by J D Jacobs
“Ehh, it’s not that great,” Jasmine answers me, her sarcasm so apparent that it’s almost overlooked. “And for the last time, get this nasty rat off my bed.”
“You know he can understand you,” I shame her as I pick up Scat and cover his ears. “Words hurt, Jasmine.” I bought Jasmine and Jordan their own apartment soon after I got back. I also took them on a shopping spree to the Tevoc Shop, so right now, I’m helping them unpack all the things they bought. Although she throws the sarcasm front just to toy with me, Jasmine broke into tears once I bought them this place. She was so relieved to finally be in a house where she doesn’t have to live in fear.
“Sissy’s lying,” Jordan tells me with an innocent smile. “She loves it here. I do, too.”
One of my proudest achievements is convincing Jordan that he can talk again. I give him a fist-bump and hand Scat over to him as I help unpack his box. Jordan loves Scat, although his stiff petting looks more painful than loving. Jordan is wearing an oversized Bulls jersey, the same Michael Jordan #12 jersey that I bought for Cody. Cody gave it to Jordan as a present once they all safely made it back to Tryton. Cody has a close relationship with the two, and looks at Jordan as the younger brother he never had.
“So are you two excited about school starting up soon?”
“Absolutely not,” Jasmine tells me. “I’ll only be there for a couple of years before I enter the nursing program, so I don’t know why I’m even wasting my time taking pointless classes. Jordan, on the other hand, may be more ready for school. He’s already got a girlfriend.”
I look at Jordan, intrigued. “Oh snap! Tell me about her.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!” Jordan loudly proclaims, not wanting anyone to know that he’s infested with cooties.
“Come on! At least tell me her name.” I encourage him as I pull a Guardians of the Galaxy blanket out from his box.
Jordan drops his head but smiles. “Kelsey.”
“Uh-oh! Look at him!” I put my hand out for a high-five, and he slaps my hand while trying to hide his shy smile. “You’ll do fine in school. You’ll make plenty of friends, and Kelsey will be begging to sit next to you!”
“Thanks,” he says as we spread the blanket over his bed.
“You flatter him anymore and his head will explode,” Jasmine says as she continues digging through her boxes.
“She’s just jealous she’s not as cool as you,” I whisper to Jordan. He smiles and pats his blanket flat on his bed. “I really like this blanket you picked out. You know, I’m a huge Guardians of the Galaxy fan.”
“Me too. It was the last movie I saw with my parents,” he says, rubbing his hand over the blanket. He traces his finger over the face of the talking raccoon, Rocket. “I like Rocket. He’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah,” I say as I watch the kid and think back to what it felt like when I was a seven-year-old, “he is pretty cool.”
…
I’ve been on the observatory deck for an hour now, waiting for Grant and his group of Scavs to return from their supply run. Grant has barely talked to me since I came back. I know we’ve both been very busy as of late, but at the same time, I also feel like he’s been avoiding me. I think it has something to do with Sabrina. Either she makes him uncomfortable or he’s afraid I’ll tell her something that he and I talked about, which then leads to Sabrina relaying it to Jenkins. Maybe it’s the fact that I threw caution to the wind just to save a girl that I fell for after a few days. Or the fact that I accidentally made Jenkins a very happy man by bringing her home. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to catch him today and ask him about it. Grant and I have been close friends; I feel like confronting whatever’s bothering him shouldn’t be a problem.
On top of that, Grant’s Grim of a brother, Xander, is nowhere to be found. I haven’t seen him since he saved me in the Atoning Arena. I haven’t put much thought into it; he’s done this multiple times. I haven’t really tried sending myself into flashbacks since I’ve been in Tryton, either. I did watch Sabrina’s high school prom her senior year, just to see if I still had the ability (plus, I wanted to make sure that the guys she dated in the past were mere peasants when compared to me). If Xander is still sending me in flashbacks, he has to be around here somewhere.
