All Good Children Page 24

  “I don’t know,” Taylor says. She speaks in whispers. Her breath smells like my breath. Every so often she pushes closer to me, like she’s trying to get inside me but she can’t. I’m full up. “Something else. Anything. This can’t be…you know, it just. It can’t be over. Like this?”

  “How were you hoping it would happen? A cake, a party, a gold watch for your stunning performance as number Fifteen, so glad you could be here, now on to your death, pip pip.”

  “Why are you being so mean?”

  Taylor hugs my arm and holds my hand and nuzzles her head into my neck. It’s pathetic. It’s pathetic that she’s two years older than me and she’s dated girls two years older than her and she even went all the way once, she told me, though she didn’t tell me how exactly that worked when it’s two girls but she would show me, if I ask her to, if I let her. She has two dads who adopted her before adoption became illegal—all unwanted kids to the mouths of the Over, please and thank you—and so she has no brothers and no sisters and she loves her fathers so much and she almost didn’t let them go when they came to visit and she had to be sedated and carried back here and she hasn’t left the cabin since, even though we didn’t get locked in until today. She plays hockey and she’s on the swim team at her high school and she’s only ever gotten a B in Chemistry and that was only as a punishment for letting another kid cheat off her test. She has a best friend since preschool and she has secrets and she has dreams and she has plans and she has delusions and she has hope. But none of that is real. Only I am real enough to hold onto.

  The girl at the front of the cabin turns from the window and rushes to the prayer circle. “They’re coming back.” The girls clasp hands and breathe heavily. The one making her bed stops and sits down on the half-made bed, facing me. We lock eyes. This girl hasn’t spoken one single word to me this whole entire time—in fact, I think she was the one who sneaked a spider into my mashed potatoes the third day we were here—and now she looks for all the world like she regrets this. She looks like she would open her mouth and say something if her jaw would let her.

  “Jordan?”

  Taylor’s grip strangles the circulation from my upper arm. I look at her and brush her bangs out of her eyes. “If they’re for you, I’ll stall them.” Long enough for her to run into the bathroom to get the razor and slit her wrists or throat with it. But I don’t have to say that. We’re beyond saying that.

  She swallows hard. “Okay,” she says. I don’t know if she would stall them for me. I think she wouldn’t, no matter how real I might be.

  The cabin door swings inward, and all the other girls stand up, it’s automatic. Facing our executioners, like good little sisters and daughters.

  But there isn’t a counselor standing there, or a gun-toting Beef Bot. There’s one of them, an Over.

  It blocks out the sun. It takes all the light of the sun into itself. It consumes the sun. It consumes our air; we choke on its presence. We burn, we burn inside out looking at it, at its eyes, viscera red, red with our own burning. It takes everything inside of us and outside of us and around us and all over, all of it, forever. It takes everything into itself and holds it there and taunts us with it and threatens us with it and murders us with it.

  There is screaming. It takes their screams. There is a flurry of movement. It takes their limbs. There is a burning, there is a yearning, there is a death, more than one. It takes it takes it takes.

  None of this is happening. All of this is in my head. No one has screamed and no one has moved. Except me. I’ve stood up. Taylor pulls on my shirt, cowering. The visceral eyes take me, take all of me. I am ready. I am ready.

  Something steps out from the blackness of the Over’s consuming form. Something steps around it and into the light in front of it. Half its size, blonde, thin, a regular t-shirt, regular jeans, boots, blue eyes that consume nothing and give away everything.

  Omalis. She says, “Jordan, we need to talk.”

  Taylor pulls me, pulls on my shirt until she’s pulled me back to the bed. She whispers harshly, spitting into my ear. “The razor. Go, go!” She pushes me off the bed and I stumble forward, crash into the bathroom, slam the door behind me. I don’t have much time. I don’t have enough time.

  The yellow floor blinks in and out of blackness, everything hazy. I drop to my knees and run my fingers over the tiles. I can’t remember which one it’s under. I peel flakes from unmoving tiles until my fingers bleed. Any second now, or now, or now.

