Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cheryl started her quilt on a normal weekend, just like any other weekend. Dad and Steve had gone out to some movie, and Mom said that Cheryl was finally old enough to learn how to use the sewing machine.

The sewing machine had been one of Mom's favorite things for as long as Cheryl could remember, so she knew that being trusted to use it meant a lot to Mom. Besides that, it meant being trusted to set foot in her parents' office. The room that Mom and Dad shared was 50% desk piled with paper (Dad), 50% sewing table and knitting machine and piles of yarn and fabric (Mom), and 100% not for children. But Cheryl was eleven now, and that was more than halfway to being an adult. She followed Mom into the office, and sat down at the sewing table, the looming machine in front of her.

"I thought we'd make a quilt," said Mom. "It will give you a chance to try out different patterns as you learn more about sewing, but everything can go together into one bigger project."

Cheryl nodded. "What will I make it out of?"

Mom waved her arms towards the biggest pile of fabric. (Well, technically, it wasn't a pile so much as a bookcase full of bins that had then had fabric piled on top of them, but still, the end result looked like one big pile.) "Pick whatever you want," she said. "Well, try to pick from the smaller pieces of fabric. Some of the larger ones are enough to make a dress or a coat, so we probably shouldn't cut them up for patchwork. And that gold twill is off limits. I'm saving it to make something special for myself, but I need to find the right buttons first." She coughed. "Your dad says I have enough buttons, but if I don't have any buttons that look right with the gold twill, how can that be enough? But for now, just pick any two fabrics in different colors, and we'll cut some squares out of them."

Cheryl ended up picking blue and purple—purple because it was her favorite color, and blue because it was Mom's. The blue was solid, but the purple had little darker purple flowers all over it. Mom said fabric with little flowers on it was called calico, and nodded approvingly at Cheryl's choices. She pulled out her big zipper bag full of plastic templates, and handed Cheryl a big square to trace on the fabric and cut out. Five of the blue, and four of the purple. Five plus four was nine, because this was a nine-patch quilt square.

Mom showed her how to make long straight seams with the machine, and how to line the sides of the fabric up with the little lines on the throat plate, so that every seam would be exactly the same size and all the patches would line up. Or at least, that was the general idea. Cheryl tried her best to keep the edges of her squares right against the line that said 1/4" the whole way through, but still when she had the whole block put together, somehow they didn't quite line up. All the squares were in the right place—an X of blue and a diamond of purple—but the places where they met weren't as perfect as that cross on the ground at Four Corners where they'd gone on vacation year before last, but a bit offset. More like the intersection of Main and Bailey, where Bailey didn't go straight through but you had to turn left and then right if you wanted to stay on the same street.

"Great job!" Mom said, ignoring the messed-up bits. "It looks much better than the first quilt block I ever made. And don't worry, as you get the hang of using the sewing machine, your seams will get more and more perfect. Or at least, they can if you want them to and you work on it. If you don't mind everything not quite lining up, this is fine and you can definitely just be happy with this." She coughed, and then coughed again. It took her a minute to catch her breath, but then she smiled. "How about ice cream, as a reward for how hard you've been working? And then tomorrow, or today if the guys still aren't back when we get back, I'll show you how to quilt the block that you just pieced together."

Cheryl accepted, because she always accepted a chance for ice cream. They went to Thirty-One Flavors, and Mom got rocky road, the same as she always got. Cheryl got pecan praline. It was sweet and salty and delicious, and it was the last time she ate ice cream.

By the next weekend, Mom was in the hospital. The weekend after that, Mom was dead. Dad died two days later.

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Cheryl wasn't sure how long she sat without moving on the couch in the front room, after they got the phone call that Dad had died. It was hours and hours, and it was about twenty minutes longer than Steve sat there. Steve had sat so terribly, terribly still—Steve, who always ran too fast in the house and was always bouncing a ball or flipping his scout knife open and shut or tapping a pen or doing something to make noise. Suddenly, out of the blue, he had jumped to his feet, stomped to the front door, and gone out, slamming it behind him. For a moment, he almost sounded like himself, then the echoes of the slam died away and the house was terribly silent again.

Cheryl sat there, wondering what to do. After a while, when Steve hadn't come back, she went into the office. There wasn't any Mom or Dad anymore to tell her not to come in here. She picked up one of the ledgers off Dad's desk and threw it at the wall. It wasn't doing anybody any good anymore. Nothing was doing anybody any good.

Her blue and purple quilt square was still sitting on the sewing machine, locked down by the presser foot and sandwiched to a piece of batting. They'd started quilting it, the next day, but then Mom had had that one coughing fit that was worse than any of the other ones she'd had before, and they'd dropped everything for Dad to drive her to the ER. Cheryl sat down in front of the sewing machine and started stitching jagged lines in every direction. Mom had said that once the pieces were pieced together, you could quilt them to the batting in any way you wanted. "You can echo the lines of the patchwork," she had said, "or you can make fancy swirls and curlicues once you learn to sew a curved line, or you can just stitch crazy lines any which way." Back then, Cheryl had decided to try to echo the patchwork lines and make her quilting barely noticeable, but now she felt like making crazy lines. Angry lines. She didn't stop until the square was full of them.

She flipped the lever to raise the presser foot, pulled the square out from under the sewing machine, and snipped the threads that ran from the bobbin and the needle to the square. It was Mom's last gift to her, and all it was was a slightly squishy square of blue and purple, with white on the back from the batting. Not much of a quilt, yet.

Mom had told her about how most people waited until the whole quilt was all pieced together before sewing batting to anything, but that she liked to quilt each of the squares separately because they fit better on the machine that way. You were supposed to sew the squares together afterwards, but with only one square, there wasn't anything to sew it to, was there?

Steve still hadn't come in. There wasn't going to be any school, with two thirds of the teachers dead and the rest dying. The purple and blue fabrics were still sitting on the sewing table, right where Mom had left them two weeks prior. Her bag of patchwork templates was right next to them. There was nothing better to do, was there? 

Cheryl opened the bag and took out the biggest square she could find. It had "4 patch, 12 inch square" written on it in Mom's neat round handwriting. A four-patch square ought to be nice and simple. Cheryl ought to be able to figure it out without Mom's help. She'd never have Mom's help again. But she was eleven, and that was more than halfway to being an adult, so she'd just have to try to act like one. She rubbed her fists really hard in the corners of her eyes until she didn't feel quite so much like crying, and then she cut out two purple squares and two blue squares. She sewed them together so that they made one big square, and then she cut a square the same size off of Mom's big roll of batting in the corner, and then she quilted the square onto the batting with jagged lines that went every which way, and she pretended very very hard that Mom was helping her with this square just like she had on the other square, and that she had just stepped out of the room for a minute to check on whatever she was cooking for dinner. Probably some delicious homemade chicken soup.

Cheryl didn't know how to cook chicken soup. And besides, there wasn't any chicken in the fridge or the freezer. But when she pulled the square out from under the presser foot and snipped the threads, the clock said it was after six, so she went and opened a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and heated it up on the stove.

Steve came in before she had quite finished eating, so she gave him the leftovers. She didn't ask where he'd been. He didn't ask what she'd done. They didn't talk about Mom and Dad. They didn't talk about much of anything, really. When all the soup was gone, Steve cleared the table and washed the dishes without being asked. Then they both went to bed. There was nothing else to do, was there?

