by Kyle Andrews
Maybe there would come a day when Justin would be able to openly recruit new members, but that wasn't his job now. If he gave himself away, he could put everyone he cared about at risk. Not kicking that boy was as risky a move as Justin was willing to make until this situation progressed and he knew what was happening to the world.
As he turned the corner and looked out across the front of the school, Justin saw students walking home. Some were in deep conversations. Many were arguing. Some were all-out fighting each other, rolling on the ground and beating each other in the face.
Without knowing who was who, Justin didn't know which kids he was supposed to be cheering for in those fights. He just walked past them and continued on his way, drawing no attention to himself.
He wasn't sure what to expect when he moved away from the school. He didn't know how large an impact those sidewalk taggings would have on the general population. The painted words themselves had been washed away by the end of the day, with no sign of them remaining. But the lesson wasn't lost. As he walked, Justin stepped on a piece of paper. When he looked down, he saw a printed list of the Amendments that had been painted on the street that morning.
He didn't pick up that paper. He moved away from it as quickly as possible, but when he looked around, Justin saw similar fliers littering the street for as far as the eye could see. He saw people discreetly stuffing copies into their pockets. He saw parents ripping copies out of their children's hands. He saw couples arguing. He saw police officers placing people into the back of patrol cars and driving away with them.
These ideas that were circulating were nothing new, but until people held those words in their own hands and read them for themselves, they never understood what Freedom stood for. Was this the thing that changed the world? It was so simple—so stupid. They could have jotted down their philosophies years ago, and scattered them to the wind, but would that have made as large an impact as writing down the words of the men who formed the nation, hundreds of years earlier?
Maybe there was something to be said for outdated English. Maybe it lent weight to the ideas being expressed. Or maybe people weren't reacting to the dream of the way things could be. Maybe they were reacting to the proof of the way things had once been. Maybe when they held something in their hands, and could see with their own eyes what had been taken away, it sparked something inside of them.
Or, maybe people had been sick and tired of the way things were for a long time, and were just looking for an excuse to get mad about it.
Either way, the world that Justin was walking through that day was not the same place he'd walked through the day before. The tension was thick in the air. It could explode at any moment. What did that mean? He didn't have any idea. What he did know was that walking through those streets gave him a strange sense of power. The awakening of the people around him was something that he had been a part of, if only in a roundabout way. This was his world. His people were taking what was rightfully theirs.
He walked a little bit taller that day, but he never forgot the way things worked. He never showed any sign of rebellion. He never winked at a potential ally. He never forgot that if any one of those people knew that he was a member of Freedom, they could turn him in and he would suffer, now more than ever before.
He was about to make the turn that would lead him away from his apartment and toward the Garden when he heard a voice calling to him from behind.
“Justin! Wait up!”
Without turning around, Justin knew that it was Sim. He was making a habit out of these chats with Justin, and Justin didn't like it at all.
He turned around and waited for Sim to catch up with him. If it was even possible, Sim looked worse than he had that morning. It looked like the stress was going to break him at any moment.
Once Sim caught up with Justin, he stood there for a moment catching his breath and trying to pull his words together.
Justin waited politely for several seconds, but after some time he raised his eyebrows and asked, “Did you want something?”
“I did,” Sim replied. “I do. I think. I mean...”
“What's going on?”
“I've been thinking about what you said all day. The thing about Libby and Uly not speaking to each other before he died. And I keep asking myself whether it was because she was really mad at him, or if it was all an act.”
“I don't think I can help you there.”
“But I have to find out.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know who she is. Who she really is. I need to know why she was at the hospital. I need to know if she's one of them.”
“Do you think she is?”
“No. She can't be.”
“Then there's your answer. Why go poking around for bad news? It won't bring her back.”
“But what if it does? What if she's being held against her will and they're making her do things? They could be brainwashing her.”
Justin didn't say anything. He just narrowed his eyes and tried to look deep in thought.
“I know it sounds crazy, but so does everything else,” Sim told him.
For a second—maybe two—Justin felt bad for the guy. He genuinely had no idea what was going on. Whether he was a loyalist or a Freedom sympathizer didn't matter. He was the product of the world around him, which was quickly falling apart.
Justin turned and started to walk toward his apartment. He said, “You're asking for trouble.”
“I'm asking for help.”
“You don't think that I went through all of this before? You don't think that I tried to find some way of making sense of the fact that my best friend was suddenly the most hated person in the country? That he'd been lying to me for years? You don't think that Marti cried herself to sleep every night and drove herself crazy over this?”
“So you think Libby is one of them?”
“I think that whatever you find, it's bad. Either she's one of them, and you have to deal with knowing that the girl you love is crazy, or you discover that she's being held against her will, and what then? You track down Hate and make them pay? HAND's been trying to do that forever. It's not that easy.”
