No Dawn without Darkness: No Safety In Numbers: Book 3 (16 page)

From the lines on her face, the shadows on thin skin, it’s clear she was there with us every night in her mind.

The truth might be a kindness. So I tell her about the men. About Preeti, unearthed on the floor of a toilet stall. Even Ryan—there was some good in that place. I lay myself before her.

And when I have spewed the last horror, she holds me, the whole tangled mess of me, and whispers she loves me into the wet cords of my hair.

• • •

My mother and I are both somewhere between laughing and crying—snot running, mouths smiling—when Preeti comes up the stairs. Ba is telling the story of how Bapuji nearly got himself arrested after the FBI cut off our one CB conversation.

“He had his fists up like some cartoon boxer, ready to take on the entire army to get you girls back on the phone!”

Preeti is all snark. “Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

My mother reels her laughter back in, wipes her face with a washcloth retrieved from our neat honeycomb of terrycloth in the closet. “You should be in bed,” she says.

“That’s where I’m going,” Preeti says.

“Then I’ll come with you to tuck you in.”

“Oh, god, Mom,” she whines. “I’m not, like, five anymore.”

But Preeti can’t get enough of the attention. She even waits by the door to make sure Mom follows.

Ba squeezes my shoulder, and I rest my head against her arm. Then she meets Preeti at the door and hugs her thin shoulders. “You want me to read to you, or is that only for five-year-olds too?”

Preeti closes the door behind them.

I get up, suddenly aware that I am in the hallway naked save for a damp bath towel. It’s still weird, going into my room. I’m not used to all the personal space, to sleeping alone in a real bed.

I throw on pajamas, then flip open my laptop. There’s a new email from Kris, telling me the details for where he’s going to pick me up on Monday. He offered me a job helping with his afterschool theater program. Of course I said yes.

I think about sending Ryan a message, but the words
breaking news
intrude. I try typing the line:
We interrupt this program for breaking news
. It doesn’t feel right.

Digging through my desk, I find some loose-leaf and a pen. I write it over again.
We interrupt this program for breaking news.
The rhythm of the words pulses:
Da-dum-da-dum da-dum-dum da-dum da-dum.

I think of “One Art,” I think of the Fall of Lost Things. I think of Nani, of my painted body. And the words come.

We interrupt this program for breaking news:

The bad guys have been caught! It’s finally over.

Everyone can move on, let fade the bruise.

How many died as part of their ruse?

Why count? This is the time for closure.

Don’t interrupt our program to scavenge old news.

But I see remnants in the rubble: a hairband, shoes.

Why look? It’s done. Spring will dress it in clover.

Everyone please move on, let fade our bruise.

I keep covering the wound, keep tightening the screws.

Push through each day. Maintain composure.

But what’s breaking now is not the news.

Inside, the bomb ticks—all my effort, confused.

The inmates escape the wall of the enclosure:

Every one, please move on. Let fade my bruise.

I watch them spill out, spread, their power defused;

the lie was in the hiding, not the disclosure.

The world did not crumble after hearing my news.

Everyone
can
move on. Let fade the bruise.

My cell buzzes. It’s one in the morning. My head throbs and my hand aches. It’s a text from Ryan.

You didn’t call.

I love that he’s such a girl.

I text him back:
I was writing a poem.

The phone vibrates and the screen changes to show he’s calling me. I pick up.

“Will you read it to me?” he asks.

And I do.

L
E
X
I

CHAT WITH D-MASTER

G
I
N
G
E
R

T
he cameras are going to be there, in the dining room,” my dad says.

“But Deborah Winters, she’ll be sitting with you here, by the fireplace,” says a youngish woman named Kate from his firm. Kate moves around my house as if she lives here.

She and my dad are tag-team prepping me for my interview on
Night Chat
with Debbie Winters on cable.
Night Chat
was the only program that guaranteed my father could approve all questions and topics in advance. It’s my first chance to tell “my side of the story”—Kate’s words. But there’s only one side to the story—the truth. And I don’t need Kate to help me tell it.

“I have to get to school,” I say.

“I can drive you,” Kate says.

“I’ve got this,” my dad says, touching her gently on the arm.

I leave the room to grab my bag from the kitchen table. “I’m going to be late,” I bark over my shoulder.

On the ride to school, I flip through radio stations.

“Kate picked out a nice skirt for you for the interview,” Dad says over a thumping pop song. It’s one I haven’t heard before. I’ve been gone long enough for there to be a new song-of-the-moment.

“I want to wear pants.”

“A skirt looks more professional.”

“Once people hear what I have to say, they won’t care what I’m wearing.”

“You can decide later.” He doesn’t say anything more until we get to the circular driveway in front of Irvington Country Day.

“You sure you want to go back today?” he asks. “We could go over things again for tonight.”

“I’m sure.”

He follows me out of the car so he can hug and kiss me good-bye. In front of everybody else who’s getting dropped off. Like they don’t already think I’m a wounded bunny.

