by Caela Carter
I leap toward the kid-pile, sailing through the air headfirst with my arm out to the side. I land next to Junior, my arm anchoring his hand to his hip. The force of my shoulder slams into his throat and knocks him into the grass. I use my hands to pin his elbows down to the ground and then Elsie is free.
And I remember the word.
Fight (v.): to contend in battle or physical combat. Esp: to strive to overcome a person by blows or weapons
There were fights Inside when new kids arrived. Only then. Those kids were still addicted to Darkness. They sometimes got confused and then they got angry and then they screamed and kicked and punched, until they remembered Father Prophet and they’d stop.
This was a fight. Of course it was. These kids are all addicted to Darkness.
The next second, while I’m holding Junior to the ground and he’s beneath my palms, is the quietest one in Darkness so far. All three of them stare at me, six green eyes wide and weird and six brown eyebrows arched high into three cinnamon-colored foreheads.
Then Junior is crying. It’s loud but at least I know what it is.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how they punish fighting here. I don’t even know if fighting is against the rules. I don’t know anything.
My skin feels like it’s burning where it’s touching Junior, so I let him up.
Elsie and Jakey are crying now where they sit in the grass. All three of them sit and cry. Elsie cries the loudest. I look at her, confused. She should have been crying before. Now I rescued her. Now it’s time to stop being loud.
Then Louis and Charita are there with us saying, “What happened? What happened?” and I wonder if words are this loud on every Outside compound or only on this one.
Charita is looking at me. She’s holding on to Elsie, squeezing her. “What happened?” she says to me again, not soft anymore.
I don’t want to use my voice. I don’t want to leave my words here. I don’t want to be here.
Please, take me away. You can do anything. I believe in you. I’m sorry and I want to be with you.
I watch Charita holding Elsie. I watch her spreading her arms like they can go on forever and then I watch her holding all three of the kids on her one-and-only lap. It looks like when the women come home after a long, long time. But it also looks different. Somehow. She’s holding them the same way. She’s kissing their heads the same way. But they’re the ones crying.
When the women hugged us, the grown-ups cried and little kids squirmed in their arms. When the women hugged us it was like they were latching on to our Light after a long time in Darkness.
But this hug looks different. The kids are latching on to Charita. It’s as if the hug is for them and not for her.
What does it feel like to be held like that?
When she asks again, her voice is quieter. “What happened, Zylynn?”
I answer. “They were fighting.” Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine words out here in Darkness.
I’m sorry, Father.
Charita looks down at the kids, three little heads gathered under her nose. “Tickle fighting,” Junior says quietly. “We were tickle fighting.”
Tickle. I scan through lists and lists of vocabulary words. Tickle. I don’t know that one.
There was a sound coming from the next bunk over. We didn’t know what it was.
I rolled over. “Are you crying?” I asked.
“No,” Jaycia said. “Laughing.”
I located the word in my head right away.
Laugh (v.): to emit a sound of joy, merriment, or amusement
We hadn’t heard a real laugh before.
“Why?” I whispered. I was in charge in the bright sleeping room. I was the oldest besides Jaycia, and she was the newest so she couldn’t be in charge. Father Prophet said Zylynn was in charge. Zylynn was supposed to stop any whispering; Zylynn was supposed to end any nightmares; Zylynn was supposed to keep it bright-light and quiet until the Caretakers came back in the morning.
But no one told me what to do about laughter.
“I was remembering this one joke my dad told me once,” she said. “Want to hear it?”
I knew it was a Mistake to talk during the nighttime. Too many Mistakes would make Father angry. I knew I should say no and tell Jaycia to go to sleep. But would her joke make me laugh too? What would it feel like to have that bubbly sound pass through my own windpipe?
“Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?” Jaycia said.
“Is that the joke?” I asked.
“No, now you ask why,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he didn’t have the guts.”
Jaycia laughed again. Was this the part where I joined in? Was this the part where the bubbly noise was supposed to come from my own belly? Was it like crying, which happened whether you wanted it to or not, or like talking, which only happened when you told your body to do it?
I tried it. I made a sound in my stomach that jabbed my throat on the way out. It didn’t sound bright and lovely.
It made Jaycia wrinkle her nose at me.
Maybe we didn’t have laughter.
It’s nighttime again.
First, the sun set. I saw it sinking down the sky. And I was trapped again. If I ran away, I’d get stuck in the dark and I’d suffocate or burn or something.
There was more food, then there was more going “outside” but I wouldn’t do it. I sat under the electric bulb in the living room and prayed and begged and pleaded and planned. But I didn’t come up with anything. I don’t know how to get out of here.
Then there were some strange bedtime prayers. Then there was brushing teeth and other normal things. Then there was bed.
A whole day in Darkness and I still don’t know the rules. Inside, we tell the new people all of the rules right away.
I stand under the weak lightbulb in the Pink Stripes room.
