You Can't Catch Me(34)

PART TWO





Chapter 14

The Back Forest

Two weeks after the branding, I was sitting in our weekly session with Todd when I spoke out.

Well, first I sat out.

I never understood what Todd’s obsession with sitting was about. I only knew that ever since I could remember we were told to sit with our backs pressed against our chairs with our feet planted firmly on the ground. Our arms were to be by our sides, and there was to be no crossing of the ankles or, Todd forbid, legs crossed over one another. Even now, I find myself sitting like that when I’m not paying attention.

My arm was still smarting. That’s why I think I did it, but it wasn’t as if it was planned. I didn’t know how to plan then, only react. My arm hurt. It was Todd’s fault. I couldn’t understand why that had to be. Why my parents hadn’t stopped it, why no one had. I’d spent two weeks nursing it, climbing into Kiki’s bed and resting my bandage against hers. Kiki tried to pretend that she understood why it had happened, but I knew she was only pretending to try to make me feel better because it seemed to affect me more than it did her.

“We need to be prepared, we need to be ready, we need to have everything set to go on a moment’s notice,” Todd was saying. He was wearing one of his uniforms—white pants and a top that looked like hospital surgeon scrubs, only it was pressed and starched, so it looked almost military-like. His skin was tanned to a perfect bronze, and his eyes stood out with a blue intensity. I used to try to count how often he blinked, certain it was less than other people.

“Why?” I asked, the word I’d thought over and over escaping my mouth before I could stop it.

“Who said that?” Todd asked, spinning on his heel and pointing at us. The twenty kids in the room were sitting four by five, in precise rows, with the smallest kids in the front, the oldest in the back. Kiki and I were in the middle.

The room was deadly silent. No one spoke out during Todd’s lectures. Silence was even more important than sitting properly.

“Who. Said. That?” Todd asked again, his voice shaking. Todd wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and he didn’t react well when it happened.

“It was her,” a quisling named Jaimie said, turning and pointing at me. The small children were always the worst. They didn’t know, yet, that sucking up to Todd didn’t insulate them from punishment.

Todd was next to me in an instant. His hand reached down and encircled my branded wrist. I cried out.

“You had a question?” he hissed.

“No, no.”

I could feel Kiki shaking next to me.

“Yes, you did,” he said. “Go on, ask it.”

“I asked . . . why.”

“Why what?”

“Why do we need to be prepared?” I asked, my voice hiccoughing and rushed. “Why do we need to fear everyone?”

His fingers tightened. He was so much stronger than I was. “Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Then you know why.”

“But I—” Kiki stomped on my foot. I stifled the cry, but my knee jerked up in the air.

“But I what? How are you sitting? What is happening here?”

He jerked me up by my arm and dragged me to the front of the room. Kiki followed along as if she were tethered to me. Todd was so mad that he didn’t even notice her at first; he just tossed me into his chair like a piece of garbage. We weren’t ever allowed to sit in that chair. One of the grown-ups brought it up for his talks each week, then took it away again. Todd himself never sat in it for more than twenty seconds, the time it took him to wind himself up and begin pacing back and forth.

“How do we sit?” he said.

I held my arm, feeling frozen by pain.

“How do we sit?”

Todd was yelling so close to my ear that my eardrum started to rattle. I planted my feet on the ground, but I couldn’t seem to let go of my arm.

Todd started to move me like clay, forcing my back against the chair, squaring my shoulders, then prying my hand off my arm.

“That hurts!”

Todd froze, and I froze right along with him. Then his hand reared back and cracked against my face.

“Stop it, Todd!” Kiki said, astonishing everyone since she’d never spoken out of turn her whole life.

And then we both got punished.

There wasn’t a beating, but there was the Back Forest.

Kiki and I were banished there for a week. For willfulness, for troublemaking, for talking back to Todd. The list of our crimes was long, and we were lucky, my mother hissed at me, that she’d managed to intercede on our behalf and keep our banishment to a week.

“What were you thinking?” she asked us, over and over. “I just don’t know what you were thinking.”

“Oh, stop it, Therese,” Tanya said. “Can’t you see the girls are terrified as it is?”

My mother looked at me, then Kiki. We were sitting together on Kiki’s bed, huddled together, too scared to cry. We’d never been to the Back Forest, but we’d heard enough horror stories about it. The bogeyman lived there. The devil. Children who were sent out there came back changed, or never came back at all. Who knew what was true?

We were about to find out.