I hear the thunderous wind pound down on top of the roof above me. The sound of the helicopter’s blades above vibrates the large window that I’m looking out of. A few minutes later, three men in full-bodied white suits make their way through the stairwell door, all carrying large bins of random objects. They all say hello to me, and I nod back to them. A fourth man comes through the door rolling two bicycles by his side; once he sees me, he tells the other three men to head down the elevator without him.
“How long have you been here?” Grant asks as he unhooks his mask and places it under his arm.
“About an hour. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since you rescued us from Avvil.”
“Yeah, we’ve both been pretty busy,” he agrees. “The Scavs have probably went on more supply runs in the three days you’ve been back than we ever have in any three-day span. You’re a busy man now, too. Out there saving people from hellhole cities. Those two kids you saved? Just from the few conversations I’ve had with them, I can tell that they’re very bright. They have a lot of potential.”
“They really do,” I nod, pausing after. “I’ve been meaning to run this by you for a while. In Avvil, the top floor in the Grandsmont Hotel where I stayed was filled with eleven women that were being kept as prisoners. I gave them our bin full of suits and told them we would come back to save them soon. Is there anyway you and the Scavs could make that run sometime soon?”
Grant purses his lips, considering the request. “Eleven women, you say? I don’t think our crew would be thrilled to travel back to Avvil anytime soon, especially taking multiple trips. I don’t know if that trip is plausible at the moment.”
“Are you sure? The women are very important and they’re innocent. They shouldn’t even have been on that floor to start with.”
“That may be true, but you know as well as I do that the Cozmin sinks. If they’re on the top floor of that hotel, the Cozmin will take weeks, maybe even months, to reach them. And you said that they have those suits, so they should be able to figure it out and survive for now.”
“Are you serious, Grant? There’s nothing we can do now?”
“Look, I’d love to help them, but there’s many innocent people in Avvil that have died. We should be able to fly back sometime in the future and rescue them, but now is not the ideal time. I’m sorry, but they’ll be fine until we’re ready.”
I’m irritated at Grant’s lack of willingness to help. How hard would it be to fly back and save those girls? He’s thinking selfishly, and if he knew what those girls have been through, he wouldn’t think twice before he would agree to save them. But I don’t bring up my irritation and instead transition to another topic I want to bring up.
“Sorry. It was just that Sabrina was one of those girls and she could easily have been left on that floor, too. She’s meant a lot to me since I met her… I’m sorry, this may be a random question, but what do you think about her so far? Have you two had a chance to get to know each other?”
As expected, Grant hesitates, the tiniest look of disgust across his face. “Oh, her? Yeah, she seems nice.”
“Come on, Grant. I can tell something about her bothers you. What is it?”
He shrugs. “Nothing! I’m okay with her; nothing about her bothers me. I don’t know where you got that notion.”
“I got it the moment we made it to the helicopter and I introduced you to her. You acted like you knew her already. Do you?”
He looks away from me and out into the city through the windows as he thinks over his answer. “I didn’t know her. She didn’t do anything to me that set me off. She… I can’t explain it.”
“She what? Tell me, Grant,” I try to withhold my frustration in my voice. “I’m not going to tell he
r or Jenkins anything. I just want to know the truth. I feel like you’ve been avoiding me, and if it’s because of Sabrina, I want to know why.”
“It’s not that simple, Jaden,” he tells me, sounding annoyed. “There’s a lot of things that go on behind closed doors that you don’t need to know about. This is one of them.” He turns and starts pushing the two bikes toward the elevator.
“Quit talking to me like I’m a kid!” I tell him as I follow him to the elevator. “It’s not your job to decide what I should and shouldn’t know.”
“Fine, you really want to know?” he irritably asks as he pushes the elevator button. “And I swear to God, Jaden, if you run back and tell anybody that I told you this, I’m never speaking to you again. Got it?” I impatiently nod. “That story that Jenkins gave you about the whole reason for going to Avvil; what was it, to boost morale or something stupid like that? That’s not the real reason you guys left for Avvil.”
