Vagabond (27 page)

I shook my head. “You don’t get it, do you. This is different from yesterday. Yesterday, we were two kids on the Tracks. Today, they are searching for an entire Revolution. If they catch up they won’t just let me go!” I took a deep breath and cringed. I couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen to my brain, but I had to keep moving.
 
He didn’t reply or argue, but we both listened the howls as they got louder. They were honing in on us, and I thought about our options. I thought about Randolf’s dues ex machina, and I thought about all the ways I could escape.

“Wait!” I whispered. Two pine trees grew side by side with grated trunks growing parallel until their branches linked pine-needle fingers high above our heads. “I have an idea. Just wait here for them, okay.”
 
I positioned him about fifteen feet from where I planned on going. He’d be the first to intercept the dogs and soldiers, and if it all went according to plan, he could steer them in a different direction.
 

He grabbed my elbow before I could walk away. “Wait a minute. What are you doing?”
 

“I have no clue.” I laughed.

He reached his hand up, and tried to move the hair out of the gash on my forehead. “You’re a mess.” He smiled.
 

“Just stay here, okay. Draw them right here.” I pointed to his feet. “Then direct them east.” The howls only grew louder in our ears. I couldn’t even feel the fear that was everywhere inside of me, because he pulled me in for a kiss that throbbed and tore and made the entire world dizzy.
 

Mama held Daddy’s hand over the table. It was an oak table— sturdy, solid, and plain. Its grains trapped so many stories within them that I wished I could record them on paper into a nicely bound book to read later.
 
It was time for family secrets. At least that’s what Mama called them. They were really just our stories. Some, I’d heard more times than I cared to admit. Others were new, and came out of the woodwork of their memories.
 

“This is a topic of great embarrassment, but I’d like to preface that it all ended well,” Mama said. “But we never told you how we met.”
 

Daddy laughed. “Embarrassment? That’s an understatement.”
 

“Are you going to let me tell the story, or not?”

“By all means, tell away!”

Mama grinned. “Well, a couple friends and I got an approved camping trip along the river. We’d been planning it for months, and we were so excited to be away from everyone and everything. Just three girls and the wild. We even took wilderness classes for a month so we’d be prepared. Unbeknownst to us, your father and three of his friends were approved for the same weekend excursion, and the excursion planners didn’t realize that the trips overlapped. Otherwise, they would have moved one group to another weekend or sent one group to another site.

“Anyways, when we got out, freedom was all we could think of. One of the girls had read about this thing in the archives. She was a library tech and loved to study history. She came across this thing about the 1960s.” I gasped. The document Mama was talking about must have been hundreds upon hundreds of years old. “…And there was this story about skinny dipping.”
 

Daddy cackled at this. Whatever skinny dipping was still brought a blush to his chubby, pale cheeks.
 

“We knew we couldn’t go to the approved campsite, because there were cameras there. So we ventured off course. We thought we could lie if we got caught— say we got lost because it was our first time out.”
 

Mama acting rebellious? It wasn’t something I could fit into my idea of her. Even just knowing this made my heart kick-drum against my chest.
 

“We got to the river, and the water looked perfect. We’d been so excited about this, but once we got there, we were so nervous. To peel off all our clothing and be completely nude in the wild was so raw and scandalous.”
 

Nude! Nude? The story kept getting worse and worse!

“But we did it. We got in, under the sun and under the water, just skin and nothing else.” Mama laughed at Daddy’s still reddening cheeks.
 

“That’s where I come in.” Daddy cleared his throat. “My friends and I weren’t considering anything as scandalous as skinny dipping, though. We just wanted to figure out what it felt like to be drunk. One of my friend’s had a grandfather who made moonshine.”
 

Daddy? Drunk? I’d heard of moonshine. To get caught with it was to get a large citation. It wasn’t like Whiskey. Whiskey was a quality drink, and highly rationed. But getting drunk? That lowered inhibitions and led to bad decisions. Everyone knew it. That’s why it was so regulated.
 

