by Nick Courage
“Listen,” she says. “You’re thirteen years old. You’ve been okay up to now, and I want you to know that you’re going to be okay for another three hundred years.” Dad laughs. “Okay, maybe not three hundred. But more than thirty.”
“You’re going to be fine, is what your mom’s saying,” says Dad. “And so are we. Everyone’s going to be fine. Better than fine.”
“We just have some . . .”
Grammy ominously cuts in: “Growing pains.”
“Exactly.”
We park outside the warehouse, in view of the plane, which is already idling a little further down the block. It’s probably about the size of our car, and Mom’s right: if I got worked up about anything on one of those things, I’d probably take out its engine or radar for sure. And I can’t see myself not getting nervous in a tin can like that. It’s so small it can only make it about halfway to the City under average conditions, so they usually stop and refuel in a federale weigh station along the way.
We all get out of the car to hug goodbye. Mom makes Grammy—who thinks I’m old enough to take care of myself—promise to look in on me every day, then Dad hands me a wad of scrip and makes me promise to look in on Grammy. Before I even have a chance to answer, they’re ducking their heads to fit through the door of the little plane. Mom blows a kiss. Dad calls out, “Easy on the ladies!”
And they’re gone.
Grammy and I stand watching while the pilot spins the propeller and hops into the plane. In under five minutes, they’re airborne and we’re back in the car, heading home through the clanging construction of the Green. We don’t say anything to each other until Grammy drops me off. She still seems distracted, and I’m trying not to think of my parents hurtling through the night with only a thin layer of metal between them and . . .
“All right, Henry,” says Grammy. “I have some people coming over tonight, and I have to get everything ready, so I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay, baby?”
“Okay, Gram,” I say, shaking myself back into the moment. Why do I even think stuff like that? I wonder. And then I realize that I’m thinking about thinking and have to shake my head clear again. “Love you.”
Her eyes focus on me with a clarity she hasn’t had since the accident at the dam earlier in the day. “I love you too, Henry,” she says. “Sweet dreams.”
I smile and hop out of the car, waving goodnight. It’s darker now than it was when we left to drop my parents off, and I watch the rear lights of the car disappear as she turns down the block. Of course Grammy’s having people over. If she wasn’t . . . now that would be a reason to worry.
The house is dark now, too, darker than outside, where some ambient light is still bouncing around the clouds. I reach to turn on a lamp, only to remember again that we’re still in Powerdown and—with Dad and Grammy gone—there’s no one to crank up the generator. I can’t believe we didn’t realize this would be a problem beforehand. All that talk about electricity, about my heart . . . you’d think someone would’ve made the connection.
I throw myself down in a kitchen chair and grab a cucumber from a basket on the table. Biting into it, I consider my options. The easiest thing to do would be to go upstairs and lay down in bed, but I know I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. The cool from the rain wouldn’t last long, and I’d be stuck in the dark without a fan, suffocating in the stagnant summer air.
But what else could I do?
In theory, I know how to start the generator. It’s like a lawn mower—just pull the cord a few times, and with any luck, the engine takes over. But, with my heart, I probably shouldn’t chance it. Especially considering how things have been going lately. It’s too easy to imagine myself silently splayed in the soggy grass, my chest covered in black scorch marks like the conductors at the dam. So: no music, no fans. No light.
I could always ride over to Conor’s or Scott’s and get them to crank the generator for me, but then there’d be the inevitable questions, and they might want to hang out in my house. They’d eat everything and touch everything and it’d be just like in the attic. They might even try to get another game of spin the bottle going . . .
Or I could get Alice, who apparently lives next door. But I don’t even know which house. I walk outside to check the weather and take another bite of cucumber. It’s spongy and light, except for the rind, which is rubbery and still a little dirty. I spit it out into the garden and then toss the rest of the cucumber after it. The worms will enjoy the cucumber more than me.
