by Caela Carter
We nodded. We all nodded. We always nodded.
Charita knocks on the bathroom door. Clomp, clomp, clomp.
She’s not using her nails this time but I can still tell it’s her because I can see her because the door is mostly open. I don’t have to say anything or get out of the tub. She stands in the doorway.
“Zylynn? How you doing in here? Almost clean?”
I bite my scabby lip. I was hoping Father Prophet would come for me before I had to get out of the tub. I’ve been praying and praying and praying to him.
“Here,” she says. She’s leaning against the door with slips of color folded into her arms. “I brought you some clothes for when you’re all clean.”
She shows me denim shorts and a pink shirt with buttons up the middle. She pulls a pair of purple underwear out of a plastic package. “These are all new, see?” she says, holding up the package.
I keep my words locked up.
I can’t like the clothes. I won’t.
I pull the bar of soap—smooth, not sandy, from the bottom of the tub where I was hoping it would soften, I put it to my head to show her I still have to wash my hair. She lowers her eyebrows.
“What are you doing?” Charita says.
I rub the soap against my skull until I can feel the first bubbles tickling my fingers.
Charita rushes through the door. “Oh, sweetie. Oh, Zylynn, stop. We have shampoo.”
I open my palm. The soap plunks back into the water.
“I’m sorry, if you want me to go I’m—anything you need you can let me know, OK? Including privacy.”
Privacy . . . privacy . . . privacy . . .
I’ve never learned that word.
I won’t wonder about it. I’m not curious. Curiosity is nearby but I won’t let her catch me.
“You’re almost thirteen, I know. I have to keep reminding myself that you’re older than my kiddos downstairs.”
They know. The Liars know how old I am. They know how close it is to my time.
“So, anyway, I’m sorry. I’ll get out of your hair, but—” She plucks a plastic bottle with pink goop filling about half of it off the edge of the tub and hands it to me. “Here. Shampoo.”
My hand is slippery and the bottle splashes into the water but I fish it back out. I stare at the label.
Shampoo (n.): a liquid or cream prepared for the washing of hair or carpets
I know what it is. We know what everything is (except privacy and I’m sure we were about to learn that one). Only I don’t know how to use it.
“OK?” Charita freezes by the tub. She won’t leave until I say something.
I snap the bottle open and smell it. Strawberry jam. She wants me to put it in my hair?
“If you don’t like it we can get you something else.”
Why is she speaking so fast? Why is she jittery like I make her nervous? If she doesn’t like me, will she let me go home?
“Do you like it?” she asks.
I look at her.
“Sweetie . . . do you want . . . should I help?”
I can’t answer. I don’t want to talk. She won’t leave if I don’t answer. I don’t know what to do. Get here, Father. Get here now. Help me.
She leans over the tub and her fingers rest on the top of the bottle. I loosen my grip. I let her slip it out of my palm.
Then it’s my head under the pitcher as she pours water through my hair. It spills down my neck and back in warm rivers. Her fingers work suds through the clumps on my head until they separate and she spends extra time rubbing my scalp until I feel as smooth as a bar of soap on New Soap Day. When it’s over, my head feels lighter.
But my heart feels heavier. Guilty. Guiltier.
Back in the kitchen.
The colorful fabrics slip against my skin. The cushion of the kitchen chair whispers nice things to the bones in my butt. The new socks and sneakers hug my feet. Lies.
There are three other kids sitting at the table. They stare at me. Charita and Louis are busy behind my head, opening and shutting the refrigerator, turning on and off the sink faucet like they have all the water in the world. They won’t stop talking, their words filling up all of the space in my head where I’m trying to keep up my pleas to Father.
“Junior?” Charita says. “Peanut butter and jelly? With carrot sticks.”
“Yes, please,” the oldest one says. He has curly hair that flops over his ears and forehead. It’s so dark. He has green eyes. His hair bounces on his head when he talks.
“Elsie?” Charita says.
