A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

  Without a word to Adam or the girl, I cross my old living room and step out into the backyard. I take in a deep breath, and blink back tears. This is my yard, my real yard. And it’s closer to what I remember, but it’s still wrong. It’s smaller, as if the fence has been squeezed in on all sides. The bamboo forest isn’t a forest at all, just two dozen waxy green stalks, most of them not much taller than me. I remember getting lost in them.

  I walk the perimeter of the fence, and try to summon what I used to feel back when I thought I could bend time and spoons. I touch the red grains in the wood. I have a vague memory of doing that.

  I freeze at the triangle-shaped garden in the corner. There are no flowers since it’s winter, but it’s still framed with red brick exactly as it was. I kneel in the grass and press my fingers into the cold soil.

  I remember.

  Waking up early on Saturday to the specific scent of morning and pure unfiltered joy. Grabbing a gardening shovel, eager to get outside, then being here in this exact spot. Black dirt on my fingertips. The sun and air clinging to my skin and my clothes. I remember looking over my shoulder, and there was my mother, still in her nightgown, standing on the back porch shielding her eyes from the sun.

  “Are you okay?” Adam asks as we’re driving away.

  I don’t really want to talk, and for once I don’t want him to talk either. I’m trying to capture more of the memory. What came next? Did she step off the porch? Did she say something? What did we do that day?

  But the rest won’t come. I have just that moment, her on the back porch, me kneeling in the grass and feeling a sort of happiness I didn’t remember I could feel.

  “Yes,” I finally answer. And even though it’s not enough, I add, “Thank you, Adam.”

  THE BUS RIDE is quiet—boring. Everyone scatters in a million different directions the second we get to the museum, so I have to wander around alone—also boring. Then an elderly security guard yells at me for stomping. So basically this field trip sucks.

  I explain to the old man that I wasn’t stomping, but my feet fell asleep and I was doing that thing where you jump around to wake them up. We end up talking and I find out his name’s Gus and he has four kids and nine grandkids. He shows me a private exhibit of swords that’s closed to the public, so okay, maybe things are looking up.

  Gus and I are saying our good-byes when I spot Charlie and convince him we should go outside and find that labyrinth our teacher kept telling us about—the one modeled after the eight-hundred-year-old Chartres Cathedral in France, the most intricate labyrinth design ever created.

  After a twenty-minute cold gray hike, Charlie and I reach our destination. “Well, this sucks,” he says.

  I agree, the labyrinth is a little disappointing. I was expecting something from The Shining—you know, a complicated maze of tall green hedges with plenty of corners to hide in. Instead it looks like a massive pagan crop circle, only the swirls are made of red and black stone tiles winding until you reach the center.

  “It’s not even a real maze,” he whines. “There’s only one way to go.” He’s right. There aren’t options, just a single path. After a minute of looping around, he yells, “This is dumb!” and stomps over the lines.

  “Cheating!”

  “I don’t care. I’m going back in. It’s cold.”

  I ignore him and keep walking the maze. It’s impossible to tell how far I am from the center. As soon as I think I’m close, the path forces me back down and around again.

  I hear soft footsteps behind me, and glance over my shoulder. Emerald. She doesn’t look at me and keeps walking, her shoulders back and her strides long. Maybe this is why she’s always fascinated me. She seems so perfectly contained, while I feel like I’m spilling out of every pore.

  The two of us weave in and out—at one point she’s only a line away—but we still don’t talk.

  It takes a while, but finally I make it. I stand in the center, looking out over the vast field and foggy sky. When Emerald joins me in the middle, she glances around, a brief flicker of triumph in her eyes before they fill with hurt. Whatever Brett did, he’s an idiot.

  She turns, already leaving.

  “Wait,” I say. “Don’t go yet.” She pauses. “I haven’t seen you in a while. I mean I’ve seen you, but we haven’t talked. It feels like a divorce or something. Like we’re all gonna be sent to different families.”

