In the morning, Peter returns our keys in the motel lobby and grabs a map of Keystone for the four of us to study. It’s a small town with only three main streets. Peter’s plan is that we’ll dress in our Believer garb and circle Keystone for a half hour at most, looking for any sign that could suggest a nearby New Orphans compound. At the end of that time, if we’ve found nothing, we leave. Harp has been using Peter’s phone all night to tweet at Spencer G. with increasing desperation—“WE’RE IN KEYSTONE WHERE U AT, SPENCER”—but has gotten nothing in reply, although his account is active and retweeting posts by New Orphans in other cities. I don’t say it out loud to anyone, but I no longer expect to find them here, in the middle of what’s basic-ally Believer City. Maybe they were here once, but they’re gone now. Which means we’ll be running blind once we hit California. The insanity of our plan is beginning to sink in, and it’s taking all the strength I have not to lock myself in the bathroom with Harp’s vodka.
“The main thing is getting out of here safely,” Peter says, looking right at me like he can hear my thoughts. “As long as we can get out of here safely, we can make our way to California and figure it out from there.”
Harp and Edie murmur their agreement while I stare out the motel window, like a brat, pretending Peter doesn’t exist. This morning when he was in the shower, I hurriedly whispered to Harp what he said to me last night, and she rolled her eyes at my despair.
“Girl, please. Don’t you realize what that means? You’re already in. You just have to make him want it.”
She suggested further indifference, aloofness, as much distance I can manage in a small four-door sedan. And at the moment, I’m just embarrassed enough to try it. If I pretend to be less than interested, I can avoid the looks I keep noticing Peter give me, which read to me to be full of humiliating sympathy and guilt.
Outside, South Dakota is hot and dry, as far from yesterday’s snow as I could possibly imagine. We leave the motel parking lot and get onto the main road, and when I see Casa de Millard in the distance I feel a little twinge of pain at the sight of it, at the thought that I’d just been about to declare how I felt when Peter declared his necessary non-interest. The rational part of me tells me to relax: not to work myself up into a state over a boy I’ve really only known for a couple of days now. But I can’t help it—the looming apocalypse heightens every emotion, makes attraction more powerful and rejection more dire. Peter might’ve been my first shot at a boy who really saw me, and liked what he saw—and now it feels like he might be my last shot, as well.
In the last three years Keystone has been majorly revamped. Where once it must have been a Mount Rushmore tourist trap, it is now essentially a Church of America playground. The buildings along Route 16-A are polished red wood, meant to resemble the Old West of cartoons and Disneyland. But every sign features some nonsensical marriage between patriotism and Belief: The All-American Christian Family Restaurant, Fine Holy Leather Goods (WE SELL AMERICAN FLAG COWBOY BOOTS AND ALSO WWJD BRACELETS), Li’l Ronnie Reagan’s Heavenly Jelly Beans. We creep down the increasingly Believer-friendly main road, and I feel tears like pinpricks gathering at the back of my throat. I don’t know why I’m so disappointed—it was always a long shot—but it would have been nice to see some sign of the New Orphans out here. It would have meant we aren’t alone.
Suddenly Peter, in the front seat, points and says, “There!”
At the corner of the intersection is a tan brick building with a sloping red roof and no visible crosses or flags. It’s surrounded by a tall, menacing barbed-wire fence, with two armed guards in full riot gear standing in a small opening. There’s a large makeshift white wood sign on the grass on the front lawn, and on it someone has spray-painted WE ARE THE NEW ORPHANS in red. Harp sighs.
“I swear to you,” she says, “that if I hear so much as one beat of a drum, I am going to crack some skulls. I mean that literally,” she clarifies, turning to Edie. “Not figuratively. I’m going to straight-up murder some hippies.”
To say this was not what we were expecting would be an understatement. I’d imagined the New Orphans headquarters to be a large green farm out in the country, populated with long-haired women kneading dough in the kitchens. Failing that, I thought we’d find just some powerless kid like us, in a basement. The reality is so much more impressive than either of those possibilities. It’s hard to tell what the building used to be, but Spencer G. and his cohort have taken absolute possession of it, and it sticks out in Keystone boldly and unapologetically, a direct challenge. At the sight of it, I feel this soaring sensation in my chest, a feeling I haven’t felt in days, weeks, months. It’s hope. For this place to exist in the midst of a Church of America stronghold means that Spencer G. must be more powerful than any of us would have imagined.
We park around the corner and try to de-Believer our outfits as best as we possibly can—we imagine the guards wouldn’t take kindly to being approached by four apparent Church-goers. Only Edie stays in what she’s wearing, proclaiming to be comfortable. We walk up to the guards with our hands in the air, and they just watch us from behind their reflective sunglasses with expressions we can’t read.
“Hey,” says Peter, doing what seems to me to be not a particularly good job of acting casual in the face of a huge automatic weapon. “Is there any chance of us getting in there? We’re not dues-paying members, or anything, but we don’t mean any harm. We’re not like a secret cell of Church terrorists or anything, ha ha ha.”
Harp groans softly behind me. I know I’m supposed to be acting indifferent to him, and that even if I wasn’t, I should be slightly concerned about the terrible job he’s doing of ensuring our safety right now, but I can’t help it: I find his nerves adorable. One of the guards sighs. The other, his face dry and cracked with sunburn, seems crankier. He doesn’t speak, but his upper lip curls up into a sneer, and he shifts his gun from one hip to another, causing us all to flinch.
“We have money?” Harp says. I glance back at her and she shrugs at me, her hands still lifted in the air. “I mean, we have some money, if that what it takes to get in.”
I think about what I have in my pockets—a little over $150, and Harp probably doesn’t have much more than that. I don’t know if this will be enough to bribe the guards. If it’s not enough, what do we do? How much of our money can we afford to give them?