“Can I have turkey? With mustard? And tomato?” the girl says. Her brown hair is divided into two braids that hang next to her ears. My own hair sticks up from my scalp in every angle, all of the hairs separate now that Charita washed out the clumps. My hair has never been long enough for braids because I have never been thirteen and I haven’t had my ceremony and I’m not a woman yet so it’s right and perfect for my hair to keep getting chopped. Elsie’s shirt looks like mine, only it’s green. She has green eyes. Also like mine. And Junior’s.
“Jakey?”
“Peanut butter!” the little one screams from his high chair.
I jump at his loudness and they stare at me again. I’ve never heard words be so loud. Usually noises that are that loud are crying or angry or nightmares.
The little one hides his own green eyes behind his tiny fingers.
My stomach gurgles even though it’s still full of breakfast. I won’t be getting any food. There can’t be that much food out in Darkness. It can’t be the way they’re making it seem, like their fridge has no back wall, like it goes on and on, like it’s a cold cave filled with all sorts of meats and fruits and vegetables. The Agents of Darkness will make me sit here and watch these squeaky-clean kids with the dark hair eat and eat and eat while they laugh at me behind my head. They want my stomach to churn and ache so that it feels like it’s eating itself.
But they aren’t that smart out here in the Darkness. My stomach is still full from before.
“Zylynn?” Charita says. “Is peanut butter and jelly good for you too?”
I nod, wide-eyed. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what jelly is, but it is good. Food is good.
Food shouldn’t be good in Darkness. I don’t know how to make it not-good. I know it’s a lie, but I still don’t know how to hate it. I’m sorry, Father. Help me.
I need to go home. Time is running out. But I can’t run away now; they would notice and snatch me right back up. I have to wait until they leave me alone while the sun is up and while I have clothes on. Help me, help me!
Charita puts a white plate in front of each of us kids. Each plate is different. Mine is the only one with strawberries on it.
“I noticed you liked them at breakfast,” she whispers over my ear.
I turn and stare at her.
Each of the other kids says thank you. My mouth stays shut. They start eating. So do I. I shove a huge mouthful of bread mushed with peanut butter and something purple into my mouth before they can take it away. Louis comes next to me and sits. I know he’s going to take the plate away. He’s going to laugh at me for liking the food and the bath and the clothes and the way there’s a woman right in the same room with us. I try to shove more food in.
“Take it easy there, Zylynn,” he says. His green eyes are rimmed with red. His eyebrows look more gray than they did yesterday. His fur is mostly gone. “This isn’t a race.”
I stare at him.
“Does she know how to talk?” Junior says.
Is the “she” me? How could he think that? I’m bigger than he is once or twice over. Of course I know how to talk. I know how to speak and read and count and find the Light and a million other things that there’s no way little Junior knows.
“I’m not stupid,” I say. The words slip from my mouth and line themselves up on the table. They stare at me. They are the proof that I am really here, far away from everything that is real and Light and safe.
Those are the fir
st words I say in the Darkness. And they come out all jumbled because I have to push them through a mouth sticky with peanut butter.
I take a sip of rich, creamy milk. A lie. I know it’s another lie, Father.
“I’m not stupid,” I say again. “I know more than you do.”
The kids stare at me. We all chew.
The girl says, “Is our father really your father?”
I almost smile. They’re the ones who think I’m stupid. But I stay serious. It’s not Elsie’s fault she was raised in Darkness. That was a big lesson from Outside Studies. We have to try to win souls, young souls. The doomed children in the Darkness can become lucky Children Inside the Light. They’re not the evil Liars; they’re the victims.
I tell her the Ultimate Truth. The thing that you must know and believe in order to be in the Light. The piece of knowledge without which it is not worth living. I say, “There is no Father except the Prophet; there is no Mother except God.”
Her eyebrows jump. She looks confused. She maybe looks scared.
Maybe, when Father Prophet comes to find me, I can take her back with me. I can become a Gatherer early. Maybe I can start doing the Work before I even turn thirteen. Father Prophet would be so proud. He’d forgive me for being in the Darkness and eating the food and taking a bath with shampoo.
