“But what if we lose you?”
Megs’s look was steady as she stood up.
“I told you before, I don’t think they’d make us do something that dangerous.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“Stop it!” She stamped her foot and the mushrooms jumped in her basket, some tumbling out. “Just stop it, okay? Why do you always have to worry about everything?”
I swallowed hard as her watering eyes stared into mine.
“That’s not fair.” I dragged the back of my hand across my eyes, refusing to cry. “You wouldn’t volunteer if you weren’t worried about your family.”
“You don’t know what it’s like! Your father’s still here!”
The words hung between us. Searing.
“Still here? What about at night, during the bombings? When I don’t know where he is, or if he will ever come back? You say that I worry too much, and that I don’t know what it’s like to worry!”
I stared at her, my heart beating fast.
But we weren’t really angry at each other.
Then she nodded. She understood.
And I had to understand, too. I had to accept what she was going to do. Even though she had said she would be there with me, whatever happened, and taking the test would be breaking her promise.
I stooped, picked up the scattered mushrooms, and dropped them back into her basket. My hands were steady.
“I have to,” she whispered when I stood back up.
“I know,” I said.
We both crouched down and started collecting mushrooms again, though I picked as slowly as I could without making it obvious that I was leaving them for her.
The war was eating up everything—our food, our sleep, our homes, our fathers…now even each other.
We picked until there was nothing left in sight. Then Megs linked her arm through mine, and we were swallowed by the darkness.
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Tye stood on a chair next to me at the kitchen sink, proud to help with the dishes, but scooping suds off the top of the water and sticking them to her chin as if she had grown a foamy white beard.
She giggled as if each time was the first time she’d thought of it.
“Come on, Tye, use those suds to clean the dishes. Here’s your porridge bowl, you can clean that.”
I absentmindedly rinsed the washed dishes under the running faucet and handed them to Kammi, who said, “Slow down, I can’t dry them all at once.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“When will Mother come home?” Tye asked.
“I don’t know. She went to get meat, but the line must be very long today.”
“And Father?”
“He came home, didn’t he?” I asked. I thought I’d heard the door open and shut a few minutes before, but wouldn’t he have come in to give us our hugs?
“I think he did,” Kammi said.
“You finish washing up, okay?”
—
Father was in the living room, hat in his lap, staring at nothing. But he sat straight up, as if he expected to hear the sirens sound at any second now that it was dark out. He had purple circles under his eyes and one of his eyelids twitched.
“Father?”
“Yes, Big?” He didn’t look at me.
“When do you sleep?”
He hadn’t been home in three nights. Even when we were all home, it wasn’t easy to sleep; we were always waiting for the sirens, and our stomachs rumbled in the night because we were so hungry.
“When will they stop bombing us?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“I know what’s happening,” I said. “You may as well talk about it. They’re going to flatten us like they did the Skaves.”
The many tiny kingdoms of the Skaves out east had been brutally taken by Tyssia in the past two years. At school, we’d learned that the Tyssians, who lived in rocky mountains, wanted the fertile Skaven valleys. Then the black flag of Tyssia flew over these lands, until it was replaced with the new orange and black stripes of the united Tyssia and Erobern.
Sofarende stood between Tyssia and the sea; between Tyssia and the great island nation, Eilean.
They probably wanted to sail out into the world, capture Eilean and her colonies.
Father looked up as if only just realizing that I was there.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Big, I’m sorry. Come here.” He drew me into a hug.
“You think so too, then?”
“You’ll have to be strong through it, whatever comes.”
I nodded against his chest, his arms tight around me. But why hadn’t he said we’ll have to be strong? Us together? Wouldn’t he be with me?
It was suddenly hard to breathe, but I wanted his arms to hold me even tighter, and I couldn’t squeeze back nearly enough.
“If you have to go out tonight, can you stay home from the post office tomorrow?”
“I would lose the day’s pay.”
“But you’re so tired.”
Mother came home. She went to the kitchen, kissed Kammi and Tye, and put the meat she’d managed to get into the oven.
Then she came into the living room.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Is anything all right?” I snapped.
Normally it wouldn’t have been okay, to snap at her.
But there was no more normally.
Mother just sat down as Father let me go.
“I’ve been wanting the three of us to talk,” she said.
In the winter, the stream out in the woods freezes, but only on top. Sometimes I punch through the ice and run my fingers in the frigid water, the cold beautifully fluid, but numbing.
That icy water was running inside my rib cage and pooling in my stomach.
“What about?”
“The army test. What do you think?” she asked Father.
He looked at both of us. Then he said carefully, “If they are screening the children, that means they aren’t taking just anyone, which makes me think they aren’t going to throw them away. Maybe they’ll train them to have a fighting chance. Mathilde knows the enemy may make it here. She knows we’re sitting ducks. Maybe we should…let her go.”
And for the first time in my life, Father was crying.