  The pressure on my back comes from hands, not talons, or anything worse, anything unimaginable. Omalis lifts me up and turns me around. I didn’t even hear her come in.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” I say. Or I want to say it, but my mouth won’t let me. The only thing my mouth will let me be rid of is a scream, not a frightened scream, a real scream, a true one, full of rage as red as the Over’s eyes, full of me, full of everything I’ve never been and won’t ever get to be. It catches Omalis right between the eyes. She holds onto it. She holds onto it for me. But she can’t hold me up. I slip back to the floor and everything’s gone hazy again, hazy and wet, and her arms are around me and she feels like my mother, which can’t be right, which is not right, which is something I will never feel again so okay, okay, let it be like that, let her arms be my mother’s arms, sure, okay.

  We seem to sit like this for too long, long after I should be dead. Omalis presses her hands to the sides of my face but I won’t open my eyes. Why is she doing it like this? How sick is she, that she has to see it happen, that she has to kiss me goodbye.

  “Jordan,” she says, with her calming balm of a voice; her scratching, clawing voice. “Marla sent me.”

  The room fills with ice; my body fills with ice. I push her back from me; I kick out with my legs so she’ll stay away from me. My back hits the wall and my left hand disrupts a loose tile at my side. When I look at Omalis, she’s holding something out to me.

  “I need you to see this,” she says. It’s a portable video player, like the one Marla had. Maybe it is Marla’s. I scan it for blood stains.

  When I don’t go to take it from her, she sets it on the floor and flips it up and presses play. She isn’t wearing any makeup today, her hair isn’t done. She doesn’t smell like anything, but she’s kneeling very far away from me.

  The sound of Marla’s voice reaches me from the vid player. I flick my eyes to the small screen:

  First there’s just static, a wobbly grayness, then a blurry pink ball, ridged and cracked like asphalt. It pulls back—Omalis’s thumb covering the viewfinder; the rest of her fades into view. She’s immaculate. White blouse cut just low enough to tease but not low enough to embarrass you for looking too long at it; white skirt that reveals those dimpled knees, coquettish in their tan stockings, a color just a shade too dark for her skin. The video doesn’t reveal her shoes. Her hair is curled and pinned up with those chopstick hair things; her earrings are diamonds, or glint like diamonds; she wears a silver tennis bracelet on one wrist and her nails are painted a delicate red. Her eyes look above the viewfinder, to Marla’s voice, off camera.

  “Step back a little more,” Marla says. Her voice is close to the mic, too loud. “A little more.”

  It’s hard to tell where they are; so little of it is captured in the small screen. It’s a patio, I think; there’s a light wooden railing behind Omalis, and grass beyond. The shadow of a tree; it’s bright like they’re outside. Ambient sounds like wind rustling leaves, like birds or ducks or something.

  Omalis asks, “Okay?” My stomach clenches. Omalis is asking permission. There’s this…this familiarity in her tone. I mean, she’s only saying one word, but she is begging. I’ve heard so many girls beg in these last few weeks, heard it even when they were only talking with their eyes, and that is what is in that “okay,” that’s what’s feeding it. Omalis is standing there, in her Sunday best, like my mother, but she’s begging, like me.

  The camera remains steady—it must be set up on a t
ripod—and there’s no verbal response from Marla. Omalis’s eyes focus on the viewfinder—on me—and she clears her throat.

  “My name is Heaven Omalis,” she begins. “For all intents and purposes, I’ve been a Liaison for the Over since I was eleven, for twenty-three years. Whatever choice I had then, I—” She looks down abruptly, smoothes her unwrinkled skirt with her hands, fiddles with her bracelet. I touch the beads of my own bracelet. “I never had that privilege. But I’m invoking it now. My choice.”

  She straightens her shoulders a bit, turns her chin up. Her eyes flick off camera again. In a lower voice, Marla whispers, “Good, baby. Good.” Omalis smiles shyly—I don’t know how else to describe it. She’s never smiled like that at me. She pulls her face together and refocuses on the viewfinder.

  “Under my own volition, under absolutely no duress or coercion from any external force, I volunteer my services to the Resistance. I understand the risks to my life. I understand—Marla, can we stop this?”