Chapter Text

Cheryl supposed there were other squares she could make than just squares of squares—the bag had a lot of triangles in it, and even some complicated curved shapes—but she didn't want complicated. Steve was out again, and she hadn't asked where he was going this time either. He'd made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for both of them before he'd left. She didn't feel like going out. She didn't feel like eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, either, but there weren't many other options, so she ate the sandwich, and then she went into Mom and Dad's office and picked up the nine-patch template.

She was getting tired of blue and purple. She dug through one of the bins until she found some black fabric. Black was for mourning, wasn't it? But she couldn't very well just sew black fabric to black fabric or the patchwork pattern wouldn't be visible.

She sat on Dad's desk and stared at the fabric bin for a while. Finally, she decided that she'd put the black fabric together with the blue calico that she'd been using, because blue was Mom's favorite color.

She ought to have something in there for Dad, too, but she didn't know what Dad's favorite color was. He'd never mentioned having a favorite color, and she'd never thought to ask. If only she'd thought of it a few days sooner, she could have asked him, but now she'd never know. Well, the black would just have to stand in for him.

She traced the template square five times on the black fabric and four times on the blue. When she was almost done cutting them out, the overhead light went out with a pop. Cheryl sighed. Hadn't she already had enough to deal with? She didn't know how to change the bulb, so she went over to the window and tugged the curtains to the sides until they stayed mostly open, and enough light shone in that she could see just as well as she had before. She cut out the last squares, pinned them together, and took them to the sewing machine.

She pressed the foot pedal down, the same way she always did, but the needle didn't move. Cheryl flipped the presser foot up, readjusted everything, flipped it back down, and tried again. Still nothing. She checked all the connections between the sewing machine and the foot pedal and the wall outlet, and tried one more time. Nothing. The little light on the sewing machine was out too.

Realization began to sink in. Cheryl went into the kitchen and flipped the light switch on and off, and then flipped the switch on and off in the front room. Then she went back to the sewing machine and sat down and stared at it for a very long time. It had been Mom's very favorite thing for a long time, and now it was useless. Mom had done so much work with it. Just like how a lot of workers had probably done a lot of work on the power station, and now...it was probably useless too.

She was still sitting there when Steve came in. She heard him flipping the light switches on his way through the house, as if he didn't already know. "Did you—" he started, sticking his head in the door of the office.

She shook her head. Whatever he wanted, she hadn't done it or she didn't want to do it. She didn't care much, which.

"The stove's electric," he said. "But it's not as if it would be much better if it were gas, 'cause that's probably gone too."

"I don't care," she said.

Steve walked further into the room, until he was standing next to her. He leaned down and hugged her, even though last month he'd said he was too big for hugs and that hugs were for babies and sissies. "I'm sorry," he said. "Is the sewing machine electric?"

She nodded.

"Maybe you can sew stuff by hand," he said. "Mom had sewing needles around here somewhere, didn't she?"

If they could have asked Mom where she kept things, Cheryl would have. But since she couldn't, she crossed her arms and glared at the sewing machine and didn't say anything. Eventually, Steve went away. She heard him banging cabinet doors and pans in the kitchen, as if he was going to cook dinner even though there wasn't any point, because there wasn't anything to cook.

All the adults were dead. All the farmers and all the cooks and all the electricians and all the governors and all the doctors and all the teachers and all the parents—

Steve made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. They didn't taste any better than they had that morning, but Steve sat next to Cheryl and waited until she had eaten every last bite. Then he opened all of the boxes and bins on the sewing table one by one until he found a packet of needles. He pushed them into Cheryl's hand. "I'm going to bed," he said. "Good night."

It was early for bed, but the sun had nearly set, and the moon wasn't out yet. Cheryl couldn't have seen to thread a needle even if she'd wanted to, so she followed Steve's example and went to bed.

Cheryl had wanted to just leave those needles in the office and never go in there again, but it got so terribly boring just sitting around the house all day with nothing to do. She'd never thought before that she could miss school, but now she'd give anything to be there, sitting in Miss Johnston's math class.

By noon, she gave in. She shoved the door of the office open with a bang—if Dad had been here, he would have yelled "Not in the house" or "Don't go in the office without permission" or both, but he wasn't, so nobody said anything. She took a needle out of the packet, and she cut an arm's length of thread off of a spool, and she set to work trying to put the thread through the eye of the needle.

It was harder than it looked, and she'd already thought it looked pretty hard. Every time she got the end of the thread anywhere near that tiny metal hole in the tiny metal needle, it bounced off in one direction or another but never in the direction that led through the hole. Maybe the end of the thread wasn't cut right. She picked up the big sewing shears and cut the thread at an angle, so that it would be skinnier and pointier, but her hands still shook too much. If she'd been sewing on the machine, she'd probably have the block half finished by now.

Finally, she flung both thread and needle down in disgust and went back to the bin that Steve had found the needles in, to see if she could find any bigger needles, or at least one that had a bigger eye or something.

She didn't find any other needles, but she found something even better: a needle threader. It was just a little piece of wire with a plastic handle no bigger than her thumb, and she wouldn't have even had any idea what it was except that Mom had never taken it out of the packaging, so it still had a label saying what it was. It took her a few tries to figure out how to get it to do any good, but eventually she figured out that she needed to push it through the needle before she put the thread through it, and then pull it out afterwards.

With her needle successfully threaded, she sat down in the chair in front of the sewing machine and picked up her pinned fabric. She supposed she didn't need to stay in here—she could sit anywhere she wanted, now that she didn't need to be close to an electrical outlet—but it just felt right. She stabbed the needle through the fabric, up and down and up and down. Her stitches didn't look nearly as neat as the stitches from the machine, and it was hard to figure out how far to put the stitches from the edge of the fabric, without that handy 1/4" marking on the machine. But she kept going. It was either sit here and sew, or sit out in the front room on the couch and cry. Up and down and up and down.

The short straight lines that she could have sewn in seconds on the machine took minutes as she stitched away by hand. She only poked herself three times with the needle, though it would have been more if she hadn't remembered that she'd seen a thimble in the bin with the needles. Once she had the thimble on her finger, nothing could get through it to hurt her. (She needed a thimble for her life right now, but she was pretty sure they didn't make those.) By the time she had finished sewing the nine pieces of fabric together into one big piece, the sun was low in the sky and Steve was banging around in the kitchen. She wondered what Campbell's cream of mushroom soup tasted like cold. She wondered if she was about to find out.

(Steve made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, instead. Cheryl was starting to wonder if he knew how to make anything else.)

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Every day, Cheryl sat in the office and sewed, while Steve went out and didn't come back until it was nearly dark. Cheryl didn't ask him where he had gone, and he never volunteered any information.

Quilting a patchwork block by hand was a lot more work than sewing it together had been, and Cheryl found herself more and more grateful for the weighty metal thimble. She spent days using it to push the needle up and down, back and forth through the fabric-and-batting sandwich in little tiny stitches. When she'd quilted a square on the machine, she'd sewn big angry lines on it, but making straight lines was a lot harder working by hand, and a lot more boring. She made wiggly lines and curlicues and circles and any pattern she felt like, as she sat in the house alone with her thoughts.

