by Diane Cook
“How am I the bad guy?” her mother cried. Agnes buried her face in her mother’s neck. She could smell the heat of her—it was always hot in the building; none of the windows opened. She could smell whatever they had been drinking. Then Agnes smelled Glen because he had appeared and pretended to eat her nose. Then she could only remember the feeling of sleep. Of warmth, of cool sheets, her mother’s dry lips. “Good night, sweetheart.”
A shooting star drew a blue line above them.
How awful it must have been, Agnes thought, to leave such a nice life.
* * *
After a morning hunt, Agnes and other Originalists scraped and washed and stretched skins by the fire while the Newcomers explored the area.
Val appeared next to Agnes and sat down.
“How are you, kiddo?”
“Fine.”
“Friends?” Val held out her hand.
Agnes shook it. “Friends.”
Val caressed Agnes’s head. “Your hair looks ridiculous, by the way,” she said, a tsk in her voice. But she was speaking softly too. She was trying to be kind in the ways Val could be kind.
Agnes touched it. To the touch, her shorn head growing out all at once made her imagine a scene from an old wildlife special that lived in her memory like an image through fog. Of an immature lion with an immature mane. One skulking on the outskirts of the pride, not ready to take on the alpha. Yet.
“You’re going to have to decide if you want to have some self-respect and cut it again, or if you’re going to look stupid while it grows to your butt.” Val’s eyebrows, so shaped and black they looked painted on, wiggled. “It’s really so stupid-looking,” she said, smiling.
“Cut it please,” Agnes said.
“Okay.” Val clapped her hands. “You’ll look fierce.”
“I want to look like a young lion who is ready to be a leader.”
“Well, sure, that sounds like it could be fierce.”
Val got on her knees, and Agnes sat against her and took off her shirt.
Agnes closed her eyes as Val pinched sections of her hair to cut.
The strands lifted in the wind like dandelion seeds.
“Make a wish,” Val said.
“I did.”
“What was it?”
“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
“Oh, sweetie, it won’t come true regardless. What was it?”
“I wished that my mom didn’t suffer,” Agnes said. She hadn’t really wished that, but thought it would make her seem noble.
“Well, that’s very selfless of you. Next time, though, make a wish for yourself.”
“But you said they don’t come true.”
“If you make wishes for other people, like the one you made, you’ll never know. If you make wishes for yourself, at least you’ll find out. See my logic?”
“Yes, I see it. What did you wish for?”
“A baby.”
“Babies aren’t so great.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Then why?” Agnes heard the whispering snip of the scissors behind her ear.
“Because I want one. And I hate when I don’t get what I want.”
Agnes thought of Val’s life, or what she knew of it. She liked Val. A lot more than many did. She had never thought of Val as someone who hadn’t gotten what she wanted. But she guessed she didn’t really have a sense for everything Val wanted. And if it was a baby, then she certainly didn’t have that, and she had certainly tried. A lot. Everyone knew about that.
“Okay, you are done, m’dear. Looking good if I do say so myself.”
Val put her hand in front of Agnes as though it were a mirror. “See, take a look.”
Agnes stared into the calluses of Val’s hand and touched her hair. She cooed, something she somehow knew to do from watching the women greet one another with air kisses outside their office buildings. “I love it,” Agnes cried. She pretended she had on layers of lipstick and smiled like she imagined one would with layers of lipstick on. Her lips full, sticky, hard to move, covered in mud. It was funny to her that she could remember such strange images that had nothing to do with her daily life and never would again. Made-up women in an unbelievable world. She giggled like she’d seen them giggle, her fingers to her collarbone, her chin up at attention.
“You are a hilarious weirdo,” Val said, planting a quick kiss on the top of Agnes’s shorn head and bounding off to help with lunch. Agnes decided a swim would be a good way to rinse off, and a swim would be good for Glen.
He sat on a log whittling a piece of wood into a hook, his hands covered in small bloody nicks. Agnes stood over him for a moment before he looked up, and when he looked up, it was a slow, stiff, painful movement. He smiled.
“Que bonita,” he said, touching his own hair to show what he meant.
“Thank you, Glen.”
He picked a stray hair off her smock. “Make a wish,” he said.
“I did already.”
“Then I will.” He closed his eyes, held the hair to his lips to kiss it before blowing it into the wind.
He smiled up at her, squinting into the sun behind her.
“Do you want to swim with me?” she asked.
He shook his head, mouthed no, still smiling and squinting at her. He grasped one of her hands and wagged it back and forth. “So proud of you, my girl,” he said. His voice was reedy again, and fell into a whisper at the end.
“Thanks, Glen.”
He let go and went back to whittling, and she stood there for a moment more, wanting to somehow change his mind but not knowing how.
Everyone, even the smallest of the Newcomers, was busy around camp, but still Agnes went to the river. She knew she was neglecting important work. That worm of irresponsibility squiggled against her ribs, made her feel like a kid again, without a worry or duty, and she secretly cherished the feeling.