I say it again. “Did you hear me? There is no Mother except God, no Father except the Prophet.”
Louis sighs.
Elsie takes another bite.
I’ll save her.
I’ll get myself home. And I’ll take her with me.
The worst days Inside were the Hungry Days.
They started like all the other days. We would wake up at the Caretaker’s whistle and we’d crawl out of our beds and shift our way through hot sand, freezing showers, and hard toilets. We’d march the five minutes to the next building in the first circle. We’d sit at the long kids’ table in the Dining Hall with the electric lights buzzing over our heads and to our right and left and front and back, and nothing would show up.
The Cooks would come out of the kitchen in the back. Their hands would be empty. Their mouths would be straight. “Be brave,” they’d say. “Ask for forgiveness.”
On Hungry Days the sticky, pasty oatmeal in our brains was the most delicious meal we’d ever thought of.
On Hungry Days we would go to school and write answers on our chalkboards and read our pamphlets or listen to lessons and learn and try not to think about our stomachs folding themselves in half over and over again. We’d try not to listen to all of the folding stomachs around us as they grumbled through the classroom.
On Hungry Days, during Exercise, we would end up lying on the mats, clenching our middles while a fire ripped through them one after the other. We’d try not to cry out loud. We’d usually fail.
On Hungry Days we didn’t even go into the Chapel for prayer. On Hungry Days Father Prophet was never around.
Hungry Days were his way of reminding us of our Inadequacies and Abominations. They were his warning about what would happen if we forget him.
I thought I’d already been punished. I’d hoped the string of Hungry Days after all the strangers left was enough to punish me.
But my Abomination was really bad.
And now I’m in Darkness.
Four
WHEN JUNIOR TAKES ELSIE AND JAKEY down the stairs in the back of the kitchen and Charita and Louis turn their backs to put some plates in the sink, I take my sandwich and run out the front of the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the Pink Stripes Room.
I bend over the bed and pull out the breakfast plate. I scoop the round-and-flat circle thing and five more strawberries into my hands and clutch the food to my chest.
Go down the road, I remind myself. Make a left at the end of it. Walk until you see the shrugging cactus.
Wait.
Was the shrugging cactus on the next road? The third or the second road?
And is it a left if I’m coming from this way? Or was it a left when we drove here?
“Whatcha doing there, Zylynn?” Louis’s voice says behind my head.
I’m still hunched next to the bed holding all of the food. The air rushes out of me. I drop the food onto the plate.
I missed my chance.
How will I escape when I don’t know where to go? Please come get me, Father.
I stand still, make my back rigid, like it’s pressed against one of the wooden boards of the Inside classroom that we have to stand between if we forget an answer. I make my eyes huge and innocent. I trick him.
“How was your lunch?” He says it like it’s normal. He says it like Lunch is something that happens every day.
“Good,” I say to distract him. He’s so delighted by my word that he misses it as the toe of my new sneaker shoves the rest of the white plate under the bed.
He takes a step toward me, then another one, then another like he’s going to be right next to me and sit on the bed or something, and he can’t sit on the bed because I might need to sleep in it tonight and I don’t want to sleep in it if a Liar has touched it.
I look at him and he freezes.
“Do you understand what’s happening, Zylynn? Do you want to ask me anything?”
That’s not fair. Those are two questions with two different answers. He’s trying to make me speak as many words as possible. He’s trying to use my voice to fill up his Darkness.
It’s hard to remember that I’m in Darkness with the way the sunshine is streaming through the open window behind me. But Father Prophet said that the Darkness is always tricky. I have to be trickier.
“I don’t have any questions,” I say.
“Do you understand what’s happening?” he asks again.
This time I nod. I’m lying, but he’s the Liar. It’s so confusing.
Louis sighs.
“The kids went to play outside,” he says.
I don’t understand because we are Outside. Everything is Outside. And it’s the middle of the day. Don’t we have to go to school and exercise?