“What if she is being held, and I don't do anything to help her? What does it make me if I'm the guy who won't even try to help her when she needs it the most?”
“It makes you the guy who listened to the news reports and did what the authorities want you to do. If she's in on this, they know it. And they want the rest of us to forget about her and move on.”
Sim stopped walking and said, “So you won't help me?”
Justin turned around and said, “I just did. Move on.”
The conversation was over. Justin resumed his walk toward his apartment, where he didn't really want to be. He didn't turn around to see if Sim was still standing there after he left. He assumed that Sim would be in the area for a while longer, so he acted as he was expected to act. He went where he was expected to go. He played the good little citizen. Yet, the whole time he did this, Justin's mind was back at the Garden.
For some reason, Justin wasn't looking for a chance to make Sim understand what was going on. He wasn't hoping that Sim would read those words on the fliers that were spreading around the city and realize what they meant. All he wanted was for Sim to be as far away from the Garden as possible. As far away from Libby as possible.
She didn't need Sim right now. She was going through enough as it was, without being accused of being a terrorist by her own boyfriend.
Amanda was lying in a hospital bed. For all Justin knew, she could be dead already. And Libby could be there, alone in her grief, without any true friends to lean on for support. Justin needed to get to the Garden as quickly as possible, and the more he went through this act of going back to his apartment, the more annoyed he became. If Sim just left things alone and stopped bothering him, he could have been there already.
37
Libby had asked a nurse to turn on the sound of Amanda's hear
t monitor. Its steady beeping threatened to drive her insane at any moment, but she wanted to hear it. When the machine was silent, she was constantly turning toward the monitor to make sure that she could still see Amanda's heartbeat, or going to Amanda herself to watch the rise and fall of her mother's chest. At least with the beeping, she could focus on other things.
She had paced as much as she could pace in front of her mother's bed, watching the TV as they went back and forth between bad daytime talk shows and news updates, reporting on the unfolding events of the day. As Libby watched those reports, she wasn't listening to what they were telling her. She was listening for what they weren't telling her.
Ideas started swimming through her head. Images of revolt and fighting in the streets. A new flag being raised... or at times, the horribly bloody death of everyone who belonged to Freedom and anyone who dared to question the authorities.
She couldn't stay in that room any longer. She needed to walk and talk to people. She needed to get a real idea of what was happening before she went insane.
Justin should have been there. School would have let out a long time ago, yet he was still nowhere to be seen. Did he have someplace better to be? Did he think that Amanda's sickness was no longer his problem?
To be fair, it wasn't. He wasn't family, strictly speaking. He'd known them long enough to be considered more than a friend, but he didn't have any obligation to be there. Libby wasn't even sure if she had an obligation to be there, except that she couldn't bring herself to leave. The idea of loyalty outside of a national sense was new to her. She wasn't raised to believe that there were certain people who deserved your love more than anyone else. To prefer her mother to anyone else was hateful and wrong, according to a teacher that kept yelling at her for crying in school, back when she was four years old.
She wondered where that teacher was now. Was she still screaming at little kids? Or was she aging and sick, like Amanda? Was she dying in a bed somewhere, unable to get help? Was she alone, without anyone left to care about her?
Libby didn't necessarily wish that her former teacher was rotting in a group home, but then again, she wasn't necessarily wishing her all the best either.
Fighting the urge to leave that room and wander the halls of the Garden for a little while, Libby stood facing the wall and put her hands on her head. She told herself that walking the halls wouldn't make her feel better. It wasn't that room that was suffocating her, it was the entire world. It was the fact that she had spent the entire day trying to figure out how she could be useful to the cause, and she had drawn a blank. She was useless. The only value she had was in her blood, and there were samples of that blood all over the place, after a month of being tested over and over again.
Where was Justin? Even Rose had been by to see Libby already, but nobody wanted to stay in a room with a dying stranger, so Rose didn't hang around for long, and Libby couldn't blame her.
Libby would have loved to have asked Rose a hundred questions about what was going on beyond the walls of the Garden, but she couldn't really cut Rose off in the middle of her heartfelt concern for Amanda, and ask her what else was new. It seemed somehow improper.
There was a soft knock on the door, and Libby heard it open. She didn't turn right away. She waited, listening for the person to speak. Wondering if it was another nurse, or doctor, or random person who wanted to gaze upon the amazing library girl. But what she was really wondering was if the person entering the room was Justin.
“How's she doing?” he asked her.
The stress must have been getting to her, because the second she heard his voice, Libby wanted to cry. She turned around, desperate to tell him everything that was going on with Amanda, and express how happy she was that he was finally there. Instead, what she heard herself say was “Where have you been?”
