The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  But it wasn’t over. Sometime in the early morning my lungs started to open up a little. And by the end of the day a little more. And six weeks after that I was reciting the sixth rule in this very hall.

  Mr. Botts, two rows behind me, stands up to recite the third rule, about not using our knowledge to change anything. I remember him from our early tutoring sessions. Mrs. Connor, with the thinning hair and weird orange tunic, takes up the fourth, which is kind of an extension of the third. I forget how I know her.

  A guy named Mitch, who’s a star because he goes to Yale, recites the fifth one, the secrecy rule. That may be the rule we think of most often. The leaders are obsessed with the minutiae of it, with us fitting in and never letting anything slip that might give us away. But at times I seriously wonder, if one of us did let something slip, could anybody ever guess where we are from? And if they did, could they possibly believe it?

  The sixth and seventh rules, the ones about medical stuff, are recited by two people I don’t really know and who, like me, probably just barely survived those rules.

  I zone out on rules eight through eleven because a purple bead pops off my shoe and I scan the floor for it without appearing to. I’d frankly rather look anywhere than at the big screen up front, because for the finale they’ve left up the photo of Aaron Green, and I suspect that’s no coincidence. It’s a heartbreaking picture of a confused and well-meaning fourteen-year-old who tripped over his lies so clumsily they stopped him from going to school in the middle of last year. His teacher went to his house to check on him, and two days later he drowned in the Housatonic River on a rafting trip with his dad and his uncle. There was no ambulance, no emergency room. Mr. Green quietly followed the protocol; he called the special number he was supposed to call.

  I snap to attention for the twelfth rule. It is Mrs. Crew, the angel of death herself, who stands up to deliver it. She is about five feet tall and her hair looks like a cremini mushroom, but she still scares me. I swear she recites that rule staring directly at me.

  1. WE MUST UPHOLD ABSOLUTE ALLEGIANCE TO THE COMMUNITY, TO ITS SURVIVAL AND ITS SAFETY, AND ACCEPT THE GUIDANCE OF OUR LEADERS AND COUNSELORS WITHOUT QUESTION OR DISCUSSION.

  2. WE MUST RESPECT TIME’S INTEGRITY AND HER NATURAL SEQUENCE.

  3. WE MUST NEVER EMPLOY THE EXPERIENCE GAINED IN POSTREMO TO KNOWINGLY INTERVENE IN THAT NATURAL SEQUENCE.

  4. WE MUST NEVER CHALLENGE THAT SEQUENCE TO AVOID MISFORTUNE OR DEATH.

  5. WE MUST UPHOLD ABSOLUTE DISCRETION ABOUT POSTREMO, THE IMMIGRATION, AND THE COMMUNITY AT ALL TIMES AND IN ALL PLACES.

  6. WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION OR SUBMIT TO MEDICAL CARE OF ANY KIND OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY.

  7. WE MUST USE ONLY THE SERVICES PROVIDED BY OUR MEDICAL TEAM IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES AND EMPLOY THE EMERGENCY PROTOCOL IF REQUIRED.

  8. WE MUST AVOID INCLUSION IN THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVAL RECORD, WHETHER IN PRINT, PHOTOGRAPHY, OR VIDEO.

  9. WE MUST AVOID PLACES OF WORSHIP.

  10. WE MUST MAKE STRENUOUS EFFORTS TO FIT INTO SOCIETY AND NOT BRING ATTENTION TO OURSELVES OR OUR COMMUNITY IN ANY MANNER.

  11. WE MUST AVOID CONTACT WITH ANY INDIVIDUAL KNOWN TO US FROM POSTREMO WHO DID NOT TAKE PART IN THE IMMIGRATION.

  12. WE MUST NEVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DEVELOP A PHYSICALLY OR EMOTIONALLY INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH ANY PERSON OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY.

  TWO

  A bunch of us get takeout from a Chipotle around the corner from the former Pentecostal church and walk with it to Central Park. The ceremony has fallen on a Wednesday this year, so we’ve taken a vacation day. We eat it on the Great Lawn and kill a couple of hours between the end of the ceremony and the beginning of the semiannual “teen social.” Because our spirits are so light after the Rules Ceremony, why not have a party?

