by Cote Smith
“I pretended I was them. It was easy. I just used as few words as possible.” He passed Emile a spotless pan. “I don’t understand. Do you want to get kicked out?” Emile didn’t say anything. “You were with Austin again?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m glad you have a friend, even if he is a jerk.” Jacob took his hands out of the sink, told Emile to finish up. “Just be careful, there’s knives in the water.”
The next morning Austin was waiting for Emile in the school parking lot. Jacob parked next to Austin. Emile got out with his brother. Austin was still wearing his work overalls, which were soiled at the knees and looked damp everywhere. His face was grimy with dirt. He left the truck running.
Jacob looked Austin over. He did not approve. “You all right?” he asked Emile.
“We’re fine,” Austin said. “Buzz off, track star.”
Jacob walked away, shaking his head.
“What’s going on?” Emile said.
Austin looked around nervously. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday. Do you forgive me?”
“It’s fine. Are you okay?”
“I told her,” Austin said. “You know, that I was weird too. I thought she would understand. More than him.”
A car full of students pulled up next to them. All Austin’s friends, all Emile’s foes. They stared.
“I gotta go, all right? She’s probably looking for me. But I’ll meet you at the tree tonight. Bring a bag.”
“What?”
“Here,” Austin said, and handed Emile a folded note. “This is all you need to know.”
He hopped in his truck and drove off before Emile could say yes or no, before he could even think to look inside Austin’s mind. Emile decided not to read the note right away. He would save it until after school. Otherwise, he would be distracted the entire day, tempted to ditch, assuming that’s what Austin wanted. And maybe Jacob was right: there were only so many times Emile could screw things up before he felt the consequences. What would he do if he got kicked out of school?
He tucked Austin’s note into his American History textbook. That afternoon in Ginny’s class, they sat in a circle again, the seat next to Emile noticeably empty. Two of the boys from the parking lot grinned in his direction. They whispered to each other and laughed. Terrible names popped up in their thoughts, worse than usual. Emile tried to filter the noise out, but the hate behind their words was stronger too. He felt his own anger rising in response. He stared straight ahead, told himself to focus on Ginny’s lecture. Something about a final project. She used the word capstone, something they would present at the end of the semester, a little over a month away.
“The subject is your choice. This is your education. But it should reflect a mind driven by inquiry and interconnection. Ask a question that isn’t being asked. Show us why your answer matters. How we’re all a part of it, whether we realize it or not.”
Emile glanced at the empty seat next to him. He could almost hear Austin say, Give me a break. He couldn’t wait to tell him about class tonight, about what strange things Ginny said. He would make his new friend laugh, there in the dark, by the tree, and take away the pain that plagued him. Then, when Austin was ready, Emile could ask him what was wrong. They could talk about Austin’s family, his mother or father, if they were the problem. He could become someone Austin could talk to, if, like Emile, he didn’t have anyone else. And maybe someday, in return, Emile could share his own stories. About Jacob, the guardians. About his mother. He could even tell him about himself, what made him different. Austin could be the first person Emile shared his secret with.
Ginny passed out the assignment sheet. Emile folded it in half and opened his textbook to place it next to Austin’s note, but the note wasn’t there. Immediately he felt his face flush. He checked his pockets, beneath his seat. His heart drummed in his ears. Ginny carried on. “Part of your assessment will be based on how well you demonstrate an open mind. Will you put aside your preconceived notions? Will you let the research take you where the research wants to go?”
Emile slumped in his seat, retracing his steps that day. If he was lucky, the note was at the bottom of his locker. But he could have lost it at any time. He could have dropped it anywhere. Anyone could have picked it up.
Something inside Emile made him want to skip the rest of school and run directly to Lost 80, even though Austin wanted to meet him at night, for reasons he didn’t explain. Maybe it was safer then, to meet where and when no one could see them.
Ginny finished going over the assignment.
“Do you have any questions?” she said.
No one raised their hand.
She shook her head. “That’s not a good start.”
* * *
Emile lied to Jacob that evening. He had his brother drop him off at the library after dinner, claiming he wanted to get a head start on his capstone project, then snuck out the back and made his way to Lost 80. It was a cold, long walk. The sun had fallen quickly and took with it any memory of warmth. By the time Emile arrived at the park, his hands were numb inside his coat pockets, where they sat balled up into fists.
He did not see Austin’s truck. Perhaps he was early. Maybe the note specified a time, or a specific part of the park where they would meet. Emile assumed Austin would wait by their tree. He walked there. No one. He ran his hand over the carved verse. Frost had settled on the tree, giving each letter a velvet touch. Emile whispered the words he’d carved, as if they were a magical spell that would make his friend appear.
It didn’t work. He waited. He sat down and leaned against the tree. He dared himself to close his eyes, just to see what would happen. When he did, he heard something. A voice. No, voices. Fevered, roaring. Violent. He sprung up and ran in their direction. The closer he got, the more the voices grew. Or, not grew exactly. Changed. They weren’t louder. They were more forceful.
Emile stumbled into a clearing, where he found three men, huddled together, hurling names and slurs at someone unseen. Worse than anything Emile had ever been called.
