All Good Children Page 12

  “Sounds kind of like murder,” I said. Twenty-six-Brenda gasped again, and the snicker came again, and Gertrude turned ember red.

  She raised her pen like a sword, or like a shield, close to the chest. “Now, Eleven—”

  “My name is Jordan.”

  “Enough of that.”

  But I wasn’t talking to her anymore, I was talking to the black sphere in the corner of the cabin, to whomever was watching, to whomever might watch later.

  “My name is Jordan Fontaine, I’m fourteen, I live in Silver Lake, Utah. I have two brothers and a mother and a father and I go to Silver Lake High School and I don’t play sports anymore because my therapist says it’s hard for me to get along with others on account of my—”

  That was when my head hit the plank wood floor. It felt like I was back in my old classes again, just like I’d been only last week, which had become old now, I guess, and something to miss, being tackled and twisted like this into the pretzel hold, which I guess they teach everybody how to do if you’re going into some sort of social service work, which I guess you could call what these women do a social service but that seems kind of ridiculous. I struggled, of course, and some of the other girls screamed, and they all got up to back away, and one or more of them probably ran to get some help. Gertrude wasn’t strong but she made up for that with enthusiasm. During the struggle I guess my sweatshirt rode up and her hand brushed my naked stomach and it made her stop, and it made her look, and then she was the one who gasped.

  So now I’m waiting in a special room, one I hadn’t seen until they led me here this morning, which is actually really big, like a great big lodge where you might hold a wedding reception, if you could bring yourself to get married in some place that used to be a camp, or if you’d gotten married before it became one. Inside it’s all hallways, though, and so many doors, and behind one of those doors is me, waiting at a table with two chairs, cushioned, which is nice, and a hardwood floor that someone laid a rug over. The table sits on this rug, whose dark green frayed edges I pick at with the toe of my assigned sneaker. The corners of the room are empty, only lonely right angles, bare pine walls, not even a knot hole to hide in. No cameras.

  That’s how important she is, I guess. How loyal. I don’t really want to meet with her, but there isn’t any alternative. I just have to wait here, and I’m shaking a little because I didn’t eat much this morning, low blood sugar or whatever. Why did they call her? I don’t want to see her. She’s late, though, maybe she won’t show, just tell them to let me alone, because she knows my history and everything, she has my file, right, so, it’s not my fault, what I did, and nothing needs to be accelerated, even though it doesn’t matter, but I still can’t keep my stomach from dropping a thousand miles when I think about it, so, yeah, yeah, that’s what I’ll tell her, I’ll say, when she gets here, I’ll say—

  “Good morning, Jordan.” Her lips make my name sound like poetry breathed to life through her rounded vowels. I want her to say it again. I want it to be the only thing she says.

  She doesn’t sit down right away. She’s wearing a short skirt that will ride up and expose her knees when she sits, no stockings. The door brushes the skirt as she glides it closed behind her, ruffling the smooth slate gray pleats. Her blouse is white, long-sleeved, and she’d look like just another school teacher if it weren’t for the soft shadow of cleavage that peeks out below the third undone button. She doesn’t wear a necklace so it’s hard not to look lower, but she does wear earrings, the same small faux-diamond—or real, maybe, I don’t know her salary—studs, and her face, again, bears only a light patina of blush-eyeshadow-lipgloss. Today, she smells like cinnamon and something sweet.

  Her shoes make no noise as she walks to the table and sets her briefcase on top of it. She pulls out her chair. She smiles at me, closed-mouth, and sits, knees together, elbows on the table, hands clasped as if in prayer.

  “Truthfully,” she starts, drawing my eyes to her mouth. I can see saliva in the corners, cracks in her gloss, the slick pinkness of her tongue. “Truthfully, I hadn’t expected to see you so soon.”

  If she expects me to say something, apologize maybe, I don’t. I’m not close enough to smell her breath, but I bet it is spearmint, or I want it to be spearmint, or just pink, the smell of pink, like the girls all together would smell after showering when I used to take a gym class.

