by Caela Carter
But that day it was confusing. I didn’t understand how Hermeel had broken the rules.
Playing is not hard. I don’t even have to talk. Elsie takes Turtle all around the Pink Stripes Room. She walks over to the bed and puts Turtle tummy down on the blanket, swishing him back and forth.
“Look, Zylynn!” she says. “He’s swimming.”
I nod.
She runs over to the desk and bounces Turtle up and down on his legs. “Look, Zylynn!” she says, “he’s dancing.”
I nod. It’s all I have to do.
My cheeks still hurt. Elsie’s smile is making them pinch.
“Elsie!” Charita’s voice comes flying up the stairs. “Elsie! Get down here! You have to eat before camp!”
Elsie bounces over to where I still sit in the chair. She puts her mouth too close to my ear and blows into it in a “Shhh.”
My shoulder comes up to scratch at my ear. Her voice itches being that close.
“It won’t matter if I don’t eat before camp,” she says.
My eyes go wide. She doesn’t want to eat?
“Zylynn?” Charita’s voice comes up the stairs again, a little quieter, a little more of a question. “Would you like to come down for breakfast?”
“Nope,” Elsie whispers but I don’t know why. She says it too quietly for Charita to hear from all the way downstairs. Elsie is standing at the desk still, making Turtle spin on his shell.
I stand and walk out of the room. Playing was all right but eating is better. Elsie follows me down the stairs anyway.
I sit at the table in the spot that has been assigned to me. Junior’s already eating and Jakey’s smashing banana slices into his ears in his high chair. Scrambled eggs and strawberries appear under my nose like magic. This place is magic. I’m starting to wish the food would disappear so I could figure out the tricks and make myself want all the way to go home.
I almost spit out my first bite of eggs.
I do want to go home. All the way.
Elsie sits next to me and puts Turtle at the top of my plate. “Here,” she says. “Here’s Turtle, Zylynn.”
Charita spins around from the stove and stares. “What were you two doing?” she asks.
Elsie shrugs. “Playing,” she says.
“You were?” Charita asks.
Elsie nods.
“You two? Together?” Charita asks.
Elsie nods again. She takes a bite of eggs.
“Wow,” Charita says.
She’s still smiling at me when I finish my last bite.
I stare out the window until lunch. I watch Father Prophet come up the road like usual: the light, the cape, the people bowing on the curbs, the little children following, the way he looks at me. I’m almost remembering his face.
I have to remember it before I can go home. Once I know his face, he’ll give me a plan.
Boom. The front door slams below me. I listen. Someone or someones who is not Louis or Charita or Jakey or Elsie or Junior comes to the front door and makes a lot of noise until Junior and Elsie go out the door with them. Charita says, “Thank you so much,” to the someone/someones. Jakey and Charita stay in the kitchen. He shouts and talks and squeals. She clanks dishes together. Then they come upstairs and go into a room that is not the Pink Stripes Room that I’m in and is not the room next to the Pink Stripes Room where Louis and Charita had a quarrel. Then Jakey gets quiet and Charita goes back downstairs by herself and it makes me queasy to think that there are three people in this house and for some reason they’re all in three totally separate places.
I look for Father Prophet again. He’s not there. Where are you?
I try the playing thing. I get up and walk to the desk. I put Turtle on his shell and spin. I do it again. My eyes watch him spin around and around until if he were a real turtle he’d be so dizzy. It’s sort of nice to watch him, but my cheeks don’t pinch like they did before. I’m no good at playing.
I put him in my pocket and I go downstairs. Even though no one told me to.
Mistake? Abomination?
“Zylynn,” Jaycia hissed into the lightbulb hanging between our beds. It was night, middle of the night. It was after a Hungry Day.
“Shh,” I said. I was supposed to stop the whispering. Whispering was a Mistake. Even if I wanted to hear her laugh again, I couldn’t let her. We had to do the right thing always.