One of the men turned and saw Emile. Though it wasn’t a man at all. It was a boy, one of Austin’s supposed friends.
“Hey, look,” the boy said, “it’s the boyfriend.”
The others turned. The moon was bright enough that Emile could see all of their faces. Art, one of the snickering boys from Ginny’s class, stood between two other boys from the school parking lot. Emile had fought them all before, bloodied all their noses, and they his.
The biggest one, Bill, stepped forward. “That what you’re doing here, huh? Looking for your date?” Another muttered the same slurs Emile had already heard, threw in a few curses for good measure. “The thing is, I don’t think he’s up for it. Doesn’t look so hot to me.”
Emile didn’t understand. Not until Art, less resolved than the others, let his guilt in. Emile saw Art wanting the others to stop as they punched and kicked. He saw Art’s hand reach out to pull them away, but he wasn’t strong enough.
“Move,” Emile said, and he walked into Bill, who blocked the way for a second before stepping aside. Emile saw what he knew he would see. Austin, lying on the ground. His head was turned to the side. His arms clutched his chest, shielding himself, maybe, or trying to hold what was left of his beaten body together. Emile stepped to the other side of him. He saw Austin’s face, dark and bloodied, almost beyond recognition. One eye was swollen shut. The other hung open, white and lifeless.
“We found your note,” Bill said. “Guess you dropped it. Real romantic.”
Austin was unconscious. Emile heard nothing from him. He kneeled down and put his hand to his friend’s chest to check his breath. His shirt was damp and reeked of urine.
“Let me read a snippet: You’re the only one who gets me. How is that?” Bill crumpled the note into a ball, threw it at Austin’s motionless body. “Makes me fucking sick.”
Emile lowered his head. How did he not hear it? How could he have not realize
d it before?
Art spoke up. “We were just going to mess with him. But he got so mad.”
“He was gonna run away with you,” Bill said. “To San Francisco or some shit? Or was it Jonestown?”
Emile stood up. He turned to the boys, his classmates, his peers.
“Ask me, his mom did the right thing, kicking his faggot ass out of the house.”
Emile stepped toward Bill, who boasted a bloody lip from where Austin must’ve fought back. Bill straightened his back. “Go ahead,” Bill said. “Austin was ten times tougher than you. Now look at him.” He puffed out his chest and clenched his fists, but Emile felt the hesitation, even as two of the other boys egged Bill on.
“Are you sure?” Emile said. “You don’t seem sure. You seem afraid.”
“Screw you,” Bill said, but the wave of fear rose higher. He tried to ignore it, to manufacture the hate he’d relied on earlier. He called on what he’d been told all his life, about sissies like Austin. Emile tilted his head and listened carefully. He heard Bill’s hate-filled stepfather, his gravelly voice. He looked at the other boys. He cracked his knuckles, knowing that if he listened closely, if he asked the right question, he might understand why each of them was here, how they were all interconnected, despite what they had done tonight—or because of it.
“Shh,” Emile said. “Do you hear that?” The boys looked at one another, confused.
“I don’t hear nothing.”
“It’s your father. No, wait, he left you. Couldn’t stand you or your mother. No, it’s your stepfather. You’re watching a game. Baseball, I think. Yes. The crack of the bat. You’re in the kitchen. Your team just signed a new player. He’s from Cuba, and he’s amazing. But your stepdad doesn’t approve. He lets you know it. Calls the Cuban inferior. You’re just a kid. Still, you know what he’s saying isn’t right. You want to say something, but you don’t. You never do.” Emile stepped closer. “Is that where it started? It’s all you can think about.”
Emile heard the swing in Bill’s head before he saw it. He ducked and caught him in the stomach, dropping him to the ground. Art ran. The other stood and watched. What Emile liked most about fighting is that while he was in the middle of it, while he was smashing Bill’s face in, over and over, he couldn’t hear anything. Not even his own wild thoughts.
“Stop! You’re killing him!” the other boy said.
Not yet. Emile would be done when the face beneath him looked like Austin’s. He clenched his fist tighter. His knuckles were numb, so he punched harder. He wanted to feel it, feel what his power could do.
“Stop,” the boy said. “Please stop.”
* * *
Emile wandered away from Lost 80 in a daze. He left behind two battered bodies and a crying boy who didn’t know whether he should stay or run for help.
As he walked down the gravel road to the guardians’ house, he felt strangely calm. Odd, considering what he’d done. His hands still rang from the impact, as if calling out to Bill, echoing his pain.
It wasn’t until he stepped through the front door that it all set in. Luckily only Jacob waited up. But the look on his brother’s face when he saw Emile’s knuckles, his shirt, both stained with someone else’s blood—why did it take seeing another’s grief for Emile to understand the significance of his actions?
Jacob asked him questions, and Emile answered, and Jacob asked more questions through tears. “They’re going to come for you,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’ll be arrested. You can’t. You can’t just—”
Yes. He knew. He would be expelled. He might go to jail, prison maybe. The guardians would disown him. You couldn’t do what he did without consequence. That too was what it meant to be connected.