It was so quiet here, now that there were no more cars or planes or refrigerators or ceiling fans. There was no more laughter or conversation or neighbors playing basketball, either. Wherever the other children like her and Steve were, they were hiding away inside too. Steve might know more. She didn't want to ask him, because learning more about this new, frightening world that they lived in meant further admitting that her old life was lost forever.

When she had quilted every last bit of the square, and then quilted in between that quilting so that the lines were even closer together, so that she finally couldn't make her nine-patch square of mourning last any longer, she went over to the bookcase and found a book of patchwork patterns.

She took the second-to-last apple from the kitchen, sat down on the front room couch, and did her best to read the book from cover to cover. All the words were easy enough to read (Cheryl had been in her class's top reading group in every single grade, so she would have been surprised if they weren't), but she didn't know what all the terminology meant. Some of the patterns seemed really complicated, with lots of different-shaped pieces, and she wondered if she'd ever be able to make them. But Mom wouldn't have been satisfied just sewing squares together for the rest of her life, and Cheryl supposed she'd better not be, either. She flipped back through the book to look for something simpler.

Some of the patterns reminded her of a nine-patch: there were nine squares that made up the pattern, but the squares were just made up of smaller pieces sewn together to make a more elaborate pattern. The "Churn Dash" pattern was one of those. Some of the squares were two triangles put together, and some of them were two rectangles put together. Kind of like a sandwich cut diagonally (the way Steve insisting on doing it) and a sandwich cut into two symmetrical halves (the only way a really self-respecting person would cut their sandwich). And one of the squares was even all one piece, the same as the squares in her nine patch blocks. Maybe it wouldn't be that hard.

It was a lot harder than it looked. There were so many more plastic templates to track down in Mom's bag than when she'd just had to use the same square for everything, and then she accidentally sewed the wrong sides of two of the triangles together and had to start over. She had barely gotten all of the smaller pieces sewn together into their nine separate squares by the time Steve got home, so she took her sewing to the dinner table.

They had run out of bread yesterday, so they ate cold Campbell's tomato soup and saltine crackers. There were only half a dozen cans of soup left, and a few half full boxes of cereal and crackers and such in the pantry. Mom had always prided herself on keeping a well-stocked pantry, but she hadn't been home to do any shopping during those last few awful weeks. Cheryl didn't know what they would do when the food ran out, and there weren't any adults around to ask. She supposed Steve was the closest thing there was to an adult anymore, so when they were done eating, she asked him. "Have you seen how empty the pantry is?"

Steve swept the saltine crumbs carefully off the table into his hand, and poured them all carefully into his mouth. "Yeah, I'm sorry I haven't done anything about that. I've got a few ideas, though."

"What kind of ideas?" Cheryl asked. She felt almost hopeful for the first time in days. If her big brother had ideas about how to fix their food situation, then maybe she wouldn't have to worry about it herself!

"Well, there's this—well, they're calling themselves a gang, but I don't think they're actually that bad. It's not like they're going around hurting people like a bad sort of gang, they're just banding together for protection and doing what they have to to get food. And if I join their gang, then they'll give me and you food."

"Where do they get the food?" Cheryl asked skeptically.

"Oh, I don't know. I think they break into deserted houses where everybody who lived in them has died."

"And you promise they aren't stealing it from anybody who's alive? They're just taking things that aren't owned by anybody anymore?"

"Look, I don't know! Do you want food or not? This is our only chance, Cheryl. I'm just trying to take care of you because there's nobody else to do it."

Cheryl blinked back tears. "I know you are, and I appreciate it, but I don't want you or anybody else to get hurt."

Steve slammed his chair back from the table. "I'm not going to get hurt, and you aren't, either. I promise." He stomped down the hallway and called back to her. "Don't you see, joining the Chidester Gang is how I'm going to do that. We're going to be okay."

"Just...wait a few more days? Please?" Cheryl called after him.

Steve didn't come out of his room all evening. Cheryl sewed the squares together until it was too dark to see, and then she went to bed. But before she could sleep, she got back up and went around the house to check that all the doors and windows were locked, now that she knew there were gangs roving around.

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As the days went on, Steve became more and more insistent on joining the Chidester Gang, and Cheryl became less and less certain that there was any way to avoid it. The pantry was nearly empty; only two cans of green beans, some moldy cheese, and Mom's collection of spices remained. What else could they do?

And then their problems were forestalled, in the most unexpected way. Their next-door neighbor Lisa Nelson came to visit. She had access to food, and she would give it to them: not for joining a gang, but for forming a militia to protect their neighborhood from gangs! Cheryl felt hopeful for the first time in weeks. Steve was more pessimistic, but once they went to Lisa's meeting and listened to all of her plans, even he had to admit that it sounded promising.

The only problem was, Lisa kept all of the children so busy building defenses and training on what to do in an emergency, that there was very little time for sewing. It was several days later, when their house finally had a fully-fashioned rock slide trap and a stockpile of Molotov cocktails, that Cheryl decided that it was okay to spend one morning sewing instead of working on the house's defenses.

She flipped through Mom's patchwork pattern book until she found a block that was shaped like a star. The sun had come out again for the children of Grand Avenue, and Cheryl wanted to celebrate the best way she knew how.

The "Lone Star" pattern was all squares and triangles, just like all the other blocks she'd sewn before, but there were more pieces and some of them were smaller than anything she'd worked with before. But if Lisa Nelson could figure out how to protect a neighborhood and find food, even though she was only ten, then Cheryl Cole ought to be able to sew a quilt block she'd never made before, and if she couldn't figure it out right away, then she would just keep trying. That was what Lisa was doing, wasn't it? She wasn't going to give up, no matter what happened.

Cheryl cut out her pieces, of red and orange and yellow-orange and yellow, blazing like a sun, and she set to work.

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It was just as well that the sunny Lone Star was all pieced together and quilted by the end of that week, or Cheryl wasn't sure she would have had the heart to finish it.  She finished it on the day after the Chidester Gang first attacked Grandville, when Tom Logan was hit by a stone from one of the rock traps and the militia ran out to protect the neighborhood. That night, Logan's gang had looked terribly big and frightening, but then Logan had led them all away, holding his head, and Cheryl had reminded herself that Lisa was a good leader and had planned this all out. By the morning, she had her courage back, and she took the quilt block with her on their holiday at the lake. She quilted the last few patterns on the quilt block as she sat next to their glowing campfire and sang. Cheryl thought about how the warm, sparking fire matched her quilt block, and the thought made her smile.

That night, the Chidester Gang burned down the Nelsons' house. The burning, smoking fire blazed high into the night sky, red and orange and yellow-orange and yellow. Steve made Cheryl go out in the backyard until it had burned down to embers, just in case their house caught too.

Once the fire was out, and Lisa and Todd had found somewhere to stay, and Steve had decided that it was safe to go back in the house, Cheryl went back to bed—but she couldn't sleep. She thought of her quilt, and of Mom's sewing machine and the bookcase piled full of fabric, and she pictured flames filling the office. Even when she did finally drift off, her dreams were full of red and orange and yellow-orange and yellow flames, burning higher and higher until all of Grandville was destroyed.

