The Unquiet

  I don’t think they expect us to live long at all. I don’t think they want us to.

  But how long past the war do we have?

  Chapter 26

  When I step out of Miss Odette’s office a few days later, he is waiting for me. The rude guy from before. I almost do not see him in the dark and curse the fact that I never remember to bring a light despite the fact that the hallway has been dark for months. “What cardboard face?” he asks, and I jump.

  When his flashlight comes on, I hold up my hand to shield my eyes. “What cardboard face?” he asks again, in that same barking voice.

  This time I do not hesitate. “Well, I’d imagine that it’s cardboard since it only has the one angry look. I figured it was either that or plastic surgery.” He splutters. I take the opportunity to add: “If you were a person on the street I was walking past, I would still greet you. I don’t know why you had to be such an asshole.”

  I leave him standing there, gaping at me, and think that I will never see him again. But a few weeks later we’re in front of the shop at the same time again. This time he pulls an apple out of his bag. “Here,” he says without meeting my eyes. “I’ve got this if you’re hungry.”

  I feel the confusion flood my face. “You’re trying to feed me?” I ask after a moment, holding the apple as if it were poisoned.

  The guy shrugs. He looks embarrassed all of a sudden. “You look like you need it.”

  I recognize an insult when I hear it. I throw his apple onto the road. I pull my patched-up coat tighter around my body, and I walk away without looking back.

  The next time, a box of biscuits. Which I actually don’t mind, but they meet the same fate as the apple. Though this time he walks with me. He is still holding the skateboard in his hand, and I shake my head. “You’re a very confusing person, you know.”

  “I know,” he says, staring at me, and then he sighs dramatically. “This is me trying to apologize here. I realize I was rude when we first met.”

  “Okay,” I say, taken aback. When there doesn’t seem to be a catch, I add, “Apology accepted.”

  He holds out his hand, and when I shake it, he smiles. “Great. See? And now we’ll get along.”

  “Oh, I doubt it,” I say, pulling my hand back. “Anyway, why do you have that?”

  He follows my eyes to his skateboard. “This? I’d never had one before. You ever wake up and have one of those days when you think, Oh, crap, I’m twenty-three, and I’ve never even been on a skateboard. Or a bike. Or a horse. And you’re shocked because you always thought you were more interesting?”

  I give him a blank look. He shrugs and runs his hand down the skateboard. “It seemed like something I should have, so I just walked into a store and bought the first one I saw. You see, I’ve decided to renovate my life. I quit my job, got a haircut, bought a skateboard, started writing a play.”

  We walk until the flower shop is out of view. I glance skeptically at the skateboard again and then at his shiny leather shoes. “So, how good are you?”

  “Good?” he asks, and then he understands that I am still talking about the skateboard. He makes a face. “Oh, I’m not actually going to get on it. God. I would never do that.”

  A smile escapes my lips, unbidden. Who buys a skateboard just so he can carry it around while wearing a suit and expensive shoes? “I can’t decide whether you’re fifty or ten,” I say.

  He laughs. “That’s good,” he says. “It means you’re wondering about me. Which means that I’m already more interesting than I used to be.” Before I can say anything to contradict him, he turns off onto a different street. “See you later.” When he walks away, he limps a little and grimaces, as if he’s in pain. He might be wearing an expensive suit and holding a skateboard, but he’s toothpick thin underneath. I suddenly understand that this might be more than friendliness. He might be a sick sleeper looking for someone to care for him, one of the jobs Miss Odette told me would be a possibility. And I’ve probably failed his test.

  Good.

  I stare until he rounds a corner and then decide to forget about him.

  I ride my bicycle toward the orchards and pick Cecily up from school. “I’m in the mood for some crazy,” she says gravely the moment she sees me. I have no idea where she comes up with these things. We spend half the ride home trying to come up with her crazy, with me fending off everything that crosses over from crazy to suicidal. Finally Cecily is sitting on my shoulders while I ride my bicycle, and she tells me it makes her feel like a flying bird. “Faster, faster,” she shrieks. “Lira, why are you going so slow? This is basically nothing.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry that you’re basically about to break my neck,” I say. Her schoolbag swings into my cheek. “What’s your problem anyway?”