  Again, she’s like another person when she asks these things of Marla. Like a kid, in need of approvals and assurances and someone to hold her and tell her, “Calm down, calm down.”

  Marla’s voice says, “What’s wrong?”

  Omalis wipes her brow with a knuckle. “Nothing. I don’t know. It’s…” She wipes her mouth, she brushes nonexistent bangs from her forehead. In this brief pause, I look up from the video player to see the Omalis sitting here in this room with me. Her eyes are closed, her head is turned away, facing the shower. She sits on her hands. The Omalis on the screen starts speaking again so I look back down. “Do I really talk like this?”

  Marla laughs, eliciting another shy smile from Omalis. “You can say whatever you want to, however you want to say it. This is for you, remember. What words would you believe?”

  Omalis casts her eyes down while she thinks. She clasps her hands behind her back. Something blows across the screen behind her, a leaf or a small bird. She looks back up and says, “I’d want to see you.”

  In a second, Marla is in view, standing beside Omalis. It’s like having the breath knocked out of me, seeing them together. It’s like being slapped, back-handed by some lie, some little tiny half-truth or omission that was so cute and small when it was born all pink and naked and ugly, but then it got big and sprouted limbs and wings and teeth and thorns and a will of its own and this hunger, this hunger to hurt you. It hurts, it physically hurts to see them together—Marla, in a floral print dress, like she just stepped out to get the sun tea that’s been brewing all day, her hair longer then, flowing lazily over her bare shoulders, her bare shoulder that touches Omalis’s shoulder so casually, so familiarly. I dig the tears out of my eyes with my fingers, and make some sort of awful sound, some sort of dying sound.

  Marla takes Omalis’s hands in hers, and kisses her knuckles. Omalis grimaces. She says, “Well, I wouldn’t believe that, certainly.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “It looks manipulative.”

  Marla grabs Omalis’s body and tilts her into a tango-like dip, and kisses her, kisses her deep, so deep I feel it in my own throat, dry and hard against the core of me. On screen, Omalis struggles away but she’s laughing.

  “I’m attempting a level of decorum here, darling.”

  “See, there.” Marla puts a hand to her stomach to catch her breath. “You do talk like that.”

  Omalis finds Marla’s hand again and looks into the viewfinder. Marla watches Omalis speak.

  “I’m Heaven Omalis and I am a member of the Resistance. I understand the risks to my body and to my mind. I understand them and I accept them.” She looks back to Marla. “Okay?”

  Marla only nods and brings the back of Omalis’s hand to her lips once more.

  The video stops, the screen is empty. My skin jumps when Omalis—here in this bathroom, here in this reality—clicks the player shut and pulls it into her lap. With her other hand, she gets a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and holds it out to me.

  “I need you to do something for me.” Her voice is so loud in this small room. It makes my ears bleed. I feel like I’m bleeding all over. “It’s very important. Before we leave this bathroom, I need you to read to me the words on this paper. You’ll be saving my life. You’ll be saving Marla’s life. Okay?”

  She breaks me with that “okay,” she fucking skewers me, god. It’s hot in here, it’s hot all over, inside and outside of me, it’s my own blood making me so hot, it’s my own body that won’t stop shaking and leaking and betraying me. Shouldn’t I be used to betrayal by now? Shouldn’t I know how to handle it, how to suck it back down and hold it and crush it with my thick skin and stiff upper lip?

  “Jordan. Please.”

  Some perverse role-reversal has her begging me now. I take the paper just so she’ll stop asking me for things.

  She slumps back against the closed door and looks down at her knees. Her jeans are loose on her, comfortable, her stay-at-home jeans. I can’t stop crying, silently, but I can’t stop looking at her either.

  “That woman in the video…” Omalis shakes her head. Her hair obscures her eyes. “That was three years ago. I don’t even know who that woman is. She’s meant to be me but I can’t remember her. Did you hear that laugh? When have I ever laughed like that? When will I again? And Marla…” Slowly, she spins the video player on the tiles next to her. “She’s different, too. She’s someone else. We all are. We all have to be. Someone else.”

