The Great Unknowable End

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  On Wednesday the rain calms to a drizzle. It is enough to keep the drive-in closed, though not enough to prevent me biking out to Red Sun. Jill doesn’t know the Dreamlight’s weather policy, though, and a couple of hours after dinner, I leave like I’m going to work as always, biking toward the western town limits.

  I steer down Eisenhower, around dips and crevices filled to brimming with rainwater, as even more rain patters on the hood of my jacket. The bottoms of my jeans wick up water splashed from the road, despite my careful biking.

  I’m not questioning the decision I made last night. I will be That Stella. Even so, I’m realizing that a transformation from This Stella to That may take time. I know That Stella wouldn’t panic about this meeting with Craig, but I am. As I swing my bike into the parking lot of the Moonglow Café, I try to block from my mind why I am here and who I am attempting to contact. Those thoughts turn me weak-legged, and I need to be strong for this. I need to be prepared, because undoubtedly Craig is. I wonder if, at this very moment, he’s expecting my arrival. What he can’t expect is this: a brand-new version of me.

  • • •

  The café’s hostess—a tall girl in a white linen sundress—is familiar. She was here last week and witnessed me when I was much less in control of my wits and demanding to see my brother. Her face falls the moment she sees me walk in.

  “You,” she says, leaving no doubt as to her poor opinion of me.

  She continues to look me over with disdain as I request to speak to a boy with the first name Galliard and a last name I do not know.

  “Sorry,” she tells me. “It isn’t my job to do personal favors. I seat paying customers; I don’t run messages back and forth.”

  I cannot say I blame her. I’m insistent, though, because that’s the kind of girl That Stella is.

  “It’ll take you ten seconds.” I motion to the restaurant’s few diners (business here has clearly been affected by the weather too). “You’ve got plenty of time on your hands.”

  She casts me a dirty look, but she tells me fine, she will see if Galliard is in the kitchen. Meantime I can wait outside.

  Satisfied, I walk out to the café’s front porch and sit with my back to its wood-paneled wall. I blink in surprise when I realize the drizzling has stopped and the sun has emerged from the clouds, just in time to set. It draws down deep against the horizon, rotating onward to shed its light on other continents, other cities, and other seventeen-year-old girls. I watch it, and I wait.

  Dusk rolls in. Crickets strike up their songs. From a distant tree I hear a whip-poor-will—a brief trill, ceaseless and repetitive, ending each time on a high-pitched burst. I’ve lost track of time, thinking of nothing but Craig’s last letter to me, when I hear the whine of a screen door. I turn, and since I am sure this will be just another set of patrons leaving the restaurant, I have already turned back around when I realize that it is, in fact, Galliard. I make to stand. He waves me down.

  “I’ll join you.” He sits beside me, then says, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “It was a ‘maybe.’ ” His gaze shifts over me. “You’re wet.”

  I look over my damp jacket and bell-bottoms. “I biked here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to be, unless you’re the one who’s controlling this weather.”

  “I’m a whole lot of things, but weather god isn’t one of them.”

  I find myself smiling. Then, shocked, I find myself wanting to flirt. Why not? That’s precisely what That Stella would do.

  “What kind of things are you, then?” I ask. “Are you the one in charge of human sacrifices? Or the drugs?”

  He laughs. It is a warm, rounded sound, and overloud. “Is that what you think we do in here?”

  “In there, you mean.” I tip my thumb over my shoulder, toward the café. “We’re not in the commune here.”

  Galliard’s brow contracts. Then he blinks, quickly and intensely—a tic, I think. “Guess not.”

  “Do they let you smoke in there?”

  “No. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t grow the weed. My friend Archer knows someone on the Outside.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “What, pot?”

  “Yes.”

  He blinks. “I mean, it’s probably the best thing about the Outside.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Well, the Outside is depressing.”

  I frown at him. He keeps blinking in quick bursts.

  “If you waste your time, then yeah, the real world is sure to be awful.”

  “I’m not—”

  “What exactly do you do for Crossing?” I say. “If it’s depressing, you’re not doing it right.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only been out a few times.”

  I look Galliard over. The café’s porch lights illuminate his face. It is deeply tanned, and there is a bit of stubble under his lower lip. Dark, curly hair comes down to his shoulders. His eyebrows are thick and dark, and a permanent crease runs across his forehead.

  I say, “You don’t look that young.”

  He blinks forcefully. “Thank you very much.”

  “I only mean, doesn’t Crossing stop when you’re sixteen?”

  “It’s my last summer. I didn’t want to go out before.”

  I don’t understand him, but I find I want to. “What changed your mind?”

  “It just changed.”

  “But now you wish it hadn’t, because the real world is depressing?”

  “Something like that. Anyway, about your brother—”

  “Wait.” I really do interrupt. I really do stop him right as he’s about to tell me about Craig. I don’t feel ready to move on yet. I cannot make sense of this boy across from me.

  “I’m trying to understand,” I say. “Because I don’t see how the Outside could possibly be more depressing than your life in there. If you had a proper education about the real world, you might like it.”

  Galliard blinks. “Stop calling it that.”

  “What?”

  “The real world. Like Red Sun is a fake world.”