  “I live for the thrills, Lira,” she says slowly, superiorly. “You wouldn’t understand. Mathieu says his brother is going to jump from a plane tomorrow afternoon and land on his feet. Because that’s what people do in the city. They live for the thrills.”

  I squint at her. “Yeah, you know, most people who say that never get the chance to say that they shouldn’t have.”

  She is quiet for a while, and I make the mistake of thinking that it’s because we’re almost home. But just as we reach the orchards, she begs me to put her down. Suddenly I’m chasing her past the trees. I know where she is going even before we reach it. The river breaks off into a stream that has formed a small lake behind our house, that we sometimes sit by in the summer. “Just one quick swim,” Cecily pleads, even as I argue with her. “Just one. Philip, tell her.”

  I turn around and find Philip standing there, frowning at the water. He has a bucket of soil in his hands, which means he has been helping Da all day. Then he looks at me. Cecily has him wrapped around her little finger like thread, so I know even before he does that he will grab my little sister and jump into the water with her. I resign myself to it and sit by the lake, watching Cecily wade in. But Philip doesn’t join her; he joins me. Sits beside me and yells to Cecily, “We’ll watch you from here.” She waves, and he waves back, laughs when she does a somersault. He grimaces when the water splashes him, but then he jumps up and applauds Cecily wildly, and she laughs. But he doesn’t go anywhere near her. Or the lake.

  I try not to let my hands shake. I force a smile and look away, pull a fresh blade of grass from its sheath.

  Because I know the boy she loved is dead.

  Chapter 27

  What would you do if Da died today?

  How would you feel if Gigi was killed?

  What about Cecily?

  That time is coming. Are you still ready to do what you must, soldier?

  Yes.

  At any moment?

  I have not changed, miss.

  Chapter 28

  Today I am wearing a dress that Julia brought from her house. A simple blue cotton dress that she saw, that made her think of me. I am offended as I strip out of my clothes, but she laughs. “I just mean,” she says, “that you like simple things. And the color makes your eyes stand out. There’s no boy in his right mind who won’t go mad, and yet there is nothing to it. It’s just a plain blue dress. The next time we go to the movies you have to wear this.”

  I stare at myself in the mirror after I am dressed. I have no idea what she is talking about. My eyes are exactly the same. But I humor her. She is trying to have something in common with me, and it is not her fault that I am as boring as I look. “Thank you,” I say, running my hands over the dress. It is open and low at the back, with a large bow that cinches it to my waist. The front might be plain, but the back is the opposite. Aunt Imogen would approve.

  “I’ve got some earrings and makeup here, too,” Julia says, clapping her hands. But she must see the way my shoulders droop because she hesitates. The others—Davis and the two Robbies—leave me alone for the most part, but it is different with Julia. She plays the part of a typical teenager too well, and it is hard for me to keep up. Tomorrow she
might bring a board game she wants to play with me or ask me to braid her hair like we did in the cottages.

  I am trying, but being her friend is exhausting.

  Edith walks into the bedroom with a fresh pot of tea to refill the mugs the three of us have been drinking from. She takes one look at me, eyeing Julia’s makeup bag with horror, and laughs because somehow she understands the things I cannot say. She sets the teapot on the dresser. “Poor Lira. I don’t think there’s anything she hates more than getting dressed up.”

  “Oh,” Julia says sadly, and puts her bag away. Tomorrow she might try again but today gives up on me. “Well, I should go home, I guess. My parents are probably expecting me.”

  “Maybe we can go see a movie . . . soon.” I croak the words out. “So I’ll wear this dress.”

  Julia smiles at me. “Okay,” she says, and I feel bad. I don’t know what she wants from me.

  “I invited her into the group because of you,” Edith says when she’s gone.

