The girl closes her eyes again. We climb the stairs. The third floor is still awake. Young teens and patch-beard semi-adults sitting around on folding chairs, hunched over desks writing in booklets and flipping through manuals. Some kids snore on stacked bunks inside narrow bedrooms. All the doors are open except one.
A group of older boys look up from their work, surprised. ‘Wow, hey, Julie. How’s it going? You holding up okay?’
‘Hey, guys. I’m . . .’ She trails off, and her ellipsis eventually forms a period. She looks at the closed door. She looks at me. Gripping her hand, I move forward and open the door, then shut it behind us.
The room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of street lamps through the window. There is nothing in here but a plywood dresser and a stripped bed, with a few pictures of Julie taped to the ceiling above it. The air is stale, and much colder than the rest of the house.
‘R . . .’ Julie says in a quivery, dangerous voice. ‘Why the f**k are we here?’
I finally turn to face her. In the yellow dimness, we look like actors in a silent sepia tragedy. ‘Julie,’ I say. ‘That theory . . . about why we . . . eat the brain . . .’
She starts to shake her head.
‘True.’
I look into her reddening eyes a moment longer, then kneel down and open the bottom drawer of the dresser. Inside, under piles of old stamps, a microscope, an army of pewter figurines, there is a stack of paper bound together with red yarn. I lift it out and hand it to Julie. In so many strange and twisted ways, I feel like the manuscript is mine. Like I’ve just handed her my own bloody heart on a platter. I am fully prepared for her to claw it to shreds.
She takes the manuscript. She unties the yarn. She stares at the cover page for a full minute, breathing shakily. Then she wipes her eyes and clears her throat.
‘“Red Teeth,”’ she reads. ‘“By Perry Kelvin.”’ She glances down the page. ‘“For Julie Cabernet, the only light left.”’ She lowers the manuscript and looks away for a moment, trying to hide a spasm in her throat, then steels herself and turns the page to the first chapter. As she reads, a faint smile peeks through the tear tracks. ‘Wow,’ she says, wiping a finger across her nose and sniffling. ‘It’s actually . . . kinda good. He used to write such dry and detached bullshit. This is . . . cheesy . . . but in a sweet way. More like how he really was.’ She glances at the cover page again. ‘He started it less than a year ago. I had no idea he was still writing.’ She flips to the last page. ‘It’s not finished. Cuts off in the middle of a sentence. “Outmanned and outgunned, certain of death, he kept fighting, because—”’
She rubs her thumbs into the paper, feeling its texture. She puts it near her face and inhales. Then she closes her eyes, closes the manuscript, and reties the yarn. She looks up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than her and probably sixty pounds heavier, but I feel small and featherweight. Like she could knock me down and crush me with a single whispered word.
But she doesn’t speak. She sets the manuscript back in the drawer and gently slides it shut. She straightens up, dries her face with her sleeve, and embraces me, resting her ear against my chest.
‘Thump-thump,’ she murmurs. ‘Thump-thump. Thump-thump.’
My hands hang limp at my sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
With her eyes closed, her voice muffled by my shirt, she says, ‘I forgive you.’
I raise a hand and touch her straw-gold hair. ‘Thank you.’
These three phrases, so simple, so primal, have never sounded so complete. So true to their basic meanings. I feel her cheek move against my chest, her zygomaticus major pulling her lips into a faint smile.
Without another word, we shut the door on Perry Kelvin’s room and leave his home. We descend the stairs past beleaguered teens, past tossing and turning kids, past deeply dreaming babies, and out into the street. I feel a nudge low in my chest, closer to my heart than my belly, and a soft voice in my head.
Thank you, Perry says.
I would like to end it here. How nice if I could edit my own life. If I could halt in the middle of a sentence and put it all to rest in a drawer somewhere, consummate my amnesia and forget all the things that have happened, are happening, and are about to happen. Shut my eyes and go to sleep happy.
But no, ‘R’. No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.
‘Julie,’ I say, bracing to confess my final sin. ‘I need . . . to tell you . . .’
BANG.
The Stadium’s field halogens flare like suns and midnight becomes daylight. I can see every pore in Julie’s face.
‘What the hell?’ she gasps, whipping her head around. A piercing alarm further shatters the night’s stillness, and then we see it: the Jumbotron is aglow. Hanging from the upper reaches of the open roof like a tablet descending from Heaven, the screen plays a blocky animation of a quarterback running from what appears to be a zombie, arms outstretched and clutching. The screen blinks between this and a word that I think might be:
BREACH
‘R . . .’ Julie says, horrified, ‘did you eat someone?’
I look at her desperately. ‘No ch . . . no choi . . . no choice,’ I stutter, my diction collapsing in my state of panic. ‘Guard . . . stopped me. Didn’t . . . mean. Didn’t . . . want.’
She presses her lips together, her eyes boring into me, then gives a single shake of her head as if banishing one thought, committing to another. ‘Okay. Then we need to get inside. God damn it, R.’