  “How has your week been?” Omalis unclasps her fingers so she can touch her face, her chin. Her sleeve falls down, revealing her wrist. I hold my breath.

  “Jordan?”

  I look at her eyes. They seem deeper, the color and the pupil, so black. I listen, and I hear her heart beat. I want to move closer, remembering, now, with her across from me, how it was, earlier, long ago, when she was on top of me, when I was running and she was on top of me, holding me down, saving me, saving me from myself. So long ago. I can still feel how warm she was.

  “It’s a struggle for everyone,” she says. “In the beginning.”

  “Isn’t this the end?” My voice is thick. I swallow but still feel wet, though my lips are dry and cracked, like hers, but I know you’re not supposed to lick them, it only dries them out faster, something about the salt in your spit.

  She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, just looks at me, and I feel the heat again. I’m trying to remember the things she said to me, all of the things, but I realize she never really said much of anything besides what she was instructed to say, the script she memorized through sheer repetition. And what did I say, when I wasn’t crying or screaming to go home, which I never really wanted, I don’t really want that, home. I hear her voice again, and I feel her fingers grasping my palms, though she hasn’t moved. A phantom pressure, it makes me blush.

  “I’m not going to tell you everything will be all right,” Omalis says, stopping my heart, my lungs. “There are things you’ll have to do here if you want to stay here, like everybody else. If you will not do them, if you cannot, Jordan—you will be taken directly to the Feed Program.”

  My eyes burn as hot as the rest of me. I have to look away from her because I don’t want her to see me cry. It’s all I ever do around her, when she’s smiled with me, at me, for me, even laughed. All I do is cry. I close my eyes and smell her. I lick my lips.

  “At least you don’t lie to me. I like that you don’t lie to me.”

  “Maybe you’ll return the favor, hm?” Even with my eyes closed, I can feel her smile, the small one, the smirk. “Will you look at me?”

  I do. I start on her eyes but it’s too hot, so I refocus on her nose, which is average, only the lines that droop down to cusp her mouth are too enticing not to follow, and then I’m back to the lip gloss, a different flavor this time, I think, something with more citrus, to complement the spearmint. If I leaned a little closer I could shatter my illusion. I cross my arms and lean back, refocus on her eyebrows, light and trimmed, which makes it look like I’m looking at her eyes, which might be a kind of a lie, I guess, but here we are.

  “What did you use to cut yourself?” She asks, which is kind of nice, kind of nice she didn’t start with “why,” that tired question so revered by therapists and school administrators.

  Of course, I have to lie, but it’s not really my lie, it’s not for me. It’s for Taylor, who’s probably in her own group right now, looking at more pictures or sharing more hopes and dreams and disappointments, just trying to get by, get through, like all the rest, like I should have done, like I should be doing, like my brothers are doing, like so many more will do long after we’re all done.

  “They didn’t make us cut our nails until the second day.” I hold up my hand, fingers spread, nails eclipsed by rough skin. “They were a lot longer, then.”

  “May I see what you’ve written?”

  “No,” I say, a knee-jerk no, like when Mom yells up the stairs for me because I know whatever she is going to ask me I won’t want to do. I fold my arms over my stomach.

  Omalis arche
s an eyebrow, a sharp stab up, like the lines on a heart monitor, and drops it back down again. I feel myself blushing again, I can’t stop.

  “All right,” she says. “I suppose we’ll just have to start filing down the fingernails upon initial arrival.”

  She says it like, “and that’s that,” but I can tell there’s more to come because she hasn’t moved to get up yet, and they wouldn’t have called her down here to give up so easily. She shifts slightly.

  “It’s my turn,” I say before she can speak. “I get to ask you a question now.” But my statement comes out as more of a question—“Is that okay?”—and if she were paying closer attention she would catch that and have her turn back.

  She nods, a smile in her voice, condescending if it weren’t so innocent, “I suppose that’s only fair.”

  All eyes on me. Everything dries up again. Well, almost everything.

  “Tell me about South Africa,” I say.

  “That isn’t a question. It may be your game, but you still must play by its rules.”

