by Nick Courage
One! Two! Three! Four!
Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut!
I tend to keep things—you never knew when you’ll need a paint-stained work shirt smock, if you’ll get big enough to grow into that windbreaker from your well-meaning Grammy—so I have a lot of clothes, and it takes me the first side of Dumb River plus a couple of extra minutes to get through them all (and the one on my back). Finally, shirtless and sitting on the floor—the room silent except for my thrumming pulse—I realize what I’ve done.
I take a deep breath, surveying. It occurs to me, sitting in the middle of a pile of sleeves on my bedroom floor, big orange-handled scissors in my suddenly shaking hands, that what I have is a problem. Skinny arms. Skinny arms and, after an impulsive, neurotic, totally frantic ten minutes: no way to hide them. With the exception of a nervous breeze from a small plastic fan, the room is hot, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I’m above it all, looking down on myself from the peak of the ceiling. My arms look even skinnier from a distance, and the air around me-on-the-floor is wavering like a mirage, my version of overheating: electrified sweat radiating outwards.
I consider myself for a moment: the heartless boy, electrified and steaming. It’s strange—I’m strange—but not as strange as me-in-the-air.
That’s a new me, one I hadn’t met before now.
The morning after our trip to the Other Side, I stretch languidly awake as if yesterday’s adventure had all been a dream. The sun is hot on my face, and—yawning contentedly—I consider pulling the sheets up over my head and going back to sleep . . . but just as I’m curling back into the coolness of my pillow, I see it. Catching the light in the corner of my ravaged bedroom, leaning precariously against the emptied frame of my dresser, is Tom’s guitar.
Still dreaming, I think, rolling back toward the wall. But now that I’ve seen it, I can’t sleep. Instead, I sit up, rubbing my eyes into focus, and assess the situation. Liberated dresser drawers are littered around a pile of roughly cut sleeves on the floor. I shake my head clear, flipping back and forth between regret and relief, and decide not to stress out about it. Yes, I mutilated my wardrobe and trashed my room . . .
But I also went to the Other Side and brought part of it back with me, I reassure myself, smiling at the thought of Tom and Rachel and Food Eats.
And the guitar.
Besides, the smashers might not look so bad. I pull one over my head and turn immediately to the mirror mounted on my door. When I jut my chin upwards half an inch and square my shoulders, I can almost pull it off . . .
A knock and, simultaneously, the door opens. I drop the pose, but it’s impossible to tell whether or not Mom’s seen it. She looks at me for a microsecond and jerks her head like she suddenly remembers something she’s forgotten in another room.
“School,” she says sideways.
“I know.”
“Looking good,” she mumbles, closing the door, her hand covering her mouth.
I flop onto the bed, naked arms spread out in a T. I consider being embarrassed, but it just doesn’t fit. The sun’s coming in hot and hard, rays refracting off white walls and vibrating around my room. I might have started the morning off mortified, but another emotion is quickly taking over: excitement, like my electric heart’s beating triple time.
Dad has the restraint to not raise his eyebrows when I walk into the kitchen, but I can see him holding back, so he might as well have waggled away. Instead, he’s straining to maintain a serious squint, and the corners of his lips are turned slightly downward like he’s trying not to smile—not a good sign for me, fashion-wise, but at least he doesn’t say anything about the smasher. Before his sense of humor has a chance to overwhelm his self-control, though, I decide to spare us both from any further awkwardness and rip the Band-Aid right off.
“These guys have such good personalities,” I say, curling my arms up and down like I’m lifting weights. “It’d be a pity not to share ’em with the world.”
Dad guffaws, his whole face laughing; eyebrows springing upward and his eyes creased at the corners. Mom looks up from the file folder she has spread out in front of her and—even though I know eyes don’t really twinkle—I swear her eyes are twinkling at him.
“Good man,” Dad says, after he’s finished laughing. “Good man.”