It hits the far side of the garden with a soft bounce and I make up my mind. I can’t lock myself up on a night like this, not after everything that’s happened, and definitely not when there’s such a weird chill to the air. That doesn’t happen much in the middle of summer, not in the Zone, and it feels like a sign.
The bikes are still in a tangle in the hallway from our trip to the Other Side, and while I’m pulling them apart, I get an idea. Not a smart idea or an idea my parents would approve of, but an idea I can’t seem to shake. It’s spreading from the base of my neck to the rest of my head until my mouth waters and I’m smiling stupidly, just like when I cut off all my sleeves.
It’s the perfect weather for hot coffee, and I know a place that makes a great cup.
The whir of spokes while I ride makes a sort of crooked beat when it mixes with the post-storm birdsong and the sound of waterlogged construction workers loading up their trucks for the day, and I ride to it, splashing through puddles whenever I can. It’s dark, but not scary dark. The moon is bright, and its light refracts off the still-looming storm clouds.
I take a deep breath, filling my chest with the cool evening air and letting a calm wash over me. There’s a breeze laced with the sickly sweet scent of magnolias and the river, a comforting smell that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s more an energy, or a movement—like the spirit of the Zone. Even though it’s night and I’m about to ride solo through the Grey, it’s the first time I haven’t been buzzing with nervous energy in days.
Spanish moss is waving from the boughs of the oak trees lining the Avenue, silhouetted against the still low-hanging moon, and everything seems to be going right: Mom and Dad are signing the Charter, my heart seems to be fine, Grammy’s having a party (like usual), and—for once in my life—I have plans.
Night plans.
The only thing that could make them better is some company.
I must have been subconsciously thinking that since I left the house, because I find myself squealing to a stop in front of Conor’s house as soon as the thought occurs to me, my wet brakes not quite doing their job. Unlike my place, the generators at Conor’s house are humming and the lights are on and shining orange through drawn white curtains. I drop my bike on the soggy front lawn and knock twice, sharply, on the heavy wooden door. Muffled behind it, Conor’s mom calls for him to answer. “Just a minute,” he yells, followed by a few resounding thumps and a smack—Conor jumping down the stairs and, unable to stop his forward momentum, smashing into the door. I step instinctively backward as he opens it, letting out the no-longer-muffled “Con-or!” of his exasperated mother. He smiles lopsidedly and yells back over his shoulder, “It’s Henry, Mom,” as if me being at the door explained his hurry to get there.
“So,” he says. “What’s up?”
“Wanna ride?” I ask flatly, trying to hide my excitement. It occurs to me that riding through the Grey Zone at night might be a hard sell, and maybe I shouldn’t have come. My parents are out of town, but Conor’s mom is gingerly descending the stairs in a billowing pink nightgown, and I know better than to give everything away in front of her.
“Henry!” she says, smiling genuinely. “Come in!”
“Actually, Mrs. Wallace, I . . .”
“C’mon, man,” Conor says, hooking his elbow around my neck. “Brownies.”
You wouldn’t guess it by looking at Conor, who’s such a jock, but his house is probably the prettiest in the Zone. The outside is all swirly gingerbread wo
odwork, like a dollhouse—and they even grow flowers in their garden, hibiscus and foxglove and azaleas. The inside is like something you’d see in a magazine: matching couches and curtains, a lace tablecloth, and everything in its place.
Mrs. Wallace jokes that she’s able to keep everything “just so” because Mr. Wallace isn’t around to make a mess, and even though I usually like going to Conor’s house—Mrs. Wallace is always cooking treats from Before, made with northern supplies courtesy of Ben—those conversations are usually uncomfortable enough to keep me from coming around too often. Mrs. Wallace lost Mr. Wallace in the Tragedies. Not that he died or anything . . . he just didn’t come back. They’re still married, but I’ve never personally met him, and I’ve noticed that Conor looks absentmindedly at the floor every time Mrs. Wallace jokes about “how lucky we are that he’s not here to eat all the cupcakes.”
Tonight, though, Mrs. Wallace has something else to talk about.
