by Caela Carter
Two days of eating and sitting and thinking.
I pull the chair in the Pink Stripes Room over to the window and I stare out of it and imagine Father Prophet coming up the road. He’ll be in his pressed white pants with his white cape trailing behind him. His feet are so huge that his steps will make tremors in the road. The people on the other compounds, in the other houses, will rush out their doors as he passes and throw themselves on their knees at the curb of the road, begging him for mercy. He’ll walk and he’ll walk and her Light will be trailing behind him, brightening the street until it is burning all of the evil Liars. The little kids will follow him but he won’t watch as they gather behind his cape. He’ll keep walking, his eyes on my face through the glass, on me sitting here, waiting, until he’s here, at the circle-y end of the road, underneath the window with his arms stretched toward me and that smile making his cheeks so large and then Mother God will make it so that I can float down to him on a beam of Light all because I remember.
Help me come up with a plan, Father. Help me get out of here. I believe in you.
I go downstairs to eat. Only to eat and steal food. My stomach gets so full from milk and pancakes and turkey and tacos and peanut butter and hamburgers and mac and cheese and bacon and guacamole and strawberries and ice cream and chicken and bread and a million other things that they eat in Darkness. I have to rub it to calm it down while I sit by the window or lie in the middle of all the pink stripes at night. The plate under the bed piles up toward the mattress.
A smell gathers there, then spreads like fog between all of the pink stripes. The smell is good. The smell is food.
There’s a pattern to the compound around me. I haven’t figured out all of the pieces, all of the rules, but I can feel it. Louis knocks and says good-bye; Charita cooks a lot of food; Elsie leaves in a different car, then comes back; Junior is away a lot of the day; Elsie and Junior on the swing set; Jakey taking a nap; Elsie taking a nap; Elsie and Junior going away in a car, coming back. This is what I hear but they don’t make me talk. They don’t make me leave the window.
So I sit, I eat, I fail to come up with a plan.
Louis never takes me with him.
Then I’m two days closer to being thirteen. I only have seven days left.
Seven
THERE’S A KNOCKING ON MY DOOR. “Zylynn? You in there?”
I’m in here. I have been forever. I’m lying in my bed awake, staring at the ceiling and asking Father Prophet to give me a way out.
“Zylynn?” Knock, knock.
The voice is Charita’s but it’s so different from the voice she uses to quarrel with Louis. It’s soft and almost like singing. The same voice she used when giving me peanut butter and strawberries. The same voice she used when holding Junior and Elsie and Jakey, all three of them on her one lap. It’s weird that one woman can make her voice sound so different in the night than she does in the day.
“Zylynn?”
I don’t want to answer her. I don’t want to leave any more of my words out here. Father said that, even though we can’t see them, to Mother God words are physical things. They’re little pebbles made of Light. And if we leave them all over Darkness, we leave little pebbles of our own Light out here, little parts of ourselves we can never get back.
“Get dressed, OK, Zylynn? Just wear the same clothes you’ve had on but with a new pair of underwear. We’re going out,” she says. “In the car.”
Out. In the car. I sit up. Maybe Louis wasn’t lying! Maybe they will take me home!
They want to send me back in brand-new underwear.
“OK,” I say.
I get out of bed and take the soft clothes off my body. I put on the pale green underwear, the denim shorts. I button the pink buttons.
Father Prophet will make me throw all of these clothes away. He won’t be happy with me now that it’s my fourth day in Darkness. He’ll be angry that I lost my white clothes. He’ll want me to burn this pink shirt. I’ll never tell him how much I like having a color against my skin. But he might know, just by looking at me.
Then I freeze with the shirt half buttoned. There will be a punishment. For leaving, even though the leaving was also my punishment. Father Prophet will say that if I wanted to stay badly enough, if I remembered him often enough, if I followed the rules closely enough, if I was sorry enough for that night, I would have stayed. I would have gotten back faster. There will be a punishment for the things that he’ll know I liked: colors and food and softness and shampoo. Three days of silence. Two Hungry Days just for me. A pinging at the fence with all of the boys and girls throwing rocks at my legs. Maybe two punishments. Maybe all three at once.
I glance at the bottom of the bed where I’ve been stashing the plate. Maybe I should try to shove some strawberries or some bacon or that half peanut butter sandwich into the pocket of these shorts.
The door opens and Charita’s head pops in. I whip my face around to see her. The yellow strap of a dress I’ve never seen is peeking through the door around her shoulder and her hair is down in flowing curls and her smile is huge and she looks like an entirely different person and I’m not prepared for it so I almost scream.
Her eyes go wide and her nose wrinkles. She makes a sound like a dog who has dirt stuck in his throat. “Zylynn,” she says, “what’s that sm—” Then she shakes her head. “Never mind. Glad you’re up. Almost ready, kiddo?”
I’m so tired of being confused.
Forget the food. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she’ll take me back Inside. Relief floods my chest and limbs and I finish getting dressed.