Problem solved, I grip Dad’s shoulder to let him know we’re okay, me and him, and grab two apples from a bowl on the table.
“No loaf?” Mom asks, arching her brow.
I can’t handle loaf most days, and definitely not today. It’s short for Non-Meat Loaf (NML), a hyper-nutritional brick of a meal made from vegetable scraps and a nutty dough. It’s an old Zone recipe, adapted from the emergency rations we all had to live off of after the Tragedies. Healthy, but slimy in all the wrong places and hard to get down. I set my jaws, and Mom knows not to push the issue.
“Meet us at Grammy’s after School, we might have news.”
I nod over my shoulder, already halfway out the door with a mouth full of Red Delicious, and wonder what they could possibly have to tell me at Grammy’s. City business, probably.
It’s a beautiful day, maybe the most beautiful day. The sky is such a crisp and impossible blue that the trees and houses beneath it seem to be glowing in its reflected glory. It’s only five blocks to School, and since the streetcars aren’t running, I walk in the center of the tracks bisecting the Avenue. I’m not alone. Since the Powerdown, the tracks have become a hub of foot traffic—everyone gravitating toward the previously forbidden. Not that it’s crowded, but there are probably fifteen or so people walking up the tracks in front of me, and I pass four or five walking in the other direction, nodding affably at our shared transgression; wishing me a good morning as I balance along a hot steel rail.
Even though it’s summer, it’s early enough that it’s not too hot, and there’s a light breeze. Soon enough I’m standing in front of the chipped sign: a concrete book, open and propped on mossy concrete feet. “Memorial Public Library,” a grimy engraving proclaims. Beyond the sign, there are a handful of kids milling around the garden, but the majority will show up later. There’s no set hour you need to be at School in the Zone—it’s not like anyone’s keeping track. Since the Powerdown, everyone’s just been guessing at what time it is, anyway.
The Library is in the middle of the Zone, squarely between our house and the park. It’s a funny old mansion from way before, and I spend a lot of time there because it’s also the School . . . at least until we get our Charter.
For the most part, no one cares what we do at School, so long as we’re here. I guess everyone figures it’s enough for now just for us to be out of our parents’ hair and around all these books, so most kids either play in the garden all day or hole up and read. I do a little bit of both, but ever since I found a way into the attic, I’ve been spending most of my time up there.
The trick to getting into the attic is that you can’t get to it from the inside—at least, not entirely. Which can drive kids crazy when they realize that the windows built into the roof don’t correspond to the top floor reading rooms. I don’t think anyone consciously blocked off the attic, though, it’s just that the interior of the Library has been plastered over so many times through the years that whatever entrances may have existed have long since been sealed.
Most kids—if they get the itch—look for secret doors behind revolving bookcases, as if the Library’s a pirate ship or something. But I figured the Library was probably like my house, and if there was any attic access, it would be through a door with a pull-chain somewhere in the ceiling, a retractable ladder that popped down when the chain was pulled. I looked for something like that for a while, and when I didn’t find it, I took extreme measures.
I went outside.
Unlike the rest of the Zone, which is almost completely flat, the Library’s lawn has a roll to it—two stepped little hills that flare downward from the base of the building into the School’s vegetable gardens. It was while
walking through these gardens with my neck craned upward that I noticed it: the key. Barely visible in the perpetual shade of a rear-facing overhang: the top few feet of a wide-mouthed drainpipe bolted into the corner of an ornamental third-floor balcony. It was easy enough to get to once I figured out which window I had to force open, surreptitiously leveraging a butter knife against years of disuse, and the brackets holding the pipe against the outside wall turned out to be more ladder-like than I would’ve dared to hope.
Looking back, the first time was the easiest.
Once I decided to go for it, wedging my body into the corner and climbing resolutely skyward, the ascent was over in seconds. Peering over my shoulder as I scrambled onto the flat, tar-black roof, adrenaline pumping, I expected to see a crowd forming. But the garden was quiet, save for a few kids, hunched over, sneaking tomatoes or squishing caterpillars, too preoccupied to have noticed me.