“So, Henry,” she says conspiratorially, “A little bird told me that you . . .” She pauses, looking at Conor mischievously. I look at him, too, wondering what she could possibly be leading up to. “Have,” she says, pausing for emphasis. And then, high-pitched and hugging me: “A girlfriend!”
I look over her shoulder at Conor, trying to raise one eyebrow, but raising both of them instead. He’s too preoccupied with cutting the brownies to see me. “Who”—I gasp, still getting squeezed—“did the bird say who it was?”
She pulls back and pinches my cheeks. “You! Little charmer!”
Conor, typically unruffled, holds out a plate of thick, gooey squares to both of us. Mrs. Wallace looks over at him, still pinching my cheeks. “If only Conor-baby could’ve gotten to her first.”
“Brownie?” Conor offers, turning slightly red around the edges. Mrs. Wallace picks one up with two fingers and bites carefully into it, closing her eyes and cooing softly to herself.
“Okay, Mom,” Conor says, pulling me quickly toward the door. “We’re gonna go outside for a minute.”
Back on the front lawn, Conor starts talking—and fast—before I have a chance to give him the third degree. “So-where-do-you-want-to-ride?” he blurts out, slurring the question into one long, foreign-sounding word.
“Um,” I say, caught off guard. Finally, understanding the question and remembering the delicacy with which I’d decided to approach my night ride proposal, I answer: “There’s this place on . . . on the Other Side.”
“The Other Side?” says Conor, suddenly excited. “Wait . . . you’ve been?”
I guess with everything we had going on at School the other day, I’d forgotten to say anything about my ride with Dad—Food Eats, Tom and Rachel, the concert and the guitar. Conor probably didn’t even know about my slightly less fun adventure at the Hospital. I take a deep breath, trying to figure out where to start.
“Conor,” I say, preparing—and then realizing that I have a few questions of my own.
“Yes, Henry?”
“Why does your Mom think I have a girlfriend?”
Conor rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and scratches his shaved head. “Okay,” he says. “Julia’s mom and my mom are best friends.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding him along. “Mouse.”
“Yeah, Mouse,” Conor says. “Well, she’s been on a kick about how nice Mouse is and . . .”
“And?”
“And how I should ask her out.”
“Oh,” I say, starting to get it. “So you told her that I was already dating her.” Conor shrugs. “Okay,” I say, “I guess that’s cool.” Conor starts to smile, a big toothy grin. “But,” I say, “I don’t like Mouse like that. And—and—you have to go back in and get me a brownie.”
“Okay, Hank, but first . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Lemme get my bike ready.”
Conor doesn’t even have to sneak out, he just tells his mom that he’s spending the night at my place—he’s done it loads of times, so she doesn’t question it. He does come back outside blushing, though, and I don’t have the heart to ask him why.
At first we ride silently, taking in the quiet—unusual after weeks of construction—and the promise of the night. We pass Scott’s house and look at each other, silently agreeing not to stop. Tonight isn’t for goofing off; it feels too serious for that. Too grown up. My skin is tingling, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m scared or if it’s my heart.
Or if it’s an increased current from my heart because I’m scared.
I don’t feel scared, though.
Like the Green Zone, the Grey Zone feels empty. If there are any ghosts or thieves or weirdos out here, they seem to be tucked in for the night, too. Regardless, Conor and I pedal hard, and in twenty minutes we’re through the worst of the Grey. It took me and Dad almost an hour to get this far the other day, but we’d been stopping to assess the construction along the way. Now that I know how quickly I can make it here, any doubts I may have harbored about biking to the Other Side dissipate.
Our speed makes the Zone feel even smaller, like the Grey Zone’s just a harmless, dirty ribbon separating the Green and the Other Side, which is glowing like a string of pulsing Christmas lights on the otherwise black horizon. We’re drawn to them as they gently swell and shrink with the power of makeshift generators—it’s hypnotic, and I’m so focused on the light that the darkness around us feels like it’s intensifying in contrast.