We’ll see who’s a wounded bunny after tonight’s interview. Once everyone knows how we were treated, how we were made to fend for ourselves, how people were jailed for no reason, left to die in the dark. I survived all that. No
bunny
could have survived all of that.

“Love you, sweetie,” he says as I trudge across the lawn.

The door clangs shut behind me, echoing around the large vestibule of the side entrance, and tears spring into my eyes. As if by instinct, I am in the place where Maddie and I have met every morning before homeroom since starting in the Upper School.

She’s who I’m doing this for. Maddie and everyone else who died. The world has to know what happened to us. It can’t all just be buried under tons of concrete.

“Hey, Ginger,” some guy says, walking in through the doors behind me. “You’re back.”

“Hey, Liam,” I say. “I am back.”

“I watched it on the news,” he says. “When they let the people out, and then when they blew the mall up. Crazy how they nuked the place.”

“It’s a crime is what it is,” I say. “After what happened, to just bury everything like it doesn’t matter.”

“What was it like in there?” he asks, a smile creeping across his face. “Was it awesome, like some free-for-all? Or was it like the apocalypse with, like, dead bodies everywhere?”

“It was—” And suddenly my speech is gone. I had a whole thing planned out about the government’s invasion, then how they left us, the senator’s society. “At first—”

He raises an eyebrow. “At first what?”

“At first it was kind of— Well, see, I went there with Maddie. I mean, Maddie and I kind of always . . . ”

The first bell rings.

“I have to go,” Liam interrupts. “Talk to you later?”

He opens the inner door and swings it wide enough for the both of us. He trots away from me as if escaping a trap. Too bad Lexi isn’t back yet to help take some of the pressure off. She texted that she might be feeling healthy enough to come back next week, but by then, everyone will already have heard the story from me.

I have to write my speech down, that’s it. I’ll get it down to a pithy punch line.
We were screwed by Big Brother
. That’s a good place to start. I join the crowd in the hallway and find my locker.

Wrinkled wrapping paper, torn streamers, and deflated balloons cover its front. I can barely find the lock and handle under everything. There are get-well messages, like I was just home sick for a month. Someone made a collage with labels from my favorite stores. There’s a picture of me and Maddie and some of the other girls we used to hang out with from the first day of school.

I tear it from its wrapping paper frame. Maddie’s face is kind of hidden by Ariel’s ponytail. It was windy. I remember having to keep holding my scarf down so Mrs. Yoshida could take the picture.

“Ginger!”

Hillary Kransfeld is running down the hall toward me, her brown bob flapping like a fringe around her hat, arms open, waiting to smash me into a hug. I brace myself for impact.

“Hi, Hill,” I say into the thick knit of her head.

“Everyone’s going to go insane when they hear you’re back!” She holds my shoulders and smiles bright white teeth at me. “Oh my god, did you hear? No, you couldn’t have. They’re holding a service for Maddie today during last block.”

“A service?”

“A remembrance thing. We’re all saying something. We brought in pictures.”

“Like this?” I hold up the one from my locker.

“Oh, we should add that one.” Hillary pulls out her phone and begins swiping the screen with her fingers. “We decorated your lockers, both of yours, right at the beginning, when we first heard you were in there. We all wanted to do something. It was so awful.”

I have better pictures on my phone. Well, no. I guess I don’t. My phone is somewhere in the rubble that was once the Shops at Stonecliff. Just another thing lost in the wreckage.

“You should say something about it,” she says. “About what happened in there. Everyone’s been talking about it, what it must have been like.”

“I plan on it.”

“I heard you’re doing some TV interview?”

“Yeah. But that’s only the first step. I want the world to know—”

“So what was it like? Was it crazy? I heard there were riots.”

“Yes, but first it was actually—”

Hillary finishes whatever she was doing on her phone. “Were people, like, eating each other?” She looks hungry enough herself.

“No. I mean, in the beginning—”

“Oh, crap,” she interrupts. “I should get to class.” She hugs me again and runs down the hall.

Bells start ringing and I know I should go to class, but I don’t even know what day it is in the schedule, so who knows what class I’m even supposed to go to.

“Ginger!” Ariel Blake waves to me from across the hall. As if reading my mind, she says, “It’s a green day—we have bio together!”

Everyone’s so excited to see me. I lope to Ariel’s side.

“Thanks,” I say. “It’s weird coming back.”

“Oh my god,” she says, holding the door open for me. “I can’t even imagine. If you need to talk to someone, I am so here for you.” She throws her arms around me. “I just had to do that,” she says into my ear. “You know we all loved Maddie.”

“Thanks,” I say. But I’m a little uncomfortable with the line. No way did everyone love Maddie. Fear Maddie? Yes. Envy her? Sure. Maddie’s thing was pissing people off. It’s one of the things
I
loved about her.

Ariel lets me go and we walk into bio. My classmates jump from their chairs to greet me. They’re all too friendly, too eager to not seem too eager. And they all say how sorry they are about Maddie. What did they have to do with it?