  How I want to smile, but I don’t. I take a deep breath and try again.

  “Did you get caught in the war?”

  “Yes, if you can call it that. I think of it more as a decimation.” She never takes her eyes off me, but she tucks her hair behind her ear, the nervous gesture equivalent of shoving your hands in your pockets. “My turn, then. What’s your favorite color?”

  “What?” Now I’m tucking my own hair behind my ear.

  “Your favorite color?” she repeats.

  “Um…I don’t know… I don’t think I have one.”

  “Oh, everyone has a favorite color.” Her cheeks brighten with the sharp points of her smile. “For instance, mine is pink, though I would never wear it in public, but I love it on other people. That’s a freebie,” she says, and her right eye closes in a quick wink.

  I shove my hands in my pockets.

  “I don’t really like pink,” I say.

  “Few people generally do.” She thinks a moment; I watch it in her eyes, how they quiver, flick down to the table, then just as quickly back up to me. “Your bracelet,” she says, stopping my heart, “it was made of very bright colors, yellows and oranges, a spot of green in there. Any of those your favorite, perhaps?”

  Again, I fumble. I feel my underarms begin to sweat. I want to leave, or at least change the subject. “Yes, all of those. My turn. How did you get out of there? I’ve never read anything about the survivors or anything.”

  “My father was a fisherman,” she says. “My mother smuggled me to the marina and we set sail.”

  “I think you’re lying,” I say.

  “Why would I lie? You can count that as my question if you’d like.”

  “They wouldn’t have let anything that noticeable leave the continent,” I say. “That place was like ironclad lock down.”

  She looks bemused again, with her half smile, tilting her head to the side, like suddenly I’m a child again. “What books have you been reading about South Africa?”

  I shrug. “History books. In school.” I don’t want her to think I’ve been doing any extra reading-up on her birthplace.

  “I see,” she says. “Well, it is your choice not to believe me. After all, I’ve never had my account of things published in a textbook. But then, you’ve never heard stories from a survivor, you said. Who’s writing these books, then, I wonder?”

  “I don’t…” I’m getting distracted. “Anyway, it’s still my turn. When did you decide to become a Liaison?”

  “A long time ago,” she says, but she can only be thirty-five or so at the oldest, so this answer is too vague to count. But she jumps back in before I can say anything else. “Did you make the bracelet, the one you wore before?”

  “Why do you care?” I snap, forsaking my stupid game, avoiding her eyes now, giving up. I wonder if I can just get up and leave, or do I have to wait for her to dismiss me.

  “Why do you care about my upbringing?”

  I can’t answer her. “Look, I’m sorry I got into trouble or whatever. You know they took away my meds, so. It’s not like it’s all my fault. I just…I didn’t mean to get into trouble.”

  Dammit, I’m sulking, which is close enough to crying to really piss me off. If she doesn’t leave in the next thirty seconds, I will.

  “I’ll see what I can do about that,” she says. I am looking at the carpet, but I hear her chair slide back and her clothes rustle as she rises. Her shadow peeks onto my knees. “In the meantime, if you have anything you’d like me to pass on to your parents, a letter perhaps, you can give it to one of your mentors and she’ll pass it on to me. All right?”

  I can’t even nod, I don’t even have that left. She doesn’t say anything else and then she is gone. When I look back up, there’s something on the table. My bracelet. I feel like I can’t move, but I grab it before counselor Ninety-Seven comes to take me back to my cabin.

  On the way back, we pass by the small lake, a handful of two-man canoes lined up across its bending shore. There’s a boathouse near the short plank-wood dock but they don’t keep anything in there except for a few barn swallows, on account of how old it is, and how the weather has worn out its boards. The roof is already caved in in spots, the walls and floor rotting. They don’t tear it down because some of the kids like to go there to smoke, and they turn a blind eye—a sympathetic one, maybe—to that one and only refuge.

  As we pass, I see a shadow through the barn-like opening. The brief flicker of the end of a cigarette lights up Taylor’s face. I stop and tell the counselor I’m not ready to head back yet. She reminds me that dinner is in thirty minutes, and I nod and walk away, not looking back to see how closely she may watch me, how long she waits to make sure she knows where I am going.