  “Me?”

  She smiles at my surprise. “You were so good at protecting her at the cottages. I’m sure you were hoping no one would notice, but I did.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

  “No? My mistake, I guess.” But she doesn’t sound as if she believes her own words. I don’t want to disappoint this flawed memory of me she has, so I say nothing else. I listen instead to her talking about how she and Julia live in the city near each other and how they accidentally run into each other sometimes. At the same supermarket or on a walk. It has become a game for them. They have special signals—secret winks and hand gestures and coughs. “There was a time,” Edith says, her eyes glowing, “months ago when we were standing on opposite ends of an aisle making plans for a movie with our special gestures. Some little boy walked by, saw us, and ran off screaming to fetch his mother. I guess he thought we were crazy or something. Julia was so shocked she knocked a stack of cans over and landed on top of them.”

  “And you?” I ask.

  She waves me off nonchalantly. “I left her there, of course. I heard the boy’s mother yelling at her for making obscene gestures at her son while I was hightailing it out. Julia pretended she was deaf and couldn’t understand a thing.”

  We both laugh.

  It has been six weeks since my first time at the farmhouse and only two weeks since our night of dares. I have been back every chance I could get. Most days there is no Robbie (girl or boy), there is no Gray or even Davis. They are usually out completing their missions, especially Robbie and Gray, who always seem to have the most work.

  Edith and I are now lying on the bed with our feet hanging over. We’re staring up at the cracks in the roof, lazy and wordless. We do this sometimes. Julia cannot understand it when we do this. I get the sense that she does not appreciate her friend being stolen away, and I wonder what Edith is like without me. But each time I try to find out, she’ll pull up a chair or ask my opinion on a book or song.

  When Gray walks into the room, we are playing a game like one we played when we were at the cottages. Madame would divide us into groups and then write a list of things on a piece of paper. On bad days the list consisted of horrible things like punches, no dinners, sleeping outside, no shoes for a week, washing duties for a month. And then Madame would pass the list around and make us assign each thing to someone in our group, right to her face. And the people with the most votes had to do whatever they’d been assigned. I was no longer friends with Alex, Gray, and Edith at this point, but Madame felt there were other friendships that needed to end. To break. Most of us had caught on to this by then. We would see that Jenna and Annie still talked to each other, so we would give Jenna the punches (from Annie), and Annie would sleep outside.

  It was a horrible game, but over time it became one we liked. A way to settle any differences, especially among the boys. We would play it even when Madame was not around. The skeleton game, we called it. The boys would have physical fights with one another, but with us girls it was all about how cruel we could be: Martha was not allowed to brush her hair for a week, no matter what, and for ten days I could not bathe with soap. I looked homeless, smelled worse. But one of the meanest things we ever did was to a girl named Naomi. A group of us held her down while each one of her former friends wrote down what they really thought of her on her skin with black markers. She tried to wash it off afterward—the word Ugly—but it was there for days, and it is entirely possible that it is still there now, hidden underneath her skin.

  But Madame was pleased with us. Her game worked well, and we were no longer friends. For us, though, we liked the game because being hurt by the other cottage girls and not letting it break us was our way of showing strength.

  In our modified version of the game, Edith and I trade in pinches. It is not horrible, but it hurts. She tells me a single thing about what she’s done in her life that I do not know about, and I decide whether it is worth a pinch or not. A pinch means I don’t find it interesting. Then I tell her something about mine. The longer the game progresses, the harder the pinches, until either one of us manages to draw blood or begs to stop.

  “My alternate has been taking riding classes since she was eleven,” she says. “I have a horse named Barnacle, but we’ve never won any races together. I love him anyway.”

  I consider this for a moment. The cracks in the ceiling seem to grow bigger. I turn and pinch her hard and for as long as possible, until she howls and shoves me away. We’ve both got red welts along our arms, but when Gray comes in, we stop. The room is dark, and we pretend to be part of the lumpy bed. He shrugs out of his jacket, shirt, tosses them on the floor, and finds another clean shirt in the cupboard. His arms are covered in bruises. Then, without even looking at us, he says, “I can see you, you know.”