Her toes in the cold water, she thought about washing parties with her mother, when they’d wash the special rags they used to have in the river. They were just old strips of cotton T-shirts, repurposed by Debra. But they had been one of the last remnants of the City that they relied on daily. She’d been much smaller, her mother sometimes seemed nervous to have her go too deep into the water. But now Agnes was a swimmer. She flopped toward a deeper pool in the lazy river, dunking her whole self under and scrubbing the loose hairs from her scalp, shoulders, chest.
She rolled over, flippered her hands to stay submerged, and opened her eyes to see the blue of the sky through the water, see the sun’s effects, diluted by her depth. In other parts of this river, it picked up speed and became dangerous. If she tried to stay still, she could feel that pull beginning even here. Small and gentle, but an unmistakable tug. She wouldn’t notice it if she were standing or washing, or even treading upright. But once she relaxed, she could move quite swiftly downriver. But where she was, the river slithered back and forth, like a cold snake. And there was no danger, as far as she could tell.
She thought back to Ranger Bob. The way he had looked at her after he gave her the lollipops. The skin between his eyes sagging down in a deep V of worry. She remembered that look from their very first day. Their trip had been exhausting. Her mother was exhausted. Her face blotchy and laced with red veins like cobwebs from crying. Agnes remembered that on their last day at home, her mother and Nana had fought.
“You can’t go,” Nana had said.
Her mother was flustered and upset. But more, confused. “I have to go. Why are you making this harder?”
“Because it’s so stupid.” Nana had scrunched her fists and face, like in the cartoons that Agnes watched when smoke would come out of someone’s ears if they were mad. Nana was very mad.
“This is not stupid, Mom. It’s important. Don’t you care about Agnes?”
Nana’s eyes got big, and she blinked them at Agnes as though seeing her for the first time. Her anger softened and she smiled. She reached out to hug Agnes, and Agnes stepped
toward her, but her mother’s heavy arm pushed her back behind her. Then her nana howled.
Seeing her nana with tears falling made Agnes’s chest constrict. She felt her throat tighten and the water rise to her eyes and she heard her mother become angry. All was cut short, though, when her mother threw a glass against the wall.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” her mother screamed. Nana screamed, “But I’m so scared.” Agnes slunk away from her mother’s arm and moved herself toward her room slowly so as not to be detected.
She needn’t have worried. Neither woman noticed her leave. Even though they claimed to be fighting about her, they had forgotten she was there. They were wailing at each other now, accented by hysterical words. She’d never seen anything like it before. Now, of course, she knew the Twins, and they acted in a very similar fashion. Now she could marvel at it. But at the time, she remembered being scared.
Agnes had shut the door to her room that night, slowly releasing the knob so the click was hushed. The pain in their voices dulled by the barrier of the door. Agnes walked around the room and touched the things that belonged to her, trying to hear if they had something to tell her. She tapped her fingers on the window and waited for a response. She put her head into her pillowcase and stretched it across her face and breathed through the cotton weave. She lay down like that on her bed, her head on her pillow inside the case. That’s how she fell asleep. She woke up to her mother pulling things from her drawers.
“What are you doing?” she muffled from inside the pillowcase.
“Oh, good, you’re alive,” her mother said, distracted by filling a backpack with Agnes’s warm clothes. Her voice was ground down, powdery. Her eyes were bloodshot. She had not slept. She wore a giant T-shirt Agnes had never seen before, and puffy socks pulled up to her knees. Her hair was in a fallen side ponytail. She looked like an unhappy adult dressed as a once-happy child. “Sweetheart, can you pick two things that are the most special things to you? That you wouldn’t mind carrying around with you for a long time?”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going away. And you might not see your other things for a while.”
Agnes nodded solemnly. “Is Nana gone?”
“Nana is gone. Bring two things to me in my room, okay?” Her mother hurriedly kissed the top of her head.
Agnes chose her stuffed unicorn and her butterfly necklace. She lost the necklace within the first couple of months in the Wilderness.
“Oh, we were looking for it everywhere. How did you find it?” her mother had cried when a Ranger reported the discovery.
“We find everything,” the Ranger said. His stony face ground down her mother’s smile. He wouldn’t give her the necklace back. He said it would be kept in the evidence room.
“Evidence of what?” her mother had asked.
“Of your failure to follow rules.”
That was the earliest interaction Agnes remembered with a Ranger other than Ranger Bob, who had led them on their intake day.
She thought about her mother living in the City, there for Nana even though Nana was dead. She didn’t understand it. Agnes loved Nana too. But I’m alive.
From under the current Agnes felt a disturbance from the bank and popped her head up, alarmed.
Patty and Celeste, naked and knock-kneed, were wading into the river.
“You are a cheater,” Celeste sang. “Skipping work like that.”
Agnes’s heart burned with shame. “I’ve never skipped work before,” she said, sinking underwater up to her nose and looking woefully back toward camp.
“Oh.” Celeste frowned. “I figured you were a badass. You should do it more,” she said.
“Ugh, I had to whittle,” Patty said. “And now I have splinters.” She waggled her swollen red fingers. She had bad splinters and would probably need to see Dr. Harold.
“At least you didn’t have to touch the dead things like I did.” Celeste scrunched her face in disgust.
“But you love dead things,” Agnes said, and Celeste rolled her eyes.