The next day, Lisa didn't tell anybody to do anything. Nobody seemed inclined to give the militia any orders, so Cheryl went to the office. All of the fabric from her last block was still sitting on top of the pile, and it was so bright and so full of fire colors that for a moment Cheryl feared that the room had caught fire, just like she had imagined last night. But she blinked back the tears and blinked a few more times for good measure, until the room just looked like an ordinary craft room with ordinary fabric in it. Then she looked through the patchwork book for a block that looked like fire. She would never get anywhere in this new world if she didn't confront her fears.

There weren't any blocks that were directly inspired by fire, and there weren't any blocks that looked very much like fire, so Cheryl finally picked a block made out of two big triangles and four littler triangles. It was supposed to look like triangle geese flying through a triangle sky, but Cheryl thought that if she made it out of orange and yellow, it would look rather like triangle campfires burning beneath a sunny triangle sky.

There were only five seams in the whole block, so it came together faster than anything else Cheryl had made since she'd first had to sew by hand. She pinned it to a square of batting, and took it over to Jill's.

Lisa was sitting on Jill's couch. She didn't move, she didn't speak, she just stared at the wall. Cheryl wasn't sure what to say, so she just said "I'm sorry about your house" and then sat down in the big easy chair next to the couch. Lisa didn't say anything in response, so Cheryl didn't say anything more. She just sat there and quilted the fire block in long, straight, angry lines like the ones she had made on the sewing machine so long ago.

Cheryl could stitch much faster now than when she was first learning, but it was still a slow process. She sat in that chair for hours, and not once did Lisa move or speak to her. Finally, Cheryl fastened off her last stitch and stood up. She thought about several things she could say, but finally she just said "Goodbye, Lisa," and walked back to her house.

When she got back to the house, she went into her bedroom and took all the finished quilt squares from where she had been keeping them in a neat little stack. She sewed them all together in a long row, and then folded them back up so they were not much bigger than the pile they were before. But now they were all in one piece, so she could grab them quickly and not miss anything. Then she put Mom's sewing machine inside a black trash bag and hid it under a bush in the backyard.

She still couldn't stop thinking about fire that night, as she was trying to fall asleep, but this time she was thinking about what she would do when it happened, not just cowering in fear from the idea that it might.

Chapter Text

The militia leaders finally started doing drills again after that, and then Lisa got a wild hair about some new project or something, and once again, there was little time to sew. The militia captains did their best to reinforce the neighborhood defenses at first, but then they were busy with Lisa's secret project and needed the younger children to stand sentry duty. It was the first time Cheryl had had to stand guard at night. It was too dark to do any sewing, so she just stood by a tree and rubbed her eyes and stomped her feet up and down, trying to keep herself warm and awake. She only ended up having to be sentry once at night and a few times during the day, but in between there were improvements to the defenses and all the other things that needed to be done that the captains weren't doing.

The captains' project was supposed to be absolutely top secret, but one morning when Steve was just coming in from being out all night and Cheryl was just about to get up for the day, he knocked on her bedroom door and stuck his head in. "I can't tell you anything about what's going on," he said, "but you might want to start thinking about what you would want to pack, if you had to leave in a hurry."

"Is there going to be another fire?" Cheryl asked, eyes on the fiery quilt block on the top of the pile next to her bed.

Steve shook his head. "No, this is something good. But you'll have to travel light. We might be able to come back for more later. But for now, only what you can carry, maybe what you can carry in two trips at most. You won't be able to take the sewing machine. What did you do with it, by the way?"

"I hid it so we wouldn't lose it if the house burns down," Cheryl said. 

She almost wanted him to laugh at her, to say Don't be silly, this house will be here forever. But he just nodded and said "That makes sense. Don't do any packing until you get word, so you don't give away that I told you. It's supposed to be top secret."

Cheryl grinned. "It will be our secret." She walked over to the door and gave him a hug. "I'm glad you're my big brother."

"I'm glad you're my little sister," he said. "I can't wait for you to find out what Lisa's got in store. You're going to love it."

The word came two nights after that. Cheryl had suspected that something was in store, because Steve encouraged her to go to bed early that night. Sure enough, sometime later, when it was pitch black outside, Steve shook her awake. "Lisa's got a new home for us to move to, and we're doing it tonight. We don't want anyone to know what we've done, so make as little noise as you can, but pack everything you can carry and bring it to the front of Jill's house." He hurried away, probably to pack his own things.

Cheryl had spent sentry duty the day before thinking about her plans, and the previous evening "reorganizing" (and pre-packing) the bookcase of fabric. She went quickly to the sewing room, put the roll of batting and her chosen pile of fabric into a double-bagged garbage bag, and put the bin of needles and thread and other sewing supplies on top. The bag of plastic quilt templates and the patchwork book went last, with a couple other sewing books. All she needed was the quilt-in-progress, and she would be all set.

It was when she went into her room to get the quilt that she realized she'd forgotten something important. Clothes! She ran to get another garbage bag. She tumbled most of the contents of her closet and dresser into the bag. What else did she need? She grabbed hairbrush and toothbrush and barrettes and headbands from the bathroom. How could she have forgotten all this, and after Steve had warned her, too?

He'd also said they could probably come back and get more things later. So it wouldn't be too bad if she forgot something now. With that in mind, she twisted both bags shut and lugged them one by one out to the front room. She glanced around, to see if there was anything she'd forgotten. The mantelpiece was empty; Steve must have packed all the photos. The old Cole family Bible, where their births and Dad's family's births and his father's family's births were all recorded, was gone, too. Steve had obviously put more thought into this than she had, so she'd just have to trust him. She set out to drag her two bags all the way down to Jill's house.

Lisa's new home for them turned out to be Glenbard High School, high on the hill above the lake, walled and defensible. Lisa announced the rules: they would work together to fortify the school in silence and secrecy, and only then would they make their presence known to the outside world. There would be classes and chores, and later in the day everyone would work on their assigned roles. Everyone who was assigned a role, at least. Jill was going to be in charge of the hospital, and Craig was going to be in charge of the school, and Charlie was going to be in charge of the militia, and a lot of the younger children were assigned to be people's helpers, but Lisa didn't have any job in particular for Cheryl to do.

For a while, of course, there was plenty of work to go around, and Cheryl didn't feel jealous of the people with assigned roles because all they had was extra work on top of all the other work. But eventually things calmed down, and Cheryl found herself with little to do once classes and chores were over. She thought about spending the time sewing, and then she thought about spending the time exploring, and then she realized that she could do both. She cut out squares and triangles for a new quilt block, and put them into her pocket with a threaded needle and Mom's tiny embroidery scissors. Then she wandered around their city for a while. Eventually, she found a home economics classroom full of sewing machines. None of them would do her any good without electricity, of course, but the room held many other treasures: pins and needles and thimbles and thread, and a few bolts of fabric, and half-finished sewing projects in the cubbies of now-dead students.

She sat down at the teacher's desk, and laid out her fabric pieces. She was making another star, like the one she had made when Lisa first brought hope to the neighborhood. She'd brought them even more hope now, so it seemed like the right choice. And it would be nice to try making the same pattern again to see if she could make it faster and with neater seams than she had last time. It had been so long since she'd made that block that she felt like she ought to be a better seamstress by now; but she'd had so little time to sew for so long that she almost wondered if she would have gotten worse at sewing instead of better.

