“Hey.” He reaches out and touches my shoulder, just for a second, but in that second my body shrinks down to that single point of pressure under his hand, and glows with warmth. I’ve never felt like this, so calm and peaceful. Maybe I’m dying. The idea doesn’t really upset me, for some reason. In fact, it seems kind of funny. “You okay?”
“Fine.” I start to giggle softly. “You’re naked.”
“What?” Even in the dark I can tell he’s squinting at me.
“I’ve never seen a boy like—like that. With no shirt on. Not up close.”
He begins wrapping the shredded T-shirt around my leg carefully, tying it tight. “The dog got you good,” he says. “But this should stop the bleeding.”
The phrase stop the bleeding sounds so clinical and scary it snaps me awake and helps me to focus. Alex finishes tying off the makeshift bandage. Now the searing pain in my leg has been replaced by a dull, throbbing pressure.
Alex lifts my leg carefully out of his lap and rests it on the ground. “Okay?” he says, and I nod. Then he scoots around next to me, leaning back against the wall like I am so we’re sitting side by side, arms just touching at the elbows. I can feel the heat coming off his bare skin, and it makes me feel hot. I close my eyes and try not to think about how close we are, or what it would feel like to run my hands over his shoulders and chest.
Outside, the sounds of the raid grow more and more distant, the screams fewer, the voices fainter. The raiders must be passing on. I say a silent prayer that Hana managed to escape; the possibility that she didn’t is too terrible to contemplate.
Still, Alex and I don’t move. I’m so tired I feel like I could sleep forever. Home seems impossibly, incomprehensibly far away, and I don’t see how I’ll ever make it back.
Alex starts speaking all at once, his voice a low, urgent rush: “Listen, Lena. What happened at the beach—I’m really sorry. I should have told you sooner, but I didn’t want to frighten you away.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I say.
“But I want to explain. I want you to know that I didn’t mean to—”
“Listen,” I cut him off. “I’m not going to tell anyone, okay? I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything.”
He pauses. I feel him turn to look at me, but I keep my eyes fixed on the darkness in front of us.
“I don’t care about that,” he says, lower. Another pause, and then: “I just don’t want you to hate me.”
Again the room seems to be shrinking, closing in around us. I can feel his eyes on me like the hot pressure of touch, but I’m too afraid to look at him. I’m afraid that if I do I’ll lose myself in his eyes, forget all the things I’m supposed to say. Outside, the woods have fallen silent. The raiders must have left. After a second the crickets begin singing all at once, warbling throatily, a great swelling of sound.
“Why do you care?” I say, barely a whisper.
“I told you,” he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making the hair prick up on my neck. “I like you.”
“You don’t know me,” I say quickly.
“I want to, though.”
The room is spinning more and more quickly. I press up more firmly against the wall, trying to steady myself against the feeling of dizzying movement. It’s impossible: He has an answer for everything. It’s too quick. It must be a trick. I press my palms against the damp floor, taking comfort in the solidity of the rough wood.
“Why me?” I don’t mean to ask it, but the words slide out. “I’m nobody. . . .” I want to say, I’m nobody special, but the words dry up in my mouth. This is what I imagine it feels like to climb to the top of a mountain, where the air is so thin you can inhale and inhale and inhale and still feel like you can’t take a breath.
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.