“Zylynn,” she said. She didn’t sound like she was going to laugh.
“You have to be quiet,” I told her.
Her head popped up in the bed next to mine. The lights had to sneak around her. She was a shadow in the dorm.
“I had a nightmare,” she said.
Oh. We could speak when someone had nightmares. I don’t know why. I didn’t know why the rules were the rules and I didn’t wonder, then. Curiosity stayed far away from Mother God’s home.
I got out of bed and climbed the rope ladder next to hers. I patted her head. “There there,” I said.
She lowered her eyebrows. “What are you doing?” she asked.
I was doing what I was supposed to because I was the one in charge.
“Stopping the nightmare,” I said. It was usually only the littlest girls who had nightmares. Or the newest girls. And the nightmares were always loud; they woke me up. And when I found the girl being loud, she was always still asleep. I was supposed to pat her until her eyes opened, then give her some more pomegranate tea.
I didn’t know what to do with Jaycia. She was awake already.
“It won’t stop unless I eat,” she said.
All of our stomachs grumbled to echo her. They clenched and spread and clenched and spread in pain.
“Do you have an orange under your covers?” I asked. My orange and banana were long gone. Thesmerelda hadn’t been back to give me more fruit either.
“What? No,” Jaycia said. “What are you talking about?”
My face burned and I didn’t answer. She hadn’t said so, but I thought maybe the orange and the banana were a secret, just between me and Thesmerelda and Father Prophet and Mother God. So I didn’t explain.
“Have some tea,” I said.
“No, I don’t drink that stuff,” Jaycia whispered. “You should never drink that stuff. They put bad stuff in the tea.”
“The tea is good for you,” I said. “The tea is from Mother God.”
“God!” Jaycia almost yelled it.
My eyes got wide. When you said the word like that it was a bad word. Not an Abomination, but the very biggest Mistake.
“I swear, Zylynn, as soon as I start to hope you’re the one who has a brain it seems like you’re as stupid as everyone else here,” Jaycia said.
It felt like she had pinged my heart.
“You’re supposed to drink the tea,” I said.
Somehow the rest of us were still asleep. None of our heads were popping up. None of us rustling or crying.
“I won’t. I can’t,” she said. Her eyes were super wet, almost like she was having a nightmare, but she was awake. “You don’t get it. I was hoping you would, but no one gets it. No one here gets anything.”
“Gets what?” I asked.
Jaycia shook her head and kicked off her sheet. Suddenly the butt of her white shorts was in my face. “Get down,” she said. “Get off. I’m finding food.”
“You can’t,” I said. “You can’t get out of bed. It’s a Mistake.”
But I was already moving down the ropes because she would step on my hands if I didn’t.
On the sandy floor, she stared at me. “If I don’t get food, I’ll keep having nightmares. You coming?”
I didn’t like this. I didn’t know what to do. I had to keep everyone in bed. I had to stop the nightmares. Which one should I do when I couldn’t do both at once?
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She moved through the room, the sand on the floor sticking in bits to her bare feet. She pushed aside the metal door and then she was out.
I ran after her.
&
nbsp; At the door, I took a big breath, a huge one. Then I plowed through it.
It wasn’t dark out there. Spotlights hung from every building spilling light onto every path. But it was so bright in the dorms, it took my eyes a minute to adjust. Then I saw her, legs and arms flailing as she sprinted toward the Dining Hall.
I took off after her, following her through the double doors into the large room.
The tables were empty, of course. It was the middle of the night. But Jaycia did not stop, she didn’t pause, she didn’t wonder at how strange it was to be in this room all by ourselves. She kept running until she was through the archway at the back of the room.
I gasped. We weren’t allowed in there, in the kitchen.
I tiptoed past the empty tables, ignoring the sounds of my own stomach, ignoring the panic of my own heart, ignoring, ignoring, ignoring.
I tilted my head through the arch and peeked in.
She stood still, legs splayed, arms wide to each side holding open black refrigerator doors, She turned to look at me. And, finally, she laughed.