She was making the block out of only two colors this time: the same yellow she'd used for that first sunny star, and the same purple calico she'd used for her very first quilt blocks months ago. A little piece of her old home to remember it by. The patchwork book said that technically the star pattern had a different name—Ohio Star instead of Lone Star—when you only made it with two colors. Cheryl wondered why that made a difference as she stitched the little pieces together into bigger ones, and then stitched the big pieces together into one big star. The yellow shone just as bright as it had on the other block, and her corners were all just a tiny bit better lined up than they had been on the other one. Cheryl hoped that the teacher who once sat in this seat would have been proud of her.

Chapter Text

The next day, Cheryl lugged her bag of sewing supplies down to the home ec room after she was done with her chores. There was nowhere particularly good to sit and sew in the classroom-turned-apartment that she shared with Steve, so she figured this was as good a place as any. She planned to organize places for it all in the cabinets along the back of the room, and then to look through the patchwork book and pick out a new pattern to make. But she was barely half finished putting everything in the cabinets when Jill showed up at the door of the classroom with her youngest sister Missy, who was crying.

"You know how to sew, right?" Jill asked, as if Cheryl wasn't standing in the middle of a sewing room while holding sewing supplies.

Cheryl nodded.

"Missy fell and tore her dress," Jill said. "Can you fix it?"

"Sure," Cheryl said, even though she'd never sewn anything except patchwork before. How hard could it be? She had Missy sit down on one of the tabletops and took a look at the tear.

"She scraped her knee, too," Jill said, "but I bandaged it all up. That's the part I know how to do, but I've never had to sew."

"You might need to down the line," Cheryl said, "if you have to give anyone stitches. I can teach you, if you like."

Jill looked thoughtful. "I should probably do that. I'll take you up on that, once we aren't hiding and things aren't so busy."

Cheryl was lucky: the tear in Missy's dress was just a straight line. She had done straight seams a hundred times on her patchwork blocks. She wouldn't even have to ask Missy to take the dress off. She found thread that matched the color of the dress as close as she could, threaded a needle, and set to work. She folded the fabric at the tear, right sides together, and neatly stitched a straight line a quarter of an inch away from the edge, just like she did on her patchwork. It only took a minute, then she knotted the thread at the end of the stitching, snipped it with Mom's embroidery scissors, and patted Missy on the shoulder. "You're all done!" she said. "Why don't you show us how it looks?"

Missy jumped off of the table and twirled around once, so that her skirt flared out. Jill smiled. "It looks as good as new!" she said. "Don't you think so, Missy?"

Missy nodded. "Thank you, Cheryl."

"You're welcome," Cheryl replied, as Jill led Missy out of the classroom. They were wrong; it wasn't as good as new. She'd made her stitches neatly, but the fabric was all puckered around the mended bit. It didn't show very much on Missy's wide gathered skirt, but Cheryl knew she could do better.

She sat down to ponder. If she stitched a quarter inch in from the edge, then both sides of the tear lost a quarter inch of fabric. So that part of the skirt was a half inch narrower than the parts that weren't mended. So if she made a narrower seam, maybe it would pucker less.

It wasn't long before she had the opportunity to test her theory. Craig Bergman showed up at her door later the same day. "I heard you can fix this," he said, showing her the elbow of his baggy sweatshirt. "I caught it on a hinge when we were taking the bathroom doors down."

Cheryl nodded. This tear was more complicated than Missy's; it bent in the middle, like a V shape. But both sides were almost straight lines...and Cheryl could do straight lines. She had Craig take off the sweatshirt, and then she pulled out her pins. She thought it would be best to treat this like two separate tears. She wouldn't sew two patchwork seams at the same time, and it didn't seem like a good idea to do both sides of this at the same time either. "This might take me a little bit," she told Craig. "You can go back to work and come back in a half hour if you want."

"I will," he said. "Thanks a lot, Cheryl."

Cheryl waited until he was gone, then muttered "Don't thank me yet." There were still a lot of ways this could go wrong. She pinned the one side of the tear, then sewed a neat seam as close to the edge as she thought was safe if the fabric unraveled a bit, as it had a tendency to do. She didn't think the seam looked strong enough for the elbows of someone as active as Craig was; he'd likely pop the stitches the first time he hefted one of those metal doors that he was always carrying around the school, getting ready to weld them onto the windows. So she stitched back in the opposite direction, and then back a third time for good measure. Then she did the same thing on the other side.

By the time Craig came back, she had the sweatshirt neatly folded and was sitting at the teacher's desk with her feet propped up on the desk, paging through the patchwork book. She grinned at him. "Good as new, I hope," she said.

Craig picked up the sweatshirt and looked at the elbow. "Looks great, thanks," he said. "So you're here all the time, right? If anyone needs mending, do they come here or will they need to come find you?"

"Um, here is fine," Cheryl said. "I'm pretty much here whenever I'm not in class or doing chores."

"Great," Craig said. "I'll let people know."

Cheryl watched him go. Does this mean she had an official assignment now? Well, not official, perhaps, since Lisa hadn't given it to her, but still, she had a job. She went to the cabinet and pulled out a bolt of heavy burlap that had been left in the classroom. It was tough enough that she didn't want to use Mom's nice sewing scissors on it, but fortunately the teacher had also left behind some scissors in the desk drawer. Lisa cut a foot of fabric off of the bolt, and with a marker she had also found, she wrote CHERYL'S MENDING in big block letters across the fabric. She dragged a chair over to the doorway, and pinned the sign up above the entrance. The pins didn't go into the wood nearly as easily as they went through fabric; she pressed on them until her fingers hurt, but they barely moved half an inch and still stuck out most of their length. Oh well, it would hold for now, and maybe she could get one of the people tasked with construction to help her later. If it would just hold until Glenbard was revealed, then they wouldn't have to be so quiet, and they could use hammer and nails to fasten it up properly.

She put the burlap away and looked through all of her sewing books until she found one that mentioned mending in the index. Time to learn how to do this properly.

After reading for hours, she learned that she was on the right track, but that the stitches might last longer if she did something called whip stitching over the edges of the tear after she sewed it shut. She'd have to get Craig's sweatshirt back from him and add whip stitching at some point.

But for the time being, Craig must have been happy enough with her mending work, because two more people showed up at her door that day, saying that Craig had sent them. By the next day, she had at least one person every hour, and once there was even a line of three people waiting.

Shortly after the last of those three had left, Lisa Nelson walked in. Cheryl tried not to act too startled. Had Lisa, who always seemed so in charge and on top of things, torn her clothes? She looked as put together as she always did; Cheryl couldn't see any sign of damage. A worse idea occurred to her. Maybe Lisa didn't like that Cheryl had assigned a job to herself without asking permission, and was going to make her stop mending and leave the home ec room. The thought was almost enough to make Cheryl cry, even though Lisa still hadn't spoken.

Lisa walked slowly around the room, looking at the cabinets (still only half organized), the sewing books, the two mending projects Cheryl hadn't finished yet, and Cheryl's partial quilt. "Jill and Craig tell me you sew," she said.

Cheryl nodded. "Is that...okay?" she whispered.

"Of course it's okay! We're all going to have to learn lots of skills to make up for all the adults being gone, and sewing is an important one. I don't know if there's anybody else here who knows how to sew, yet. That's why I came to you."

