The Unquiet (15 page)

W
hat would you do if Da died today?

How would you feel if Gigi was killed?

What about Cecily?

That time is coming. Are you still ready to do what you must, soldier?

Yes.

At any moment?

I have not changed, miss.

T
oday I am wearing a dress that Julia brought from her house. A simple blue cotton dress that she saw, that made her think of me. I am offended as I strip out of my clothes, but she laughs. “I just mean,” she says, “that you
like
simple things. And the color makes your eyes stand out. There's no boy in his right mind who won't go mad, and yet there is nothing to it. It's just a plain blue dress. The next time we go to the movies you
have
to wear this.”

I stare at myself in the mirror after I am dressed. I have no idea what she is talking about. My eyes are exactly the
same. But I humor her. She is trying to have something in common with me, and it is not her fault that I am as boring as I look. “Thank you,” I say, running my hands over the dress. It is open and low at the back, with a large bow that cinches it to my waist. The front might be plain, but the back is the opposite. Aunt Imogen would approve.

“I've got some earrings and makeup here, too,” Julia says, clapping her hands. But she must see the way my shoulders droop because she hesitates. The others—Davis and the two Robbies—leave me alone for the most part, but it is different with Julia. She plays the part of a typical teenager too well, and it is hard for me to keep up. Tomorrow she might bring a board game she wants to play with me or ask me to braid her hair like we did in the cottages.

I am trying, but being her friend is exhausting.

Edith walks into the bedroom with a fresh pot of tea to refill the mugs the three of us have been drinking from. She takes one look at me, eyeing Julia's makeup bag with horror, and laughs because somehow she understands the things I cannot say. She sets the teapot on the dresser. “Poor Lira. I don't think there's anything she hates more than getting dressed up.”

“Oh,” Julia says sadly, and puts her bag away. Tomorrow
she might try again but today gives up on me. “Well, I should go home, I guess. My parents are probably expecting me.”

“Maybe we can go see a movie . . . soon.” I croak the words out. “So I'll wear this dress.”

Julia smiles at me. “Okay,” she says, and I feel bad. I don't know what she wants from me.

“I invited her into the group because of you,” Edith says when she's gone.

“Me?”

She smiles at my surprise. “You were so good at protecting her at the cottages. I'm sure you were hoping no one would notice, but I did.”

“I don't know what you mean,” I say.

“No? My mistake, I guess.” But she doesn't sound as if she believes her own words. I don't want to disappoint this flawed memory of me she has, so I say nothing else. I listen instead to her talking about how she and Julia live in the city near each other and how they accidentally run into each other sometimes. At the same supermarket or on a walk. It has become a game for them. They have special signals—secret winks and hand gestures and coughs. “There was a time,” Edith says, her eyes glowing, “months ago when we were standing on opposite ends of an aisle making plans for
a movie with our special gestures. Some little boy walked by, saw us, and ran off screaming to fetch his mother. I guess he thought we were crazy or something. Julia was so shocked she knocked a stack of cans over and landed on top of them.”

“And you?” I ask.

She waves me off nonchalantly. “I left her there, of course. I heard the boy's mother yelling at her for making obscene gestures at her son while I was hightailing it out. Julia pretended she was deaf and couldn't understand a thing.”

We both laugh.

It has been six weeks since my first time at the farmhouse and only two weeks since our night of dares. I have been back every chance I could get. Most days there is no Robbie (girl or boy), there is no Gray or even Davis. They are usually out completing their missions, especially Robbie and Gray, who always seem to have the most work.

Edith and I are now lying on the bed with our feet hanging over. We're staring up at the cracks in the roof, lazy and wordless. We do this sometimes. Julia cannot understand it when we do this. I get the sense that she does not appreciate her friend being stolen away, and I wonder what Edith is like without me. But each time I try to find out, she'll pull up a chair or ask my opinion on a book or song.