Mother God,
Keeper of Light
Everything I have is yours; I choose to have nothing of my own.
I choose to be nothing but an Agent of your Light.
May the Darkness never find me.
I believe.
I put on the pink clothes tonight. They feel like clouds against my skin.
I get under the thick blanket. Its weight is like one of the women hugging me. Like Thesmerelda hugging me.
I think about the pancake (I finally figured out the word), the five strawberries, the three strips of bacon, the half peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the four chicken fingers from dinner under the bed. I think about the stuff I couldn’t steal—mac and cheese and milk—in my belly.
I hate it here, Father. I really hate it.
It’s confusing and upside down and pointless. Everything good is a trick. Everything bad is real.
I close my eyes and scary things fly through my brain: the fastest car ever, the dogs at the gate, the shampoo falling into the water . . . Jaycia climbing out of her bed for the last time . . . the moon on the night of the Abomination . . .
I tremble in the new clothes and new bed until I’m sure I’ll never sleep.
Five
I’M FINALLY ASLEEP AND THEN I’M not anymore. The window is still black, the lightbulb’s reflection shining off it.
Again, I’m awake in the middle of the night and alone so I could run away without being caught, but I’m trapped by the Darkness on the other side of the window.
Noises sneak into the room. My head is only a foot from the wall because the bed I’m sleeping in is flush against it. The noises get louder, then quieter, then louder, then quieter. It’s voices. Charita and Louis.
At home, the walls are covered in lights and the lights buzz and the buzzing sounds like something safe and warm and close and it helps me sleep. Here in the silence the voices outside the wall can come wandering in through the pink stripes whether you were sleeping or whatever you were doing.
And there’s no tea.
“I know,” Louis’s voic
e is saying. “I know. I did it all wrong.”
“Louis, she’s lost. She’s almost thirteen and she knows nothing about the world.” Charita’s voice is louder. I’ve never heard a woman sound so loud. Or angry.
“What do you want me to do? She’s my daughter.”
Daughter. I flip through the in-brain vocabulary lists for that one. I can’t find it. But I think the “she” is me. Me, Zylynn. Me, all by myself. Me, alone in Darkness. I am daughter.
“Louis!” Charita yells this, yells his name like he doesn’t know who he is or like he needs to come over to her even though they’re in the same room and he’s already talking to her.
I know what this is. It isn’t a fight because there are no blows or weapons. Just words.
“We aren’t talking about what to do now,” she says. “How did it get this bad? Why was she there for so long?”
Quarrel (n.): a verbal altercation between two antagonists
There’s quiet now, muffling.
I hate that I don’t understand what they’re talking about. It makes me feel stupid.
“It got so much worse,” Louis says finally. The words barely find their way between the pink stripes and into my head. I sit up in bed to try to catch them in my ears, but I don’t know why. I didn’t want to hear them when they started. I don’t know what they mean.
His voice is soft like always.
“Back when I lived there, back when I was a part of the Movement . . . or whatever . . . I mean, we lived in the same place. We had our own room, two parents and a kid . . . it was on the compound but it was still . . . more . . . normal . . . Inside . . .”
Louis used to live Inside?
“I’m not defending myself,” he says. “I . . . It was the worst thing I ever did . . . going there . . .”
“I know, babe, I know,” Charita says.
“And . . . leaving her there . . . leaving my daughter . . .”
Daughter. Me again? Daughter. He didn’t leave me there. He took me away.
Louis is still talking. I can hear most of it now. “But it wasn’t as bad as . . . when I went back there, I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . prepared. It was so much worse . . .”
“Oh, baby,” Charita says and I don’t know why because there’s not a baby on this entire compound unless Charita and Louis have been hiding it from me in whatever room they’re in now that’s next to the pink stripes.
“I thought I’d leave her as long as I could . . . I hated the thought of taking her from her mother . . .”
There is no Father except the Prophet; there is no Mother except God.
“She doesn’t even know who her mother is,” Charita says.
My Mother is God.
Her voice is softer now. I wonder if the quarrel is over. “She doesn’t know anything. She’s terrified. What are we going to do with her?”
“Do you want me to take her back?”
I hear Louis ask it and I sink into the bed. I pull the blanket over my head and I breathe hot air out into the little soft cave I just made for myself.
He’ll take me back. Just like that. After only one full day in Darkness, tomorrow he’ll take me back.
I allow myself a smile. I did it.
Thank you, Father. I knew I wouldn’t forget you. I knew it.
Six
“I don’t want to be here,” Jaycia said at breakfast during her first week. “I don’t want to be like you.”
We all squinted at her.
“My mom is making me,” she said.
We didn’t know that word. Mom.
We tilted our heads. We squinted more.
“What?” she said. “I don’t want to be like you with your icky oatmeal and your bright, bright bedroom and your weird ideas about God. I want to be Janice again. I want it to be like I used to be.”
“But,” I said.
“But,” we all said.
