Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(67)

“It’s still you, isn’t it? You’re still Card.”

“I don’t—”

“We tried to find you, but you were gone. We looked everywhere. What happened? How did you—”

I knocked her hands off me and rolled away, scrambling for the backpack amid the fallen chairs. There was another crash of metal as I yanked it out of the pile.

“You’re immune.”

I pulled the backpack close and wrapped my arms around it. Outside, moonlight struck the sidewalk and lawn. They were only a few feet away, on the other side of the glass doors, but I suddenly felt so tired I stayed where I was, kneeling on the tile floor, my back to her. I nodded.

“So, you’re leaving?”

She was sitting cross-legged behind me in a pool of moonlight coming through the windows in one of the open classrooms along the hall. Her hair was mussed. She was barefoot, in plaid pajamas.

“Yeah.”

“I could go get the kids if you—”

I shook my head. If I saw them, if I talked to them, I knew I’d never be able to do what I had to do. “I think I should just go.”

Hannah stared at me. Footsteps sounded on the floor above us. Someone was coming to check on all the noise. I lifted my backpack and started for the door.

“Hey.”

Hannah was standing in the hallway.

“Let me change,” she said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

It was a clear summer night. The streets were empty. I told Hannah everything that had happened with Freeman. Who he was. What he’d done. The notebooks, his hope for a cure, and his certainty that Dr. Lassiter would be able to infect me. She nodded through it all, saying little. When we passed a neighborhood playground, she left the sidewalk and sat on one of the swings. I took the one beside her, and we drifted back and forth.

“Do you think they’ll send you back here?” she asked. “Once you’re infected.”

“Guess they’ll have to send me somewhere.”

“Well, if it’s here, you don’t have to worry. We won’t bother you.”

“Hannah—”

“Not bother you,” she said. “You know what I mean. We’ll let you be no one, like you want.”

We were quiet for a while, and then Hannah jumped off the swing and crossed the playground to a set of monkey bars. She climbed the ladder and crawled out to the middle, where she sat with her legs folded beneath her. I climbed up behind her and found a spot of my own, four or five feet away. Old habits.

“Do you really think he’ll be able to make a cure?” Hannah asked.

“Freeman seems to think so.”

“You don’t?”

I shrugged. Miracle cures and villains brought to justice. They seemed like things that happened in the pages of one of Dad’s comics.

“If there’s a cure, do you think they’ll make us take it?”

She was leaning over the edge of the monkey bars with her arms wrapped around her middle, staring at the ground.

“You don’t want to find out who you are?” I asked. “Why you came here?”

“I already know.”

“You do? Did you talk to the Marvins or—”

“I didn’t talk to anybody.”

“Then how do you know?”

Hannah sat up and looked out to where St. Stephen’s spire rose over the town.

“There’s this scene in Hamlet where the queen has to tell Laertes that his sister, Ophelia, died,” she said. “Ophelia was in love with Hamlet, and he loved her too. But then one day he became cruel. He toyed with Ophelia and he rejected her and he would never even say why. In the end Ophelia drapes herself with wildflowers and lies down in a stream to drown. When the queen tells her brother what she’s done, it’s this beautiful, sad speech. There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . . The first time I read it, I started to cry. There was something about it that seemed so familiar. I thought maybe it was because I’d studied the play in school or something. But it wasn’t the whole play that felt familiar, it was just them, just Hamlet and Ophelia.”

She smiled dreamily.

“I felt like I knew them so well that I knew things Shakespeare didn’t even write. Like how, in the beginning, when they were still happy, they used to meet in secret at a cabin with a sky blue door. But there were things Shakespeare got wrong, too.”

Her look darkened and she turned away again.

“It wasn’t Hamlet who became cruel. It was Ophelia. He loved her and she toyed with him and rejected him. It was Hamlet who was heartbroken. It was Hamlet who drowned. And when Ophelia saw what she’d caused, she felt this pounding deep in her chest, like a second heartbeat, and she just . . . ran.”

Hannah fingered the key around her neck.

“No one needs to tell me who I am,” she said. “I know.”

“Hannah, you can’t really know that. You—”

She looked back over her shoulder. The sun was just coming up over Lucy’s Promise.

“Tomiko and Crystal have to start cooking breakfast soon,” she said. “I like to be there when everybody wakes up.”

She slid off the bars and landed on the ground. When we got back to the high school, Hannah climbed to the top of the stairs, but she didn’t go inside. She stood there, just under the single bulb that lit the entryway, staring at our reflections in the glass of the front door. The night was soft and quiet.