by Caela Carter
“There are some people downstairs who want to meet you first. If you’re afraid . . . that’s OK . . . maybe you can manage a small wave?”
He pauses but I’m not hearing him. I’m thinking about going back Inside. I’m thinking about Father Prophet and my heart is hammering all the way down in my belly because I can’t remember the exact shade of his eyes or the contours of his cheeks. I can’t remember what he sounded like when his voice wasn’t booming off the stone benches in Chapel. I can’t remember his smile.
I’m going to get the worst punishment there is. He won’t let me eat until my stomach deflates back in between my ribs. I’ll be pinged at the fence all day every day for the next three days.
My blood is rushing close to panic. I should be happy.
I’m happy to go home, I tell myself.
I’m happy for what will happen after-after. Once the punishment is over and I go back to waking up with everyone else, hot sand on my feet, cold morning showers, oatmeal. I’m happy for when that becomes normal and something I understand. I’m happy for when I forget the Darkness ever happened to me.
But with each day I’ve spent out here it feels like it will take one more day to forget Darkness and that’s one more day that Father Prophet will punish me. At this point I’ll be punished right up to my Ceremony.
I choke in air.
Louis is talking. He says we’re going out, the two of us. He’s taking me home. I should smile at him.
“So get dressed, OK?” he says, and he steps out and closes the door. I fly through the Pink Stripes Room looking for the white shorts, white T-shirt, white underwear I showed up in. I check the drawers and the closet where all of my newly colorful clothes call out their lies to me.
Not mine. They can’t be my clothes. Nothing can be mine because I belong to someone else.
See, Father, I remember. But I’m confused. The Darkness has twisted me.
The old white clothes are gone. The new white clothes aren’t here either. Charita must have taken them and hidden them somewhere. He is a Liar and she is a crook and they’re both evil and maybe I am too, now.
In a final attempt to find them, I dive under the bed and come face-to-face with the two round white plates piled carefully with all of the food I’ve been saving. Except it’s different. I’m so surprised, I bump my head on the bottom of the mattress.
“You OK in there?” Louis calls.
I didn’t realize he was standing in the hallway waiting for me. I only have a few seconds to figure out what to do.
The food is still there, in front of me. Charita didn’t steal any of it. Or Louis. Or anyone. Each strawberry, each pancake, each crust of peanut butter sandwich is still there, under the bed. But it’s different. I’ve never seen this before, but I know what it is.
Tupperware (n.): a range of plastic containers used for storing food
The strawberries are packed into a big, deep one. The bits of peanut butter sandwich are stuffed into one that’s long and flat. The chips and cookies and pretzels are all divided and stacked in separate plastic bags. Who did this?
I don’t have time to figure it out.
Instead I grab the backpack that Elsie left in here when she was playing School last night and I stuff it. The strawberries go in first. Then all the things that have meat. The peanut butter crusts next. The cookies last. I don’t know how I’ll sneak it into the Girls’ Dorm. But I’ll hide it under my blankets once I get there. It worked when I hid the orange and the banana so it will work with this food too. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this when I was there before.
Louis knocks on the door. “You almost ready?”
I bump my head again. I pull on the first pair of shorts and T-shirt in the top drawer. No time to search for my whites anymore.
I take a step toward the door and spin around. I find the last thing I’m looking for. He’s on my gold carpet, lying on his green shell so that his yellow underside is all exposed. I dive for Turtle and stuff him in my pocket.
If Mother God is the source of all things good, she’ll be proud of me for bringing good things into the Light.
I’m still rushing so I swing the door open so fast it bounces against the wooden wall. Louis jumps like he was standing too close to it.
“You all ready?” he asks me.
I stare.
“You’re going to take Elsie’s backpack?”
I didn’t even think about that. About how the backpack is Elsie’s and Louis might not want me to take it. About how things belong to certain people here and sometimes that certain person isn’t me.
“It’s OK,” he says. “Elsie can share.”
I don’t quite understand that word still. But I nod. He’s taking me home now, so I smile. Louis smiles so huge I think his face may crack in half. His face is furry again, gray. Is that gray the color of Father’s eyes? Why can’t I remember?
“Well, I’d love to hear your voice but a smile is better than nothing,” he says.
I wish he didn’t look so kind.
I follow him down the stairs and at the bottom he freezes. I’m still behind him.
Standing in front of him are two people I’ve never seen before: a tall man standing so close to a short woman, his elbow is pressed against her shoulder. Their hair is full of every shade of gray and all I can do is look at it, search it strand by strand to see if I can come up with the right shade for Father’s eyes. If I can do that, if I can remember that one thing, maybe I won’t be punished. Even their faces, which are full of bumps and wrinkles, look a little gray. Is Father Prophet putting all of this gray in front of me to prove how awful I am for forgetting his eyes?
“Zylynn,” Louis says, “you don’t have to say anything but I promised your grandparents that they’d have a chance to meet you if they came over. Maybe you could give them a smile or a wave.”
It’s not only me staring at them. They’re also staring at me.
I take another step so that I’m completely behind Louis, as if he’s safe. He seems safe, now, but I know that’s a lie.