The letter jumps immediately to mind. Grant must know about it. Wait–Grant knew about the letter and didn’t warn me? He knew about Jenkins’s intentions the entire time? And he’s just now admitting it to me?
“Yeah, I knew that already,” I answer, bitterness in my throat.
As he makes his way into the open elevator, he throws up his empty hand and squints his eyes at me in exasperation. “Then why are you acting so oblivious? There’s your answer.” The elevator door closes between us, and I’m stuck wondering what Sabrina has anything to do with the letter.
39.
tap tap tap
I back away from the window, bouncing on my heels to shake off the combination of butterflies along with the brisk, early-morning air. After impatiently waiting for a few seconds, I tap on the window again.
tap tap tap
The window slides up once my knuckles leave the glass. “Not so loud!” Sabrina pops her head out and whispers as she brushes her hair.
“You afraid you might get caught sneaking out?” I smile at her.
She rolls her eyes at me. “I told you: it’s not sneaking out. I just don’t want to wake Daddy up.” She points to the picnic basket in my hand. “What’s in there?”
“It’s a surprise,” I tell her. She probably already has a clue on what’s in there: two croissants, a small jar of strawberry jelly, two bottles of orange juice, and a blanket. But I like to keep her on her toes.
“I like surprises,” she smiles at me as she grabs her radio and steps out of the window. I grab her empty hand as we walk down toward the center of Tryton to the only safe park left in the world, Bridge Park. Now that she’s been in Tryton for over a week, I reminded Sabrina about what she told me in her room before my Atonement: how she wanted to see a sunrise that wasn’t covered by an amber glass. So we planned to wake up early once the week was over and watch the sunrise together. Even though she’s still a little sleepy from waking up at 4 AM, I can tell she’s still excited about it.
“Oh, this is a good one by them,” she tells me, referring to the Fleetwood Mac song playing softly through the portable radio that I bought for her at the Tevoc Shop.
“What’s the name of this one?” I ask her, twisting the volume dial up as the voice of Stevie Nicks kicks in after a few instrumental seconds of guitar and drum beats.
“‘Rhiannon,’” she tells me.
“What’s a Rhiannon?”
“It’s a girl’s name,” she answers. I begin to criticize the name which, to me, doesn’t sound like the best name to title a song after, but she continues. “I’ve always loved that name. If I could’ve had kids, I would have named my daughter Rhiannon.”
Maybe it was the way she said it or maybe it was the word “could,” but just like that, I’m convinced that Rhiannon is one of the most beautiful names on the planet.
Bridge Park is empty, minus the seldom jogger we see getting their Saturday morning cardio in. We make our way to the center lawn of the park, where the Tryton wall is just far enough off in the distance to where it shouldn’t get in our way. I spread the blanket out as Sabrina immediately sits down on it and digs through the basket. She smiles as she pulls out a croissant and slathers half the jar of jelly over it.
“You know, it’s weird how all these foods that should’ve molded or went bad by now are still good to eat,” Sabrina thinks aloud as she bites into the croissant.
“It never made much sense to me,” I agree. She lifts her head for me to lie down and rests her head on my stomach. “Milk goes bad, though. I found that out the hard way.”
“Wait, when did you find old milk?” she asks me, her eyes turning from the fading stars above us to me.
“Back in Westwood. One of the ways I found out that I’d been asleep for weeks was the lumpy milk that I poured into my cereal when I first woke up.” I gag as the smell rejuvenates itself into my memory. Sabrina thinks it’s funny.
“I forgot that you were found in Westwood half a year after the Cozmin,” she says as her laugh subsides. She’s heard a few people mention it here and there across Tryton, but I never really went into details about my time in Westwood. “Tell me about it.”
“You sure you want me to?” I ask her. “It’s a long story.”
“I don’t have anywhere to be for the rest of the day,” she says, staring back at the twilight sky. “That is if you’re okay telling me. If it bothers you, don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, no, I’m okay with it,” I tell her. Thinking back to my abandonment in Westwood doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
And so I told her all I could remember about that dreadful week in Westwood: crashing into the wall, finding my faceless Grandmother, the pile of bodies in Roaksville, crashing into yet another wall at Stevenson’s. Sabrina suggested that I must have a weird grudge against perfectly stable walls. Either that or I like crashing into things. Apparently if you’ve done anything more than once, it is permanently a part of your character.