When Gray walks into the room, we are playing a game like one we played when we were at the cottages. Madame would divide us into groups and then write a list of things on a piece of paper. On bad days the list consisted of horrible things like punches, no dinners, sleeping outside, no shoes for a week, washing duties for a month. And then Madame would pass the list around and make us assign each thing to someone in our group, right to her face. And the people with the most votes had to do whatever they'd been assigned. I was no longer friends with Alex, Gray, and Edith at this point, but Madame felt there were other friendships that needed to end. To break. Most of us had caught on to this by then. We would see that Jenna and Annie still talked to each other, so we would give Jenna the punches (from Annie), and Annie would sleep outside.

It was a horrible game, but over time it became one we liked. A way to settle any differences, especially among the boys. We would play it even when Madame was not around. The skeleton game, we called it. The boys would have physical fights with one another, but with us girls it was all about how cruel we could be: Martha was not allowed to brush her hair for a week, no matter what, and for ten days I could not bathe with soap. I looked homeless, smelled worse. But one
of the meanest things we ever did was to a girl named Naomi. A group of us held her down while each one of her former friends wrote down what they really thought of her on her skin with black markers. She tried to wash it off afterward—the word
Ugly
—but it was there for days, and it is entirely possible that it is still there now, hidden underneath her skin.

But Madame was pleased with us. Her game worked well, and we were no longer friends. For us, though, we liked the game because being hurt by the other cottage girls and not letting it break us was our way of showing strength.

In our modified version of the game, Edith and I trade in pinches. It is not horrible, but it hurts. She tells me a single thing about what she's done in her life that I do not know about, and I decide whether it is worth a pinch or not. A pinch means I don't find it interesting. Then I tell her something about mine. The longer the game progresses, the harder the pinches, until either one of us manages to draw blood or begs to stop.

“My alternate has been taking riding classes since she was eleven,” she says. “I have a horse named Barnacle, but we've never won any races together. I love him anyway.”

I consider this for a moment. The cracks in the ceiling seem to grow bigger. I turn and pinch her hard and for as long as possible, until she howls and shoves me away. We've
both got red welts along our arms, but when Gray comes in, we stop. The room is dark, and we pretend to be part of the lumpy bed. He shrugs out of his jacket, shirt, tosses them on the floor, and finds another clean shirt in the cupboard. His arms are covered in bruises. Then, without even looking at us, he says, “I can see you, you know.”

Edith and I giggle. The sound is so strange it makes me giggle even harder. We're like little girls. The kind of little girls we never got to be. “Is that the shirt you're planning on wearing?” I ask Gray. “Wait, I've got something better.” I stand and twirl in my dress. “It'll bring out your eyes, and you won't understand why because it's so simple. All the boys will come running. Or is it girls? I think Julia said it only works on the boys, so if you're looking for a girl . . .” I shrug.

He doesn't seem all that interested in any of it. I tell myself that that's Gray being Gray, but it suddenly seems a lot harder to reach the bed in the dark. I don't realize just how hard it is until he is catching me just before I hit the floor.

“Don't,” he says softly, eyes on mine in the dark, as though I might have any control over gravity. His fingers are wrapped tightly around my waist, but he lets me go almost as quickly. As if the skin underneath my dress were made of fire. Edith is watching us with interest. My cheeks heat up, and I look
away. I must be full of imagination today. Gray squints at us both, and then he sniffs the air, walking right over to the mugs sitting on the dresser. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I say, straightening. “We've only had tea.”

But he's frowning at his sister. “Did you get her drunk, Edith?”

Edith doesn't meet either of our eyes. “Don't look at me like that. She's less wound up.”

Gray shakes his head. “Did you ever think that she might be wound up for a reason? She's got a family, a kid at home, for crying out loud. What's she supposed to tell them?”

“Sister, not kid.” I correct him, but I am suddenly distrustful of everything I am saying, everything I have said in the past hour. Gray is right: I do not get drunk. The whole staying-on-guard thing does not work otherwise. I sit back down on the bed, saying nothing to Edith, hands clenched at my sides. I listen to Gray and Edith argue for a few moments before I stumble into the kitchen and put a pot on the stove for coffee. Even from here I can hear them.

