The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Ann Brashares

  Cover photograph © 2014 by Aleshyn Andrei/Shutterstock.com

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Produced by Alloy Entertainment

  randomhouse.com/teens

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brashares, Ann.

  The here and now / Ann Brashares.

  pages cm

  Summary: Seventeen-year-old Prenna, an immigrant who moved to New York when she was twelve, came from another time and she and the other travelers must follow strict rules to avoid destroying the new life they have worked so hard to get, as well as the one person Prenna is desperate to protect.

  ISBN 978-0-385-73680-0 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-385-90629-6 (glb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-307-97615-4 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-385-39008-8 (intl. tr. pbk.) [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Community life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 6. Time travel—Fiction. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B73759Her 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For dear Isaiah, captain of family time travel.

  And for the smart, patient, generous editorial team without whom this book would not be: Josh Bank, Beverly Horowitz, Wendy Loggia, Leslie Morgenstein, Sara Shandler, Katie Schwartz, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Thank you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

  If time travel were possible, we’d be inundated with tourists from the future.

  —Stephen Hawking

  PROLOGUE

  April 23, 2010

  Haverstraw Creek

  His dad had to work, so Ethan had gone fishing alone. Usually he just followed his dad through the woods to the deep bends of the creek, slapping at the prickers around his ankles. This time he was confounded by how little he knew his way even though he’d been here again and again. After today, though, he’d know.

  When he finally came upon the river, it was a different part than he’d seen before, but same water, he thought. Same fish. He put his pack down, baited his hook and made a good cast. It was different when he was alone and his cast was for catching a fish instead of showing his father he knew how.

  He listened to the water and tended his line and considered the stillness of the air. Except for that one part over there. Downstream it seemed like the air was moving. He squinted at it, then opened his eyes wide and closed them again, wondering if he’d wash out the strange impression that the air was rippling over the stream. But it still looked like that, more like that, air moving and scattering in a way that he could see.

  He edged downstream, pulling his line along. As he walked he could see far past the bend to a footbridge. And at that distance the air and the leaves were still. But here the air moved faster and seemed to quiver like the water. As he moved slowly toward it the air took on a strange texture. He squinted again and saw in amazement how the sunshine seemed to refract into colors around him. He walked a few more steps and felt the air moving faster over his skin, almost like liquid but softer. He wanted to focus on pieces of the splintering light, but it was all moving too fast.

  He lost hold of his fishing rod as the liquid of the air seemed to blur and blend with the liquid of the stream, pulling him inside the brew. He lost his hold on what was above and what was below, what was sky and what was earth, what there was to breathe, or even where his body began and ended. The odd thing was, he didn’t feel the urgent need to find out. It was like a lucid dream in that he occupied no part of the world he’d seen before, but he knew he would wake up from it.

  He had no idea how time passed, whether there was a big cascade of it or almost none at all. But at some point the spinning churn of river and air coughed him onto firm ground, and slowly the elements went back to their ordinary places. He closed his eyes for a time, and when he opened them again, the river was mostly in its banks, and the air went back to being invisible and the sunshine had reassembled itself. He sat up and gradually reoriented himself to basics like up and down. The storm produced a scoured, sparkling look through the trees, and it also produced a girl.

  She was almost certainly part of his dream in that she was not quite made of regular-girl substance. The outlines of her weren’t quite distinct. She was the kind of girl he would dream up because she was approximately his age, her skin was bare except for the dark wet streamers of hair around her body, and she was supernaturally beautiful, like a mermaid or an elvish princess. Because he imagined her he felt it was okay to stare boldly at her.

  But as he did it dawned on him that her arms were clutched around her body like she was cold and also embarrassed. Her legs were muddy up to her knees. He could hear her rough breathing. The longer he stared, the more details she accumulated, the more distinct her lines became, until he began to suspect she was real and that he shouldn’t keep looking at her like that.

  He stood up, trying to keep his eyes mostly down. A couple more glances convinced him that, though the air around her remained oddly charged, she wasn’t a nymph of his invention, but a shivering skinny girl with muddy feet and a weird bruise spreading from the inside of her arm.

  “Are you okay? Do you need help?” he asked. It was hard coming back from the dream. She’d been swimming maybe, and had gotten pulled downstream by the storm. It was awfully cold to be swimming.

  She didn’t say anything. He tried to keep his gaze fixed on her face. Her eyes were big and her mouth was pressed shut. He heard the drip, drip, drips from the leaves around them. The sound of her trying to catch her breath. She shook her head.