A few minutes later, I’m in the car. It’s me and Charita. I don’t ask where Louis is. I don’t ask why Louis is the one who got me but Charita is the one who’s bringing me back. I don’t ask if I can have my white shorts and T-shirt back so that Father isn’t mad at me when I arrive. I don’t ask any of these things, even though I want to. I’ve already left forty-nine words here in the Darkness, and I want to be able to tell Father Prophet that I left fewer than fifty.
The car is not as scary in the daytime. The sunlight is slicing through the window, which is over our heads and baking the insides of the car even though there’s air blowing on us through the openings in the front. Air-conditioning. We have that back at the compound, but we only turn it on on the very hottest days when Mother God is so angry she’s trying to roast her creation back into ash.
The road moves too quickly under the tires and the turns make me want to yelp because they throw my body into the car door, but I won’t. It’s as fast and confusing and weird as it was on the way here, but it’s not as scary. And that’s because I know where I’m going. To safety. To the Light. Inside. In a few minutes or hours I will be back and I remember and Father might be mad about the clothes but he’ll be happy that I remember. The Darkness didn’t eat my brain. I still know Mother God. I still believe.
After a few days back Inside, after just a few days of breakfast and school and exercise and coming to the Light and dinner and prayers and bedtime, after only a few days of real life, I’ll forget all about Louis and Charita and Elsie and Junior and Jakey and I will be like the rest of us who never ever left.
The best thing about being Inside—I’ve seen it happen with every new soul that the women gather—is that we forget all of the things Father Prophet didn’t teach us. We forget the Darkness.
The best thing about Inside is not knowing anything else.
“Here, Zylynn. Breakfast,” Charita says. She hands me a square with pink frosting. I lick it. It’s so sweet my taste buds need to rearrange themselves before I should take a bite. I take one anyway. It squirts sweetness around my tongue and between my teeth and onto my inside-cheeks.
“Is that your first Pop-Tart?” Charita asks. She looks at me and it makes me nervous because she should be watching the road. I think that should be a rule out here.
I don’t answer.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
I love it.
In the days before I forget, I will miss the food. But I still don’t believe all the food can be real. It tastes real and it makes my stomach stick out in a real way. But it’ll go away soon. It’s a trick to keep me here, to make me addicted to Darkness.
I take another bite of Pop-Tart. I won’t get addicted now. I don’t need to worry. I’m going back.
The car slows down and I stuff another big bite into my mouth, trying to finish as much of it as I can before we stop and Father Prophet finds me again.
I remember you, I promise him. I hope he won’t sense all the sugar in my mouth when he sees me.
The car stops and my heart speeds with the anticipation of Father Prophet’s words and promises.
I look out the window but I don’t see our compound. We’re in a huge flat area made of gray concrete and full of cars.
Parking lot (n.): an area, usually divided into spaces, designed to store motor vehicles for long or short term
Charita gets out of the car. I shove in another bite.
Is this a different compound? Another land filled with things I’ve never heard of before and words I have to search for in the folds of my brain?
Find me. Please come find me.
Charita opens the door next to my seat.
“You coming?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“Come on,” she says.
What if taking me “back” doesn’t mean Inside. What if that wasn’t what Louis meant at all? What if “back” is another compound, someplace worse than where I was, someplace where there isn’t so much food and so many little kids who laugh all the time? And women? What if I failed a test and now comes the real punishment?
I stuff the rest of the Pop-Tart into my mouth. I should have shoved all of the food from the plate into the pockets of these shorts before we left.
I’m sorry I don’t understand. What do I do? Father, I remember you.
Why aren’t you answering me?
I’m frozen in the seat. Charita is staring at me.
“Are you OK, Zylynn?”
She’s whispering: quiet and musical. I shake my head. A crumb escapes the corner of my mouth. I miss it immediately.
Charita squats by the car seat. She puts her hand on me and I don’t want to like it there but I do. It’s warm and soft and it looks like a tea-colored pillow on my pale knee.
“What’s going on, Zylynn?”
“I’m sorry.” I try to say it but it comes out all muffled.
“What?” Charita says.
“Please don’t leave me here,” I squeak through the Pop-Tart crumbs. “I’m sorry I’ve been bad.”
Something invisible slashes across her face as if it’s breaking open. Her brown eyes get bigger and her burgundy mouth turns into a circle and her arms come up until they’re around me and her long black hair is hanging by my nose and it smells like oranges and she’s holding me the way she held Junior and Elsie and Jakey and I realize that this is a hug and that, even though she’s a woman, which means she carries all the pain and responsibility, the hug is for me and it’s not for her and I feel my heart slow down because I’ve wondered for two days what a hug like this would feel like so I want to forget everything, every worry, every pain, and try to memorize it.
“You haven’t been bad, Zylynn. You’re not bad,” Charita is whispering in my ear. “You’re a good girl.”
“Where are we?” I use my voice. I ask her because she’s so close and because Father hasn’t answered me.
“Target,” she says.
Target (n.): an object, usually marked with concentric circles, to be aimed at during shooting practice or contests
I pull my head back to look at her. Maybe she’s crazy.
“It’s a store,” she says. “Target is the name of a store. You need some more clothes. We only got you one outfit and three pairs of underwear.”
Store (n.): an establishment where merchandise is sold, usually on a retail basis
I need more clothes?