“So, we got there and heard laughter. It scared the crud out of us, but we followed the sound anyways. We’d heard about the Terrorists out in the woods, and we wondered if that’s what we were stumbling upon. After all, I didn’t expect to see a bunch of Citizens in the nude in the river.”
 

Mama laughed even harder than before. “We didn’t know what to do! Dunk into the water to hide? We couldn’t. It was clear. Run for our clothes? Then they’d see everything! We were in quite the pickle.”
 

“But we were gentlemen. We turned our backs and let the ladies get dressed. Then, we sat around the campfire and drank moonshine and told secrets.” Daddy rounded out the story. “Afterwards, we went about the next month pretending we’d never met. It was torture to feel your heart connect— to want to explore another person so completely only to know it could never happen.”
 

“Then, one day, I was sitting in a coffee shop,” Mama interjected. “I was stuck on some math problem when he walked in. He helped me figure out some theorem, and the conversation turned everywhere else. We started meeting there every week under the guise that he was helping me with my math homework. It was odd, really. We’d gone to the same school and were even in the same year, but we’d never run into each other. Then, suddenly, after the camping excursion, he was everywhere. He was everywhere even when he wasn’t there.”
 

The story was so so fluidly told. They interlaced threads of the tale like their fingers when they held hands. “So we applied to be partnered. I think we were the first couple to try in five generations!” Daddy laughed. “The Department of Human Relations receptionist didn’t even know how to file the paperwork. She had to look it up and ask management for help. Eventually, rumors spread everywhere.”

“It was pure cruelty,” Mama groaned. “People said such horrible things, and our parents threatened to disown us. Things kept getting worse and worse for us. Then, we got the news. We were meant to be partnered anyways! We were walking, talking proof that the G.E.G. was on point. We found each other by instinct even before the G.E.G. let us in on our own secrets, and we became somewhat famous for a bit because of it…”
 

“The G.E.G. even paid for the commitment ceremony and televised it. And that’s it. See. Told you. Everything ended well.”
 

But did it end well? Later that night I couldn’t help but wonder. Did the G.E.G. really have my parents paired, or did they do it to save face? Did they let my parents have me to go along with the bluff, knowing they’d stunt the line at me? Was that why I was flagged?

Obviously, Mama and Daddy clicked better than any partnership I’d ever observed. They were in love beyond the science of it, and it was beautiful. But no one applied to be partners anymore. For the G.E.G. to televise it? That was a gamble. It could have sparked a fad of people pretending “they met their partners through instinct” and diluted an entire Colony. There had to be another purpose to the televised ceremony.

Curiosity got to me the way it always did, and I watched their commitment ceremony vid. Sure enough, there was a public service announcement before the ceremony. It warned people against mistaking instinct for science. They cautioned people to always get tested first before acting on suspicions or instincts. “Trust the facts over feelings,” was the ending line. After his speech, the Politician’s face bled away so that my mother’s was there instead. Her smile was so perfect and bright, and I’d never seen her look so beautiful as she was in her green commitment dress.
 

Was I not supposed to exist because I was an unplanned line? I didn’t know how to be angry about that possibility, because without their small rebellion, I wouldn’t exist at all.
 

They didn’t know it, but their story only made me want to prove myself more. I had to be worthy of existing in the Republic, because perhaps I didn’t deserve to be there at all. The next day, I went to school and put all my petty thoughts aside. I’d been bitter about having to work so hard for being flagged and let it define me. I shoved all the woe-is-me feelings into a safe place in the back of my mind, and I began to push back against my genetics.
 

Adrenaline always fixes things. It made me forget that I may have had a concussion, and it made me ignore all the parts of my body that screamed out for me to stop moving. I couldn’t run fast, but it didn’t stop me from trying. I reached the two pine trees and braced one arm and one leg on each tree. My body spanned the space between the two, and I slowly crawled up, inch by inch, rocking my body back and forth so that I could climb the parts of the trees that were branchless. The bark bit into my bare hands, and my pack made the balance difficult, but it was working.
 