The girls floated on their backs and watched a few bullet-shaped clouds speed across the sky. That wind was high, though, and around them nothing moved.
“This is a pretty okay place,” Celeste said, her voice slightly wistful.
“It’s the first place I remember,” Agnes said.
“Was it the first place you went?”
“One of them. Yes. It’s near the Post where we entered.”
“We haven’t been to Post yet,” Patty whined.
“It’s not special.”
“But there are snacks!”
“Only in some. Most of the snacks are gone from the machines. There’s water. That’s about the best thing.”
“And handsome Rangers?” Patty asked.
“The Rangers are old,” Agnes said. She and Celeste laughed at Patty.
“They don’t seem so old,” Patty said quietly.
“Rangers aren’t worth your time,” Celeste said.
“Why do you say that?” Agnes asked.
“Oh, you can just tell, right, Agnes?”
Agnes was surprised Celeste had come to that conclusion so quickly. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I guess,” Patty mocked for no reason.
They continued to float. Agnes listened for sounds of bird wings and the occasional splash of their hands in the water.
Agnes felt like she was dozing, but she didn’t know if it was possible to fall asleep in the water. When she heard the Twins scream, she was slow to move, as though she were floating in sap. She flailed to stand and looked around. She saw no threat. The Twins were cowering up to their necks in the water. Then she noticed they screamed with smiling mouths. She rubbed her eyes again and looked.
Jake stood on the bank, his arms hanging confused, his mouth agape, trying to say something but not being able to over their screams of, Agnes now realized, pleasure.
“Jake! We’re naked!” Celeste squealed.
The girls turned their attention to Agnes.
“Get down, Agnes,” Patty screamed, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Why?” Agnes asked.
Patty screamed, “Because you’re naked!”
“So?”
The Twins laughed hysterically, water rushing into their mouths. They looked like they were drowning.
Turning to Jake, her hands on her bony hips, Agnes said, “Does it bother you?”
“No,” Jake said, his eyes trained on the ground.
“See?” Agnes said to the Twins, submerged to their shoulders. Patty and Celeste cackled maniacally like Debra did. Like Val still did sometimes. Their faces guffawing all over the place.
“You are so weird,” the Twins screamed in unison. And Agnes felt a sting of jealousy. She’d never said the same thing as another person at the same time. It seemed impossible. How did you do that? she wanted to ask, but now they were staring at her body and she felt unwelcome.
“I’m leaving,” she said. She walked toward where Jake stood, and he stepped back from the shore as though afraid, turned around and started to walk in small circles, his head down.
Agnes put her smock back on. “Come on,” she said to Jake.
He followed her downriver from the Twins. “I see you cut your hair,” Jake said to the ground.
“Yes,” Agnes said.
“How come?”
“Because it looked immature, like a baby lion.”
“What do baby lions look like?”
“Like furry babies.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“Well, I liked your hair. I thought it was cool. Shaggy.” He smiled. “I mean, it’s cool now too.”
Agnes felt a blush come on, which she quickly turned into anger. “Well, I think your hair is stupid and I always have.”
“Why?” he said, his voice high-pitched and sad.
“Your bangs. You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Because of my bangs?”
; “They cover your eyes. You’re going to trip over a rock. A cougar is going to attack from above. You’ll flip your hair too hard and break your own neck.” She stopped, a little breathless.
“It sounds like you’ve thought a lot about my hair.”
“About how it’s going to kill you, yes. I have.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment. Because it means you’re thinking of me.”
Again, Agnes felt heat rush to her neck, her cheeks. “Just because you’re new. Your hair is dumb and it’s going to kill you one of these days and someone needs to tell you.”
“Do others think this?”
“Well, it’s not like I talk about your hair all the time,” Agnes snapped. “But I’m sure everyone knows except you.”
Jake nodded. “Will you cut it for me?”
She thought of her fingers in those stupid soft bangs, trying to cut a straight line that would allow Jake to still look like Jake. Agnes realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled slowly.
Jake watched her thoughts race across her face. But his smile faded as she remained silent. “Or, you don’t have to,” he stammered.
“No, I want to.”
“Okay.” He seemed unsure.
“I really want to. I really, really want to.”
“Okay.” He seemed happier.
Agnes started running, yelling “Stay there” at Jake. He stayed.
She ran and smiled the whole way to get the scissors from Val. She returned to Jake with a pounding heart.
She breathed deeply a few times. “How do you want your hair?”
“Like yours?”
“But I thought we were just doing your bangs?”
“Do whatever you want. I trust you.”
Agnes looked at him nervously. She thought of touching his whole head so close to his scalp. Of having to fold his ears forward the way Val had folded hers, so they wouldn’t get nicked. Of peering close at the back of his neck to get a clean cut, of breathing on his neck and having him feel that and know something new about her.
“Just your bangs for now,” she said.
She cupped water from the river in her hands and wet his hair down. She straightened the bangs down his face and the ends curled under his chin. With him sitting and her standing, she was hunched down to reach his face. She tilted his chin up, but then the bangs parted and slipped to either side of his ear. She could hear the Twins splashing upriver. Jake watched everything she did.