“Zylynn,” she said. “Look!”
“No,” I said. “This is an Abomination. Mother God could strike you dead.”
“There’s so much food!” Jaycia laughed again. She turned. In her hand she held the largest, yellowest block of cheese I’d ever seen.
My stomach tried to climb up my throat, to escape my body in order to get that cheese.
“Want some?” she said.
I took a step toward her. She nodded. She held the cheese out even farther.
It wasn’t my legs walking, it was my stomach, pushing me forward and then I wasn’t stepping, I was sliding, skipping, running across the kitchen until my teeth had sunk into the cheese right where it rested in her palm.
Abomination.
We ate the whole block, passing it back and forth, taking bites right on top of each other’s teeth marks. When it was gone, our stomachs twisted in a new kind of pain.
Abomination.
A few days later, she was gone. A few weeks later, so was I.
I walk into the kitchen but I’m still alone and I don’t like that. I walk down the stairs and into the family room that’s connected to the screen porch that’s connected to the yard that holds the swing set. Charita is in the room, but she’s so quiet I almost miss her. She’s sitting alone at the very back of the room, staring at a small screen. It paints a bright line across the profile of her face.
More lights in Darkness. So many lights in Darkness. They didn’t tell us this at all in Outside Studies.
She doesn’t see me. I wonder if she can’t see me while she’s looking at the glowing book.
I take a small step closer to her. I don’t want to scare her the way Louis scares me when he starts walking into the Pink Stripes Room. Even though I won’t touch her. Even though I kind of want to feel her dark hair and her arms the way they held me in the car yesterday. I take another smaller step.
She turns and gasps. “Zylynn!” she says. “You scared me.”
I retreat immediately. I wasn’t going to touch you. I promise. And even if I was, I wouldn’t hurt you.
“No, no, no,” she says like I’m one of the guard dogs at the gate who were always getting yelled at for eating stuff they shouldn’t. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean you scared me. I didn’t see you is all. You startled me.”
Startle (v.): to disturb or agitate suddenly by surprise or alarm
Even when I know the words it’s not helping me understand.
I’m walking backward, back toward the steps.
“It’s OK, Zylynn,” she says. “You’re welcome anywhere in this house.”
I freeze.
I am?
“Is there something you want to do today?”
My eyes bug so far out of their sockets I’m sure they’ll roll onto the floor. I can’t believe she asked me that. There are those words again: What do you want?
The answer is so simple. It was so simple the whole time. She asks me what I want, I pick it out, I get it. That’s how it worked in Target with the Shoppers. Could it be that easy?
I open my mouth to tell her, to say it, to end this.
I want to go home.
Instead my voice says, so quietly even my own ears can hardly hear it, “What is that?”
My jaw drops. Curiosity somehow snuck into my lungs and out of my throat. I can’t make myself stop wanting to know about a book that glows.
“This?” Charita laughs. She points to the thing on the desk in front of her.
I nod.
That was my first curious question in Darkness. My heart burns with shame. I shouldn’t want to know about the glowing book. I shouldn’t be sorry for scaring Charita. I shouldn’t be wishing that I lived with a woman all the time the way that Elsie and Junior and Jakey get to. A woman who hugs you when you’re feeling sad and who feeds you when you’re feeling hungry. I shouldn’t be here, right now, at all. I should be upstairs praying. I should be trying to escape. I should be asking this woman to take me home and leave me there and never see me again.
Curiosity. It’s terrifying.
“It’s a tablet. Like a laptop,” Charita says. “A computer.”
I tilt my head. We had computers on the compound but they were always bigger than my head and shoulders combined. This glowing book is barely the size of Charita’s hand. “Come here,” she says. “I’ll show you.”
Charita asked me what I want to do. I didn’t say go home. I ignore that wobbly-ness.
I walk over to her.
On the screen there are dancing turtles, each with a different number painted on the front of their shells.