"Do you need something mended?" Cheryl asked her.

"No, I need a flag."

Cheryl's eyes widened. She'd never made a flag before.

"My captains and I were discussing different ways to announce to the city that Glenbard is here, and we finally decided on a flag. None of us knows how to make one, so we thought it would be better if you made it. You can be like Betsy Ross!"

"Did you have a design in mind, or do you just want me to come up with something?" Cheryl asked.

"I want something bright. Something that will signal that while it may be the Dark Ages out there, in here, behind the walls of Glenbard, the sun is rising and things are getting better. Like that." She pointed at one of the squares of Cheryl's quilt.

It was the fiery Flying Geese block, that Cheryl had sewn after the Nelson's house burned down. Cheryl didn't remind Lisa where she had seen it before; she didn't think the reminder would be appreciated and she didn't want to think about it herself. "Do you want that design or just those colors?" she asked.

"Either, I guess," Lisa said. "Can you make it bigger though? And maybe make it a rectangle; I think flags are supposed to be rectangles, not squares. Well, squares are rectangles, I guess, but can you make it wider than it is tall?"

"I'll see what I can do," Cheryl said.

"I don't know how much time it takes to make something like this," Lisa said. "We only have a couple days left before January sixteenth. I'd like you to prioritize this over your mending duties, and you're released from chores but not classes until it's finished. Will that give you enough time?"

Cheryl nodded. "I'll get started on it right away." She didn't even watch Lisa leave; she was too busy pulling orange and yellow fabric out of the cabinet where she had stowed all of Mom's fabric.

She made the block the same as the one in her quilt, and then added one more rectangle. From the name of the block, that made it one more goose flying in the sky. From her choices of colors for the block, that made it one more campfire in a sunny sky. But for this new version of the block, she thought of it as one more arrow, pointing forward into a brighter future.

When she was finished, she didn't think it was big enough, so she looked in her book and found instructions for how to put a border around the block. She used the orange fabric, since there was plenty of that. She thought that there was even enough to make another flag the same as this one if this one ever wore out.

Chapter Text

After Glenbard was revealed, things only got busier and busier. More and more people came to Glenbard and were given permission to live in the city. Some of them already had torn clothes that needed mending, and nearly every day someone found a way to scrape up themselves and their clothes while doing chores or sentry duty (or even, for a select clumsy few, while they were just supposed to be sitting in class). Jill and her little sisters patched up the injuries, but the job of fixing the clothes fell on Cheryl's shoulders.

She was sewing a Flock of Geese block for her quilt now, in white with triangle geese made out of purple calico. Though could she really say she was working on it, when she'd scarcely sewn a dozen stitches on it in the entire last week? Before, she at least used to be able to get one seam done in the few minutes between when everyone was dismissed for the evening and lights out. But these days, she was so tired that she didn't even bother with a light, and she fell asleep almost the instant she sat down on her bed.

Clothes were starting to wear out, too. Mending, Cheryl could do; but she didn't have very much material that was suitable for patches. Some of the clothes were so bad that if she tried to patch them, she'd probably just end up sewing patches right next to each other until she had an entire new garment sewn out of the patch fabric. 

She told Steve about it, one morning when they were both getting ready for the day at the same time. "I don't know much about where we're getting supplies from," she said, "but do you think any of the places might have clothes? Or at least fabric."

"A department store might have what you want," Steve said. "They're sure to all be ransacked by now, but most kids have been worried about more immediate needs. They might have left the clothes departments alone. You should talk to Lisa."

And so, that evening right as lights out was being announced, Cheryl ascended to Lisa's tower chamber and explained her concerns.

"We've made a few trips to both Sears and Wards," Lisa said, "but we never thought to get clothes. I suppose people will probably be growing out of clothes soon too, if they haven't already and I just haven't heard about it."

"So you'll send somebody out to get clothes?" Cheryl asked.

"Better than that," Lisa said. "I'm sending you."

Cheryl hadn't set foot outside Glenbard since they'd moved here, and she was as scared of gangs as anybody. "But I've never—"

"Don't worry, I'll send Steve too, and he can be in charge," Lisa said. "He's led plenty of raiding parties, so he knows what to do. But you'll be the one that tells him what to take."

In the meager midnight moonlight, Montgomery Wards looked much more foreboding than it had when Mom used to take Cheryl and Steve there for new clothes, every year before school started. Almost every window was broken, and the floor inside was strewn with overturned racks and abandoned merchandise.

"Start in the children's section," Cheryl announced. She pointed. "It's over there. Don't worry too much about baby stuff, but take everything else. No matter what size it is, we'll probably have someone it fits. Once you've got those, half of you go to the men's section and half to the women's. They might not fit anybody now, but I can cut some of them down to size, and people will start growing into them pretty soon. Steve will tell you who goes where. When he says it's time to go, then we're done, so get as much as you can before then." She turned and headed for the back of the store.

Behind her, she heard Steve giving orders. "Okay, let's go. Rosa and Carrie keep watch at the doors, and everybody else head for the kids' section. As soon as you've got that section mostly cleared, I want Timmy to come tell me. Then I'll tell you all what to do next." There was the sound of quite a lot of people trying to move very quickly but very quietly, as they all dispersed to their assignments. Cheryl didn't think that quite all of them sounded like they were headed for the children's section or the doors, so she wasn't surprised when Steve came up behind her. "Don't you want to get clothes too?" he asked.

"I've got something better in mind," Cheryl said. She pointed ahead of her. The section was barely visible in the darkness, but he ought to know what it was as well as she. Both of them had had to wait here too long in boredom on previous shopping trips, because Mom always had to spend an hour in the fabric department, browsing [leisurely] through the bolts of fabric and picking out a choice few to take to the fabric counter. Mom would sure be jealous of them now, Cheryl thought, as she grabbed the first five bolts off the closest rack. She couldn't see what color they were, but they felt soft. Hopefully they were nice. "Do you want to help with this, or do you need to oversee the children's section?"

She couldn't see her brother grin, but she could hear it. "Bet I can carry more things of fabric at one time than you can!" he said, and grabbed an armful off the rack.

The next morning, Lisa found herself the owner of rather more lime green silk than she'd ever felt a need to have, but there was also bolt after bolt of calico that she knew she could use in her quilt. And there were heavier-weight fabrics, that eventually she hoped to learn how to sew into pants. There was even another roll of batting—not that the one she'd brought from their house showed signs of running out any time soon. And of course, there were piles and piles of clothing, enough to clothe everyone in Glenbard several times over.

Now maybe the need for mending would lessen enough that she could finally finish her "Flock of Geese" block.

Chapter Text

Life went on much the same in Glenbard for months and months after that. Sometimes Cheryl was swamped for weeks straight with piles of mending, and sometimes she actually had time to work on her quilt. She still tried to fix every piece of clothing that was fixable, but she was glad now to have the option to tell people "No, this is just too far gone. I'll take this to salvage what material I can from it, and you can go see Rosa in the clothing room for a new jacket. Tell her I sent you."

One day, when she set down her quilting after a few snatched moments, ready to help whoever had just walked into the home ec room, she realized that it was her brother. "Steve! Have you finally managed to tear your clothes?" she teased. "You didn't hurt yourself, did you?"