“Vince?” says a voice behind the guard, and he shifts to reveal two people—a boy and a girl of indeterminate age who are standing behind the fence, peering out at us with interest. “We wondered who you were talking to.”
“They say they’re not terrorists,” Vince replies, and he and the other guard laugh then, like they’ve been waiting to laugh the whole time. Peter makes a face.
The girl steps between the two guards. She’s in her late teens and has a sun-bleached, beach-y look—long, honey-colored hair that hangs down her back, freckled shoulders, flip-flops. She holds an armful of fresh-picked flowers. The boy is a little younger; his sleek black hair is shaggy over his ears, and he wears a green hoodie and no shoes. He carries a basket of skimpy-looking radishes, still speckled with soil. He indicates for us to lower our arms and move closer. When we do, an unmistakable scent of weed hits our noses.
“Welcome,” he says. “Are you Orphans?”
Harp, Peter, and I nod uncertainly, not sure whether he means orphans with an upper- or a lower-case “o”. “Are you Spencer G.?” Peter asks.
The boy looks back at the girl and both of them laugh at this. Peter gives me a puzzled look, and I quickly turn away.
“Sorry, friend,” the boy says. “My name is actually Gallifrey. Around here, it’s a great honor to be mistaken for Spencer G. But also, he’s not known as Spencer G. anymore. Please, come in; let us show you around.”
The four of us move past the guards, who immediately lose interest in us and stare again into the heart of Keystone. It’s clear that these men are neither Believers nor Orphans—they must be free agents who take their guns to wherever they receive a steady paycheck. We follow Gallifrey and the girl across the dusty front lawn, towards the building’s entrance.
“Sorry,” says Harp. “Did you say your name is Gallifrey?”
“It’s not my given name,” Gallifrey explains. “It’s a recent New Orphans initiative. Lacking parents, we must rebuild ourselves as new and complete individuals, rather than part of a family unit. So we’ve all disposed with the names we were given, and chosen words that better describe the people we’ve raised ourselves to be. I chose ‘Gallifrey,’ which to me represents exploration. Have you ever seen Doctor Who?”
Harp shakes her head. Gallifrey looks disappointed.
“Well,” he says. “It’s a reference to that.”
We step inside. The building is cool with air-conditioning, and dark—the windows of the front room have been boarded up. Gallifrey and the girl, whose chosen name turns out to be Daisy, explain that we’re in what was once a presidential wax museum, a popular tourist spot for families who’d come all the way to Mount Rushmore only to find that after twenty minutes of staring at those four stone faces, you’d run out of things to do. As the town turned Believer, the owners abandoned the building, and Spencer G., a local who was growing more and more disturbed by his parents’ behavior, took it over as a hideaway and headquarters. This room we’re standing in was once the gift shop, but is now a communal meal room, with a small kitchen to one side, and a long table where three New Orphans now sit, waving at us, eating cereal. Gallifrey and Daisy take us on a tour of the building—the old diorama-like exhibits have been renovated into bedrooms, but their painted presidential backgrounds remain, so that we see various replicas of the Oval Office, but with beds where the desks should be, and New Orphans lounging around in them. Some are asleep; some are reading books or knitting; some are curled up with members of the opposite or same sex, in various states of undress. We see maybe thirty Orphans in all, and they all look alarmingly happy.
“Will you be staying long?” Daisy asks.
“We just came to talk to Spencer,” I say. “I mean, the guy that used to be Spencer.”
Gallifrey points to an empty exhibit just down the hall from us—two big empty unmade beds lit up under the museum lighting. “This used to be the Reagan-meets-Gorbachev room,” he explains, “but it’s yours now, if you want it.”
I shake my head, glance at my friends for backup. “No, that’s okay, thank you.We’d really just like to talk to him and move on.”
“You have to stay for dinner,” Daisy insists. “Goliath will want you to stay for dinner.”
I stare at Daisy a moment, at her pretty, imploring face. I wonder if I’ve heard her wrong.
“Goliath?” Peter echoes.
Gallifrey beams. “That’s the name of our leader. The man you knew as Spencer G. We’ll take you to him now, but Daisy’s right—he’s going to want you to stay for dinner.”
They lead us further down the hallway, which takes a sudden horseshoe curve and leads back, I see, into the communal room from which we just came. On the way, Edie takes my hand and squeezes. When I look back at her, I see everything I’m feeling expressed on her face. She looks terrified, hopeful, dazzled. At the end of this hallway is a boy so powerful, so fearless, that he’s set up shop in the middle of a Sacred Site and renamed himself Goliath. At the end of this hallway lie answers, a path to California. My mother and my father. It doesn’t seem so impossible now. I feel as I did when I first stumbled upon the New Orphans in New York, before Harp and Peter recounted their disappointments. I feel, for the first time, like this trip has not been the most needless and foolish and dangerous enterprise four teenagers have ever undertaken. When Gallifrey and Daisy reach the end of the hallway, they turn to us, smiling.
“Goliath,” Daisy says to whomever is sitting inside the last exhibit, who we can’t see yet. “We’d like to present to you some new New Orphans.”
The four of us catch up. Unlike the rest of the Oval Offices we’ve passed in the museum, this last has not been renovated into the bedroom. Its centerpiece is still a huge, cherry-wood desk, bearing the presidential seal. The boy they call Goliath sits behind it, typing furiously at a laptop, but he stands when we’re assembled before him. Goliath is tall—taller than Gallifrey and Peter both—and broad-shouldered, with high cheekbones and golden-blonde curls that fall just past his ears. He looks like the star of a movie about a really handsome surfer.
“Brothers,” he says. “Sisters. Orphans. Welcome.”