Page 24 of Our Last Resort

That had done the trick. Your mother, however yearned for, feared, or resented, was forced into a corner of your mind. And your father—well, the fathers didn’t matter. Only one man mattered: Émile.

From three to eighteen, you learned Émile’s philosophies, some history, grammar, math, and some science. Survival skills: how to plant vegetables, how to light and put out fires, how to tie a tourniquet. From six to eighteen, you had chores on top of classes. Cleaning, gardening, meal preparation, clerical tasks.

The goal was self-sufficiency. To never have to rely on the outside world.

Before you knew it, you were eighteen.

You were expected to keep working on behalf of Émile: caring for the facilities if you were a man, for the children if you were a woman. Vetting and evangelizing new recruits. Selling Émile’s books and—once they became a thing—his online seminars. Even as an adult, you had to keep taking classes. If you were successful, you’d start teaching them, too, first to kids, and then to other adults.

We never left. That was the most important rule. Émile had gifted us a perfect world. It would provide everything we would ever need, if only we allowed ourselves to be molded by it.

Émile had a car—an old, perpetually muddy 4x4 when I was a kid, and later, a shiny sedan he said ran on electricity—but he never took anyone on his drives. He could be trusted with the outside world; we couldn’t.

And that was it. That was your life.

You wanted it.

Worse: Like every cherished thing, you were afraid to lose it.

Gabriel and I sat together at meals and during class. (Never at Assembly. No one had to tell us; we knew.) We made up little games, the rules too childish, too embarrassing, to explain to other kids, but between us, there was no shame. We coached each other through chores. We made up chore-specific songs. Within weeks, we had a window-washing song. A cleaning-the-cafeteria song. A sorting-through-paperwork song.

A year passed, then two, then five. Gabriel towered over me. For a while, he was horrifyingly skinny, and then he filled out again. Me, I stopped growing at five feet five. I was slight, but tough, my body making muscle out of our meager meals.

On the day I turned fifteen, Gabriel brought me a littleFcarved out of wood.

“From woodworking,” he said.

I turned it over in my hand. The shape was blunt—the bottom bar tilted at an odd angle—but it was the first birthday present I’d ever received.

“Thank you.”

By which I meant:This means the world to me.

One evening, Gabriel and I stood in an empty classroom, sorting pamphlets into stacks.

“Simon was talking yesterday,” Gabriel said.

He meant in the boys’ dorm. From fourteen to twenty, boys and girls slept in separate quarters. The only part of Émile’s world that wasn’t coed.

It was unlike him, this concern with propriety. But we didn’t question it too much. Émile had his ways.

“What was Simon saying?” I asked.

Gabriel knocked a stack of pamphlets against the table to smooth its edges.

“That he and a couple of other guys went outside.”

“Outside? Like sneaking out of the dorm?”

This happened on my side, too. Girls waited for the rest of the compound to fall asleep. There was the pitter-patter of their bare feet on the dusty tile, the swoosh of the sheets they wrapped around their shoulders. If you pressed your face against a window, you’d see them, clandestine ghosts glowing against the night sky.

I never joined. Once I was in bed, I liked to stay there.

“No,” Gabriel said. “Outside-outside.”

The elastic band I was wrapping around a pile of pamphlets snapped against my fingers. I ignored the pain and stretched it back into place.

“What do you mean,” I said, eyes still on the rubber band, “ ‘outside-outside’?”

---