“You can't do things like that to her,” Gray is saying. “You're supposed to be getting her to trust you.”

“It's not that easy,” Edith replies, and her voice fades out.

I clench my fists at my sides again. They are talking about
me like I am a game. Like I am something they have to accomplish. I'm going to leave the moment the alcohol wears off.

I am standing at the stove when I hear muffled laughter coming through the wall on the other side of the kitchen. Which is strange because Edith, Gray, and I are the only ones here. Julia left, and the two Robbies and Davis don't come until evening. I follow the sound and wind up at the bathroom, but it's empty.

I return to the kitchen, vowing never to drink again.

By the time my coffee is ready the fight is over. Edith convinces Gray to play the skeleton game with us.

He is sitting on the bed, waiting, when I enter the room. “But I can't stay long,” he says, watching me.

I sit on the dresser. My hands are still in fists, but I say, “I never throw out my old paintbrushes. I initial them with the last date I ever used them, and then I save them in a box without washing the color off the brush so I remember the last thing I painted with them. My grandfather says they are like commas instead of full stops.” I take a huge gulp of my coffee, even though it's too hot.

Edith still isn't meeting my eyes. “My father wants me to apply to medical school next year.”

“That's not a thing,” I say automatically. What her father
wants tells me nothing about what she wants.

She scowls. “Yes, it is. Gray, what's yours?”

Her brother pretends not to notice the tension between us. “I really like my truck,” he says. “It's not new, but it has yet to disappoint me.”

I put my coffee mug down. I climb off the dresser and walk over. We both pinch Gray. For every single one of his responses, which are small, superficial things about his truck, his boots. He gives nothing about himself away. The less he says, the more intrigued I am. Who is this boy? “This was never going to be a fair game, was it?” he says afterward, clutching his side and pretending we ripped his skin right off. “Come on, I'll give you and your bike a ride back into the city.”

I stand, scan the room for my boots and other things. I climb back into my normal clothes once Gray is gone. Edith and I do not say a single word to each other. It is my own fault for not paying attention to what I was drinking. But I hate the fact that I trusted her. I hate the fact that it's what you're supposed to be able to do—trust your friend—because of how quickly I've done it. I should have known better.

“Bye,” I say quietly when I'm done.

Edith is standing by the door, looking miserable. “Don't be mad, okay?” she says, and hugs me.

“Okay,” I lie.

I walk down the hallway toward the door. Someone laughs again, the sound reverberating in the walls, and this time I stop. Either I am going mad or there are ghosts here. “I thought we were alone,” I say, and wait for Edith to tell me the truth.

She nods. “The house is old. Sometimes it creaks.”

But she doesn't meet my eyes. She is lying to me again.

There is someone else in the farmhouse with us.

I think this as I enter Gray's truck. I don't know what it means, and I should probably leave it alone. Trust them. But the moment I shut the door I know I can't. Gray is already turning the truck around, headed for the road. I say, “Can we go back? I forgot something. The dress Julia gave me.”

He says okay at first. He stops the truck, and I climb out. Walk back toward the farmhouse.

Then he must grasp what I am banking on. That Edith has gone off in search of company. “Hey, Lira, wait,” he calls, climbing out of the truck and coming after me. But I am already running.

When I enter the house, there is a gap in the wall of the living room that was not there before. A door. It is open, and I run down the stairs, hearing Gray call my name and ignoring
him. When I reach the bottom, the two Robbies are cuddled up together on a couch, but they pull apart guiltily. Edith is sitting across from them. Her head snaps toward mine in shock.

For a long moment there is silence. Gray reaches the bottom of the stairs and says nothing, just watches me walk around the room.

The television screens are like the ones at the cottages, the ones we used to learn about our alternates. On them now, there are different people, different faces. I do not recognize any of them. And then I see Miss Odette, but she is not sitting in her office. She is in an apartment, and she's sitting with a little girl no older than two or three, and she's singing to her and laughing. I know adult sleepers did not have the procedure, but I am surprised that Miss Odette has a daughter. I don't think she knows she is being watched. I don't think any of these people do.