Grandparent (n.): a parent of a parent
How did I not realize back at home that I didn’t understand any of this vocabulary? How did I not know that in order to understand grandparent I’d have to first understand parent?
My brain flips and flips for it, but it was never on any of our lists.
Who are these people? Why do they care if I smile or wave at them? And Louis didn’t just call them grandparents, he called them your. Mine. What does that mean? What could make another human mine?
My breath gets shaky behind his back and Louis sighs. “She’s not ready,” he says. “I’m sorry. It’s . . . slow-going . . .”
The two gray heads nod. “She’s here,” the woman says. “She’s safe. That’s what matters.”
I’m not safe. Yet.
“Whatever you need, son,” the man says.
Then they’re gone, down the stairs where Elsie and Junior and Jakey are still yelping and laughing. The Darkness must have twisted my brain so badly in under a week because I could swear their laughter sounds like tiny lightbulbs. Elsie’s laugh is the loudest.
Elsie!
Will Louis let me take her? If I save someone, maybe my punishment won’t be so bad. And maybe I’ll have those little lightbulbs of laughing back Inside. It’s another good thing I can bring to Mother God.
Louis turns around and looks down at me. His eyes are sharp in their veiny red cages.
We’re alone in the room and he’s scary again. I back up a few steps.
“You ready?” he says. It’s like he’s trying to make his voice as bouncy as possible. Like he’s trying to sound like Elsie does downstairs, but he can’t.
“I . . .” Ask him. Just ask him.
With Elsie there Father will be so pleased with me. I’ll get my ceremony for sure. I’ll get praised in Chapel for finding a new soul.
I’ll finally be forgiven for eating that cheese.
�
��Yes, Zylynn?” Louis says.
It’s hard to make my mouth say the words. “I . . . Can . . . Can Elsie . . . come . . . too?”
Relief floods my body cool and sure. I’m doing the right thing. I’m doing it all for you.
But Louis laughs. “Oh, Elsie doesn’t need to come. She went to the doctor when she turned five.”
“Huh?” I say before I can trap the sound.
“We’re going to go meet your uncle Alan.”
No.
“It’s a short drive. We can do something fun afterward. But we have to meet your uncle. We can’t put that off any longer.”
No.
“It’s a Saturday, so he’s coming in special just for you. There won’t be anyone else there. Just you, me, your uncle.”
No.
“We’ve got to get you healthy. That’s priority number one.”
Louis takes a step toward the door. I take another up the stairs.
I thought I was going home. Again.
“Zylynn?” he says. “We’ve got to go.”
I’m not going to let it be like before when I thought Charita was taking me back Inside. I have to ask. I put the word together in my stomach. The letters form there, they arrange into the right order in my ribs, and I push them through my mouth until the sound comes out, raspy and hoarse. I speak to the kidnapper. “Where?”
Louis smiles again and his eyes get a little wet at the same time. “Alan’s office,” he says. “The doctor’s office.”
No.
I cannot get in a car with him, just me and him, and go somewhere else, another compound, another place, another stranger.
I have to ask him. I have to be brave. “I . . . I wanted . . .”
Louis’s smile gets bigger. “Yes?” he says. Like he wants to know what I’m going to say. Like he’ll give me everything I want.
“I wanted to go . . . somewhere . . .” I can’t make my mouth say the word home. I’m too terrified.
Once I ask, he’ll either say yes or no. If he says yes, everything is great. But what will I do if he says no?
“I wanted to . . . go . . .”
When I’ve stopped talking for a long time, Louis sighs.
“We have to do this, kiddo. We have to go to the doctor, even if you’re scared. I promise it will be OK. But it’s not a choice,” he says. “We need to get you healthy.”
I shake my head, a tiny no. I’m not sure if he sees it.
“We can do whatever you want to do after we see your uncle Alan, OK?” he says.
So that’s it. Another strange place. Another strange Liar looking at me. Touching me. Then I can ask to go home.
I swallow the scream, force it back down my throat and all the way into my heels. I can’t let myself get too twisted.
I take another step backward, up, toward the pink stripes and the window that feels safe even though they aren’t.
Louis sighs.
“What if Charita comes along?” he asks, the corners of his lips pointing toward the wood floor. “Would that be better?”
A tiny jerk of my head. My heart starts beating again. The scream dissolves silently into the steps beneath me.
It will be better with Charita.
But it shouldn’t be.
I don’t have to flip in my brain for the word doctor. There was one on the compound, but I forgot all about him until I heard Louis say the word. We all went to see him once a year, the day before our birthday.
In the backseat of their car, I study my flip-flops and wonder if this doctor will be the same.
“Zylynn?” he said when I walked into the white room from the white hallway where I was waiting with the ten or fifty Children Inside the Light who share a birthday.
We were in the back of the compound, past the Girls’ and Boys’ Dorms, past the Teen Girls’ and Teen Boys’ and Men’s Dorms, past the Dining Hall and the Chapel and the Exercise Fields. We were in the third circle where we almost never went. We were as back as we could go, a thirty- or forty-minute walk from the front gate. Only one building was behind this one. It was the big white-and-silver one with rooms built right on top of other rooms; the building that we weren’t ever allowed to enter because it was where Father Prophet lived. Just being that close to it made me feel icky and guilty. Even though this was before I ever did anything bad. This was before Jaycia did anything worse than laugh in the night.