  It seems crazy, but that’s what we do. The night of the ceremony everybody in our community between the ages of fifteen and eighteen gets together and tries to fall in love with each other over dumb music and soggy chicken fingers. Good luck with that.

  Because if we’re going to love at all, or even like or lust, we have to do it with each other. See rule twelve. And it’s not just for our own safety, as the counselors are quick to point out. It’s for the health and safety of the people outside our community too. It’s not something you can even joke about. Not that we joke about so many things.

  At the park it’s me, Katherine, Jeffrey Boland, Juliet Kerr, Dexter Harvey and a few others who go to school in Rockland County. Jeffrey falls asleep in the sunshine, Dexter puts on his headphones, and Katherine and I go for a walk around the reservoir.

  “So hard to see Aaron’s face up there on the screen,” I say slowly, glancing at the side of Katherine’s face as we walk. I see the color blooming in her nearly transparent skin.

  Aaron lived around the corner from her. He had a little dog, a pug mix or something, named Paradox, that used to run to Katherine’s house every chance it got. Katherine worried about Aaron. It was harder for him than for most of the rest of us. Maybe I worried too. Katherine gave Aaron her old Mongoose BMX bike, and you always saw him riding around on it.

  I know how sensitive Katherine is, and I know she’ll hide everything she can, but I want to say something. I want to say at least one true thing.

  “He wasn’t much of a swimmer. He never was,” I add. It’s a morbid point for me to make. I realize that, but Katherine looks relieved because it’s my way of telling her that I’m not trying to be too honest here. I’m not trying to challenge anybody. I’m accepting the story of Aaron’s demise, as we all must, even though we know it is total bullshit.

  She smiles a tiny bit. I can see the tears welling in her eyes. I see her look up at the cherry blossoms spread like an awning over the bridle path. I can see how much she doesn’t want to cry.

  I reach for her hand. I hold it for a moment and let it go. She is the only person I can do that with.

  “They renamed his dog,” she says, so faintly I can barely hear her.

  “What?”

  “Aaron’s dad renamed his dog Abe. He doesn’t come to it.”

  We all meet up again on the Great Lawn and head twenty blocks uptown, where we’ve got the big upstairs party room of Big Sister’s Diner rented out. We usually have our gatherings in New York City because we all live within a thirty-mile radius of it and there’s a lot of good transportation, but even more because it’s so giant and chaotic it easily swallows everyone without a burp. We prefer not to be noticed.

  Tonight on the second floor of Big Sister’s there are streamers hanging and big foil pans of food laid out buffet-style and café tables set up around the room. Right at the front I see a few chaperones I recognize from other socials.

  “Prenna? Right?” A woman about my mother’s age with silver-and-black hair comes over as I’m taking off my jacket.

  “Yes … Mrs.…” I feel like I should know her name.

  “Sylvia Teller. From, uh … We live in Dobbs Ferry,” she says. She looks uncomfortable. My mind is leaping around nervously, and then I realize it’s just the usual reason. She was a friend of my father’s. They went to college or graduate school together. She is racking her brains for a contemporary connection between us, because those are the only kinds we can mention, and she can’t think of one.

  I know I resemble my father, who was striking-looking and who knew practically everybody. I can see that’s the first thing that comes into people’s heads when they look at me. I am tall like him and have his straight dark hair and wide, Asian cheekbones. I look nothing like my mother, who is small and blond, except for the silvery eyes. Nobody ever connects me with her at these events but only, uncomfortably, with a person who can’t be mentioned.

  I don’t want to feel sad. I go to the bathroom to wash my face and put on some lip gloss. I nearly slam into Cora Carter coming out of the bathroom and we both take a step back.

  “Hey, Prenna.” She smiles.

  “Cora. How’s it going?”
>
  We don’t kiss on the cheek or embrace or anything. The people in our community hardly ever touch each other.

  “Good.” She studies my outfit. “You look great. I love your belt.”

