At the End of Everything, page 16
I can feel a headache build behind my eyes.
This is neither a responsibility I wanted, nor one I know how to take. I stayed here to survive, and if any of the others survive too, so much the better. But this… They want me to do something. They’re hurting. And I don’t know how to make it better.
Khalil looks at me. “Why did you bring her back in the first place? What if Saoirse is still contagious or Josie’s sick and her illness hasn’t manifested yet?” His voice holds no anger, just a mild curiosity and a whole lot of fatigue. He’s sustained a black eye from the hallway brawl.
Before I can even say something, Sofia answers in my stead, “Because in spite of everything, they’re part of us. Saoirse is ill, and she needs care. Josie was hungry and desperate. We couldn’t let her die outside, could we?”
It would’ve been easier. I don’t say that. I didn’t miss the edge to her words, and she may not be wrong.
Khalil nods. “I understand, but—”
“Josie can stick to her room. If she gets sick, that’s the easiest solution.” Riley raises her head, chin pointing out and a challenge in her eyes.
“No.” Casey’s voice is soft, but that one word hits like a thunderclap. He leans toward her, his arm muscles rippling and his hands clenched. His brown skin is near gray, and his shirt hangs loosely on his shoulders. “We’re doing everything we can to survive. All of us, together. That’s the only way to keep going.”
“So we should accept that she stole from us?” Mackenzi asks, her voice faux pleasant. “It doesn’t matter that she tried to suffocate Logan and harm Emerson? It only matters that none of us want to die?”
Logan narrows her eyes. She taps her foot. She signs something in Nia’s direction, and the other girl nods. “We’re not murderers,” she says. “And not judges either.”
“Then maybe we should figure out how to be,” Mackenzi suggests. “Judge and jury.”
“And executioner?” Casey demands.
“Calm yourself, doc,” Mackenzi mocks. “We’ll do this the proper way.”
His eyes flash. He takes a step in her direction, then seems to think better of it. He pushes his hair back with his hands and stalks toward the door.
“Case, wait!” I call out.
“In case you missed it, I’ve spent the better part of three weeks trying to keep as many people alive as possible. So I’m going to check on my patients,” he snaps, without looking back. “I want no part of this.”
“Case…”
He slams the door closed behind him without another word, and it is irrational, it isn’t about me, but it feels like it is. We used to be able to talk without talking. We used to be able to find comfort with each other. And now there aren’t just doors but walls between us.
Alone is not worth living, Josie said, but I don’t know how to keep all of us together. Maybe with all my anger stripped away, I still don’t know how to make the right decisions.
“Protecting ourselves from intruders is a way of keeping ourselves alive too,” Riley mutters.
Mackenzi smiles, her teeth bared, and it makes her look dangerous. “Imprison her. Leave her to rot.”
“Throw her out. Let her figure out her own way,” someone else says.
Sofia gets up and stalks past me too. Before she reaches the door, she turns around to all of us—but she looks straight at me. “Is this what has happened to us? Is this who we are now? Helping you find Josie seemed like the right thing to do. Now I’m not so sure.”
Heat rises to my cheeks.
Logan demonstratively folds her arms, and she needs no interpreter to make it clear where she stands. She agrees with Sofia. Her words rattle my brain. No murderers. No judges.
Nia twiddles her fingers, then raises an eyebrow. “What Josie did wasn’t right,” she says softly, “but she did it to survive. She did it to help Saoirse survive. Doesn’t that count for something? Are we going to punish her for trying to do good?”
Mackenzi audibly draws breath to speak, to interrupt, but Nia pushes on. “If we do, are we any better than the people who put us here? I’m not saying we all did…good…but I would venture a guess that we all feel mistreated. If only someone had listened to us, right? If only someone had given us a chance…”
Riley raises her hands. “Don’t look at me, kid, I know why I’m here.”
“Okay, fine.” Nia rolls her eyes. “So you’re the shining exception. But don’t tell me you wouldn’t’ve wanted someone in your life to see or hear you. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Riley shrugs, the very picture of a girl who’s seen a world that doesn’t care for her, so she doesn’t care for it. I can’t imagine how she feels. We may be both here, but our experiences are different because of the color of our skin. The hurdles we faced are different. We both may have had our own understanding of what difficult means, but our difficulties are impossible to compare.
“What if I don’t care?” Mackenzi drawls. “I’m not here to find a moral high ground. I’m here to try to survive too. And she endangered all of us with her deathly ill girlfriend or whatever, so forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for her. She chose her own path, she has to deal with the consequences. Right now, she’s a waste of our resources.”
And from there it goes in the same circle it did when we started. Consequences versus empathy. I don’t even know if they’re actually opposites, and I don’t see a clear path forward.
Did the judges who sentenced us ever feel the same way? Did they look at us and wonder why we did what we did? What could’ve been done to prevent it or to help us? Or did they want vengeance too? Not personally, like Mac and Riley, but revenge for the fact that we broke their sense of normal and acceptable. That we broke whatever social contract they thought we had.