I thank everyone, give hugs, smile the way I’m supposed to.

After faking my way through bio, I follow the rush in the hallway to English. They’re reading
Romeo and Juliet
. When I left, we had been on Book X of
The Odyssey
. Guess I’ll never find out how that one ends.

Maddie had English with me. Her chair in the back is empty. She used to hurl her completely bizarre comments from that perch.
I think Odysseus is a punk—he’s married to Penelope and she’s, like, pining away for him while Odysseus is banging Circe. How is
he
the hero?
The teacher was totally dumbfounded. I bet no one in the class says stuff like that any more.

A kid I have never spoken more than five words to ever, turns around in his seat. “You have to tell me all about it,” he says. His glasses give him bug eyes; in the mall, if he’d lost those, he’d have been blind, then dead. “Was it crazy? I heard the government was in hazmat suits Tasing people and stuff.”

“There were people in hazmat suits.”

The teacher tells him to sit straight and I’m rescued.

After English is my lunch period. I don’t feel like eating, so I kind of hover in the administrative hallway, looking at the new artwork hung on the walls. It feels like I’ve been gone for centuries. There’s even a new fad—people are wearing these cheap slap bracelets.

Now is the time to write down my speech for the interview.
The government has committed a crime against its people.
Ugh. That was Kate’s line. And it’s not even true. Okay, how about,
In the beginning, after the announcement, everything was actually pretty normal. Senator Ross tried to make things work. We had showers, jobs, clean clothes. We all ate together. Our biggest worry was whether we could sneak out to party.

Should I mention the parties? It was my and Maddie’s main focus. We planned our outfits down to the last bangle. I can’t believe how much stuff we stole. All buried now. Gone. Poof.

I drift into World History and face another onslaught of inquiry into whether anyone tried to kill me for food. I say no. They don’t deserve to know the truth.

The bell rings and it’s announced that the memorial service for Madeline Flynn will begin in fifteen minutes in the Great Hall. We three—Lexi, Maddie, and me—were the only ones from our school in the mall, and only Maddie didn’t make it out. I debate hiding in the library, but then Jenna Yoshida and Grace Bailey snag my arms.

“We will totally sit with you,” Grace says in a voice like she’s telling me I lost a leg, but I’m going to live.

“We made a slideshow,” Jenna says. “Did Hillary tell you?”

“Yeah.”

People are standing three deep against the wall. Everyone wants to be here for the memorial. Jenna elbows our way up to the front row, and so I am sitting with everyone’s eyes boring into my spine.

First, the headmaster makes a little speech about lost friends and focusing on the good memories. Then the chaplain says a short, innocuous prayer. After that, the head-master opens the floor to anyone who wants to speak.

Avery Dunmore gets up first. Avery hated Maddie.

“Madeline Flynn was the perfect example of what all students at Irvington Country Day should strive to be.”

Is this girl serious? Maddie was like the definition of problem student. She was always one demerit away from expulsion.

Avery continues, “She was smart and funny and knew how to wear a studded belt with pearls. But whenever we think of Maddie, let’s remember her amazing record-breaking season on the field hockey pitch.”

Good god. If Maddie knew she was being remembered as a field hockey player, she’d start whipping people in the face with that studded belt. Each successive speech is worse than the last. Maddie was an excellent student. A super-great friend. Such a fashion plate. I’m not even sure who they’re talking about anymore. It’s like they’re making the Maddie they always wanted, clipping pieces from the whole.

Jenna gets up with Hillary to introduce the slideshow. They have picked this totally cheesy song to play under it. People begin to weep. Some girl in the back mumbles along with the lyrics.

I cannot take this anymore.

“Are you people crazy?” I say, standing. “Do you even remember who we’re talking about? Avery, didn’t Maddie punch you in the face over the summer for saying something about her mom at Tomo’s party?”

Avery’s eyes scan the room nervously—she knows she’s been caught.

“It’s a memorial, Ging,” Hillary says, giving me the stink eye. “We’re here to talk about the good stuff.”

“But this isn’t the good stuff,” I say. “The good stuff was Maddie punching Avery in the face for being a bitch. It was Maddie calling people out for being fake, for pushing us—for pushing
me
to be real, to be myself, always. Maddie was the girl who drank too much and set fire to people’s lawns. She was also the one who got everyone dancing at a party.

“You know, it was Maddie who pulled the fire alarm in seventh grade. But she did it because she was trying to help distract people from the fact that I had gotten my period and bled through my jeans.

“That’s the real Maddie. That’s the Maddie I remember. She was smart, but she was no student. She was stylish, but only because she didn’t give a crap about trends. She made the strangest things work as an outfit through sheer force of will.”

Some people nod along.

“Maddie only played field hockey because she liked hitting things with sticks.”

A few girls laugh.

“She was a great friend, but not in some Hallmark card way. She was my best friend, but not because she was easy. She pissed me off. She made me grow in ways I never would have on my own. She was braver than me. She taught me how to be brave.”