  I look down at it. “Thanks. You look great too.”

  “Did you see Morgan Lowry’s bow tie?” She looks delighted about it.

  “No. I just got here.” Morgan Lowry’s bow tie is what passes for outrageous with us. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Okay. Well, see you in there.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  I realize I stay one second too long on her eyes, and it makes her uncomfortable.

  I remember Cora from before. Everyone in our community came from roughly the same geographical area, and many of us knew each other in Postremo. We all have in common that we survived the plague, but none of us got through it unscarred. I remember the day Cora’s mother died. I remember her half-starved, half-crazy eyes when her aunt brought her and her brother to our house until the body could be looked after. I remember a few months later when her brother died too. I don’t want to remember these things right now, but I do. I have memories like this about at least a dozen of the kids here, and somewhere in them they have memories like this about me. Since we came here, the deepest conversation Cora and I have had is about my belt.

  “See you.” She waves awkwardly and disappears.

  I try to steel myself for a night of these kinds of conversations. Because these are the kinds of conversations taking place all over this room. No one talks about what really binds us together. The gap between what we say and what we feel is so big and dark that sometimes I think I’ll fall into it and just keep falling.

  At least, I think we feel it. I feel it. Does anybody else feel it? I don’t know and I won’t find out. We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn’t real.

  Sometimes I only hear what we don’t say. I only think the things I shouldn’t think and I remember what I should forget. I hear the ghosts in this room, all the people we lost in our old life who are crying out to be remembered. But we never do remember them. The whispers of things we feel and don’t say—I hear them too.

  Jeffrey puts a bunch of the little tables together, and a crowd of kids assembles, talking and flirting. He pulls a chair out for me and I sit down. I look at the people sitting around this circle. They are my friends. I care about them. This is my life. They are talking about their belts and their shoes and the car they want to get and the show they saw, and I can’t hear them because the ghosts are too loud.

  Around nine o’clock the chaperones help clear the tables to the sides of the room for dancing.

  Jeffrey gestures to me, so we dance to a sugary pop song. Other kids dance too. I see Katherine dancing with Avery Stone, who is a letch.

  If you pay attention, you see how awkward it is, how cautious and fearful we are of touching each other in the most casual ways. We can’t help it. We spent our tender years surrounded by plague. I see the regular kids at our high school always grabbing at each other and hugging people left and right. Not us. We have no path to walk between physical isolation and hooking up. There’s just the one and then the other, and I guess on account of the one, the other tends to be pretty jarring and impersonal.

  Adrian Pond asks me to dance. He holds me around the waist. He is tall and good-looking, and I don’t have any memories of him from our old life to haunt me. The song gets slower and he gets closer. His breath is warm in my ear.

  I want to feel something. I really do. But it’s only the absence I feel, just the wishing and wanting where there is nothing. I just feel lonely.

  I lean my cheek on Adrian’s shoulder. The lights over the buffet table blur and I close my eyes. I do something I should never, never do. I let myself think about someone else—a person I should never think about at a moment like this.

  For a few seconds I give in. I let myself imagine it is his cheek I feel on my hair. I imagine his hands on my waist. I imagine him holding me like somebody who really knows how to hold a person. I imagine lifting my head and seeing his eyes, which really know how to look at a person, and he is studying me in the perceptive way he does, wanting stories from me I never tell him and seeming to understand me anyway.

  It’s wrong, I know, but I play out this dance with him, exquisite and slow. I play it out in my head, because that is the only place it will ever happen.

  THREE

  “Hey, Ghouly. What’s with you?”

  I keep my eyes away. I work on the loose joint of my glasses. I can feel the blood heating my cheeks. If I look at him, I’m scared he’ll see everything.

  He nudges my foot with his. I pretend to be studying my notes very carefully.

  Mr. Fasanelli turns from the board, where he’s been chalking his way through a long calculus problem.

  I glance at Ethan’s fingers, his knee. Not his face. I should never have let myself think about him the way I did.

  He’s looking for something in his notebook. As soon as Mr. Fasanelli turns back to the board, he passes the notebook to me.