If I’d known all of this would happen when I pulled Ian off that girl—perhaps the easier route would have been to simply let him assault her. That can’t have been what they had in mind either.
I massage my temples. The dull, throbbing headache that’s settled behind my eyes refuses to dissipate, and the conversations around me are still going. Everyone has an opinion, an ideal solution, an argument or five.
How am I supposed to make a decision? How am I supposed to decide what is right, when I’m torn between anger over seeing people hurt, fear that none of what we do will be enough—and the understanding that I would have done the same for Casey? For Sofia. For all of them.
Fuck, I would do the same for all of them. But I don’t know how to make this decision on my own.
I clear my throat. “We’re not going to solve this tonight.”
The words are immediately followed by a barrage of protests. “We can’t ignore what happened!”
“We have a solution!”
“We need to be able to talk about it.”
I sigh and raise my hand until the silence settles.
One by one, they all focus on me, and I feel the weight of it in my bones.
“We’ll vote on it tomorrow. Emerson should get a say too, and Casey, and everyone else not present here. We either do this together or not at all.” Maybe that will help us figure out the right path.
The words are met with grumbling. Mackenzi and Riley share a look, and I can all but see the bloodlust between them. The anger too and the desperation.
I hesitate. “Khalil? Can you keep an eye on Josie until then? From a distance, of course, but to make sure she doesn’t do anything foolish.”
And to make sure we don’t either.
Twenty-one
Emerson
I broke my wrist once before. I was ten, and I went skateboarding with my best friend, Diana. It was a Saturday morning, and the streets in our upper-middle-class neighborhood were empty of cars, so we had the whole block to ourselves. Between the smell of baking drifting up from her house and the sensation of our wheels on the road, it felt like freedom. Neither of us could skateboard very well. We couldn’t do the same tricks Diana showed me online, and I wobbled and balanced and overstretched continuously. We made our way down the streets, picking up the pace and egging each other on, and it felt like flying. Me on my pink board with purple wheels, and Diana on a beat-up, black-and-green one.
We’d been going faster and faster and faster. Our eyes half-closed and our arms stretched wide. Neither of us saw the car pull up from the driveway until it was almost too late.
Di came to a screeching halt, her board crunching on the road.
And I swerved. I might have been successful if I had been better at keeping my balance, if I weren’t already overstretching and overcompensating. But while I managed to avoid the car, my board snagged, and I went flying for real. I did the same thing I did during the fight: I stretched my arms in front of me to break my fall. I figured it’d be easy enough to catch myself, and I didn’t want to hit my helmed head on the curb.
Pain shot through my arm like spikes of ice. I didn’t hear the snap of bones breaking, but I felt it. Diana was at my side immediately, and one of the neighbors must have phoned my parents, because they showed up minutes later. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember crying and my mother holding me, comforting me. My dad oh-so-gently carried me to the car so he could drive us to the hospital.
Diana brought my skateboard and helmet home so I wouldn’t have to worry about those, and every one of them cared so deeply that, even though the pain made me sway, I felt rooted and protected. When I got back from the hospital with my wrist in a cast, Diana showed up with a bouquet of flowers her mother had bought for me. Dad cooked my favorite meals, and my mother bought me books to read while I recovered.
But oh, how I loathed the skateboard. I knew it was irrational. It was the car and the maneuver and pure, bad luck. But I didn’t care for a rational explanation. I didn’t want to look at that skateboard anymore, and if I could have managed it, I would have found a way to snap it in two.
I asked Dad one night if that was bad. To think of violence against this inanimate object that had no blame in my spending six weeks with my arm in a cast.
He sat down on the edge of my bed and smiled. “I don’t think it’s bad,” he said in that soft bass of his. “You are hurt, and that is understandable.”
“But?” I prompted. Dad preferred to always look at both—or all—sides of a question. At least back then.
“But you may think of it as a learning experience,” he said, with a hint of a smile.
Internally, I groaned.
“Practice forgiveness, Emmy,” he said. He bent down and pressed a kiss on my hair and then left me before I could think of a counterargument. Before I could tell him that I was too old for his pet name. That I didn’t care about forgiveness and I didn’t want to practice it either.
I never broke that skateboard, and I went skating again with Diana in the spring, when we both turned eleven. I wore it down, not with anger but with play.
Now, I turn my splinted wrist back and forth to make sure it’s supported as well as it can be. The splints are nothing like a cast. Not as stable, but not as itchy either. The bandages are actually quite soft, though the sticks hold my wrist and hand locked. Like the cast, they will prevent me from doing my work. I couldn’t write with a broken wrist, and I certainly can’t dig holes with one.
I still don’t want to practice forgiveness.
I wonder how Diana is doing. If she’s—how she’s doing. When my parents kicked me out, I begged her to let me crash in her spare room for a few nights. She and I were best friends since our first communion, and we planned to be friends forever. We remained that way until she became concertmaster of St. Agnes’s orchestra and fell in with the popular crowd at school—and I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be anymore.
She closed the door on me too. I wonder if she’s thought of me at all, these past few months.