My parents didn’t really come here before the Tragedies—Downtown was about as far as they got, and then only on special occasions—but from what I’ve heard it was a place where people had good reason to lock their doors. Now it looks bad even by Grey standards. A single sign, reflecting the glow of the moon, reads “Royal Street,” and it seems like a stupid joke. The houses that are still standing are looming shadows in the night, ruins covered in a thick layer of silt from the flooding.
And yet, I’m not scared.
Conor, on the other hand, is gripping his handlebars tightly and keeping close. I’m glad he’s here, and also a little glad that he seems spooked. He deserves it for what he told his mom about me and Mouse, and for tricking me into spin the bottle earlier. Still, the stretch between Downtown and the Other Side would be legitimately scary if it wasn’t for the closeness of the light beckoning us from the end of the street.
“Do you hear that?” It’s the first time I’ve spoken since we left Conor’s house, and it comes out crackly. Conor swerves, almost knocking into me.
“What?”
He says it too loudly, jerkily scanning the shadows, but his voice isn’t shaky. If a ghost or something did hop out, he’d probably jump off his bike and try to tackle it. For this, I think, I’ll forgive him for the Mouse thing . . . and for forgetting the brownie. With a bittersweet lick of my lips, I wonder if the Embargo extends all the way to the Other Side.
“The music,” I say, a distant movement bringing me back into the present. Conor stops peering into the shadows and leans forward. Behind the clatter of our spokes and chains, of the cobblestones under our tires, is a lonely melody. A walking bass line and a trumpet—or whatever. Something brassy and alive, vibrating out across the blanketed wasteland.
Calling to us.
We pedal faster, toward the light and the sound.
And then, like before, after a sharp T-bone off the old road, we’re skidding to a stop in the thick of the Other Side, a riot of light and color and music; people milling around, laughing and eating like it’s a street fair. Which it seems to be. Lights have been strung from building to building, crisscrossing the Other Side’s main thoroughfare.
We stand in the middle of the street, staring. The Other Side is amazing enough during the day, but at night—it stops you in your tracks, especially the thousand points of rainbow light shining against billowing flags, color on color in the middle of the Grey on an ink black night. And the smell . . . spicy and buttery, warm like baking bread. Conor lists toward Food Eats like he’s been here befor
e, and I smile to myself and follow him.
We lean our bikes against the wall with the mural of the sandwich eating another, smaller sandwich, and Conor hesitates, unsure of whether or not we should go inside.
“I, um, I don’t have any scrip or anything,” Conor says.
I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze, then walk past him into Foods. “I gotcha, buddy,” I say, radiating happiness and loving the dazed look he’s not even bothering to hide.
“I can’t believe you’ve been here before,” he says, awestruck, following me in through the propped-open screen door. Inside, Foods is empty except for a handful of Other Siders scattered around the room—it’s late, and we’ve clearly missed the rush. We walk up to the window at the back of the room and I’m about to order when the guy with the super-villain mustache and the tattoos on his neck hands us two mugs of coffee.
“Buh-scuits in minute,” he says with a heavy accent. “Syit.”
“Okay,” I say, taking the mugs off of his hands and brushing up against a thick, hairy knuckle as Conor looks around the restaurant, realizing that there aren’t any chairs, only counters lining the walls. “Thanks, man.”
“Yis, syit.”
I bring the coffee over to where Conor’s leaning and hand him one.
“Cheers!”
“This place, Hank. This place is wild.”
“I know,” I say, smiling and eyeing the rest of the clientele. Most of them are clearly off-duty construction workers, like when I came here with Dad, but there are a few other people who are definitely here for the scene: the pinwheel woman, talking animatedly with two of the workers; a guy with green paint all over his face, eating a biscuit and crumbing up the book he’s reading; and, in the corner, brooding over a cup of coffee, a guy that looks like a werewolf mid-transformation.
“Greg!” I call out, already walking toward him. He looks up with a stern expression on his face. I start to second-guess myself, and then he recognizes me and his face relaxes.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Kid from the other day. Cool dad. Hi.”