different. Behave different.

I realized my best chance at survival wouldn’t be hiding from people, but being among them. Because that’s where opportunity was. People can be played, moved, and sacrificed.

Book smarts are nice like heelies are nice: They’ll only get you so far, until you have to use your freaking feet. In fight-or-flight situations it’s street smarts that will get you out alive.

I didn’t have the melodramatic self-centeredness to be a goth, or show up to class enough to play the geek. I didn’t have an IQ low enough to tolerate the popular crowd … and I’m pretty sure I would have preferred impalement on the school’s flagpole than be a hipster.

And then they medicated me for it. Thank you, Dr. Quack. It was great. For them. I didn’t have motivation enough to have opinions, or energy enough to care.

eyes aren’t as dull and vapid as I had first thought. She’s shrewd. Which means she could be a problem.

pack animals that go rogue are always hungrier and nastier, because it’s harder to hunt food without a pack – and when it comes down to it, you have no idea what they did to be excluded from the pack in the first place. Jacqui is an unknown quantity in an unmarked bottle,

She’s got the gun, and a shriveled raisin of a conscience, if she has one at all. I imagine her to already be animal, without needing three days to get there.

Kingston, a dog that, under any other circumstance, would have been loyal to the end, made an instinctive choice for his own survival.

A little reality kick thank goodness

“The end of the world is our family hobby.”

inside I’m smiling – because, for the first time in my life, I’ve made fear a tailwind rather than a headwind.

She doesn’t thank me this time. Maybe she rations gratitude the way the rest of us ration water.

Then he meets my gaze, but rather than his typical bone-chilling glare, his eyes are different. Shimmering and glassy. Vulnerable. An honest display of emotion that I’ve never seen before. And in this single look I feel as if I’ve opened his personal .zip file; suddenly years of compressed emotional information comes bursting out, and I’m hit with an overwhelming truth.

As a kid you idolize your parents. You think they’re perfect, because they’re the yardstick by which you measure the rest of the world, and yourself. Then as a teenager they just piss you off, because you realize that not only are they not perfect, but they may be even a little more screwed up than you. But there’s that moment when you realize they’re not superheroes, or villains. They’re painfully, unforgivably human. The question is, can you forgive them for being human anyway?

sometimes doing the right thing means doing the wrong thing first.

“You can fit two more in the side pockets,” she tells me, and hands me the bottles. “The meeting’s already started, so you’ll have to hurry.”

Awww

It’s not like it’s their fault, but I can see how, when people feel a threat to their lives, they’ll exercise any option they have. If you don’t want it to be at your expense, you have to take yourself off the table as an option. “Either you open your doors wide, or you lock them,” I say regretfully. “People are too complicated to trust with anything in between.”

Martial law is the last step before everything falls apart. Now it could go one of two ways: 1) Martial law will be effective; there will be enough military might to counteract the chaos; riots will be flashpoints, rather than widespread; things will break soft, and recovery will be relatively easy. 2) Martial law will fail; the military will underestimate the need, or not be able to scramble fast enough; riots will be systemic and severe; Southern California will break hard, and recovery will take years, if at all.

And now I finally start piecing it all together.

Fuck... didn’t see that coming

Grief can twist people in ways they’re not supposed to twist.

“God answers all prayers. And sometimes his answer is no.” My grandmother hated that. “God never says no,” she told me. “He just says, ‘Not today.’”

you may be rich, but you’ll still be one important skill set away from being wealthy. That’s because wealth is a mindset. Or, as my mentor, Vice Principal Metzer, always says, “Rich is an adjective, wealth is a verb.”

True wealth is only established after you’ve disciplined yourself to invest in assets that generate enough income to cover your expenses.

where personal space is at a premium, tensions are apt to spike much more quickly than in a place where one’s battle cry reaches maybe ten neighbors instead of a hundred.

You’ve got to do something you’ve never done, to have something you’ve never had.

the key to being a good leader is acute observation and subtle manipulation – so subtle that no one knows they’re being manipulated. Come to think of it, that’s also the key to a successful government.

Graves rarely get so deep.

😂