Bortank, one of the teen-boy Messengers, had come with a note that removed me from Exercise for the day. That never happened unless you had committed an Abomination. And I was pretty sure I hadn’t. And I was pretty sure Mother God wouldn’t let me be punished unjustly. But I was still nervous.
“Zylynn?” the doctor said again. I recognized this man, but I didn’t know he was the doctor. I couldn’t remember my last birthday, which was the last time I would have seen the doctor.
I nodded.
“I’m Brother Tomlinkin.”
I nodded again. I’d seen him in Chapel. I knew the names of everyone Inside except the newest of new souls.
“Do you remember coming to see me last year?” he asked.
I shook my head and shifted on my feet.
It wasn’t Brother Tomlinkin who was making me uncomfortable. He wasn’t an Outsider or a Liar or any other terrible thing. It was being in such an empty room. It was being so far from the rest of us. I hadn’t ever been with just one person in a room before, that I could remember. And before I crossed the door, Brother Tomlinkin had been the only, only person in the room. It made me feel queasy.
“OK, well, I’m a doctor,” he said. “I was trained Outside, a long time ago, so it’s all official and everything.”
That sentence made me gulp.
“Father Prophet wants to make sure all of the Children Inside the Light are healthy. So I check everybody out—boys, girls, men—once a year.”
It was for Father Prophet.
I nodded. “OK,” I said.
Brother Tomlinkin motioned to the little paper-covered bed that was behind him. “Hop on up,” he said.
He explained that he was going to take my blood. He told me to be brave while he stuck a needle in my arm and I held my breath and tried not to feel it. It wasn’t really my arm anyway, I told myself. Not really my blood. I belong to someone else.
When the blood snaked out, through the tube and into a vial, I expected it to be white or Light, like us. But it was dark, almost the color of the clay paths all around the compound. I watched it ooze into the tube and I wondered how a color that rich could be hidden inside our pale bodies.
Everything else with Brother Tomlinkin was easy. I stood on a scale and put my back against a wall while he held something on the top of my head. I let him shine bright lights in my eyes. He knocked a hammer against my knee but it didn’t hurt. He stuck things in my ears and nose and mouth and put headphones in his ears to listen to my chest. He didn’t smile or speak in that soft feathery way like they do in Darkness, but he said my name a lot and gave clear instructions.
“How old are you turning tomorrow, Zylynn?” he asked at the end. He was frowning over a clipboard. “Eight?”
“Twelve,” I said. I was pulling a shoe back on.
Brother Tomlinkin’s frown deepened. “Twelve?” he said. It was a loud word. Louder than anyone dared to speak Inside. “Are you sure?”
I didn’t jump. “Yes,” I said.
He made me take my shoes back off and stand on the scale again. His frown got deeper and deeper and I got lonelier and lonelier in this room with only one human. My ears stretched and shook trying to hear the sounds of normal life: the ball hitting the fence in Exercise, Brother Frankater demanding we run faster, the whistles of the Caretakers telling us to line up for dinner. Instead I was alone in this room with this frowning man.
“How are you sleeping?” he asked.
I didn’t understand the question. I tilted my head at him but he stared at the clipboard.
“How are you sleeping?” he said again
.
“In my bed,” I answered finally. “The bed, I mean.”
He looked at me then, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I mean, how do you sleep at night? Do you sleep well?”
I sucked on my lower lip. Brother Tomlinkin was an authority figure with an office closer to Father Prophet’s house than I had ever been. He was one of the most important men on the compound, one of Father’s Officials. It was important to please and obey him. But I didn’t understand.
“I didn’t know it was like school,” I said finally.
He scrunched his eyebrows like he was confused.
“I didn’t know it was something I had to do well at.”
He made a clicking-type noise with his mouth and shook his head.
“You’re really twelve?”
“Yes,” I said. I would be eight if he wanted me to be. Anything to get me out of there.
“You can go,” he said.
And I did.
I didn’t see Brother Tomlinkin too many times after that. Not at Chapel or the Dining Hall or anywhere on the clay paths. Sometime, days or months after, he was gone.
Uncle Alan’s room looks a lot like Brother Tomlinkin’s. But Uncle Alan does not look like Brother Tomlinkin.
Another man introduces himself as Pete, Alan’s nurse, whatever that is. He leads us through a bright room with couches, down a short, bright hallway, and into a room with three chairs and a sink and a little paper-covered table against the back wall.
Everything is white and everywhere there are lights. Not on the walls. I don’t think they know about lightbulbs on the walls in Darkness because I haven’t seen one anywhere. But tubes of light run through the middle of every ceiling. And lamps rest on most of the counters and surfaces. A big silver lamp reaches from the floor all the way above my head where I sit on the table, so bright it buzzes. The buzzing works its way into my ear canals, comfortable, familiar, relaxing.
I can see Uncle Alan through the open door, not coming in yet. Not looking at me yet. Instead he’s holding a folder shut between two splayed hands, looking at it and taking deep breaths.