This is Not a Test

“I don’t think it works like that,” Rhys says.

Trace shrugs. “A guy can hope, can’t he?”

The Rayford discussion just dies. Everyone is on edge after that except for Trace. He finds it endlessly amusing to incorporate words like bang, shoot, click, and trigger in every sentence that comes out of his mouth until Cary can’t take it anymore and leaves the room.

Grace sits in a corner alone, wringing her hands. All of this drama. All these little dramas. It’s exhausting. She looks exhausted. I go to her and sit beside her. She glances at me and glances away and I feel bad for how I laid into her yesterday. I shouldn’t have.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I would never say anything to Trace.”

“I know but Cary might,” she says. “If Trace keeps pushing it.” She forces a weak smile at me but her eyes are full of worry. “And then Cary probably would wake up with the gun against his head. It would kill Trace if he found out.”

“Cary won’t tell,” I say.

I don’t know if that’s true but she relaxes a little, lets herself believe it.

“It’s not going to happen again with him,” she says. “It was spur of the moment. I just—wanted to touch someone, you know? Be close to someone. He was there. Do you get that?” I do but I don’t say so. “Look at Trace and Harrison.” She nods at them. They’re on the couches. Trace is leaned back, his hand resting between his legs. Harrison mirrors his pose. In some extremely fucked-up way, they look like they belong. “Guess what Trace said to me.”

“What?”

“He said all Harrison needs is a little guidance.” She sighs. “I guess that’s how pathetic we both are now.”

“It’s not pathetic.” I swallow. “When everything happened … like the day it happened, I was thinking about you. I thought about you a lot after Lily left.”

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Never,” I say. “I was thinking about that sleepover because I really liked your family. You guys were the perfect family to me.”

She laughs. “We were far from perfect. Trust me.”

“I needed to believe you were,” I say. “It was a good memory. I needed it after Lily left.” And then, something else she needs to know: “I’m not strong, Grace.”

She stares at me for a long moment and then puts her arms around me.

The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don’t tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it’s like there’s nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you’d be crushed under the weight of it. They don’t tell you how you will float through days. You autopilot, here but not really here, sleepwalking, and then every so often you are awake.

The next moment that matters turns out to be this one:

“Do you need anything?”

I’m sitting on the cot in the nurse’s room. Rhys stands in the doorway. I don’t understand what he’s asking until I realize I’m surrounded by first aid. Peroxide, salve, and fresh bandages to tend to my forehead with. I bring my hand to it. It’s crusting over.

“I want to leave it like this,” I say.

“That’s not going to help it heal.”

I gather the supplies and go into the bathroom. I take care of the wound. When I come out, Rhys is still there. He’s stepped into the room and his hand is on the back of the chair he sat in that night, waiting for me to wake up just so he could demand answers from me. He looks me up and down and I flush, remembering what I’m wearing today. A drama department dress. It’s blue, straddling that strange line between casual and formal and I felt weird putting it on but earlier I decided to give my other clothes a quick wash in the showers and now they’re drying out in the locker room.

“I keep thinking about what you told me,” Rhys says. “About your father. I thought … you got away from him. You should look at it like that. Now you’re free.”

“It’s not about him,” I say.

“You’re so fucking tragic, Sloane.” He pauses. “I don’t think I’ll go to Rayford.”

This surprises me. “Why?”

“I don’t like the sound of it. Medical processing.”

“You’re not infected.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know how infection works. Maybe it’s changing all the time.”

“You know more about it than us,” I say. “You knew Baxter wasn’t infected. Cary. You were right about the cold.” He doesn’t respond. “How do you know they get cold?”

“What did your father do to you?” he asks. “You tell me about that and I’ll tell you what I know about the cold. It shouldn’t be hard, right? If it’s not about him.”

Is this what it’s like to get close to other people—you do something insane together and then you have to share everything even if you don’t really want to? But I weigh it. I want to know. I want to know what he knows about the cold. I want to know what it’s like. I’ve been close to it and I don’t know what it’s really like.

So I count to a hundred and then I open my mouth and a history of bruises comes out.

I tell him about how my father made a room small just by being in it. How he wasn’t the kind of man who hurt you and cried after, apologized after, made promises to stop that he’d never keep after. He was a machine. I tell Rhys about how my father would check us over obsessively to make sure no bruises showed, stood me and Lily beside each other in our underwear sometimes so he could take inventory of every mark. How quickly he realized hurting Lily was hurting me, how many times she stood between us … how the first time he got me so badly I saw stars, I had to crawl up to my room alone, the worst it had ever been and she wasn’t there and then I am telling him about how she never told me she felt trapped, that I wish she’d just told me but maybe telling me wouldn’t have made it better. Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad. And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over long before it was.

I tell him about how Grace and Trace kill me sometimes, for having each other, and that’s what surviving is, I think. Having something. And I think of how clever Rhys is, how he asked me one thing to get me to tell him everything else. Or maybe I knew what he was doing and I wanted to say it out loud because …

Maybe I needed to say it out loud.

He keeps his eyes off me until I tell him, “I wouldn’t have let you die out there. I know you think I would have, but I wouldn’t have.”

“But you went out there to die.”

“I wouldn’t have let you die. When I saw them coming for you, I ran to you, to save you,” I say. “I wouldn’t have left you like that. Not like she did to me.” I swallow hard. “She always said I’d die without her and she left anyway.”

“But you didn’t die,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “I’m just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.”

It’s silent. I wait for him to take his turn, but he doesn’t. He moves close to me, close enough to bring his hand to my face. He hesitates. At first, I think he’ll tell me he’s sorry or he understands but these are useless sentiments and he knows they’d be wasted on me. Instead, his thumb traces my mouth, lingering on my lower lip. He presses the skin of it wonderingly. His touch is so gentle that my body’s first inclination is to shy from it because it doesn’t understand. He leans in. We’re an inch apart and his breath is on my face. My heart is beating so loud I’m afraid he can hear it but my voice is even when I ask him what he thinks he’s doing. It stops him where he is and I am so aware of how much space there is in the narrow gap between our lips.