“Do you want to join them? There’s a swing set out there. You might be a little old for swing sets. I guess I haven’t figured out everything . . . what we’ll do now . . . everything you’ll need . . . a twelve-year-old girl will . . . whatever you need you’ll have . . . I’ll—we’ll—try . . .”
I can’t let the words in my ears, the soft slipperiness of them, the way they’re wiggling into my brain and getting comfortable, the way they’re promising the things we’ve never been promised, the way they know things about me like how old I am and my name, the way they coat my skull like they are meant for only me, like I am something all by myself.
I walk past him and down the stairs and he follows me but he stops talking so it’s OK or it’s at least better. I walk through the hallway and through the kitchen past Charita and out into the sunlight where the three kids are exercising.
Come and get me, I beg Father Prophet. Come and get me soon. I’m sorry for what I did.
Their compound is small. I think about that as I stand leaning on the fence in the back of it with the three kids sprinting back and forth in front of my face in some sort of chaotic and undirected form of Exercise.
If I were at home, Inside, I would be in charge of these three because I am the biggest and therefore probably the oldest. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be in charge of Junior and Elsie and Jakey. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be changing their spazzy game into productive Exercise that will increase their heart rates and build their muscles and help their blood flow and remind them to ask Father Prophet to thank Mother God for their bodies.
But I don’t care if I’m in charge here because I’m in Darkness and I’m supposed to hate everything.
I hate everything, Father.
This compound is just one building. The people here eat and bathe and sleep and dress and work and do business and pray and smile and worship and sing and talk and laugh and learn and cook and clean
and breathe all under only one roof. If they do all those things. And all the other things they maybe do also. Only one roof. I know because I can see that the fence I’m standing against goes around only this one building. They call it house.
House (n.): a building in which people live; a residence for human beings
There are only five people on the whole compound: Louis and Charita and Junior and Elsie and Jakey. I’m trying to hate them. But it’s hard to hate the kids who laugh like Jaycia while they’re running back and forth under a stream of water that juts out of a silver thing in the middle of the yard. They call it sprinkler.
I look around, out over the fence to the street. That’s where I will go to escape. I flip the palm of my left hand so it’s facing up and try to draw a map on it with my right pointer finger. There’s only one way to go on this road because this compound rests on the curved end of it. So I know the first step. At the end of the road, I’m pretty sure I turn left.
Were there three roads total? Or four?
I remember turning at a shrugging cactus.
Help me, Father. Help me.
Suddenly the three kids are all in a pile in the middle of the yard, about four feet in front of me. They’re loud. It’s a squeaking, screeching kind of loudness that isn’t words like it was when Jakey asked for peanut butter and it isn’t crying and they aren’t asleep so it isn’t a nightmare. It’s a painful, piercing, useless sound and then I hear Elsie say “Stop! Stop!”
This is something I’ve seen before. It’s something I know the word for. I flip through the lists of vocabulary words that I’ve learned in school. I can’t find the right one.
Elsie gets louder: “Stop! Stop!”
Maybe I am in charge.
She screams again.
I may be supposed to hate Elsie but I don’t. She’s too small and sweet with a smile and freckles and eyes like mine. And if I can teach her and take her back with me and make her part of the rest of us, then I won’t be allowed to hate her anymore. If I use her to get Father to forgive me, then I’ll have to forgive her.
I don’t want her to get hurt.
I run over and stand a foot away. The two boys are on their feet with their fingers on her legs and arms and she’s wiggling and squiggling and so, so loud and the “Stop! Stop!” sounds like a nightmare sounds. But Elsie is also smiling with so many teeth like Jaycia did. Whenever I hear the “Stop! Stop!” in the middle of the night I’m supposed to wake the girl up and let her remember that she is safe Inside, she is in the Light. Elsie isn’t in the Light but maybe I could take her into the Light but not if she’s loud and screaming like that and not if she’s hurt and it sort of doesn’t look like they’re hurting her but it sounds like they are and I can’t remember what this is called, the word, but I know that it’s bad and no matter what it’s called and no matter if I hate them I don’t want anyone to hurt anyone. So I do it.