Mother pressed her hand to her eyes.
Was the tumbling feeling inside me the same one that made Megs tell her mother she would take the test?
“Maybe…if I went…if I got it…” I looked at Father. “You would have money and then you wouldn’t have to worry about working days at the post office. You could stay home and rest.”
But my parents only cried harder.
“It’s not about the money,” Father said.
“No, of course not.” Mother reached out to squeeze my hand, hers slippery with tears. “In fact, the money is part of what makes it so hard, because it puts a price on you.”
“Then why do you want me to go?”
“I don’t know that I do. I’m afraid for you to go; I’m afraid for us all to stay.”
Father said, “I know that people say a family should stay together at a time like this, but I keep thinking that maybe the best chance for having at least some of the family make it is to be in different places.”
At least some of the family make it?
The icy floods started in my chest again.
Father thought we weren’t going to make it? That we were going to die?
I searched my parents’ faces to see if they really believed it, but they were looking at me, waiting for me to speak.
How could I leave them?
How could they send me away?
“I…I don’t think I can pass it. I’d be the youngest. So I don’t see…”
I had been going to say “the harm in trying,” but Mother jumped in as if she assumed I’d been about to say “why I should try.”
“Oh, no, no, no, honey, it will be okay if you don’t, I just don’t want you to miss your opportunity because w
e were afraid to try it.”
“It could save you,” Father said.
“It could kill me.”
Mother twisted her hands in her lap. Father had tears leaking out of his eyes.
No one said that it wasn’t true.
Finally, Father said, “They promise university educations. They wouldn’t if they didn’t expect the children to make it to them.”
“It’s an easier promise if they don’t expect them to,” Mother said, so quietly it gave me chills. “But you’re right, why would they select them so carefully, train them for something, and then throw them away?”
Her voice sounded like Megs’s. Reasonable. Hoping. Almost pleading.
But Megs had a chance to pass. She was closer to the older kids in her studies. I couldn’t catch up in two weeks.
But if agreeing to the test would give Mother and Father two weeks of hope, then that would be worth it.
I got up and left the living room. When I returned, they were both staring at me. They probably thought I’d walked out because I was upset.
But my eyes were dry, my hands steady, as I held out the form to Mother.
“You’ll both need to sign.”
Mother read it carefully, though she must have many times already; probably Father had, too. “When you sign, though,” I reminded them, “it means if I pass, I have to do whatever they say. We decide now, not later.”
I felt like I was the adult, reminding them that choices can have consequences we can’t even begin to understand.
Father moved first, but slowly. He patted his pockets.
And took out a pen.
He signed, and passed the pen to Mother.
She held it for a minute.
Then she signed, too.
Father handed the form back to me. Mother stood, touched my head gently, and gave me a kiss. “I’m going to go check on dinner.”
I nodded. Father followed her, leaving me staring at the document in my hands, at my parents’ signatures giving away the rest of my childhood.
Maybe my whole life.
No matter.
I folded the paper back up.
IN THE MORNING, I stood by Miss Tameron’s desk.
“Yes, Mathilde?”
I handed her the form.
She went still.
“You all talked about it, as a family?”
“Yes.”
She studied me, rubbing one chalky-white hand with the other as if cold. But after a moment, she seemed to think of something else, and smiled.
“That’s all right, Mathilde. It will be all right.”
I nodded, and went back to my seat.
Megs looked over at me, her eyebrows raised.
I nodded.
Then her eyes narrowed, and she started scribbling her math assignment with dark, noisy pencil marks.
I swallowed hard, and tried to do my own assignment.
But when Miss Tameron rang her little bell for our morning break, Megs stood silently by my desk while I pretended to concentrate on my work.
“You coming? I got your coat and scarf.”
I looked up, taking my clothes from her like a hug. She stayed close as I put them on.
She smiled. “Come on, silly.”
And we went outside together.
—
“Mathilde? I’m sorry to interrupt your work, but could you watch Tye while I make dinner?”
I shut my book with relief. I’d spent the past several afternoons stuck at my desk, under Mother’s orders to prepare for the test.
“I don’t think they played outside today. She has a lot of energy,” Mother said.
I followed her downstairs, where Tye was leaping between the sofa and the chairs.
“She’s been running through the kitchen. With the boiling water…”
“I can watch her.”
The best trick to get Tye to stop whatever she was doing was to do something fun without her.
I got out our can of crayons and a few sheets of paper—our last sheets, actually. Paper was getting scarce.
But it seemed like an okay time to use it.
I spread a sheet out on the floor in the living room and lay on my stomach, tipping over the can of crayons.
Crayons were a treasure, too. Our small collection was all mismatched stubs.
Tye was still jumping around me as I selected a green crayon and started drawing a large circle.
“What are you doing?”
“Homework. Serious stuff.”
I continued to draw.
“Can I help?”
“Oh, probably not. It’s really hard.”