  “You sure?”

  She shook it again. She looked like she was afraid to move.

  She was real, but she was faintly different from anyone else, and not only because she wore no clothes. She was still beautiful.

  He unzipped his damp New York Giants sweatshirt and held it out, taking a few steps toward her. “Do you want it?”

  She shook her head, but she hazarded a look at it and then at him.

  He took another couple of steps. “Seriously. You can keep it if you want.”

  He held it close to her, and
after thinking a bit longer she shot out her arm and took it. He now saw that the blotch on her knobby arm wasn’t a bruise at all, but a scrawl of black writing. There were numbers, five of them written by hand with a marker or something.

  He looked away as she put on the sweatshirt and zipped it all the way up to her chin. She took steps backward, away from him. In his mind a dark feeling was coalescing that she had been though something difficult.

  “I have a phone. Do you want to use it?”

  She opened her mouth, but there was a space before any words came out. “No.” Breath, breath. “Thanks.”

  “Do you need help?” he asked her. “Are you lost?”

  She looked around anxiously. She opened her mouth again but again hesitated to say anything. “Is there a bridge?” she finally mustered.

  He pointed downstream. “If you walk that way, you’ll see it right after the bend,” he told her. “Do you want me to show you?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She looked sure. She stole one more glance at him, as though willing him to stay put, and took off toward the bridge.

  He wanted to go with her, but he didn’t. He watched her stumble off through the trees in his blue Giants sweatshirt, looking overwhelmed by the tangled branches and the knotty roots and the mud and the bushes grabbing at her.

  Once she looked back at him over her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he heard her say faintly before she disappeared.

  He stayed on the bank of the creek for hours before he went home. He looked for his fishing rod but didn’t really expect to find it. He waited to see if the girl might come back, but he didn’t really expect her to, and she didn’t.

  Through dinner and deep into the night he thought about what he’d seen. Finally he got out of bed and, picturing her skinny, shivering arm, copied from memory the numbers: 51714. Because he knew they had to be important in some way.

  For the next two and a half years Ethan thought of that day so often his memory began to warp. So much that he began to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing after all. Until the first day of his sophomore year, when the very girl, now clothed, walked into his precalculus class and sat down one seat behind him.

  May 18, 2010

  Dear Julius,

  The earth sweats in the morning. Really. You can go outside here almost anytime, just like Poppy said. I like to lie down on the grass in the backyard and wait for the sun to come up. Even if there’s sunshine for days, still the back of my shirt is damp, as though rain is wept from the ground.

  Mr. Robert and Ms. Cynthia and a few others are in charge of most of the kids. They are trying to teach us how to fit in and always making us be EXTRA careful. Remember hearing about TV? Well, we watch it all the time to learn the right way to talk. One show is called Friends. People in the background are laughing the whole time and you don’t even know why. The one I like is called Family Guy, but Mr. Robert said I’m not going to learn anything from that.

  I’m worried because I haven’t seen Poppy yet. Ms. Cynthia said he decided not to come at all, but I don’t believe that. He wanted to come more than anyone.

  Love,

  Prenna

  ONE

  April 23, 2014

  We all know the rules. We think about them every day. How could we not know them? We learned them by heart before we came here, and they’ve been drilled into our heads by constant use ever since.

  But still we sit, nearly a thousand of us, on plastic benches in a former Pentecostal church (desanctified in the 1990s, I don’t know why) listening to our twelve inviolate rules recited over a crackling PA system by nervous community members in their best clothes.

  Because it’s what we do. We do it every year to commemorate the extraordinary trip we all took together four years ago: our escape from fear and sickness and hunger, our miraculous arrival in this land of milk and honey. It’s a trip that almost certainly had never happened before and, based on the state of the world when we left it, will never happen again. So April 23 is kind of like our Thanksgiving, but without the turkey and pumpkin pie. It is also, coincidentally, the day Shakespeare was born. And died.

  We do it because it’s easy to forget amid all the sweetness and fatness of this place that we don’t belong here, that we pose a danger to it. That’s why the rules are critical and the consequences of forgetting them are grave. It’s like any strict religious or political system. When your practices are hard to follow, you’d better keep reminding your flock of them.