  Omalis sucks in air loudly; my chest tightens as if she’s taken the air directly from my lungs. She drops her knees so she’s sitting cross-legged now. She stuffs the vid player in her front pocket and straightens her back against the door. It’s like a yoga position, the lotus or something, like my mom used to attempt before she got too busy or lazy or whatever. Omalis looks at me, and I’m too worn out to look away.

  “I don’t remember myself in that moment, or anything about that moment, because Marla wiped it from me. Phht—” She blows air through her teeth like the sound of carbonation escaping a can of fresh-popped soda. “—Like a wizard, a spell. Gone. Never happened. She uses me to get messages to girls like you, Jordan. To put them into positions to receive her messages. After, she goes in with her magic wand like a scalpel and carves the memory out of me, so the Over can’t find it. She’s been hard at work for three years, and she’ll keep at it for as long as it takes. Until they’re dead or until she is. Whatever else Marla is… she’s a fighter. She is that.”

  Marla is a fighter. I knew that. I could have told you that. But I never would have, because you’re the enemy. You’re supposed to be the enemy. Omalis, the Liaison, the cold-hearted bitch Taker of Children, whore to the Over, hated hated hated for everything you do to me, everything you make me think of doing to you. Why can’t I say these things? Why can’t I make more than these desperate sounds? It’s the Over out there, the one mere feet away, swallowing up all the words, swallowing everything up except my blood, which burns up everything except my tears, which the Over is saving for later.

  Omalis moves into a kneeling position and rocks forward on her knees. She wraps her fingers partially around my shin. I can’t push into this wall far enough.

  “Jordan, please look at me.” She’s crying. How can I sit here breathing when Omalis is crying? “Jordan, I am so, so sorry for hurting you. I never wanted that. You were…you are so strong. I admire you. I have nothing but admiration for you. I know I ask too much of you, and I’m sorry for that. Please say something.”

  But it’s all cry cry cry. If I open my mouth, I’ll start a flood. Omalis pulls me into an awkward hug, my knees stabbing into her abdomen, her fingers raking the sweat from my hair. She doesn’t say anything, which is good, but this holding-me thing, this holding-me thing like my goddamn mother, like my goddamn mother who would gladly feed her left leg—hell, both her legs, the legs of my father too—to the Over like caviar at a fancy cocktail party just to fucking hold me like this—this holding-me thing ha
s got to stop.

  Trembling, I stand up. I use Omalis to steady myself as I rise. My body feels heavier than it did before. I thought I’d leaked everything out but it’s still there, gaining weight. I go to the sink and run the faucet and splash my face. I rub at my cheeks until it hurts, until it hurts so much I stop crying. I turn the faucet off. Careful not to look into the mirror. To myself, I read the piece of paper Omalis gave me.

  Behind me, Omalis has stood up. She says, “It’s a trigger. That phrase. After you read it to me I won’t remember anything that happened in here. Which means…you can say anything. If there’s anything. Anything you want to say to me, you can.”

  Her pause waits for me to fill it. I turn around to face her. Her eyes are as wet and raw as mine feel. I say, “What now?”

  She blinks, like she’s trying to remember the reason for coming here in the first place. She wipes snot from her nose with the underside of her bare wrist. Like a lady.

  “Right,” she says. She’s trying to get back something, something she feels naked without, something that separates her from me, something that elevates her. She reaches into her back pocket and it turns out the thing that separates us is a hypodermic needle.

  “This is the virus.” She uncaps the needle and tosses the cap in the toilet bowl. She squirts out a little fluid and gives the syringe three quick taps. It’s filled up with about an inch of something innocuously clear. “If you still want to fight, I’ll inject you with this and we’ll go back out there and the Over will take you away. But I can’t let you make that decision yet.”

  “I’ve already made it,” I say. This is the calmest I’ve ever spoken to anyone without my medication. Because it’s true. Whoever Omalis is, whatever she’s done, it doesn’t matter. Marla laid it out for me, and at least I know she didn’t lie about that part, the part where I deliver some sort of genetic bomb straight to the collective vein of the Over and won’t live to tell the tale. But Omalis has never heard me say it, so I say it now. “I’m ready.”