  At the boathouse, Taylor stands half in and half out of the archway. It’s begun to drizzle, and her arm gets wet from the elbow down, the droplets clinging to the light hairs there, but she doesn’t move it. She moves the cigarette to and from her lips with her left hand, the one in the safe dry shadows of the boathouse. I stand inside the boathouse, sneakers creaking against the wet and rotted floorboards, arms crossed and looking at her arm. She hasn’t said anything to me since our first night here, with the razor, our secret. I don’t know what to say to her, or if she’ll say anything to me, but I know I don’t want to go back to our cabin just yet, because I’ll be alone while everyone else is in group, and I’ll have to start thinking about today, and about tomorrow.

  That’s when it occurs to me, she isn’t in group either. Well, it might be flimsy, but it’s an opening at least.

  “Did your group end early?” I ask, casual, avoiding accusation, like the soft way adults speak to me when I’m coming off an “episode.”

  She sucks in smoke from her cigarette and holds it behind her words. “Ducked out. You?”

  “Something like that.” I don’t know why I’m being coy, after the razor, after the things I saw, the things she let me see. But if she’s pretending it never happened, I will too; she’s older, I’ll follow her lead.

  “Do you want one?” I shift my eyes from her dampening arm and see she’s proffering her pack of off-brands to me with her other hand. You can use it too.

  I look at the ceiling, at the corner, the black sphere hanging ominously. Some of the counselors will give you cigarettes but only one match. And then they’ll watch you, in person or through those black, deceptively dormant eyes. I shake my head.

  “Yeah, smoking will kill you.” She tucks the soft-pack back into the waistband of her sweats.

  “If you’re lucky,” I say, kind of wishing I’d taken one now, just to show her I mean it.

  She laughs a little with her throat but her lips stay pinched. She’s old enough and she has hair dark enough to need to wax around her upper lip, but that’s a luxury we’re not allowed to smuggle in with us here. I wonder what her armpits must look like, and turn away, pretending to find something interesting in the mud clu
mping up in the corner on the other side of the boathouse.

  “Right,” she says, kind of light, like maybe I was making a joke, or maybe she is making one. There’s a lull then. I watch a barn swallow swoop in through the back entrance of the boathouse, the one facing the lake, and land on a crossbeam overhead. Three small, pink bird faces peek out from their nest of sodden twigs and grass. The mother dips her head to them and spills a worm from her mouth into theirs.

  “You had your Liaison meeting,” Taylor says, not a question. I keep looking at the swallows, waiting for the inevitable follow-up. “We’re not supposed to have them for a few more days. You got yours early. Guess they found out, huh?”

  “They found out about me,” I tell her, looking over my shoulder at her. She’s finished her cigarette, put it out on the floor with the rest of the legion of discarded butts. Arms crossed, she’s full in the boathouse now, the rain falling lightly just beyond her back. “But it’s okay. I told her I did it with my own fingernails.” I shrug.

  Taylor nods, almost smiles. “Thanks,” she says. I nod back. She swipes a hand across her right forearm, brushing the cold from it. “Your Liaison is a woman? I have a man. He’s fat, seems like the kind of guy who plays Santa for his umpteen kids. His suits always smell like a woman, older, with that perfume like grandmas have, you know? Like potpourri that’s been closed up in a closet for a few years.”

  I smile. “Mine doesn’t smell like that.” Then I blush.

  “Your grandma or your Liaison?”

  I laugh, a real laugh, quick but there. She laughs too, a mirror sound. She steps a little closer to me. I turn fully to face her.

  “What’s she like?” Taylor asks. “Your Liaison?”

  “I don’t know. Probably like all of them.” When Taylor frowns, I add, “She’s South African.”

  A light goes on in Taylor’s eyes, her eyebrows rise at the significance but she swallows any excitement that might be building in her voice. “Wow,” she understates.

  “Yeah. Fucked up, huh?”