It actually wasn’t that bad retelling the events and letting them come across my lips for the first time. Telling the story reminded me of how fragile I was at the beginning of it all. I’m not the same person who woke up that day to an empty city. But I knew that already. I knew that when I was burning down houses in Westwood…
“…as soon as the cash register left my hands, I tossed the molotov through the window.” I’ve been telling my story for an hour now, watching the blackness in the sky slowly evaporate as I do so. “Once the bottle hit the ground, it formed this giant fireball that burst across the floor. It was amazing; you should’ve seen it.”
I look down to see Sabrina’s cheek lying on my stomach, her hand placed on my chest for comfort. She’s asleep, and I have no clue how long she’s been that way. I know she has to be tired; she’s been studying her lesson plans all week. Sabrina had been an elementary school teacher for a total of one year when the Cozmin broke out. Now, she’s going to teach at the Tryton school once it starts back in August. She’s in charge of teaching the nine-year-old kids, which I believe there’s only eight of. The school is small, but Sabrina has been very excited to start teaching and helping the kids out. Throw the excitement she had for waking up at 4 AM to watch a sunrise on top of that and you get one exhausted, gorgeous girl.
I lay my head back down on the blanket and smile. I don’t realize how lucky I am.
The tip of the sun creeps over the horizon, bringing a burnt-orange glow with it. “Sabrina,” I whisper to her. “The sun’s rising.”
She mumbles as a response, but eventually sits up to look at it. After watching it for a few seconds, she turns and looks down at me. “It’s beautiful.”
I smile. “It really is.”
We sit and watch it until the sun boasts itself out completely. The park has picked up more traffic, so we decide to go back and catch up on the sleep we sacrificed. I carry the radio and basket as she cradles my arm while I walk her home. People grin at us as we walk
by. I return every one I see.
The door to her apartment opens before we approach it. Jenkins walks out in a business suit, his Fuging Bracelet hidden poorly, his figure having changed drastically. We’ve been back in Tryton for over a week, and it looks like he’s dropped fifty pounds. He looks at the two of us and smiles. “What were you kids up to?”
“We watched the sunrise,” Sabrina tells him as she lets go of my arm. “I’m about to go back to sleep, though.”
I give Sabrina the only kind of awkward hug you can give in front of her dad and lightly kiss her forehead. I hand her the radio, and she tells Jenkins goodnight and heads inside. I turn to leave, but Jenkins calls out to me before I can.
“You know, Jaden,” he begins, “I haven’t thanked you for what you’ve done. You stayed behind in Avvil and risked your life in order to save my daughter. And I know that you weren’t aware that Sabrina was my daughter, but you still saved her. That monster Miguel Ricardo would’ve done horrible things to her if it weren’t for you.”
“You’re welcome,” I respond, too tired to start a new conversation.
“Wait,” he stops me again before I leave. “Before you go, let me ask you something. Miguel… What happened to him in Avvil? Is he still alive?”
I give Jenkins a stern look that’s also mixed with a little pride. I can’t and don’t want to tell him what actually happened, so I keep it simple. “He’s dead.”
Jenkins exhales, relieved. “Good.”
“Before he died, he told me.” Oh my God. I can’t stop the words from exiting my mouth, and realizing what I said makes my neck twitch in discomfort. I’ve been wanting to spew these words out, so I guess there’s no more holding them back now. Time to confront him. “He told me of the deal you and him had.”
“He did?” Jenkins doesn’t look at me with anger, with tension, nor with denial. He looks at me with remorse. “I’m sorry. I only hope that you forgive me for lying to you.”
He waits for me to answer, but I don’t. I stare at him, not believing what I heard. He doesn’t apologize for the deal he made, he apologizes for lying. I can’t believe him.