Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  Dany tries to make sense of it. Why Liz, instead of going to class, would go to the elementary school. Why Liz would come to history class with a bagful of rocks.

  In a flash of sudden understanding, she turns and looks at her friend.

  This is a bag meant for carrying you under the surface of the water and keeping you there. Liz has gathered up rocks just like that writer – the one from English Studies. A lot of the kids were horrified by the stones Woolf filled her pockets with, the ones meant to weigh her down in the river. But Dany got it. You must know, deep down, that once you are submerged, something in you will kick to stay alive.

  The Burrard Inlet is just a ten-minute walk from here.

  And Liz, she must know that she’ll kick her way to the surface, given a chance. She’s filled her bag with rocks so that their sheer weight will cancel the impulse out.

  For a moment, just half of a second, Dany feels that same vertiginous pull, the one she felt yesterday, while looking at the virus. Only now, she feels it while looking at Liz ­Greene.

  “Calmly, now, exit the room,” Faraday repeats. But no one listens. Finally, raising his voice, he snaps at them: “Go!”

  Everyone breaks at once.

  Twenty chaotic trajectories – a chaos of elbows and legs tangling as they run for the door. But Dany doesn’t move. Because the instant after she turns to look at Liz, Liz turns to look at her.

  Dany takes in everything about Liz’s eyes: She can see that the orbs of her eyes are too pronounced – as if the brain, swelling in her head, is pressing them out. She can see the way her pupils are enlarged; the way that her eyes are, slowly and inexorably, listing to the right, only to snap back.

  Nystagmus.

  But the worst thing she sees in Liz ­Greene’s eyes is blame.

  Your fault, her eyes say. Your fault.

  Slowly, Dany moves her gaze to the table. Nothing has prepared her to see Liz like this. Nothing. All around the classroom, there are chairs knocked over, backpacks abandoned. A single sheet of paper floats lazily in the air and lands, feather-quiet, on the ground at Faraday’s feet.

  “Go,” Faraday tells her. “And close the door behind you.”

  Dany looks at her teacher’s brown leather shoes, unable to move. And in the next instant, Faraday is by Dany’s side. She feels his hand on her arm, feels him take hold of her elbow, feels him pull her up. She clutches the box of masks to her chest as she stands.

  Finally, he gives her a shove, starts her towards the door.

  Dany crosses the distance of the classroom. But at the door, she turns back.

  Liz must be feverish.

  There is a flush to her skin – and she’s struggling to take her hoodie off. But she can’t get her arms out of the sleeves and so, the sweater hangs behind her, hampering her movement like a pair of cuffs. Dany pictures the hypothalamus, inside Liz’s brain, shrivelling up like a peach pit.

  Dany feels the door handle pressing into the small of her back.

  When her hand grips the knob, she feels relief and, a beat later, shame.

  Because somehow, she knows that this is her fault. She doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why, but she knows – this is all on her. And she can’t do anything to help Liz. Can’t make her better. Not anymore than she could help Jasper.

  Dany pictures Liz as one of the so-called virals. The ones dotting the hospice yard. The ones that the government trucks come for. The ones that are put in yellow jackets and taken to the camps to die. Two days ago, she took Mac up there on the bus, and the two of them sat on a little hill outside the fence of the hospice, and she saw them. A few stood with arms held wide, turning slowly, unseeing eyes turned up towards the sun.

  Will they put Liz in a yellow plague jacket? Will they truck her out to the hospice grounds? Will Liz – muscles riddled with tiny spasms, her face a waxen gri­mace – end her days in the camp? Is ­Lizzie a viral?

  Somehow, the word didn’t fit.

  The silence breaks, and she hears her friend. Over and over Liz is muttering a word, words. Dany, so adept at finding patterns in noise, is probably the only one who could make out the slur of meaning.

  “Fire,” Liz is saying, over and over. “I’m on fire.”

  A paramedic brushes past Dany, and her eyes lock on his respirator mask.