I don’t understand anything here.
“Where we live, we wear different clothes every day.” Charita finally gives me the first rule. She smiles at me. I feel mushy inside.
Hurry, Father, please. I’m starting to lose.
The glass doors slide open like magic and we step onto the bright white tile. I feel my pulse slow inside my skin. There are people everywhere, walking in all directions between the piles and piles of stuff in front of us. The people are pushing little carts, talking constantly like they don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing or how they’re supposed to use their voices. There are some white walkways lining the place like guiding paths and between them there’s nothing but stuff. Rows and piles, mountains and pits, shelves and buckets of stuff. Who needs all this stuff? Who are all these people?
I stand still as a stone with the artificial air freezing my skin and the sliding doors swishing back and forth behind me as more people push past me into this strange building. My eyes go wide, sucking it all in: the colors, the sounds, the smells.
It’s overwhelming, but I’m calm. More calm than I’ve been in a while. Because over my head, miles and miles away, is a ceiling. And running along the ceiling, all over it from front to back and right to left and up to down are the brightest lights they have anywhere in Outside.
I stay like that for so long—enjoying the lights in my pupils—that I don’t notice that Charita has left my side until she appears next to it again. She’s pushing one of the red carts herself now, like she’s one of the rest of these people.
They have dead eyes and faces that zoom this way and that, looking, looking, looking at the stuff but thinking about nothing.
“Who are all these people?” I ask her before it’s too late to stop my voice from coming. But that’s OK, actually, because I want to know. Are they from related compounds somehow? Do they say the same strange prayers that Elsie and Junior and Jakey say every night? How do they all know to come here, to Target? How do they all know what to do when they’re here?
Charita says, “The shoppers?”
She says it with a question mark on the end, even though it’s an answer. I will never understand things here.
I shouldn’t be trying.
“Come on, chiquita,” Charita says.
I follow her over the white tiles—making sure to stay inside the two lines of red because that has to be what the rule is, even though Charita keeps breaking it by letting the back wheel cross into the red a little—and I watch the Shoppers. I see one woman standing frozen between two piles of T-shirts, tapping a pencil against a piece of paper. I see a small boy reach up from his perch in the red cart and throw a brightly colored flip-flop into it while the man pushing him around is looking in the other direction. I see a girl barely older than me holding up a skirt with pink sparkles and screaming at a nearby woman. I stare at her for a long time. This is what Father is always talking about: belongings, greed, Darkness. How can she live Outside and not even know she’s in trouble?
Who are the Shoppers anyway?
Charita’s cart comes to a sudden stop only about seven feet from the screaming girl.
She looks down at me, her brown eyes rimmed with eyelashes so black. I don’t know how it’s possible I haven’t noticed them until now. “So?” she says.
My eyebrows jump a little.
Charita makes an arc with her hand, the silver band on her finger glinting under the glorious ceiling lights. “What do you like?” she asks.
I take a step back to see what she’s looking at, but she seems to have pointed everywhere. To the shelves right next to us that are piled with neatly folded T-shirts in green and orange and brown and gray and stripes and flowers and dots. To the rack next to me where blue jeans hang in a straight line like they’re waiting for their morning oatmeal. To the wall next to her where pastel flip-flops hang next to sunglasses and belts and purses. To the rack behind her where shiny patterned shirts a
re hung directly above poufy skirts and sequined shorts.
I see now that the Shoppers have some order to all of the stuff. It isn’t in piles and pits the way it first looked. Everything is lined up like it has a place, like there are some rules and once I learn them maybe I can survive. Until I figure out a way to get home.
I look up, debating whether it’s worth it to use my voice to answer Charita’s question, but then she opens her mouth and changes it. “Zylynn,” she says softly, like she did a minute ago at the car. Or maybe even softer. She says my name so softly it makes something light up in my brain. It makes me think something I’ve never thought about anyone before: she likes me. “What do you want?”
A chill goes down my spine. The goose bumps on my arms are no longer from the air-conditioning.
“What do I want?” I repeat, hushed. This has to be a trick. I know it’s a trick. But I also believe her eyes and her voice and they don’t want to trick me.
She nods. “Don’t go crazy,” she says.
I’m not, I think. But then I wonder if I am, maybe.
“But pick out a few shirts, maybe five. And three pairs of shorts or skirts. Whatever you like. Everything here is about as affordable as we’re going to get.”
Index cards flip in my brain.
Affordable (adj.): believed to be within one’s financial means
I still don’t know what she’s talking about.
“I’m sorry that we can’t buy more for you right now. We only have so much set aside. But we’ll get a small wardrobe going for the summer, and then we’ll do a big shopping spree with all the kids before school starts . . .”
I stare at her, not hearing. “I can have whatever T-shirt I want?” What kind of rule is that?
Charita nods. I see something breaking in her eyes. I wonder if the lies are breaking; if she likes me enough, maybe she won’t be able to lie anymore.
I wander to the shelf of T-shirts behind her. I touch a yellow one, pale, like the sun in the winter. I run my finger over it. I’ve never touched yellow.
It feels like the rest of Outside: soft.