With a parting look at the world below, I turned my attention back to the task at hand. In the middle of the roof, visible only to a few curious sparrows, was a square service hatch leading down into what I hoped would be the attic. Like the window to the balcony, it was painted shut—but, shielded from view, I was able to take my time prying it open. When it finally popped, instead of the stale breath of centuries I had steeled myself for, I was enveloped with a comforting smell, almost like dust and almonds.
The hardest part about getting to the attic now doesn’t actually have anything to do with getting to the attic; it’s lying to my friends. After that first day, I’d told them I had to start helping Grammy most afternoons, that she was getting older. I feel bad when I slip away, looping back into the Library and my secret window, and I feel worse about using Grammy . . . but it’s worth it, to have something that’s just for me; an escape from the relentless boredom of the Green Zone.
Once the new School is built, we’ll have to go there instead of the Library, and we’ll have to take actual classes like Before, which will be a welcome change, even if it means homework . . . but I’ll miss the attic. It’s mostly stained glass windows and broken chairs, and I like to go up there after lunch to crack open one of the books from the towering stacks lining the walls, something weird like When Ladies Go-A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, and feel lucky not to be outside in the heat, biding time.
At School, I slip into my usual morning ritual, which is to sit on a weather-worn root knotting up beneath the big oak tree in the front yard and eat my breakfast—apples when I can snag them, loaf when I can’t—watching for my friends as they trickle in. We’ll all fool around for a while under the tree, telling jokes and—if Conor’s brought his skateboard—practicing ollies in the soft dirt beneath the tree. There’s a curved driveway leading up to the old book drop bin, and if it’s not too crowded, we’ll try to shoot that, too, slaloming around dirt clods from the garden and trying not to fall.
In the afternoon I’ll either try to break away to the attic, or—if I can’t slip up to the third-floor balcony unnoticed—dig around in the garden. During planting and harvesting season I always help out, but there are months and months between when there’s nothing to do except slop buckets of fishy chum up and down the rows of plants, fertilizing. Or pick bugs off fresh growth, either squishing them between your fingers or running them over to the grass lining the tracks on the Avenue, hoping they’ll be able to start a happy new life away from our crop of okra and carrots.
Neither of those options are a lot of fun, so I usually just try to sneak away to the roof. Not that I have to sneak, really. School isn’t really “school” anymore—I do my learning at home in the evening, usually with Dad. Since most adults are busy with reconstruction and the Charter, there’s only one grown-up in charge of the Library, Mr. Moonie, and he’s spread pretty thin. If I get to School early enough, though, he’ll join me by the tree for a minute to swap news about the Zone, which is why I try and make it in before the other kids.
“Morning, Mr. Moonie,” I call out, seeing him poking down the steps of the Library, one hand clutching the rail and the other waving hello with a rubber-bottomed cane.
Mr. Moonie is a slow walker, so I usually wait until he’s right on top of me before I say hello, but I’m on edge today. Rather than wait for him to make his way over to the oak, I jump up and slow-jog over to where he’s catching his breath at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, Mr. Moonie,” I say. “How’s the Queen?”
Mr. Moonie purses his lips and pushes his chin into his neck, like usual. You’d think he was a prude if you didn’t know that he did that instead of laughing. A lot of people, and not just kids, make that mistake. He always wears a seersucker suit, baggy but freshly pressed, and a dull, rust-red tie. His formality, coupled with his age—and he is old—gives him a serious bearing, even if he really is mostly a jokester.
The story with Mr. Moonie, as he tells it, is that the Library was privatized before—still a library, but not technically owned by the Zone. It was also Moonie’s home. After the Tragedies, though, he couldn’t afford to restore it, so the Zone stepped in . . . under the condition that the Library continue on as before, but as public property. Since the Library had been that way to start with—public—this seemed like a good deal to Mr. Moonie, who didn’t have any other options. He’d side-stepped the question when I’d asked him how the Library became his in the first place, but the long and the short of it was that now it was doubling as the School.