  “And which side will you be on?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it’s a divorce, I guess you’ll be on Camila’s side.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I know what happened between you two, Adam. I saw you.”

  “You saw us kissing?”

  “It looked like more than kissing.” It probably would’ve been if Camila hadn’t puked on the floor of my car about five seconds after shoving her hand down my pants. “Are you two going out now?”

  “No.”

  “But you liked kissing her?” Her tone’s way too intense, and even though she hasn’t moved, I feel like I’m being driven toward the edge of a cliff.

  “Well, yeah, of course I liked it. Why are you—”

  “She knows I like you!” Emerald never does anything undignified, but here she is, shouting so loud it echoes.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Camila knows, and she kissed you.”

  “But you’re going out with Brett.”

  “Oh God. You don’t get anything!” She spins around and I follow, landing in front of her so we’re still face-to-face.

  “I don’t get what?”

  “There is no Brett.”

  “There is no Brett?”

  “No.”

  “But Brett has such a detailed backstory. I feel like I know Brett.”

  “There is no Brett!” Her eyes shine with tears, her chest is heaving, and bright blotches of color stain her cheeks. This is the most emotional I’ve ever seen her.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “This is humiliating.”

  “What is?”

  “I was trying to make you jealous, but you’re incapable of normal guy feelings.”

  “Wait…does Camila know there’s no Brett?”

  “Everyone knows there’s no Brett! Can you please focus?”

  “So you like me?”

  She looks at the ground. “Yes.”

  “Really like me?”

  The blush spreads from her cheeks down her neck, so dark I can barely see her little moles. “Yes.”

  “Since…”

  “Forever. Since forever.” She makes eye contact, and she’s so beautiful, my chest hurts like asthma or a heart attack.

  Her eyes widen, a perfect startled blue, when I press my lips into hers. Not very smoothly either. She presses back, just as clumsy. For a minute it’s like that—rough and messy like we’re doing this for survival instead of fun.

  Then I’m touching her hair and slowing down, and it becomes something softer and deeper. She pulls her head back just a little, so our mouths are no longer touching. Her eyes darken, steady laser beams on mine, and it’s as if she’s about to tell me the most important thing I’ll ever hear. She takes a breath. Exhales. But doesn’t speak.

  I cup her cheeks with my palms and kiss her again. I wish there were tall green hedges with lots of corners to hide in, but this time for entirely different reasons. We keep kissing and I can feel her lips smiling against mine.

  MISS WEST IS sitting silently at her desk, staring at nothing. I can tell she’s upset, but I’m relieved, because it looks like I won’t get called on today.

  A couple of boys start to whisper, daring each other to ask her a question about the assignment, but neither of them actually does it. A couple minutes later a different boy asks if he can go to the nurse, and she snaps at him so viciously that no one tries it again. Other than that everything is quiet, and Miss West just keeps staring.

  When the bell finally rings and the room
clears, I approach her desk, my heart pounding hard against my ribs. “Miss West?”

  “What?” Up close she’s even scarier, with eyes that glow and skin shiny like wax. “What?” she repeats.

  “Are…are you okay?”

  Her dark ink-eyebrows rise up. Her chin quivers.

  Then she starts to cry. I don’t know what to do, and I’m afraid anything I say might make her yell again.

  “It’s my son’s birthday,” she says.

  And immediately, I understand. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was twelve. Only twelve.”

  She looks younger and frailer now, but I’m still not sure what to say. My father never really talked about what happens when you die. I remember one vague comment that you go somewhere else. Sometimes I wonder if my mother and father haven’t stopped at all. Haven’t stopped reading or drawing or singing. They’re just doing it somewhere else.

  I pull a tissue from the box on her desk and hand it to her.

  She wipes her face, smearing the makeup below her eyes.

  The second hand of a clock ticks loudly on the wall. The bell rings, but no more students rush to fill the room.