“But what?” Jaycia asked.
“But we’re right,” I said.
“There’s not a right like that,” Jaycia said. “Not everything is just right and wrong. Sometimes things can be about what you want.”
“We want to be here,” I said.
“I’m not talking about you!” Jaycia said, a little too loudly. We weren’t breaking any rules. We were allowed to talk at breakfast. We weren’t saying anything that would invite Curiosity. We weren’t being greedy or violent.
But it felt like we were breaking a rule.
“I’m talking about me, about what I want,” Jaycia went on. “You can want to be here, fine, fine, fine. Just because Thesmerelda brought you here so long ago and you know how to like it or something. But I can’t do it. I can’t like it. I hate it.”
“Thesmerelda?” I asked. What did she have to do with anything?
“She’s your—”
“STOP,” I shouted at Jaycia. We weren’t supposed to say “my” or “your.” It was the most bad thing ever to say “my” or “your” about another person. The worst Abomination. Thesmerelda can’t be my anything because she belongs to Mother God.
Jaycia kept talking. “I want to be home. I miss my dog. I’m missing so much school. I don’t know what movies have come out, what my friends are wearing for Halloween. I miss everything. I want to go home.”
I was the oldest at the table. I had to handle this. And I didn’t want to turn her over to the Gatherers-in-Training, the teen girls. They were usually the ones who dealt with it when the new people had too many questions. I didn’t know exactly how, but the new souls always stopped asking questions after they dealt with the Gatherers-in-Training.
“But—” I said.
“I know, Zylynn, I know, OK?” Jaycia said. “I know you’re going to lecture me about the dangers of wondering, how that’s too close to Curiosity and how she’s some evil who tempts you away from the Light. But you can save your breath, OK? Because I don’t believe any of this.”
“But—” I said.
“But what, Zylynn? But what?”
“But we’re right,” I said.
We all nodded.
We went back to eating oatmeal.
Jaycia sighed.
Later, she learned. Eventually we all learned.
Now I’m awake. It’s morning. The sunlight is falling in through the window and there are no words sneaking through the walls. It’s quiet but it’s morning. That’s the opposite of how it’s supposed to be. Mornings are supposed to be full of noise. Not loud, but noisy with the “good mornings” and the water for the washing and the sound of feet against the sand. Nights are supposed to be quiet except for the lights buzzing. Everything in Darkness is backward.
Somehow I fell asleep again last night, but first, for hours, I hid under that blanket with a racing heart, praying to Father and promising that I remember everything. I fell asleep, then woke up, then fell asleep, then woke up. So many times.
When I wake up to the sun and the quiet, I’m happy. And it’s not because my bed is all warm and snuggly. It’s not because my pillow smells like strawberry shampoo.
It’s because I remember what Louis said last night. And today I’ll get back into her Light.
I did so well, I’ll make it back to Father with eight days to spare.
Minutes and hours pass before Louis knocks on the door. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed studying the pink stripes to try to keep them in my memory for as long as I can once I’m back. Father Prophet wouldn’t like that, but the pink stripes aren’t evil or dirty or Liars, they’re just stripes. And I want to remember them.
I’m dressed in the outfit they gave me yesterday, shoes and all, my hair combed back on my head. Hours ago while the house was still sleeping but the sun was awake in the windows, I tiptoed to the bathroom so that I won’t have to go before we leave. I’m ready. Father Prophet won’t like my clothes, but he’ll be so proud of me for getting back so quickly that he’ll give me a new white T-shirt and shorts.
“Zylynn?” Louis whispers. “Are you awake?”
>
I won’t answer.
The door opens anyway. “Look at you!” he says, his voice doing a weird up-and-down thing that makes my stomach turn. But it doesn’t matter. He’s taking me home now. “Up bright and early like the sun!”
He smiles at me so hard, I shrug.
I stand to go.
“I’m off to work,” he says. “Just wanted to say good-bye before I head out.”
My heart falls so fast I’m sure he can hear it clunk when it hits the floor. He’s a Liar. How could I have ever believed that he was telling the truth? Even if he was talking to Charita.
He stares at me, his green eyes squinting, his lips curved into question marks.
“Is that OK, sweetie . . . Zylynn?”
When I don’t answer he keeps talking.
“Will you be OK here without me?”
No. No because I’m not OK here at all. No because I will never be OK here in Darkness with nothing I understand.
My knees shake. I thought I was going home.
I shrug again.
He crosses the floor, taking huge steps toward me. He’s going to touch me. I gather my legs up on the side of the bed and scoot myself to the farther side.
He freezes. “Sorry,” he mumbles.
He turns and crosses back to the door. “Charita’s cooking some breakfast downstairs if you’re hungry,” he says. Then he’s gone.
She’s downstairs so I can’t run away. She’d see me. And I don’t remember the way anyway, so where would I go if I left?
I need to get out of here. I need a new plan.