Jacob put his head in his hands. He wasn’t thinking about Emile’s future. He was thinking about his own—college, track, his dream girl—the future that once beamed so bright in his mind, now dimmed to a dull flicker.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “We have to leave. We can’t stay here.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Someplace far away.”
Emile thought of Jonestown. “No. It’s my fault. I should go.”
“Are you serious?” Jacob said. “You can’t even drive.”
Emile sat down on the couch next to his brother. His hands had stopped ringing, and now throbbed with a dull ache. He stretched them to relieve the pain, rested them on his jeans. In his front pocket he could feel the note from Austin. He’d picked it up when the fight was over, though he still hadn’t read it. He didn’t know if he ever would.
“You didn’t see what they did to him.”
“I know.”
“No,” Emile said. “You don’t. What they said, what they were thinking—that’s what they say and think about me. All the time. And they don’t even know me. They don’t know what I can do.”
Emile sunk into the couch. Finally, his brother spoke. “We need help. I don’t know how or where, but we have to do something.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Emile said. “It’s who I am.”
“Hey,” Jacob said. “Stop acting like you’re alone in this.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it. I’m going to help you, okay? We’re going to figure this out. I promise.”
Jacob patted Emile’s hand where it hurt. “Let’s start by getting you some ice.”
“Thanks.” He disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Emile on the couch rubbing his knuckles. Jacob was right. He needed help. And no one here could help him. No one could understand.
Emile leaned back and closed his eyes. But in the dark he saw Bill’s face, grinning, then disfigured. He saw Austin, happy then broken. Jacob returned with an ice pack. Emile kept his eyes shut. Did he fall asleep? He heard Jacob’s voice. Wake up. We have to leave. He pushed the voice aside. Another floated in. His mother’s, perhaps. No, it was Ginny. It was earlier in the day. She was talking about the capstone project, telling the class that no one was allowed to research Jonestown. That was her thing. They had to find their own. Besides, she explained, it ended terribly. “You don’t want the same for you,” she said.
“So what do we do?” a boy said. It was Art, the guilty one. “Where do we start?”
Ginny threw up her hands. “Haven’t you been listening?” (Wake up, Jacob said. Come on, it’s not safe.) “When I say ‘we’re all connected,’ do the words even register? Or do they pass through you like a ghost?”
And when she said “ghost,” she smiled at Emile. And her face flickered. It transformed. To Austin, to Jacob. Then to the blurred image of his mother.
Come on. I think I hear sirens.
Emile opened his eyes. The noise grew louder.
CHAPTER THREE
Lia
In the beginning, Lia searched for answers. She asked what she thought were the right questions. What happened at Limetown? What were they doing there? Where was her uncle, Emile? The government appointed a Limetown Commission, which issued a brief summary of what they knew so far. They didn’t reveal much, only a description of the town—how many houses, how many shops, how many people, and their names. The summary did not say what everyone wanted to know, which was what they were doing in Limetown, nor did it speculate as to what happened to its three hundred plus inhabitants. There was a large facility at the edge of the town, the commission could tell you that, but what was going on inside they had no idea. They promised a comprehensive report after a thorough investigation.
Perhaps it was her intuition, as Miss Scott had called it, but Lia was convinced that while the rest of the world waited for the Limetown report, she could find the answer. She waded through the Internet, rereading a hundred different news stories, all of which reported the same facts with different words. One writer’s disappearance was another’s vanishing, a fading into thin air. One reporter wrote that everyone evaporated, as if what happened was as natural as the weather.
> From there she sifted through Limetown conspiracy sites, with theories as poorly constructed as the virus-plagued web pages where they resided. Alien abductions. Interdimensional travel. Secret organization of the world’s richest and most powerful. None of it made sense, and as time went by, the articles appeared with less frequency and the posts on the conspiracy sites went cold. People moved on. Except for Lia and her parents. For months afterward, they continued to search.
Lia graduated that spring, near but not at the top of her class. Miss Scott said she could have been valedictorian, if only she applied herself, but it became increasingly difficult to care about anything other than her family, and, by extension, Limetown. She told Miss Scott this when she missed multiple article deadlines. She told her sometimes her mom left and was gone for days, and when she returned she acted like nothing happened. Lia asked her parents questions. She tried the tricks Miss Scott taught. Her parents didn’t break. They said, “Worry about your own work.”
Miss Scott said, Lia, you’re not the only one living with loss. We’re all working with ghosts looking over our shoulder.
Lia graduated. Miss Scott left on vacation, and every student pretended it was normal to go from seeing each other every day to hardly at all, or never again. When the summer was over, Lia would move to New Hampshire to attend the same small and expensive college where Miss Scott had done her undergrad, though she wouldn’t be in New Hampshire for long. Her mother had convinced her to spend the first semester studying abroad. The suggestion had come in between one of her mother’s disappearing acts. One of her students, whom her mother had written a letter of recommendation for, had emailed her saying he had to drop out of the program he planned on attending in the fall. He was supposed to spend the semester at Deakin, a public university in Melbourne, but couldn’t come up with the funds. “It actually sounds pretty great,” Lia’s mother said. “You take a couple of classes in the morning and intern in the afternoon or the evening.” She explained that it was a little late in the game to apply, but you never know. There might still be an open spot.