"No, I'm fine, and my clothes are fine too," Steve said with a smile. "Do you know what day it is?"

Cheryl shook her head. "I haven't seen a calendar in weeks. I've lost all track of time."

"It's September 24th," Steve said. "Happy birthday, little sister!"

"Oh, thanks!" Cheryl said, laughing. "I hadn't even realized."

"I got permission to go along on last night's supply run and pick up an extra treat for you," Steve said. He held out a couple of candy bars with a frayed ribbon tied around them. "I wish I could have gotten you a birthday cake, but at least it's something."

"They're wonderful, thank you," Cheryl said, giving him a hug. "I haven't had a candy bar in ages." Tears came to her eyes suddenly, and she blinked them back, head pressed against Steve's shoulder so he wouldn't see. She'd almost forgotten what candy bars tasted like. What about that pecan praline ice cream she'd had so many years ago? What had that tasted like? It was salty, but sweet, and smooth, and cold—she couldn't remember any more than that.

"I'm glad you like them," Steve said. "Now remember, don't eat them too fast!"

"Thanks for the advice, big brother," Cheryl said. "I never would have thought of that if you hadn't told me." She stuck her tongue out at him.

"I'd better get back to work," he said, "and let you get back to work too. Though it looks like you're actually caught up on mending for once?"

"Just barely," Cheryl said. "So you'd better not fall down and tear anything, because you wouldn't want to be personally responsible for ruining my birthday afternoon." She tore open a Snickers as he left.

Nobody came in for a while after Steve, so Cheryl had time to look through her patchwork book. She wanted to find something for birthdays or cake or candy, although she didn't recall seeing any blocks that looked at all like that. Finally, she settled on a maple leaf. Cheryl had never seen a maple tree, but she'd heard that that was where maple syrup came from, and it was certainly a sweet treat. It would just have to stand in for the sweet candy that Steve had actually gotten for her.

She took tiny nibbles of the deliciously sweet and salty caramel and peanut and chocolate bar as she studied the block she had chosen. Most of it was just squares and triangles adding up to a nine-patch block—oh so familiar by now—but one of the squares was made out of three pieces, to form the leaf's stem. Cheryl didn't pause for an instant. She'd learned to sew, and she'd learned to mend, and she'd learned to live in a society without any adults. A girl who could do all of those things ought to be able to figure out any quilt block she wanted to.

She wiped her hands on her pants just to be careful, even though she was certain she hadn't gotten any chocolate or caramel on them (it would have been too painful to waste a single crumb of candy outside of her mouth), and set to work.

Chapter Text

Cheryl had hoped that life in Glenbard would continue along the same lines as it had for many years to come, but that was not to be. One night, when she was sleeping safely in her bed in the former classroom that she shared with Steve, there was a sudden uproar. Steve stood up and opened the door—and on the other side of it was a boy with a gun. That was how Cheryl and Steve learned that Tom Logan had conquered Glenbard.

Rumors flew wildly for the next few days. Tom Logan said that he was holding Lisa as a hostage, but some people thought she was dead. They said there was a lot of blood. Nobody knew whether they should keep doing their duties, out of love for Glenbard, or to go on strike, out of love for the girl who had owned Glenbard.

Cheryl cared about Lisa as much as anybody, but she was scared. The rumors also said that Tom Logan was beating anybody who caused him trouble. And when Cheryl was scared, she retreated to the thing she loved best: her sewing and her quilt. She started spending every day in her mending room, except when Logan's soldiers marched through the halls yelling for the citizens of Glenbard to go to meals or to classes or to do chores. But Logan didn't know what classes were being taught nor what chores had been assigned to whom, so Cheryl decided that her chores would just be working on keeping her classroom organized and working on her sewing, and mending the clothes of anyone who was brave enough to walk all the way over here with all those soldiers watching them.

Nobody came to her door the first day or the second day. The third day, two people walked in. The first one was Steve, and he looked scared. It was immediately obvious why, because the second person was muscled and scarred-faced Tom Logan. "You fix clothes?" he snapped.

Cheryl nodded. He certainly looked like his clothes needed fixing. They were dirty and torn. One spot on his denim jacket was so blackened that she wondered if he'd been wearing it the night they'd poured hot oil on him. Whatever he'd been doing out there with his gang, it definitely hadn't been an easy life for his clothes, and it probably hadn't been an easy life for him either.

Logan slipped his jacket off. "You can start with this," he said. "Just fix all the holes, and if you can wash it too, that would be good."

"Rosa on the second floor is in charge of laundry," Cheryl said, and cringed when he glared at her. "I'll take it to her when I'm done," she added hastily.

"Good," Logan muttered. He turned and stalked out. Steve followed him, after giving her one final panicked glance.

Cheryl looked down at the torn and stained jacket in her hands. A part of her wanted to take one of the torches from the hallway and burn it until it was ash, as black as the burning oil had made the jacket's collar and as black as Logan's lack of morals had made his soul. But Steve had looked so scared, and Cheryl had felt so scared ever since Logan's soldiers had marched in, and she knew she was too scared to really do it.

And besides, what if Lisa really was dead, and Logan really was going to be in charge of the city forever now? They couldn't just let Glenbard fall apart, when it was the only thing that had allowed them to survive so long. (Well, Lisa was the only thing that had allowed them to survive so long, but Cheryl couldn't let herself think too much about Lisa or she knew she would cry all over Tom Logan's stupid sweaty shredded jacket.)

In the end, Cheryl wasn't sure whether it was the best thing to do or whether she was just making excuses because she was scared, but she pulled out her thimble and thread and a bolt of denim and she cut patches and she sewed them onto Logan's jacket. She didn't worry about making her stitches the perfect size or about finishing the edges of the patches neatly, but she did a good job that she knew would hold. That way, she hoped Logan would be happy with her, and she and Steve would be safe.

But though Logan might have conquered their city, he hadn't conquered their hearts. Cheryl might be scared, but she was still herself. And so, for the biggest rip on the elbow of the jacket, she made a two-layered patch. The outside that would show through the hole was denim. But for the inside, where it wouldn't be visible to anyone else but where it would be touching him all the time, she sewed a patchwork block. Just a simple one, an hourglass made up of four triangles. Orange for the flag of Glenbard, and purple calico for Cheryl.

If Logan asked her about it, she'd just tell him that it was reinforcement, or a signature, or something. Or maybe he wouldn't even notice it at all. But she would know it was there, and as long as it was there, she would know that he couldn't completely win.

Chapter Text

As soon as Logan had conquered Glenbard, Cheryl had hidden away the orange and yellow fabric she had used to make the old flag, just in case it was ever needed again. The old flag had gone missing almost right away (Cheryl had assumed that Logan had had it taken down, but she later heard whispers that someone—nobody dared say who—had taken it down and hidden it away before he could give the order).

The flag reappeared, one warm May night, at the same time that new whispers appeared. Lisa was alive! She was staying at a farm on Swift Road. One citizen of Glenbard after another packed their possessions and slipped out of the school, and one of them was carrying the flag.

Cheryl didn't know about all of that until afterwards. She was too afraid to leave the school. She'd seen what Logan had done to Jill and to so many other people. And there were too many things she didn't want to leave behind. All of her fabric was here, in her mending room. If she left it behind, would she ever be able to sew again? The world out there must be terribly rough by this point, and she didn't know where there would be more fabric out there to find.