  Seeing that mask, all of her body goes still, cold. Then the security guard, bigger and less cautious, knocks Dany into the wall on his way past.

  Dany turns her back on Liz, her hand on the door handle. She is taking her first step through the door when she hears it. What stops her, what turns her back, isn’t the suddenness of the noise, but the strangeness. So out of place. Surreal. It is a noise that does not make sense.

  It sounds like someone has dropped a melon from two stories up. Or taken a sledgehammer to the head of a sleeping dog. Dany hears the sound and, looking back, sees Liz bringing her forehead down against the desk.

  Three solid, bone-bruising blows.

  Cursing, the paramedic struggles to pin Liz upright against the chair back. The guard, next to Dany, scowls.

  The last Dany sees of Liz is this: her friend from kindergarten is pinned against the chair back, and her nose is bloodied, broken.

  Dany grasps her box of N95 masks and, turning her back on Liz ­Greene, she walks away. She’s heard what Liz is whispering, she’s seen what is in Liz’s eyes.

  Liz knows, somehow Liz knows.

  The virus, the fire, all of it.

  Everything is all Dany’s fault.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 11

  All around her, wherever she goes, they turn.

  They turn, they burn, they die.

  Dany learned about pain her final night at Darling-­Holmes.

  She learned that fire can invent a new category of pain. A pain so sharp, so searing, so bone-deep, the mind is razed clean. Alarms, rattling her brain. Smoke-filled halls, blinding her. The heat and the fire and the fear and the smell of burning hair and flesh. And then Dany isn’t Dany. She is her arms, burning. The dead weight she carries. Searing white flame and a mind, brutally wiped clean.

  A firefighter found the two of them where she collapsed. There, just past the exit, next to the concrete foundation of the building.

  Dany’s eyes were open – unlike Zeke's – and a man, a firefighter, tried to scoop up the little boy. He tried to take the little huddled form out of Dany’s arms. The pain of Zeke being pulled from her arms was more searing, more intense than anything she’d ever known – right up until the darkness took her.

  When Dany opened her eyes again, she was lying on a gurney.

  The fire, a distant glow.

  At some point, someone must have separated them, because Zeke was sleeping on the grass. He was so tiny, the smallest kid at the work farm. And maybe that was why he had reminded Dany of Mac. Zeke, who – as best she could – Dany took care of, because she so badly wanted to believe that, in whatever place they’d put her sister, there was someone there likewise looking out for her.

  Magic.

  Dany believed in magic. Which was stupid. Because magic never worked.

  Zeke had been covered in a blanket, but even so, Dany recognized the kid. She knew it was him. The body on the ground was just so small, there was no one else it could be.

  She dragged herself over – and the morphine drip twisted and pulled out of her neck. And then she was on the ground, next to Zeke, pulling the blanket back from Zeke’s face, because she wanted the little boy to be able to breathe.

  There was the ruin of her arms.

  There was a burned little boy, and there were her arms.

  Zeke’s pyjamas had caught fire, they were melted into his skin, and to lay the boy out on the ground, they had to have literally cut him away from Dany. Or cut Dany away from him. It hurt her to even think about.

>   Dany pulled back the blanket, because she thought that Zeke was sleeping, that Zeke needed to breathe.

  And when that blanket came away – what she saw became a picture. And the picture entered Dany’s head and made echoes there. Thousands of tiny echoes, as delicate as Zeke’s face. Echoes that touched every other memory to come.

  But at the time, she didn’t understand.

  Because when they lifted Dany into the ambulance, the morphine drip reinserted in her neck, her head lolled to one side and she thought, That’s strange. All the little kids are outside, but it’s past curfew, and they’re playing a game, the one where you all fall down.

  She looked at the kids and thought, That’s really strange. Not just the curfew part, but the falling down.

  Because they’d fallen so neatly. Because they’d made of themselves such a tidy little row.

  Outside of the classroom, Dany counts through it, counts past it.

