Alex doesn’t answer and I realize he doesn’t have an answer, just like I suspected—there’s no reason for it at all. He’s picked me at random, as a joke, or because he knew I’d be too scared to tell on him.
But then he starts speaking. His story is so rapid and fluid you can tell he has thought about it a lot, the kind of story you tell over and over to yourself until the edges get all smoothed over. “I was born in the Wilds.
My mother died right afterward; my father’s dead. He never knew he had a son. I lived there for the first part of my life, just kind of bouncing around. All the other”— he hesitates slightly, and I can hear the grimace in his voice—“Invalids took care of me together. Like a community thing.”
Outside, the crickets pause temporarily in their song.
For a second it’s like nothing bad has happened, like nothing has happened tonight out of the ordinary at all— just another hot and lazy summer night, waiting for morning to peel it back. Pain knifes through me in that moment, but it has nothing to do with my leg. It strikes me how small everything is, our whole world, everything with meaning—our stores and our raids and our jobs and our lives, even. Meanwhile the world just goes on the same as always, night cycling into day and back into night, an endless circle; seasons shifting and reforming like a monster shaking off its skin and growing it again.
Alex keeps talking. “I came into Portland when I was ten, to join up with the resistance here. I won’t tell you how. It was complicated. I got an ID number; I got a new last name, a new home address. There are more of us than you think— Invalids, and sympathizers, too—more of us than anybody knows. We have people in the police force, and all the municipal departments. We have people in the labs, even.”
Goose bumps pop up all over my arms when he says this.
“My point is that it’s possible to get in and out. Difficult, but possible. I moved in with two strangers— sympathizers, both of them—and was told to call them my aunt and uncle.” He shrugs ever so slightly next to me. “I didn’t care.
I’d never known my real parents, and I’d been raised by dozens of different aunts and uncles. It didn’t make a difference to me.”
His voice has gotten super quiet, and he seems almost to have forgotten that I’m there. I’m not exactly sure where his story is going but I hold my breath, afraid that if I even so much as exhale he’ll stop speaking entirely.
“I hated it here. I hated it here so much you can’t even imagine. All the buildings and the people looking so dazed and the smells and the closeness of everything and the rules—rules everywhere you turned, rules and walls, rules and walls. I wasn’t used to it. I felt like I was in a cage. We are in a cage: a bordered cage.”
A little shock pulses through me. In all the seventeen years and eleven months of my life I have never, not once, thought of it that way. I’ve been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven’t considered that they’re also penning us in. Now I see it through Alex’s eyes, see what it must have been like for him.
“At first I was angry. I used to light things on fire. Paper, handbooks, school primers. It made me feel better somehow.” He laughs softly. “I even burned my copy of The Book of Shhh.”
Another shock pulses through me: Defacing or destroying The Book of Shhh is sacrilege.
“I used to walk along the borders for hours every day.
Sometimes I cried.” He squirms next to me, and I can tell he’s embarrassed. It’s the first sign he has given in a while that he knows I’m still there, that he’s talking to me, and the urge to reach out and grab his hand, to squeeze him or give him some kind of reassurance, is almost overwhelming. But I keep my hands glued to the floor. “After a while, though, I would just walk. I liked to watch the birds. They would lift off from our side and soar over into the Wilds, as easily as anything. Back and forth, back and forth, lifting and curling through the air.
I could watch them for hours at a time. Free: They were totally free. I’d thought that nothing and nobody was free in Portland, but I was wrong. There were always the birds.”
He falls silent for a while, and I think maybe he’s done with his story. I wonder if he’s forgotten about my original question— why me? —but I’m too embarrassed to remind him, so I just sit there and imagine him standing at the border, motionless, watching the birds swoop above his head. It calms me down.
After what seems like forever he starts talking again, this time in a voice so quiet I have to shift nearer to him just to hear. “The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I hadn’t been to watch the birds at the border in years.
But that’s what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast. .
. .” He shakes his head. “Just a flash, and then you were gone. Exactly like a bird.”
I don’t know how—I hadn’t intended to move and hadn’t noticed moving— but somehow we’ve ended up face-to- face in the dark, only inches apart.
“Everyone is asleep. They’ve been asleep for years. You seemed . . . awake.” Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. “I’m tired of sleeping.”