  “Well,” I say. “Isn’t it?”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you’re scared to be outside of it.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  He produces a deep, throaty sound that makes my head snap toward him. Then I realize the sound is a tic, and I immediately feel bad for looking.

  “And you’re planning on staying in the commune the rest of your life?” I don’t know why I keep asking questions. I cannot quit.

  “Okay,” says Galliard. “What’s so good about the real world? Do you like it? Are you happy?”

  I consider the question, surprised to be on the receiving end of one for a change. In the end I say, “Relatively happy. Happiness is always relative, I think.”

  “Okay. Then what’s your secret?”

  I laugh—a solitary “bah!” “Are you asking me the secret to happiness?”

  “I’m asking for recommendations. What do you say I should do on the Outside?”

  “I’d have to think about it,” I say. “Make you a list.”

  “Or you could show me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I keep getting distracted by the humming sound Galliard is making. I am upset at myself for getting distracted, and I am further distracted by getting upset.

  “You could show me in person,” he says again.

  I am convinced I’ve heard him wrong. To confirm this I say, “You’re not asking me to show you around Slater.”

  “Sure. If you’re going to be judgmental, I think that’s only fair. And I’m not on shift tonight.”

  I squint at his face in the bad light. He makes the humming sound again. He jerks his head to one side. I continue to squint.

  “Just messing around.” He sounds uncomfortable now. “Anyway, about your brother . . .”

  “Did he agree to s
ee me?”

  I attempt to act unaffected, as though the answer to this question means nothing to me. I do a poor job. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Galliard knows the truth. He witnessed my breakdown a week ago.

  He clears his throat and looks away, toward the parking lot. Then he squeezes his hands together, over his knees.

  “No, actually. He, uh . . . he decided to extend the silence. He’ll be doing it another week.”

  Everything within me—heart and mind and throat—seems to descend a full inch in disappointment.

  “Oh.” I shake my head. “No one can interrupt him?”

  “I mean, I could. I think it’d upset him pretty bad, though, and that’s not the mood you want him in when I ask him about you, is it?”

  “I guess not. No. You’re right—he should be in the best mood possible.”

  “Which, if we’re lucky, he will be after the silence. He’ll be refreshed and renewed and in unison with the Life Force. That’s the best time to ask.”

  “In another week.”

  “Yeah.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know how he can do that. How any of you can.”

  Only I’m not sure that is completely true. Though I cannot imagine sitting in silence by myself for two weeks, we Mercers do a good job of sitting in silence together, and we’ve been doing that for nearly a decade.

  “All right,” I say, getting up. It’s a hard task, as my bones feel heavier. “Thank you anyway. Guess I’ll be back here in a week.”

  Galliard continues to look out at the parking lot. “Yeah,” he says, after a long silence, as though he has only just heard me. “He . . . seems to mean a lot to you.”

  “He’s family,” I say on instinct. Thinking longer, remembering two years of letters, I add, “He knows me, and I know him back. There aren’t a lot of people like that in my life.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, mine either.” Galliard doesn’t move. He doesn’t break his stare from the lot.

  I begin to back away toward the bike rack. Then I stop. I watch Galliard some more. I know he must feel my gaze on him, though he doesn’t acknowledge it.

  “When does Crossing end?” I ask.

  “Three weeks.”

  “And then you stay in the commune. Forever.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  I stare at him some more. At last he looks at me.

  Then I know what I am going to do. The words coming from my mouth feel like an inevitability.

  “I have the night off too. You can hang with me, if you want.”

  I say it because of the way he looks in the dusk light. I say it because my father has been spending time with someone outside the Mercer family, and maybe I should too. I say it because it’s the end of summer, and there is a literal countdown ticking, and a skittish feeling inside tells me I’m hurtling toward something dark and final, and I should do something I never would in winter, spring, or fall.

  I say it as That Stella—the one with a rosy future.

  Now he is the unbelieving one. He’s blinking rapidly. “Wait, really?”

  “Do you have a bike?”

  “Sure. That is, we have bikes I can use.”

  “Then we can bike together. Do you have to get permission first?”

  “Uh, no. They trust us as long as we get back by curfew. Crossing is about trust.”

  Galliard laughs, though I can’t see what he finds funny about what he’s said. He looks at me a while longer, assessing, blinking. Then he says, “Okay, give me a few minutes.”

  He goes back into the café. I look at my watch. It is fifteen past eight.

  “It’s for Craig,” I say into the dark. “I need to make sure Galliard is actually going to talk to him for me. Maybe he’ll tell me things Craig would never tell me about himself. About his life in there.”

  I don’t say out loud that I am genuinely curious about Galliard, this boy who has lived on the inside of the commune his whole life and, until recently, didn’t even want to take a glimpse of the world outside. I’m not sure I can blame him; Slater isn’t much of an outside world to glimpse. It is no Kansas City or Chicago. Still, if he thinks the Outside is depressing, then something needs to be done, and it would seem I have assigned myself that task. For Craig, my brother.

  Galliard reappears, though not where I’m expecting. He calls my name at the commune fence, many yards from the porch. I walk out to meet him. The grass is soft and drenched, and my feet squish deep into earth.