  Into the thousands, into the tens of thousands.

  And then she moves on force of will, making herself go through the motions that are necessary. In the parking lot, Dany tosses the box of N95 masks to Eva.

  Eva takes one look at Dany, and lets it go. Lets go whatever she was about to say.

  Instead, Eva walks up and down the line of students – making sure they all wear masks, handing out new ones to students who have left theirs behind. And that’s when the VP chooses his moment to announce his plan for them. The kids, the ones he’s lined up in a tidy little row – they are going to take a sponge bath. Like they are kids with sand between their toes. Dany doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream. The whole thing is so completely ludicrous.

  She wants to tell them, to stop them, but the only word her brain finds is run. Run far, run fast, it doesn’t matter where. Run, until her mind empties out and there is nothing left, until her thoughts are as empty as wind.

  Like Zeke, Liz ­Greene digs into her heart like a splinter.

  Dany isn’t getting in any stupid line.

  She stands by the school, leaning her head against the cool brick wall. She knocks her forehead against the brick once, twice, but that only makes her think of Liz.

  And with that picture of Liz burning in her brain, Dany turns and strides up to VP ­­Bricker.

  The vice principal is rustling through the pages of an old photocopied manual. A couple of admins, next to him – the ones whose job it is to sit around while phones ring and look personally offended when Dany is late – are filling buckets with water and counting out capfuls of bleach. Next to them, leaning on an old car, there is a dog-faced security guard in a bored slump. He probably gets paid to look stupid. And her classmates? They are all standing in a line. To complete the picture, all they need are sheep costumes.

  Dany turns on Vice Principal ­Bricker, her eyes choose a little black button, there, at the top of his shirt. “Are you an idiot?” she asks. “Or are you a psychopath? I mean, do you actually want to kill all these kids?”

  She can feel, rather than see, open-mouthed, the students in line gawking at her.

  “Get in line,” ­Bricker tells her.

  But Dany isn’t getting in any line. As sure as any game of ring around the rosy, that line ends in a tidy little row. “If you do this, we’re all gonna die,” Dany says. Her voice, loud and clear, rings out across the parking lot. She knows, she knows, it is the same strain that got Jasper. For a second, she pictures Mary Mallon – that image of her, looking up at the camera from a hospital bed. A dozen more beds recede into the background of the picture, like a vanishing point. An endless hospital ward for a vista. But Dany pushes the picture down.

  No good thinking about it. No good.

  All that matters now is that people know. This is the new strain. Whether it has gotten out of the lab or slipped the bounds of the hospice, she doesn’t know. All she knows is that, somehow, the new virus has found its way into Liz. Nothing else is this quick. She looks from the sponge to the other students. And as her mind fills with math, a differential equation chalks itself onto the pavement at her feet. When she raises her gaze, her eyes carve numbers into the VP’s forehead. Blood drips into his eyes.

  The VP snaps the manual against his pant leg.

  His mouth is moving, but it takes a minute for him to work the words out of his moving jaws. “Calm down. Take a quiet moment,” he says, enunciating each word in an all too familiar way. “Then get in line.”

  “Screw the line,” Dany tells him.

  “Mister ­Bricker?” Eva has pushed her way over, because she is at Dany’s side now, talking to the VP. “She’s just shaken. We’re all a little shaken.”

  “You should be,” Dany snaps. “He’s killing us. We’re all going to die. You will die. I will die.” Dany looks around for George. “If you stay here, you’ll die, too.”

  George touches the silver-framed glasses he’s wearing, and Dany expects a tiny light to blink into being on the frame.

  “Last warning,” the VP growls.

  Dany can see it. She knows she needs to stop, to shut her mouth. She bites down on a ragged thumbnail. But then, her hands are at her side again, forming fists, and her mouth is working. Now that she is talking, she can’t make it stop. “You didn’t see Liz. You didn’t see her bashing her brains out on a school desk,” she tells the VP.

  Eva takes a step back from Dany and looks at her strangely.