“It’s a math game,” Charita says. “See?”
She guides my hand as we click on numbers that are listed on the sides. We just have to choose the number that solves the equations on the turtles’ shells.
“Think you got it?” Charita asks. She backs up, watching me at the glowing book from a few feet away.
And, then, I really am playing all by myself.
Their voices are in my room again that night. Charita’s voice. Louis’s is just little grumbles.
“She knows her math,” Charita is saying. “So there’s that.”
Louis grumbles.
“We’ll have to take her to the school in a few weeks. Get her tested. See what grade to put her into in the fall.”
Louis grumbles.
Her is me. That’s all I know. It makes nerves jump around in the veins on my wrists like lightning bolts inside me.
I won’t be here in the fall. I won’t be here in a few weeks. I won’t. Right, Father?
But I feel my face flush. I wouldn’t be here right now, maybe, if I had asked to go home instead of playing on the computer today.
Louis is still grumbling.
“Is something wrong, babe?” Charita says.
Babe is Louis, or sometimes Charita. They call each other that. And other things like love and mine. It’s too confusing for me. It’s too hard to remember that all of those things mean Louis. Especially since babe sounds like a baby and Louis is almost a hundred years old and love is a thing, not a person and mine is a bad word and dad I’ve never heard of before.
“She hates me,” Louis says.
I wonder if they put their voices in my room on purpose or if they don’t know how it happens or if they even know that it’s happening. I don’t think so. I think I’m being sneaky. Or maybe it’s Father Prophet putting their voices in here to give me some hints about how to get out of here, out of Darkness, back Inside.
“She’s scared is all,” Charita says.
Louis grumbles. Then his voice comes clear. “My own daughter hates me.”
Daughter. There’s that word again. One of the other words for me.
“She hates me.” He won’t stop saying it.
My heart feels heavy then, sinking in my body toward the mattress springs. His voice is so soft and sad and that word daughter, the way he
says it, is so nice and light, I almost don’t want to hate him.
I have to hate him.
“She’s terrified,” Charita says.
He sighs. “I know. I’m glad you’ve gotten somewhere. But . . . now . . . I finally have her back and . . .”
I can’t hear anything else.
He thinks he has me. He thinks I belong here. I have to get away from him.
Father, how do I do it?
I have five days to figure it out.
Eleven
LOUIS IS THERE IN THE MORNING again when I’m up and at the window trying to remember the exact gray of Father’s eyes. I’m dressed in the pink pajamas. But he’s not dressed the same way as usual: black pants, white shirt, tie. Instead it’s shorts and an orange T-shirt that hangs almost to his knees. His eyes are red and there are black half-moons beneath them.
He stares at me from the doorway for a minute and I stare back. There are lots of voices beneath us. Different from the normal someone/someones who come and make Elsie or Junior disappear for parts of the day. Instead their feet are banging against the floors downstairs, going back and forth. There’s a lot of laughing.
If Louis wasn’t standing in my door I might try it again, myself. Laughing. I might see if it could possibly feel as good coming out of my mouth as it sounds going into my ears.
“Morning, Zylynn,” he says in that soft way. And even though that’s how his voice sounds I’m still afraid of him. He’s an Outsider, an Agent of Darkness, a Liar so skilled I haven’t been able to pick up on a single one of his lies. “We have to go somewhere today,” he says. “Just you and me, OK?”
This is it. Finally, I think. Home.
I’m relieved I didn’t have to ask. I’ve never asked for anything before.
Home. Inside. It feels weird, heavy in my heart. I clutch my turtle in my hand.
Why can’t I bring the things I like about Darkness with me Inside? Why can’t I bring laughing and toys and food and Elsie’s smiles and Charita’s hugs and leave the terrifying nights and the headaches and the confusion and Louis behind? The Light is supposed to be made of everything good. Mother God is supposed to be the source of all good things. So Turtle must come from Mother God. So why can’t he come back with me?