But most of all, she was just scared. And so, that night, as the whispers flew from ear to ear, and as half of the population of Glenbard packed their belongings, Cheryl laid down on the mattress in the room she shared with Steve, and she did her best to go to sleep.

The next day, Logan's guards rounded them all up—every single citizen of Glenbard who hadn't left the city—and kept them in the cafeteria, surrounded by guards. They stayed there all day and all night, until suddenly, it was over. Tom Logan left and he took his army with him, and once again, Lisa Nelson was the girl who owned Glenbard.

The rest of that day was an impromptu party. Everyone who had left returned. They opened a stash of soda cans from Lisa's Secret Place and an assortment of other treats, and they celebrated Lisa's safe return. But the next day, Lisa made sure they knew it was all back to business as usual. Chores and classes in the morning, other duties in the afternoon, and lots of extra drills.

Cheryl went to her mending room once she was done with class for the day, just as she had done every day for months and months, no matter who was ruling Glenbard. She supposed she wasn't particularly surprised when Lisa showed up at her door a few hours later.

"I want another flag, bigger than the one before," she said. "One to signal to everyone around Glenbard that Tom Logan couldn't defeat us, and nobody else will, either."

Cheryl was already climbing up on one of the tables, ready to push aside the ceiling tiles where she'd stowed the yellow and orange fabric. "If I put a second border around it, would that be big enough?" she asked. "Maybe yellow this time? I could make it even wider. Or I could make the inside pieces bigger, and then make the borders both the same size."

"If you could make the inside pieces bigger, that would be good," Lisa said. She headed for the door.

"I hope you're feeling better," Cheryl called after her. "We heard you were hurt."

"Yes, Jill patched me up," Lisa said. She paused for so long that Cheryl, who still had her head up in the ceiling, wasn't sure if she was still there. But then Lisa added, "I hope you've been okay here. They said Logan was hurting people."

Cheryl pulled down the trash bag that she'd stuffed the fabric into. "I didn't get hurt," she said. "I was too scared to rebel. But I didn't obey him more than I had to." It hurt to admit it to Lisa, but it was true.

Lisa nodded. "I understand. Let me know when you're done with the flag."

Cheryl watched her go. She wondered if Lisa really understood. Lisa was so brave.

Well, Lisa might be brave and smart enough to run a city, but Cheryl knew more about sewing than she did. So Cheryl sat down with her yellow and orange fabric and her scissors and her mom's old patchwork templates, and she set to work doing what she did best.

She was going to make the best flag ever, so that even Lisa could be proud of her again.

Chapter Text

Life got back to normal after that—though what was normal anymore, really? In any regard, life in Glenbard in the months after Tom Logan was very similar to the year prior to Tom Logan. There were even more drills than there had been before, and their population continued to grow, but the pattern of chores and classes and mending was much the same.

Lisa came to Cheryl's door a month after the new flag had been raised, with an idea that Cheryl wished she'd come up with herself. Lisa had noticed how many people needed mending, and she had noticed that some of the younger children were getting older and were ready for bigger tasks. She asked Cheryl if she'd be willing to take on some apprentices, to teach them how to sew and have them help with mending and eventually with sewing brand new garments.

Cheryl had hoped that Lisa would be able to feel proud of her, but she hadn't imagined being trusted with this much responsibility. All she could do in response to Lisa's question was to nod. Yes, of course she would do it. The only teaching she'd done until now was showing Jill how to use a needle and thread in case she ever needed to give anyone stitches (though she wasn't sure how much it would have helped, since human skin was so different from fabric, and the desired result was too). But everyone in Glenbard was so eager to learn. They knew they had to be, to survive as they grew older. Surely she could teach them something as simple as sewing? She'd mostly taught herself how to sew, anyway.

Beth and Grace and Larry and Jenny joined her the very next day. They were all several years younger than Cheryl, between seven and nine years old, and none of them had ever sewed a stitch before. Cheryl had them all pick out two colors of fabric that they liked, and trace and cut squares for a nine-patch block. It was the way her mother had taught her, and she figured it was as good a way as any to pass the knowledge on.

For herself, she chose a "Roman Square" quilt block. She cut nine rectangles from the blue and red plaid that Grace was using in her block, and nine rectangles from the solid olive green fabric that Larry was using in his block, and nine rectangles from the light pink calico that Beth and Jenny had argued over until Cheryl had explained that they could use it in both of their blocks. Three rectangles, one of each color, made a square. Nine squares (some pointing one way, others at right angles) made a block. It was almost like the nine-patch blocks her apprentices were making, just with three times as many pieces.

Everyone except Grace poked themselves with a needle that first day, with accompanying tears and blood and trips to Jill for bandages and sympathy. But by the end of the day, they all had three squares sewn together in a line. By the time they all headed to dinner on the day after that, Larry and Beth had finished their blocks, and Grace and Jenny only had the last long seam remaining. Cheryl couldn't help grinning at dinner. She was beginning to feel very grown up, with so many little kids around hanging on her every word (well, except when Larry was throwing his thimble at Jenny or when Beth decided to play hide and seek in the fabric cupboard). 

By September, three months after Cheryl had started teaching them, her apprentices had learned enough to be able to work on projects of their own. They asked Cheryl if they could have a bit of fabric for one of these projects. When she asked what it was for, they hemmed and hawed, and eventually she realized what they might have in mind and gave it to them without asking any more questions. On her birthday a week later, they presented her with a slightly lumpy patchwork pillow, and she pretended to be completely surprised.

She might not have been surprised, but she was certainly delighted. The stitching was as uneven as some of her very first hand-sewn blocks, but she didn't think she'd ever seen something more perfect. They'd stuffed it with dried leaves, and they'd asked Craig for advice about which leaves would smell the nicest. They'd each made a patchwork block, and then they'd sewn two next to each other for one side and two for the other side. Beth had decided to stick with a nine-patch block, while Larry and Grace had branched out to Churn Dash, and Jenny had even made a decent Roman Square block, imitating the one that Cheryl had made when she was first teaching them.

"And we all included purple, because we know that's your favorite color," Grace explained. "We each put our favorite color with it in our block, so that you would think of us when you use the pillow, but we put lots of purple in it so that you'd enjoy looking at it even if you don't like our favorite colors as much."

"I like all your favorite colors, too," Cheryl said. "But you're right, my favorite is purple." She knelt down and gathered them all in a big group hug. They were all so young and so small that she could hug all four of them at the same time.

She supposed she was young, too, but she didn't feel particularly young anymore. She was one of the oldest people here. She was one of the people in charge of a room and teaching other people, almost like a grown-up would. She was pretty sure she liked the feeling of being so grown up.

That night, Cheryl laid down on her mattress. She laid her head on the old pillow that she'd had for a long time, and she wrapped her arms around her new pillow and hugged it tightly to her chest. Was this what the rest of her life would be like? Sewing and mending and teaching others to sew—she thought she could be satisfied, if life went on like this. But she was only thirteen, and there had already been so many changes in her life. How many more were there to come?

But she was tired of being afraid. Her new pillow smelled nice, and every block on it had purple calico in it, a gift from people who cared about her. It wouldn't do to worry about the future now. For now, life was good enough.