  “You’d think it would get easier,” she says. “It’s been eighteen years. I remember being pregnant with him, and now he’d be thirty. Can you believe that? Thirty!”

  My mother once said that the planet was like an enormous womb, and every single one of us was a fetus. Death was nothing to be afraid of. It was just birth to another world, and someone would be waiting for us there. Sometimes I try to see this, my mother and father as two newborns holding hands and ejected into this other world. There they are just beginning.

  “They’re—he’s okay,” I say. “I think he’s okay.”

  “Yes.” She nods, wiping her face again. “It was meant to be. We each have a mission on this earth, and we don’t die until we complete it. I may not understand it, but he completed his mission.”

  I’ve heard people say things like that before, but I still want to ask her what she means. What sort of mission? How is she so sure that he finished? How does she know he didn’t die in the middle?

  Miss West looks almost peaceful now, but if she has an idea where her son is, she doesn’t say. That’s the thing I wonder about most—not why they’re gone, but where. Sometimes when I can’t sleep and I’m trying to think good thoughts, I imagine that magical place between worlds, the place in the flash where Elian’s ship disappears before it reappears again. In that split second maybe time slows down, and he can see all the invisible places. And maybe, sometimes, he sees them.

  I’M STILL GRINNING like my face is broken. I can’t turn it off. Emerald and I have become that annoying couple that kisses in public and can’t stop staring at each other and makes everyone else feel both nauseated and suicidal—according to Charlie, anyway. Yesterday at school he told me to take some meds and calm the fuck down, but I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m happy. And I see no reason to pretend I’m not.

  Though I will try my best not to annoy him this afternoon. The second I step inside his house, I’m ordered to stand on a rock resistant to space acid (aka throw pillow) while I wait. Today, all his brothers and sisters are aliens struggling to survive on a dying planet. Upstairs is the safety zone, but getting there is treacherous since the ground floor’s acidic. Most of the kids have already lost a limb and are dragging themselves around on couch-cushion lifeboats.

  After a few entertaining minutes, Charlie stomps downstairs, ignoring the kids’ warnings that his shoes will melt and he’ll die.

  We hop into the van, and I modulate my smile. A couple minutes later Charlie demands, “Why are you turning this way?”

  “I have to pick up Julian.”

  “What?!” he screeches about as loud as one of his little sisters. “He’s seriously tagging along again?”

  “He’s not tagging along. He’s invited.”

  “You don’t see me bringing Carver.”

  “Carver’s eleven.”

  “I don’t get it. Julian’s weird—he doesn’t talk, and he just stares at everyone! It’s fucking creepy.”

  “Julian’s not creepy. He’s, like, the nicest person ever.”

  Charlie sighs deeply. “You and Emerald have been together every second for the past two weeks, and now you’re bringing Julian. It’s never just us anymore.”

  For a second I’m too stunned to react. Then I laugh out loud, which is the wrong thing to do right now. I think he may actually punch me in the face. When I catch my breath, I say, “I’m sorry. You’re totally right. We need a night out just the two of us.” He looks suspicious. “I mean it, baby. You pick the restaurant and afterward…” I waggle my eyebrows suggestively, and Charlie does punch me, a painful blow to my bicep. “Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.”

  When we get to Julian’s street, he’s waiting on the corner, almost hidden underneath a tree. “See?” Charlie says. “Weird.”

  It is a little weird, but I’m not going to agree with him. “He’s just polite. You could do that instead of always making me go in to get you.”

  Charlie looks hurt. “I thought you liked coming in.”

  “I’m kidding. Jesus.” But seriously, even Emerald doesn’t make me go to the front door to get her.

  Julian steps up to the van, but his smile quickly falters. I follow his gaze to Charlie’s scowl—the one that turns all freshmen into frightened mice. I smack his huge shoulder with the back of my hand, but his expression becomes only microscopically less menacing.