  Edith and I giggle. The sound is so strange it makes me giggle even harder. We’re like little girls. The kind of little girls we never got to be. “Is that the shirt you’re planning on wearing?” I ask Gray. “Wait, I’ve got something better.” I stand and twirl in my dress. “It’ll bring out your eyes, and you won’t understand why because it’s so simple. All the boys will come running. Or is it girls? I think Julia said it only works on the boys, so if you’re looking for a girl . . .” I shrug.

  He doesn’t seem all that interested in any of it. I tell myself that that’s Gray being Gray, but it suddenly seems a lot harder to reach the bed in the dark. I don’t realize just how hard it is until he is catching me just before I hit the floor.

  “Don’t,” he says softly, eyes on mine in the dark, as though I might have any control over gravity. His fingers are wrapped tightly around my waist, but he lets me go almost as quickly. As if the skin underneath my dress were made of fire. Edith is watching us with interest. My cheeks heat up, and I look away. I must be full of imagination today. Gray squints at us both, and then he sniffs the air, walking right over to the mugs sitting on the dresser. “Have you been drinking?”

  “No,” I say, straightening. “We’ve only had tea.”

  But he’s frowning at his sister. “Did you get her drunk, Edith?”

  Edith doesn’t meet either of our eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. She’s less wound up.”

  Gray shakes his head. “Did you ever think that she might be wound up for a reason? She’s got a family, a kid at home, for crying out loud. What’s she supposed to tell them?”

  “Sister, not kid.” I correct him, but I am suddenly distrustful of everything I am saying, everything I have said in the past hour. Gray is right: I do not get drunk. The whole staying-on-guard thing does not work otherwise. I sit back down on the bed, saying nothing to Edith, hands clenched at my sides. I listen to Gray and Edith argue for a few moments before I stumble into the kitchen and put a pot on the stove for coffee. Even from here I can hear them.

  “You can’t do things like that to her,” Gray is saying. “You’re supposed to be getting her to trust you.”

  “It’s not that easy,
” Edith replies, and her voice fades out.

  I clench my fists at my sides again. They are talking about me like I am a game. Like I am something they have to accomplish. I’m going to leave the moment the alcohol wears off.

  I am standing at the stove when I hear muffled laughter coming through the wall on the other side of the kitchen. Which is strange because Edith, Gray, and I are the only ones here. Julia left, and the two Robbies and Davis don’t come until evening. I follow the sound and wind up at the bathroom, but it’s empty.

  I return to the kitchen, vowing never to drink again.

  By the time my coffee is ready the fight is over. Edith convinces Gray to play the skeleton game with us.

  He is sitting on the bed, waiting, when I enter the room. “But I can’t stay long,” he says, watching me.

  I sit on the dresser. My hands are still in fists, but I say, “I never throw out my old paintbrushes. I initial them with the last date I ever used them, and then I save them in a box without washing the color off the brush so I remember the last thing I painted with them. My grandfather says they are like commas instead of full stops.” I take a huge gulp of my coffee, even though it’s too hot.

  Edith still isn’t meeting my eyes. “My father wants me to apply to medical school next year.”

  “That’s not a thing,” I say automatically. What her father wants tells me nothing about what she wants.

  She scowls. “Yes, it is. Gray, what’s yours?”

  Her brother pretends not to notice the tension between us. “I really like my truck,” he says. “It’s not new, but it has yet to disappoint me.”

  I put my coffee mug down. I climb off the dresser and walk over. We both pinch Gray. For every single one of his responses, which are small, superficial things about his truck, his boots. He gives nothing about himself away. The less he says, the more intrigued I am. Who is this boy? “This was never going to be a fair game, was it?” he says afterward, clutching his side and pretending we ripped his skin right off. “Come on, I’ll give you and your bike a ride back into the city.”