  I put my feet flat on the floor as the projector hums to action at the back of the hall, cutting a beam through the dark air and slowly illuminating the first face on the wide screen that hangs behind the old altar. It takes a moment for the shadows and shapes to become a person, to become someone I know or don’t know. It’s hard to watch this, but they always do it: as we recite the rules they show the faces of the people we lost since the last time we met here. It’s like the “in memoriam” tribute you see on the Academy Awards or the Grammys, but also … it’s not. This year there are seven of them. There’s no explanation or commentary. They just scroll through these faces again and again. But most of us have a sense of the story behind each face. We understand, without saying so, the overrepresentation of the fragile, the wayward and the incompliant members of our community up there on that screen.

  My mother glances at me as Dr. Strauss stands up from the dais at the front to recite the first rule, the one about allegiance.

  The rules are never displayed, never even written down on a piece of paper. That’s not how we do things. We’ve gone back to an oral tradition.

  I try to listen. I always do, but the words have been stirred around so many times they’ve lost their particular order and shape in my ears. They’ve melted and dissolved into a chaotic mix of impressions and anxieties.

  Dr. Strauss is one of the leaders. There are nine of them and twelve counselors. The leaders make the policy and the counselors hand it down to us and translate it into our daily lives. We are each assigned to a counselor. Mine is Mr. Robert. He’s sitting up there too.

  A girl near the back in a green dress stands to recite the second rule, about the sequence of time. Heads politely turn.

  It’s an honor to get to recite one. Like landing a part in the Christmas pageant. I was chosen once, three years ago. My mom dressed me in her gold ballet flats and her most expensive silk scarf. She mashed rouge into my cheeks. I got to say the sixth one, about never submitting to medical attention outside the community.

  After the girl speaks, we all turn back to the front, obediently awaiting rule number three.

  The black-and-white face of Mrs. Branch now takes its turn up on the screen. She was an acquaintance of my mother’s, and I know she died of breast cancer that barely got treated. The photo doesn’t exactly hark back to happier times. It looks like it was taken on the day she got her diagnosis. I look away. Briefly I catch the eyes of my friend Katherine a few rows behind.

  I find it’s hard to figure out from watching the leaders fanned out on the dais which one of them is really in charge. No one will tell you, but I think I know. I think this because of something that happened to me when I was thirteen, not long before my turn at reciting the sixth rule.

  It was around nine months after we’d gotten here. I was still disoriented, still way too skinny, still watching TV to learn how to talk and act. I hadn’t started going to school yet. I was having chronic breathing problems. My mom said it was really incredibly fortunate that somebody with asthma got to make the trip at all. She said something about my “enhanced IQ” making up for it, but barely. We tried to pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was.

  And then in February I caught a bad cold and it turned into pneumonia. My mother knew this almost certainly because she is an MD and keeps a stethoscope in her bathroom drawer. A couple of other members of our community’s medical team came over. I was pretty whacked by that point. I was using an inhaler and they w
ere pumping me full of antibiotics and steroids and God knows what else. There was an oxygen monitor clipped to my finger, and I know it was dipping too low. I struggled. My lungs couldn’t take in enough air. It’s a horrible feeling, in case you’ve never had it.

  By the second night it had gotten dire. I was completely out for some stretches, but I saw the look on my mother’s face. She was shouting. She wanted to take me to a hospital. She said a simple ventilator for one night was all it would take to save my life. I guess we didn’t have one in our community clinic then; we were still pretty new here. But putting me in a regular hospital wasn’t something any of them would even consider because of the danger we pose to them, to regular people who were born here, who have different immunities than we do. And because what if, in taking my medical history or getting too close a look at my blood under a microscope, a doctor or a nurse started asking questions?

  “There’s no need for her to die!” I heard my mother crying from the next room. She was begging them, promising she would watch over everything, she wouldn’t let anyone else care for me. No blood tests, no diagnostics. She would figure out a way to do it, to keep everything secret and safe.

  Sometime later Mrs. Crew arrived. I could feel the mood shift in the house, even deep in my oxygen-poor brain. The screaming and cajoling stopped and there was just this lulling voice from the next room. For a few moments I was strangely alert, strangely cogent, listening as she calmly talked my mother down. “After all we have sacrificed, Molly. After all we have been through …” My mother left the room and I heard my counselor, Mr. Robert, talking to Mrs. Crew instead. I felt like I was listening to them from a perch on the ceiling, like I was already dead, as she coolly explained to him the procedure for dealing with my body, the issuance of a death certificate and the proper strategy for handling what remained of my identity in the state and federal databases. They had created our identities here; they could take them away. Finally she offered him some injection or pill or something like that. “The angel of death,” she called it in a low voice, to make my passing more comfortable. She assured him she would stay until it was over.