  Charlie keeps sending me bruising glares as we join the long line for laser tag. I think he’s mad because Adam paid for me again, and it was a lot of money: twenty dollars.

  Just as we’re nearing the front, a staff member tells us there’s only enough room for two more players on the Red team. One of us will have to join the Blue unless we’d rather wait forty minutes for the next game.

  “How about I go with Julian this time?” Adam says.

  “Whatever,” Charlie answers, looking angry.

  We’re all allowed into what looks like a little locker room full of equipment. Everyone begins swiftly suiting up. I lift the red gear from one hook, and mimic them by lowering it over my head. It looks like a football player’s safety pads, only it has a rifle attached by a wire. Beside me, a man kneels in front of a smiling boy and helps him put on the gear.

  A flame-haired worker shouts, “Attention!” Everyone gets quiet while he goes over the rules. “No physical contact allowed! No sitting or lying in the arena! You earn ten points every time you shoot your opponent in the kill zones…” He taps his head and chest. “…and one hundred points by shooting the signal over their home base! If your gun starts flashing, you’re out of ammo! Go back to your home base to reload! If you’re shot, you must return to your home base to recharge! Is everyone ready?”

  The players all cheer, shaking their rifles in the air.

  “You get all that?” Adam asks me, and Charlie mutters something about babysitting.

  “I think so,” I say, but it’s a lot to remember and I’ve never done this before, so I probably won’t be good at it.

  The staff lets the Blue team in first, then the ten of us on the Red team gather in a tight passageway where the walls and floors are completely black except for glow-in-the-dark swirls. Adam’s fingernails and teeth are glowing. I stretch out my hand. My fingernails are glowing too.

  An alarm sounds. A speaker overhead announces robotically, “The game will commence in three…two…one!”

  On lightning legs, Adam immediately darts out of base.

  Much more cautiously, everyone else cascades from the room until I’m left standing alone. I don’t want to leave, but it’s kind of scary waiting here by myself. Suddenly Adam leaps back into the little room, startling me.

  “Come on,” he orders. I follow him down a dark hall. He’s swift and confident. He must know the maze well. “Duck!” Someone is shooting at us.

  We dive into another passag
eway, pressing our backs against a black wall. My heart is pounding fast.

  “We’ve gotta get to their base.” Adam says it so seriously that I start to laugh. All of a sudden this feels fun-scary, like when my dad and I used to play hide-and-seek in the dark.

  Adam grins at me with glowing teeth. “You ready?”

  I nod.

  The second he jumps out, a little girl in blue fires at him. His chest plate beeps. “Damn it! Gotta recharge.” He disappears.

  I stand here alone for a moment, then duck into a narrow passageway. I don’t see anyone, but they must be nearby. My heart starts beating faster now that I’m alone.

  Where’s Adam?

  I creep down hall after hall until somehow I’m standing right in front of the flashing blue base signal. For a few seconds I just look at it. Then I take aim and shoot. I feel a jolt of surprise when I hit it.

  Behind me there’s an electric gunshot noise. I duck and sneak down a hallway. I’m trying to find my home base, but every path looks the same. The hall begins to fill with white vapor so thick I can barely see. I start to feel the vague dread that comes when you’re blind and you know someone’s right beside you and you could get away if only you could see.

  I freeze, waiting for the fog to clear.

  When it does, there’s a figure in front of me. Charlie. Huge in the ice-blue helmet and gear. For a moment neither one of us moves. Then slowly he raises his rifle and shoots me in the head.

  MOM’S SHOUTING ANSWERS at the TV when I get home—she likes to feel superior to all the contestants on Family Feud. When she sees me, she smiles and grabs Connect Four while patting the couch next to her.

  “You’ve been busy these days,” she says after I take a seat. I’m pretty sure this is her way of fishing for information about Emerald, so I give a noncommittal “yeah.” She seems to get that the subject is off-limits, so she asks how Julian’s doing instead.