I can’t wish her well, but when I think of ten-year-old Di, on her black-and-green skateboard…I hope she’s safe.
* * *
I stay in for a full day, and then I drag myself out of bed, though I have no idea what to do. My hand throbs, my head’s still fuzzy, and the pain in my wrist is a dull but constant ache. I grab one of the few Tylenols that Mackenzi brought me when she also brought in dinner last night.
I stumble out of the room and nearly trip over Mackenzi, who for some absurd reason still sits outside. She looks up, dark circles under her eyes. Has she slept here? Has she been here the entire night, like my own personal guard? If not Nia or Logan, I would expect Grace to be here. Or one of the gardeners. Not her. And not like this either; with winter setting in, the rooms and hallways are getting colder.
Out of habit, I reach out a hand, then grunt when another flash of pain stabs through me. “Ouch.”
Mackenzi pushes herself to her feet. “Don’t worry, I—” She yawns. “I’m awake. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
I wrap one arm around my waist. “Why?” Mackenzi has never once spoken to me before. If there weren’t so few of us left, she probably wouldn’t have a clue who I am.
“Because you were hurt.” She narrows her eyes. “Because Josie hurt you.”
The slight inflection in her voice hints of trouble. At least she makes it clear that I shouldn’t trust her. While she keeps her distance, she doesn’t flinch away from me. She sets her jaw and waits for me to answer.
“I’m not okay,” I snap. I can’t remember ever having said those words before to anyone, not since that conversation with Father Michael. It makes me feel brittle. I don’t like it. “I’m hurt and I’m lost, and unless you want to take over tending graves, I’m not sure what you can do to make it better.”
I can’t even play my violin like this.
Her carefully crafted frown flickers. Her nostrils flare. “Well, I can’t make it better, but I can offer you something that might help.”
I don’t say anything. I cradle my arm.
“We decided—” She hesitates then amends, “Some of us decided that we can’t let Josie get away with what she did. We’ve set rules to follow while we all stay here. She broke those rules, and she should be punished.”
I tilt my head. A part of me aches to point out that Josie wasn’t staying here, so she can’t be bound by the same rules. But I don’t. I don’t want to. “What do you have in mind?”
She shrugs, but she keeps looking at me through her lashes. “We’d have to talk about that, of course, but I wanted to make sure you’re on board with it. With consequences. Grace wants to vote when we’re all present, but that doesn’t seem right to me. Seeing as how it was you who Josie hurt. You should have the first say in what happens next.”
I can’t deny the glint in Mackenzi’s eyes. The edge to her voice. The way her words seem cautiously chosen to lure me in and trap me. This is what temptation looks like, and Saint Jude, forgive me, I want to be lured in.
Maybe it will make me feel better to have something to focus on. Something to distract me from the pain inside and out. If I’m hurting, I don’t want to hurt alone. If we’re hopeless cases, we might as well act like them.
Before I can respond to Mackenzi, footsteps echo in the hallway. Grace walks toward us, her hands in her pockets and her face set to thunder. Her hazel eyes flash. “Fuck off, Mackenzi.”
I cringe. I wish I could turn my pain into anger as easily as she does. It may not be healthy either, but it can’t be worse than this emptiness and this loneliness.
Grace turns from Mackenzi to me, and something flickers behind her eyes. “I’m sorry Mackenzi jumped on you, Emerson. We made plans, and she had no right.”
“Plans, huh?” I take a step back with my back against the door.
“Yeah.”
“What kind of plans?” Does she not trust me in the same way I don’t trust her?
Grace grumbles, “Look, we can talk about that later. How do you feel? How’s the arm? Do you need something?”
Cold determination settles inside of me. I need lots of things, but above all, right now, I need an answer to my questions. “Why later? She’s not wrong, is she?” I ask. To my own surprise, my voice sounds soft and reasonable, the exact opposite of how I feel.
Grace blinks. “What do you mean?”
“Josie may have put us all in danger, but she did hurt me. Me and Logan. We should have a say in what happens to her.”
“And you will,” Grace insists. She looks tired. “You’ll get a vote, like everyone. I’m trying to do this right. I don’t want to make the mistakes that the people who put us here made.”
I snort; I can’t help it. “We’re all dying, Grace. Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“Besides, it isn’t just about revenge or about community,” Mackenzi says. She turns back to me, ignoring Grace. She smiles, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “It’s about justice. Don’t you want justice?”
Grace might be shooting daggers at the other girl, but Mackenzi doesn’t flinch. She holds out a lifeline to me. Something I can understand and cling to.
Because here is the awful truth of it all.
I do. I do.
I want justice for being dumped here.
For being left here.
For being hurt here.
If I could’ve gone to my small patch of garden, to our own cemetery, maybe it would’ve been different. If I could’ve cared for the graves and the memories, and felt my peace there, maybe I wouldn’t be so torn up inside. If I could talk to the dead and remind them of their stories, maybe I could remember myself. If I could find myself in music.
But even that was taken from me.
So, yeah, I do want justice. I want to taste revenge.
I don’t want to practice forgiveness ever again.
Twenty-two
Logan