  It’s the hangman game we started last week. It’s already got its head and limbs.

  J? I write without looking up. I pass it back.

  Ethan gives the hangman a second chin.

  K?

  “Pren, you can’t just go through the alphabet in order,” he whispers at me. He draws moobs on the hangman.

  He succeeds in catching my eye. I let him hold it too long, and there passes all that I was avoiding: You okay? What’s the matter? Why won’t you look at me today?

  Flustered, I grab the notebook. Are there ANY letters in this word? I write.

  “Prenna, why don’t you take the next one?”

  I swing my head up. Mr. Fasanelli is staring at me. At the fat hangman. At me.

  I look at the problem on the board. I rise and trudge toward it.

  I can feel Ethan’s eyes on my back. And from the deeper seats, I feel Jeffrey’s eyes. Luckily, the bell rings to end the period before I have to do all billion steps of it.

  Ethan has the nerve to be smiling at me on our way out of class.

  I look down at the notebook. The hangman sprouted ear fuzz while I was suffering at the chalkboard.

  “It was ‘wormhole.’ ”

  I look at him.

  He points to the notebook. “The word. With letters.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “You should start with vowels, my friend.”

  “Thanks.”

  We hit the doors to the stairwell. Jeffrey is there too.

  “Can I talk to Prenna a minute?” Jeffrey says, overtaking us before we pass into the chaos of the cafeteria.

  Ethan glances at me. “That’s up to Prenna, isn’t it?”

  “Alone, I mean.”

  Jeffrey steers me toward the windows. “You should be careful,” he says.

  “I am careful.” I watch Ethan instantly get swallowed up in his pack of soccer team friends. I miss his attention when it’s gone. It is maybe the most astonishing thing I have. When I have it.

  “More careful.”

  “I am more careful.”

  “About Ethan.”

  I follow him out the doors to the walkway. Cherry blossom branches are waving along the walk, bits of flowers falling like pink rain. “We are friends.” I realize I don’t want to say Ethan’s name aloud.

  “Does he know that?”

  “Yes, I think he knows that we are friends.” It’s easy to play stupid with Jeffrey because he never really looks me in the eye.

  Jeffrey takes off his glasses and wipes the lenses with his shirt. “Does he know it’s not more than that?”

  “It never comes up. It won’t come up.”

  “You say that and I believe you. I’m just saying he might not see it the way you do.”

  I walk faster. “I can handle it,” I say. “We are allowed to have friends, y
ou know. We’re supposed to have friends. We’re supposed to fit in.”

  “We’re not supposed to have friends who look at us like that.”

  I stop. I look at the flower bits on the sidewalk, under our feet, floating in puddles of yesterday’s rain. I’m gripping my books so hard my hands are sweating. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  I can see Jeffrey feels bad. “Pren, I just don’t want you to …”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I don’t want them to …”

  “I know.”

  He glances around to make sure we are alone. “You know if any of these people find out the truth about us—no matter how nice and trustworthy they might seem—they will destroy you and destroy all of us.”

  How many times have I heard those words? “I know,” I say grimly.

  “Be careful?”

  “I’m careful.”

  Early that evening I hear the front door open and close. My mother is home, probably with dinner.

  I finish my physics problem set and head downstairs.

  Chicken, biscuits and coleslaw sit in bags on the kitchen counter. I get out two plates and two sets of silverware.

  “Just take whatever you want,” my mom calls from the front hall, where she is going through the mail. “I’ve got to finish confirming appointments for tomorrow. I’ll heat some up and have it later.”

  I leave the plates and silverware on the kitchen table. I’m hungry, but I’ll wait.

  Most teenage girls probably try to avoid having meals with their moms, but I’m the opposite. I’m always trying to corral mine into something that looks like a family dinner. The fact that my mom avoids it probably just makes me do it more. I guess a person rebels where she can.

  My father was the one who was so big on setting the table. He said family dinner was the backbone of civilization, and in our old life we sat down together night after night, five of us, then four of us, then three of us, even as the world was falling apart around us. That backbone didn’t hold up too well.