“I... Got held up,” he replied, closing the door and moving closer to Amanda. He looked her over and then turned to Libby and said, “She looks better, I think. Has she woken up?”
“No,” Libby replied. “They say she might, but she might not. They say that even if she does get past all this, the most we'll be able to buy her is a few weeks. They weren't even sure whether or not they should treat her.”
“But you are, right?”
“Yeah. I'm done letting people die without a fight. I'm so sick of sitting and watching everything happen around me. It's like... Do you remember that hamster in our third grade science class?”
Justin smiled at the memory, “The one who kept running into the side of the aquarium at full speed, because he never realized that he couldn't get through it?”
“Yes. Exactly. That's how I feel. I'm running at full speed, but I keep slamming into walls.”
“Sounds painful.”
“It's annoying,” Libby told him.
Justin took a seat on the edge of Amanda's bed. He still smelled like the outside world.
“Tell me what's happening out there,” she told him. “Please.”
“'Please?' You're being polite.”
“I'm trying not to be a bitch.”
“It suits you.”
“Don't get used to it.”
Justin took a deep breath, trying to figure out what he wanted to say to her, and she waited with bated breath for the details to start coming.
Finally, he said, “It's out. Everything. Well, not everything. But the Amendments. They were on the sidewalks this morning, all over the city. Then they were cleaned up, but people were talking about them all day in school.”
“The teachers must have been having a fit. Ms. Bloom...”
“Performed awe-inspiring acts of contortion, trying to make people believe that free speech was a bad thing.”
“Did people buy it?”
“I don't know. Nobody's really ready to talk about this stuff one way or the other. Not openly anyway.”
“Did she use a bunch of awkwardly sexual examples?”
Justin started laughing.
Smiling along with him, Libby said, “She did!”
“She might have mentioned something about knee pads.”
“No! Eew.”
“But people were whispering. You could hear it. The whole place... It was like being in an entirely different school. Like the walls had been painted a new color or something, except they hadn't.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It means that you just sent a shock wave through the world, Lib. It's pretty amazing.”
“I didn't do anything.”
“You gave people hope. You let them know that there really is another way, and it's not just a figment of our imagination.”
“I put my hand on a scanner.”
“People can push a button and blow up the world.”
Libby wanted to argue with him, but even discussing this topic was uncomfortable for her. She didn't want to think of herself as a hero, or as anything important. Yet the more she let him talk, the closer Justin came to convincing her that she was somehow special.
When she looked up once again, she saw Justin watching her. As soon as her eyes met his, he looked away. Maybe he didn't want her to know that he was watching her the way he was, but she saw him. She knew. There was nothing that she could do to forget it.
When they were younger, she would catch him looking at her like that all the time. At first, she didn't know what it meant, but when she was ten or eleven years old, she realized why he would look away from her every time she looked at him. Kids in school were already dating, and doing whatever else kids did in relationships behind broom closet doors. She knew that Justin liked her that way, but she pretended not to know.
Back then, Libby wasn't interested in dating. Some other kids laughed at her and called her names for preferring to hang out with her cousin and his weird friend, rather than go to parties or date. But she never cared. Why should she?
Justin never really said anything to Libby about the way he felt. They both knew, and her silence on the subject
was all the answer he needed from her. He was never one to push.
Over time, she stopped catching him staring at her. Then they stopped speaking entirely. She never wanted that to happen again. No matter what happened, she would not allow their relationship to revert back to passing each other in the halls and feeling awkward. Too much had happened to both of them to ever go back. No matter what, they were connected now.
Justin looked up at her again. They didn't say anything for a second or two. They just looked at each other, and all that history between them spoke for itself. It was a strange and varied history, so after a couple of seconds of silently looking at each other, Justin smiled wide and let out a chuckle. This made Libby laugh.
There was probably a lot that needed to be said between them, but words escaped Libby at the moment. She couldn't think of any way to sum up what they'd gone through or how she felt. All she knew for sure was that she was glad that they'd gotten through it. She didn't know where she would be if it weren't for Justin.
He looked away again. His smile half faded as he looked at his hands and said, “I saw Sim today.”
Libby's smile dropped and she took a step toward Justin. She was almost nervous to hear what happened next. She almost didn't want to hear it.
“Oh,” was what came out of her mouth first.
Justin started bouncing his leg as he sat there, and then stopped himself. He looked up at Libby, very matter-of-factly. and said, “He's still trying to figure out what happened to you.”
“He is?”
“You act like you're surprised.”
“I'm... Not surprised. I'm just not sure what to think.”
“Worried about what happens when he finds out?”
“I'm sure it's perfectly normal to find out that your girlfriend is part of a...”
“Terrorist organization? Group of radical extremists? Racist sect that wants to strip the rights of women away almost as much as we want to enslave anyone whose skin isn't like ours?”