At one point an older woman smiled at me and said, “Good idea with that jacket, dear. I can feel the storm coming in my bones.”
I’d stolen the jacket from a teachers’ lounge after picking a few locks in a shamefully unsecured elementary school. I wandered the unmonitored halls and quickly located abulletin board with bright letters that read GEOGRAPHY TAKES US PLACES! under which was a colorful map of my present location along with a number of important landmarks helpfully illustrated with pictures and street names.
“Thank you,” I said to the older woman, who flashed me another smile before moving on.
It occurred to me, as I stood there in my second change of clothes on a cracked sidewalk in a modest residential neighborhood, that by the time anyone even noticed I’d broken out of prison I’d already be halfway across the city. It would take them days to catch up to me—and that’s only if I stayed in one location.
These people, I realized, were breathtakingly stupid.
I’d paused on the sidewalk for just long enough to wonder how the rebels ever managed to defeat a force as powerful as The Reestablishment, and as I turned this idea over in my mind a dusty car pulled into a sloped driveway across the street. As one, the small family popped open doors, each one like a muted gunshot.
I recoiled like I’d been hit.
Unfolding before me was a moment of mundanity from the kind of life I’d never known. I hadn’t seen anything so prosaic since I was a child.
The trunk sprung open with an inelegantthunk.
Little arms and legs pushed out of the car at once, then collided on the pavement only to push each other. A frazzled mother rolled her eyes as she batted blindly at her hair, searching for the unseasonal sunglasses perched atop her head.
I held my breath.
The two children screamed at an unreasonable decibel level and my eyes darted to the neighbors’ doors and windows, bracing for an altercation.
Where were the soldiers?
Did they not assign officers to residential neighborhoods to keep order?
I looked back at the family in time to watch one child pretend to go boneless, sliding to the filthy ground with a choked gurgle that made my heart clench reflexively.
I’d closed my eyes.
The child was playing a game, I told myself. The child was not receiving a punishment for a sound violation. The parents would not be punished for—
“If you’re going to play dead,” someone shouted, “can you pretend to be zombies, at least?”
My eyes had flown open.
The dad was hauling bags into his arms. “I could use the help of some nice, slow-moving zombies with all these groceries—”
Groceries.
Groceries.
A sharp pang of hunger lances through me, returning me roughly to the present moment, the sound of rain roaring in my ears.
Not now, I tell my mind.
Not now, not now.
Not ever.
I press a hand to my chest, my heart beating too hard beneath the breastbone. My head has lately been overrun with spirals of thought and explosive feeling—refusing to remain contained—and it’s scaring me. I was fine before I came to this strange place with its strange people and their loud, unrestrained voices.
My mind was small; my heart was smaller.
Everything inside me had been hermetically sealed and stowed away in locked compartments. Now I feel as though a tornado has torn me open, and when I’m being honest with myself I know exactly who to blame.
Can you trust me?