  “Where did you come from?” I ask, noting his silver mountain bike. I wonder what kind of biking they do in there, on that land. Do they ride in circles around the corn? The idea makes me laugh, and the sound trickles out as I reach him. I attempt to cover it with a cough.

  “The gate.” Galliard points back at a tall, hulking man standing guard. “It’s the official way out. And I couldn’t exactly haul this thing through the restaurant.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Where are we heading?”

  “Have you eaten supper yet?”

  “No.” He grimaces, clearing his throat. “I’ve been kind of avoiding Dining Hall. For personal reasons.”

  I nod as though I understand any of this. “Let me get my bike.”

  I do, and we mount in the parking lot. I lead the way out toward Slater’s lights. Though the rain has stopped, the air is damp, and as I speed along the asphalt, casting a glance back to be sure Galliard is keeping up, the wind picks up my hair and sweeps chills over my body. There is a charge in this air, and a charge inside me, and I have an unshakable feeling that this charge is about to spark against another and burst into some great unknowable thing.

  It may only be the change of weather toying with my mind.

  I know only one thing for certain:

  That Stella has officially taken over.

  15

  Galliard

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10

  What a tangled web we weave . . . something, something else . . . deceive.

  I don’t remember the exact wording anymore, but Melly, Red Sun’s elementary teacher, taught me that. She made our classroom write it three dozen times in our notebooks and taught us that lying was a terrible thing, because it disrupted unity and understanding in our community.

  Now, as Stella and I bike to town, the incomplete rhyme won’t quit rattling around in my head.

  Because damn it if I’m not caught up in a tangled web.

  I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Saturday night, the crossers and I pedaled back to Red Sun, soaked bone-deep and determined to return by our midnight curfew. Pink lightning tore up the sky around us, and Archer kept shouting, “Yeah, man! Yeah!” Like it was this great, beautiful thing.

  Me? I wasn’t so sure. I’d been assuming that my gods were talking to me through the weather. They’d used those winds to blow me toward the Dreamlight; that was clear. Hendrix, Holly, and Joplin—they were risk takers. Explorers. Innovators. They wanted me to be like them. They wanted me to go out and see the Outside for myself. Meet the people. Figure it out.

  If that was true, though, then what was I supposed to make of pink lightning? How was I supposed to act with the three of them hidden away behind storm clouds? On that bike ride back, I heard Rod’s voice in my head, saying, Negative consequences for weak actions. I considered that maybe that was what it was: a bad storm, in response to my bad behavior. Maybe Rod was right.

  That night felt violent and dangerous, as though we were biking up to the edge of a chasm and at any moment would fly over the edge. Once I was finally back, safe and dry in my bed at Heather House, I sent a prayer to Holly, figuring he’d be most forgiving if I’d done wrong.

  “Phoenix was right about something,” I whispered in the dark, over Archer’s snores. “Outsiders are the worst. They’re stupid and selfish and cruel. He was right about that, at least.”

  Then I made promises. I said I’d stay in the commune, if that’s what I was meant to do. I’d work in J. J.’s kitchen,
and I’d become the leader the Council supposedly wanted me to be. I’d even make up with Phoenix and come clean with his sister.

  Pink lightning does a lot for a guy’s resolve.

  Only, in Sunday’s morning light, everything seemed a little less dire. Rain was coming down, but in a normal way, and there was no pink lightning to be seen. The promises I’d made in a heat of panic didn’t feel so . . . pressing anymore. I decided not to seek out Phoenix after all, and I haven’t since. It’s become habit now, keeping my head down when I see him in Dining Hall, changing my path so it doesn’t cross his.

  I guess I was telling myself that Stella’s “maybe” meant “no.” That she wouldn’t come back, and I wouldn’t have to be brave. I was deluding myself. And now here I am, biking with Phoenix’s sister to some unknown destination, after I myself asked her to show me around.

  What’s wrong with you, Galliard? you’re asking. Do you not learn from mistakes? Do you want to sabotage your own life?

  I wish I knew.

  But there’s this, too: I want to be biking with Stella Kay Mercer on the Outside. Because maybe Rod isn’t right; maybe he’s dead wrong. One thing’s for sure: The Red Sun Council doesn’t know me. If they did, they’d know that nothing compares to my music, not even leading the whole commune. They’re the ones who didn’t give me resident artist. They’re the ones who stuck me with ten long years of working in J. J.’s kitchen. It’s not my fault that I want to see if maybe there’s something better for me. Something on the Outside.

  I only wish I didn’t have so little time to find that out.

  I purposefully stayed inside Red Sun for almost three whole summers, stupidly thinking that I was made for better things and a bright, shiny future.

  Now? That future’s gone, and I only have three weeks to figure out if there’s a future outside the commune walls.

  As I follow Stella’s lead over asphalt and past cornfields, I pray to my gods.

  I’m thinking I misinterpreted the lightning. Maybe it wasn’t a punishment. Maybe it’s a test. You want me to try this out on my own, without you. That’s why I’m doing this one more time. And if you’re okay with that? Buddy, give me confidence. Janis, give me strength. And, Jimi, please, please give me cool.