My insides are lifting and fluttering like they’ve done what he said and been transformed into swooping, soaring birds: The rest of my body seems to be floating away on massive currents of warmth, as though a hot wind is pushing through me, breaking me apart, turning me to air.
This is wrong , a voice says inside of me, but it isn’t my voice. It’s someone else’s—some composite of my aunt, and Rachel, and all my teachers, and the pinchy evaluator who asked most of the questions the second time around.
Out loud I squeak, “No,” even though another word is rising and lifting inside of me, bubbling up like fresh water sprung from the earth. Yes, yes, yes.
“Why?” He’s barely whispering. His hands find my face, his fingertips barely skim my forehead, the top of my ears, the hollows of my cheeks. Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame.
“What are you afraid of?”
“You have to understand. I just want to be happy.” I can barely get the words out. My mind is a haze, full of smoke—nothing exists but his fingers dancing and skating over my skin, through my hair. I wish it would stop. I want it to go on forever. “I just want to be normal, like everybody else.”
“Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?” The barest whisper; his breath on my ear and neck, his mouth grazing my skin. And I think then I might really have died. Maybe the dog bit me and I got clubbed on the head and this is all just a dream—the rest of the world has dissolved. Only him. Only me. Only us.
“I don’t know any other way.” I can’t feel my mouth open, don’t feel the words come, but there they are, floating on the dark.
He says, “Let me show you.”
And then we’re kissing. Or at least, I think we’re kissing—I’ve only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions.
But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: This is like music or dancing but better than both. His mouth is slightly open so I open mine, too. His lips are soft, the same soft pressure as the quietly insistent voice in my head that keeps saying yes.
The warmth is only growing inside of me, waves of light swelling and breaking and making me feel like I’m floating. His fingers lace my hair, cup my neck and the back of my head, skim over my shoulders, and without thinking about it or meaning to, my hands find his chest, move over the heat of his skin, the bones of his shoulder blades like wing tips, the curve of his jaw, just stubbled with hair—all of it strange and unfamiliar and gloriously, deliciously new. My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it’s the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first day of real autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke—like the end and the beginning of something all at once. Under my hand I swear I can feel his heart beating out a response, an immediate echo of mine, as though our bodies are speaking to each other.
And suddenly it’s all so ridiculously and stupidly clear I feel like laughing. This is what I want. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Everything else— every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.
When he finally pulls away it’s like a blanket has come down over my brain, quieting all my buzzing thoughts and questions, filling me with a calm and happiness as deep and cool as snow. The only word left there is yes.
Yes to everything.
I really like you, Lena. Do you believe me now? Yes. Can I walk you home? Yes.
Can I see you tomorrow?
Yes, yes, yes.
The streets are empty by now. The whole city is silent and still. The whole city might have wound down into nothing, burned away while we were in the shed, and I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. The walk home is fuzzy, a dream. He holds my hand the whole way and we stop to kiss twice again in the longest, deepest shadows we can find. Both times I wish the shadows were solid, had weight, and they would fold down around us and bury us there so we could stay like that forever, chest to chest, lip to lip. Both times I feel my chest seize up when he pulls away and takes my hand and we have to start walking again, not kissing, like suddenly I can only breathe correctly when we are.
Somehow—too soon—I’m home, and whispering good-bye to him and feeling his lips brush mine one last time, as light as wind.
Then I’m sneaking into the house and up the stairs and into the bedroom, and it’s not until I’ve been lying in bed for a long time, shivering, aching, missing him already, that I realize my aunt and my teachers and the scientists are right about the deliria. As I lie there with the hurt driving through my chest and the sick, anxious feeling churning through me and the desire for Alex so strong inside of me it’s like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.
Chapter Fifteen
“Last God created Adam and Eve, to live together happily as husband and wife: eternal partners. They lived peacefully for years in a beautiful garden full of tall, straight plants that grew in neat rows, and well- behaved animals to serve as pets.
Their minds were as clear and untroubled as the pale and cloudless blue sky, which hung like a canopy over their heads.
They were untouched by illness, pain, or desire. They did not dream. They did not ask questions. Each morning they woke as refreshed as newborns. Everything was always the same, but it always felt new and good.”
—From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University
The next day, a Saturday, I wake up thinking of Alex.