“So that’s our way out,” I say. “If we have to leave.”

“That’s the door,” Cary agrees. “Unless they end up finding it too. In which case, we’d have to fight our way out of here.”

Rhys nods. “So we should be ready, one way or the other.”

How we are ready:

Two bags packed with the essentials: water, food, clothes, and medical stuff we raided from the nurse’s office. Cary and Rhys volunteer to carry them. Trace demands we get a bag each, but changes his mind when he remembers how the dead outside can and will reach for anything they can hold on to. We get aluminum baseball bats from the gym. Our weapons.

The supplies rest on the table next to the door and then we start fine-tuning our plan, as if plans make a difference when you’re being chased from one moment to the next. We had a lot of plans before we got here and I’m not sure we saw any of them through.

The plan: if the doors are breached, Cary is counting on the noise of our barricades falling to give us the lead time to get in here and get this barricade out of our way. And then we escape into the night. Or the day. Whichever.

Harrison whimpers at the idea of leaving, even though it’s purely hypothetical at this point, and we have to promise him repeatedly that we won’t leave him behind even though Trace threatens to. When Cary tries to figure out where we’ll go after we leave, Trace decides Cary’s acting too much like a leader and they get in a fight and we never figure it out. We have this teamwork thing down. And then Cary declares the library off limits.

“We’ll check it once a night to see if there’s any activity,” he says. “But we should keep this part of the school as quiet as possible. I don’t know if they can hear us out there, but I really don’t want to risk it. I want to stay here until we absolutely have to leave.”

Which is just another way of saying more waiting.

On the way back to the auditorium, Rhys touches my arm, stopping me. I jerk away, which surprises him but neither of us says anything. Cary turns at the sound of two less people moving with him. Rhys waves like, just a second. The others trudge back to the auditorium.

“So, what do you think?” Rhys asks.

I think he’s clean. His brown hair isn’t spiked with its own grime. His bangs are sharp against his forehead, some strands longer than others, like he cut his hair himself and he did it in the dark. His face is smooth. The boys have been sharing a razor they found in Coach Hainsworth’s office. Rhys Moreno. He used to hang across the street with the other senior smokers until the first bell. Sometimes surrounded by girls, sometimes not.

“What do I think about what?”