“Not too hard for me.”
“Well, I have to draw a picture of our house.”
“Our house isn’t a circle. And it’s not green.”
“Oh.” I stopped. “What would you do, then?”
She sighed and shoved me out of the way, picked beige crayons, and started drawing squares and rectangles.
I sighed, too, as she settled and started drawing a pony outside of our house.
Not that we had a pony.
Kammi came home from her friend’s house. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Mathilde’s homework,” Tye said.
Kammi looked at me, about to ask, but I shook my head.
“You know what would be really fun?” Kammi asked. “If we could use the paints.”
“Why don’t we?” I asked. “They’ll only dry up and go to waste. We can finish the paints and paper together. Let’s just go upstairs so we’re not in Mother’s way.”
Tye scooped up the papers and took them upstairs while Kammi put away the crayons. I found the paint tubes and brushes, and squeezed the colors into a tin. Red, green, yellow, blue.
The girls each painted a picture. When I went to refresh the paints for them, the tubes felt all squeezed out.
But there was only one more piece of paper anyway.
“Let’s do our handprints,” I said.
My sisters giggled as I brushed rainbow swirls of paint onto their hands. I pressed Tye’s onto the center of the paper. Then Kammi’s outside that. They both held up their hands, grinning. I painted my left hand, and Kammi took the brush to paint my right. My bigger prints joined theirs on the paper, on the outside, sheltering them.
Little, Middle, and Big.
The handprints looked like they belonged to one person who was growing, captured a few years apart.
I pinned it to the wall. My sisters stood back, admiring. We ignored the fingerprint smudges I’d made at the corners of the paper and on the wall, even though we were never allowed to color on the walls.
“It’s beautiful,” Tye said.
And it was.
Still holding our hands in the air, we looked sadly at the remaining paint in the tin.
“I wish we could paint more,” Tye said. And then she pressed her entire hand into the paints.
“Tye!” Kammi cried.
Warmth pressed on the inside of my ribs, way up high, by my heart.
“Do the other one,” I said.
Kammi’s mouth fell open, but Tye removed her hand and pressed the other into the paint.
I climbed onto the chair and then onto the desk, and signaled to Tye to follow me, which she did, carefully, her hands still raised.
She pressed her palms and then her fingers spread wide against the white wall.
“Kammi?” I asked.
I couldn’t tell them that our house would be turned to rubble any night now. What did the walls matter?
What mattered is that we were standing here right now, the three of us together.
Kammi dipped her hands and pressed them to the wall.
I did mine.
And then we were laughing, and we couldn’t stop. We stood on my bed and pressed the wall there.
Then the slanted eves.
In a row under the window.
When our house was knocked down, and someone picked through its pieces, maybe
he would find these handprints, and know that children had lived here.
That we had lived here.
And if our house turned to dust, then within the dust would be a million tiny particles with our stamp. The universe would remember we had existed.
My sisters stopped giggling.
I turned.
Mother stood in the doorway.
The warmth in my chest reached a squeezing heat.
“We—I…”
Mother came into the room, turning slowly. Her brow was creased again. Was she deciding how angry to be?
Then her face relaxed, and she folded me into a hug, kissed my cheek.
“I love it.”
“You do?”
I looked up, surprised to see tears gathering in her eyes.
“My only worry is how much soap we’ll use cleaning you up.”
“Oh.”
I looked down at my hands.
I hadn’t thought about soap.
“Go ahead, now. Help your sisters. Dinner’s ready.”
“GIRLS, WAKE UP. Mathilde, it’s testing day.”
My sisters threw on their school clothes and hurried downstairs to eat, but my fingers felt cold as I did up my buttons.
I sat in front of my breakfast so long that eventually Mother sat down next to me. I picked up my spoon and ate a few mouthfuls.
“It’s time to go,” she said at last. She kissed my temple. “Good luck.”
I went to the front hall and found my coat. Those buttons gave me trouble, too.
“Listen, Big.”
Father pulled me aside in the doorway. I hugged him, clinging like a toddler on the first day of kindercare.
Finally he managed to hold me at arm’s length. He crouched down. “What is it?” he asked, as gently as he would have spoken to Tye.
But I pressed into his chest again and mumbled, “My frid may von’t elth mm go.”
“Oh.” He chuckled. “They’ll let you go. They have to score the tests. That takes time.” He patted his pockets.
I drew back at last, and he stood up.
He pulled three copper coins from his shirt pocket and gestured for me to hold out my hand, which I did, not believing it when he set the coins there. Each was worth just an eighth of an orin, but was a treasure in our house.
“No matter what happens, you’re worth a million orins to me. A million times a million, then times all the stars in the sky…though I don’t have a million orins, so you can have the coppers I do have. For the baker’s on the way home—get yourself a treat, when it’s over. However it goes, I’m very proud of you for signing up.”
Beautiful Blue World Page 3