  But Dany can’t make the words stop. She can’t make anything stop. Not once, in her life, has she found the off button. Never. “I don’t want you to die,” she tells Eva, “but you will. And so will I and so will Mac and –”

  Dany can’t find any more words, so she turns and kicks over the bucket. The smell of bleach rises from the concrete and a dark stain blooms on the pavement, washing away her mental equations.

  The vice principal, wordless for once, slaps Dany across the face.

  For a second, a quarter of a second, the whole world spins.

  Dany feels the heat of the slap – it is the kind that hurts more on the inside of your head than on the outside. The kind of slap that makes you feel ashamed, even if you aren’t the one who hit somebody. She draws in a sharp breath. This time, when she opens her mouth, she lets out every curse word, every swear, every foul bit of gutter verbiage she’s trawled up in the alleys of the Eastside – and, it turns out, she’s stored up a lot.

  In a part of her brain she doesn’t need right now, yes, she is aware of Eva’s hand on her arm. Eva, begging her to just calm down. But they are all going to die and it is the stupid sponge that will nail the job, and Eva’s voice is lost in the white hot roaring inside of Dany’s head.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 12

  One minute, she is eye level with Bricker’s chest, swearing at the stupid bastard. And in the next, she is on the ground, and her mouth is filled with dirt.

  The whole thing happens so fast, it’s over before it begins.

  The guard grabs one of her wrists, hard, and Dany screams. She feels a searing flare of pain. His huge hand grips her scarred arm, turning and tearing the flesh. Under his grip, her scarred skin cracks at the fault lines. The pain reshapes Dany, twisting her in response. And as soon as she turns, to relieve the pain, the guard has pinned her other wrist, too.

  A moment later, she is zap-strapped in the dirt.

  The guard knocks her head into the ground, slamming her mental suitcase shut. Dany’s eyes ring in their sockets, and she stares at the ground, dazed. A trickle, warm and wet, runs from her mouth to puddle in the dirt. She can smell the blood, like pennies and salt. Rust-coloured spots bleed through her shirt sleeves.

  She’s been here before.

  Face down in the dirt.

  She’s been here dozens of times.

  This is why Dany can’t wear her mom’s old wristwatch. Never mind the scars. Never mind her hatred of time. Never mind t
hat the stupid thing hasn’t ticked in years. It is that she can’t stand the feeling of a confining band around her wrist, like a zap strap. To wear anything on her wrist is to evoke, in small, the feeling of Darling-­Holmes. The endless suck of the present tense, draining down your life. Guards and zap straps. Eating dirt.

  Dany spits out dirt and gravel.

  Face down, hands strapped behind her back, she side-eyes the guard. For the first time in two years, the world begins to make a terrible kind of sense. For the first time since Darling-­Holmes, the perpetual knot in her chest – the one that beats in place of a heart – unties itself. Her body doesn’t need a heart, not so long as there is enough adrenaline and anger.

  “Back the hell off her,” Faraday is saying.

  Dany blinks up at her history teacher.

  Her teacher has put himself between Dany and the security guard.

  “Everyone needs to calm down,” Eva is saying. “But we intern at a virology lab. And there are protocols, so, Dany has a point – though, yes, I can see that her diplomacy skills could –”

  “Would you like to join your friend?” Bricker asks. “We have zip ties enough for all of the student body.”

  Eva makes a zipping motion over her mouth and sits down on the curb next to Dany.

  Faraday tries – he is talking to Bricker – telling him what he’s seen. He believes Dany, that much is apparent.

  But Dany shuts out Faraday.

  Closing her eyes, she presses the side of her face into the dirt. Inching her knees up to her chest, she works her way into a forced fetal position. Then, rolling on the balls of her knees, she digs the toe of her sneaker under her until, finally, she is sitting up in a squat. It is uncomfortable as hell, but better than eating dirt. And it keeps her wrists out of the VP’s line of sight. Which is the point.