Moonie doesn’t really care about the School, even though he’s supposed to be in charge of it as de facto headmaster-slash-librarian. He likes us kids, but is more concerned with his life’s work, a history of the world from the perspective of the city, from primordial ooze through the present. So whenever I see him, I make a point of asking after some random historical personage—like the Queen of England—and he makes a point of answering. like it was the most natural question in the world for me to ask.
“Well, I’ll tell ya, Hank,” Moonie says, looking contemplative. “She’s just having a heck of a time with the young Prince of Wales, a heck of a time.” He hitches up his trousers, looking me seriously in the eye, and lets them slip back down to where they originally hung. “Or were you asking about the cruise ship, son?”
We get along so well, Moonie and I, for three reasons.
The first is that he doesn’t care that I’m a kid, and I don’t care that he’s old.
The second is that he’d found out that I’m circuitously related to a way-former governor of the state, one who’d been shot. Old Moonie had been tracing the genealogy of former Governor Long for his book and realized that the Longs from the Zone are a distant root of the late Governor’s tree. Apparently Governor Long was working toward something like our Charter when he’d been assassinated, so we’d had a few good talks about that.
And the third reason we get along so well is that I like the Library almost as much as he does, had been going there for years before it had even become the School. Which is another joke of ours, the School thing. We both pretend that Mr. Moonie’s actually a teacher and that I’m actually learning something, knowing full well that I haven’t been to a real school in years and that Mr. Moonie is as much a principal as he is a caterpillar.
“Okay, Hank, I got some scholastical issues on the old agenda today,” Moonie says, pulling another long face as he absentmindedly pats his pockets. “You have a good day in class, now, you hear?”
“I’ll try, Mr. Moonie,” I reply, but he’s already turned back to the Library, in search of whatever it is he’s forgotten. It’s not that School is a joke for either of us—we both know all us kids are getting a raw deal just sitting around the Library all day without teachers or anything, but the Charter is going to change all that, and in the meantime, as Mom says: “Everyone just has to make do.”
Conor and Scott roll up to the stairs in time to watch the second half of Mr. Moonie’s slow ascent. Or, rather, Conor rolls up on his well-worn skateboard wh
ile Scott jogs next to him, jumping to an exaggerated stop an inch from my face so we’re standing nose to nose.
“And a good day to you two gentlemen, too,” Moonie calls over his shoulder, tipping an invisible cap as he works his way up the last of the Library stairs. We three all watch him go, his cane tapping jauntily on the steps. When he makes it all the way inside, Scott whispers, “Tri . . . pod!”
I know better than to put up a fight for Mr. Moonie. We’ve been through all that before, and they just don’t understand how I can be friends with someone so old. It’s not worth arguing about, so I do the next best thing and punch him in the shoulder, hard.
“Hey!” Scott shouts, incredulous and rubbing his arm. “That hurt!”
Conor laughs, flipping up his skateboard so he’s holding it by the tail. “Nice guns, Hinky,” he says, squeezing my bicep and smirking.
I’d stopped caring about my skinny arms on the way to School, but now I know not to worry about them. If I looked really stupid, I’d have been able to count on Scott to let me know—he’s not mean or anything, he just lacks a censor. And Conor wouldn’t have said anything at all.
As far as my friends go, Conor’s the cool one.
He was the first to shoot down the Library’s driveway on his skateboard without falling, the first and only one of us to successfully drop down the back steps on the same skateboard and land it. And he’d probably look the part even if he didn’t wear the shiny mesh jerseys that he gets as presents from his older brother Ben, who lives outside the Zone. We can’t really follow sports here, but Conor acts like we’re from outer space for not recognizing the names on his back, which I guess makes him seem that much cooler—even though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know who those guys are either.