Ono leaned against a tree and watched me with wary eyes. I could still feel the pressure of his lips on mine. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know that it needed to mean anything. It was sweet, and that was all that mattered.
 

My breath felt scattered, and my muscles burned hotter and hotter the higher I climbed.The howls weren’t far off, so I needed to hurry. The branches would be within reach soon, and I kept wobbling by body back and forth, inching up slower than a caterpillar.
 

The dizzy came back. It came back and took away all of my air. I tried to ignore the sweat running into my wound, but the salt stung and kept me focused.
 

“Nish!” Ono commanded. “Nish!” Two dogs came to a halt at his outstretched hands. Their snouts huffed and their teeth salivated. A masked soldier followed shortly behind and aimed a pistol at the boy.
 

“Take the print,” Ono ordered and held his pointer finger out.
 

The soldier reached back to grab something from his belt, but he didn’t lower his gun. I guessed the little box he held was some kind of identification-print reader. The soldier’s focus remained completely on Ono, and I kept climbing without being noticed. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. I was so close to the branches.
 

“Petrakis, Paramonos. Says here you’re supposed to report back to the 12
^th
for debriefing if we came across you,” the soldier said.
 

I reached up and latched onto the first branch, and I pulled my chin up above the pines. My arms felt weak, and my body shook. I was almost there when my arms gave out. I dropped so that my feet dangled and weighed me down. I tightened my grip on the branch and spread my legs out to brace against the trees again. I let out a sigh when my torso stopped stretching. I paused for a moment and tried to breathe. There had to be a way to pull myself up into the needles so I’d have better coverage.
 

 
I could only look at my fingers and how my grip kept slipping, and I could only feel how my lungs burst, like they forgot how to breathe. I tried to steady myself on the trees, but even that didn’t work. Despite my efforts, my vision still blurred and faded to black, and the entire world slipped into a darkness that swallowed me whole.
 

“Is it scary?” I asked.
 

Celeste laughed.
 

“I’m being serious!”

“Awe. That’s why it’s so funny! When are you not serious? It is scary though. You open yourself up in a different way. A new way. A raw way. When you trust your body to someone, it’s not as freeing as we make it out to be.”

“I don’t get it.”
 

“You might one day. You’ll fall in love, if you aren’t in love already.” She nodded in Xavi’s direction. He’d climbed away and sat on top of the boxcar three ahead of us. I could tell he was tired of Celeste, and he gave us our privacy a lot these days. I watched him as he collected the sun on his brown skin. It got tanner and tanner, and the color of leather rippled over his arms like caramel on an apple.
 

“I’m not in—“

“Love? Sure, puppet. Keep telling yourself that.”

“He doesn’t see me that way?”
 

She tiscked— the sound clucked between her tongue and teeth. “Only time will tell. He hasn’t touched a single girl since I’ve met you, and he hasn’t let a single man look in your direction for sure. That boy has Claimed you like a piece of property, and you wouldn’t let him chain you down if you didn’t love him.” She cracked her knuckles. They made a pop-pop-pop noise as the joints readjusted.
 

“Have you ever loved someone before?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“A Cleansing. Militia shot him in the head.” Within two small sentences, Celeste told an entire story. I knew there were so many more things that deserved to be said for this man she loved, but I also knew Celeste would never say them. She kept the details to herself, because they belonged to her and her alone.
 

She grabbed wisps of my hair that were flying about and tucked them behind my ear. “We all have our tragedies, Niko, and we can’t let them define us. We move past them. We grow. We change. I can tell you carry the dead with you too because you just get it. You understand how precious this life is. Xavi? He doesn’t. He misses so much out here, and he may just overlook what he has in you. But it may happen one day, and if it does, just remember to be smart about it. Be safe. Don’t—“