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“Rhys said you might not want to see anyone.” I’m trying to figure out what else Rhys might have said when she continues. “But I wanted to see you.”
I try to guess what’s coming next. He said you went out there to die. He said you’re crazy. He said you’re a risk to the rest of us. He said you’re a murderer.
“He said the man was hurt. Dying.” She pauses. “He said it wasn’t my dad.”
So he didn’t out me.
“It wasn’t your dad,” I say.
She exhales like now she can believe it. She crosses the room and sits on the edge of my cot. She picks at her fingernails for a while before saying, “I don’t understand you.”
“What’s there to understand?”
“You didn’t … you didn’t do it because of what I said to you, did you? Because you wanted to make it up to me?”
“Does it matter?”
“I didn’t want it on me if you’d died.”
“I made the choice. It wouldn’t have been on you,” I say. “Like your parents.”
“Shut up.”
“They offered to go first.”
“Shut up, Sloane.”
“We both saw it happen.”
“Oh, so you think because you went out there you can say this shit to me,” she says, collecting herself. “It doesn’t work that way.”
I shrug and close my eyes again. I want to sleep. I want her to leave so I can do it. I let myself doze, feel my breathing even out.
After a while, she moves from the cot.
“You know what I hate?” she asks, and I surface enough to ask her. “The way everyone talks about it. How my parents chose to go into that alley, like they were aware of the fact they might die. But they wouldn’t have done it if they thought there was the remotest chance. No one thinks about that.”
“But they did do it,” I say.
“Because they thought it was clear,” she says, and then she pushes my hair away from my face and it’s such a tender gesture, it confuses me. It’s so at odds with the harshness of the words coming out of her mouth. “There was no way they would have gone into that alley first if they thought it was too dangerous because they had us. Why do you think they let Cary lead the way that whole time when they were the adults? They did it so if anything happened, he died. Not them. They went in that alley because he told them it was clear and he was wrong.”
“He’s sorry.”
“If he was sorry, he would’ve gone out there tonight. Oh, and Trace wants to thank you.” Her voice breaks. She exhales. “I think you made him finally understand that they’re dead.”
I curl up onto my side and stay as still as possible until she finally leaves and then I breathe so quietly, I can’t hear myself. I pretend I’m dead. Eventually everything disappears.
But when it comes back, it comes back as strange, uneven footsteps.
Someone entering the room. A rough, calloused hand against my cheek. It doesn’t belong to anyone in this building I can think of. Fingertips trace my face and I think I must still be asleep and dreaming, but I don’t want this dream, whatever it is, so I turn my face away from the touch and then the footsteps retreat and I realize I am awake. I sit up fast, bleary-eyed, and stare at the open door to the nurse’s office. From here, the hall seems empty, seems cold. Was I awake? I get up slowly, my body groaning, and pad out of the office. I stand in the hall, unsure of my next steps. It’s dark and I feel exposed and I want to know who touched me because the more awake I get the more awake I’m sure I was when it happened and I can’t deny the familiarity of the touch but I need to deny its reality.
I walk past the administration office, guiding myself by shadows. I stand at the barricades against the front entrance and try to remember what it felt like to come through the doors every day when this was just a school. I can’t.
And then my whole body goes rigid.
The charged feeling of another presence in the air. I step forward, my eyes traveling over nothing. I bring my hand to my face and move back down the hall, the way I came, when I get another weird feeling, like I’m being watched. And then a musky scent coats the inside of my throat. My chest tightens. It feels like I’m being wrapped in plastic. I wonder if I’ll remember him forever, if nothing will disappear the feel of his hands, his scent.
“Dad,” I say.
The hall crackles with my voice, breaking the spell. I fumble back to the nurse’s office and sit on the edge of my cot, waiting for the invisible hand that’s squeezing my heart to let it go. I grab the flashlight and turn it on its lowest setting and it catches my note to Lily on the table. I unfold it and smooth it out over and over until I calm down.
I wonder if she hears him where she is now, if she hears his voice and his footsteps in her dreams. I wonder if she hears him when she’s awake or if she stopped hearing him as soon as she left, if everything got more okay the more distance she put between us. Or maybe the voice and the footsteps she hears are mine. I hope they are. I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.
“Ready to join the land of the living?”
I wince. Even Cary cringes as soon as it’s out of his mouth.
“I guess,” I say.
He brought me clothes from the drama department. A plaid men’s shirt and a pair of jeans that don’t fit. I look rural. The buttons of the jeans dig uncomfortably into my abdomen. I changed into them in the little bathroom across the room and when I came out, he was still there, waiting to ask me that. Am I ready.
“What’s it like out there?” I ask. “I mean … outside.”
“There are a few stragglers, but they’re mostly in the streets. They haven’t gone back to the doors, which is good,” he tells me. “We covered the windows again, just in case. Do you feel okay? You were pretty out of it when we brought you in here.”
The bandage on my head itches. It also looks stupid, but it would be ungrateful to say so. The side of my face is scratched, red. My cheek is bruised. Lots of bruises have exploded all over my body in the last twenty-four hours. I feel like I was in a minor car accident but I tell him I’m fine and he says, “I’ll bet,” and then we both stand there uncertainly. He stares at me for so long, it makes me prickly and hot.
“What?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I was just surprised you were the one who went out there.”
“Everyone was.”
“Yeah, but it probably should’ve been me.”
“Why would you even say that?”
“Because that’s what Grace and Trace keep telling me. I don’t know. Now Trace is saying I almost had your blood on my hands too.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
He exhales slowly. “You mean that?”
“It wasn’t about you, Cary.”
“What was it about?” I look away from him. And then he says, “Rhys told me.”
“Rhys told you what?”
“About the man out there. What you did. Rhys said he was half crazy and that he would’ve jeopardized us if you brought him in. Now he’s—he’s one of the stragglers…”
So the man turned. My eyes burn. I don’t want to talk about it with Cary, though, so I twist the topic back around to Grace and Trace.
“They’re in mourning. They just need to get through it…”
“Everyone’s in mourning,” he says. “There’s a whole world out there to mourn. The only difference between them and us is they got their parents a little longer and the only reason they survived as long as they did was because of me and—” He struggles to force the next words out. “I apologized to them and they never once thanked me for getting them this far.”
“They’re probably not going to.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath.”
It’s quiet for a minute and then I kind of lie. It’s not a bad lie, though. Maybe it will make him feel better. I look him in the eyes and I say, “Thank you.”
It doesn’t have the desired result. It doesn’t make him feel better. Instead, Cary seems to get sadder. He forces a half smile at me, but I see through it.