Malorie(31)

His ear is on the loft.

He wonders, distantly, if Olympia hears it, too.

Something is in the loft.

The bird suddenly explodes into flight, squawking, crying, singing a song that makes no sense, has no rhyme, has no end. Malorie grips Tom’s wrist harder as the bird flails through the barn and strikes a wood wall. It falls to the hay, rises, and flies madly into the wall again.

It falls. Again. Rises. Again.

Flies madly into the wall.

“There’s one in the loft,” Tom says.

Malorie stands up.

“Now,” she says. “Now.”

The teens rise without argument. Tom finds his bag quick in the darkness, but the few seconds he’s away from Malorie are bad ones. Like the thing from the loft could come down.

Like it wants to touch him.

Malorie says, “Why are the pages out of my bag?”

As he moves, Tom imagines himself living in Indian River. He imagines waking in a town with other people, people ready to invent.

“Tom?” Malorie says.

“Mom,” Olympia says. “It’s moving.”

It is. Tom hears it, too.

“Go,” Malorie says.

Then Tom asks it. Because he can’t not.

“Are you bringing the pages with you?”

He has to know. He can’t leave them here.

But Malorie doesn’t respond. Instead, Tom feels a hand on his wrist. Her hand. Her fingers ride up his arm, to make sure he’s rolled down his sleeves. He has.

But it reminds him of being touched.

He shudders.

This time, though, he forces the feeling, the fear, out. And, for a moment, it works. For a hideously unfamiliar moment, Tom feels fearless in the face of so many creatures, as his mom pulls him toward the barn door, as Olympia breathes steadily beside him.

Malorie slides the door open. Tom feels the cold night, colder yet, rush into the barn, touching his nose, his mouth, his chin.

“Olympia,” Malorie says.

It’s obvious that she isn’t looking to Tom for help. Why not? Can she tell he was touched by something? Does she think he’s going mad?

“There’s one blocking the door,” Olympia says.

The loft behind them creaks.

“Back up,” Malorie says.

“Wait,” Tom says. “It’s moving.”

He hears it stepping out of the way.

“Go,” Olympia says. “Now.”

Malorie moves first, Olympia right behind her. But before leaving the barn, Tom turns his blindfolded face to the loft.

The ladder creaks.

Footsteps in the hay.

He thinks of Athena Hantz just as a hand, Olympia’s, reaches into the barn and pulls him outside.

“Cover your faces,” Malorie says. And her voice is unabridged hysteria.

As he listens to her, as he moves, fleeing the barn, he tries hard to hang on to the feeling he had, the fearlessness, that moment, just now, inside the barn when he felt brave.

It was extraordinary.

And now it’s gone.

But he believes he can feel it again.

Indian River.

The community’s name sparkles in his personal darkness. As if the letters that make up the words are forged in fire, enormous bright squares beckoning him, telling him, hey, hey, we’re scared, too, but either you live a partial life or you experiment.

You test.

You invent.

Indian River.

We’re allowed.

Come on.

Come on.

“Tom!” Malorie calls. “Come on!”

Then he’s moving, the stealthy sounds of what swarms the barn receding. He catches up to his mom and his sister as their shoes crush the gravel of the shoulder before leveling out on the old unused country road.

They walk. They don’t speak. They listen. They move fast.

And when enough space has gotten between them and the place they hoped might provide a night of sanctuary, Malorie’s voice cracks the silence.

“No,” she says.

Tom knows what she means. He knows she’s answering what he asked before they left the barn. She’s saying she didn’t take the pages.

But Tom hears something in Malorie’s voice that she claims to hear so often in theirs.

A lie.

He hears the crinkle of paper in her bag, too.

And as the three continue toward a place that may or may not harbor a mode of transport large enough to carry them north, Tom feels gratitude, to the pages, for teaching him, already, that while it’s okay to be scared, you’ve got to push back while you tremble.

He’s in the big world now. This isn’t Camp Yadin.

In the distance, behind them, he hears the creaking of the barn, as if more creatures now walk on its roof.

Do they look to the fleeing trio? Do they know what they do?

It doesn’t matter to Tom. Not right now. As he walks, in step with Malorie and Olympia, it doesn’t matter what the creatures mean to do.

All that matters is what he means to do.

From here on out. In the big world.

He’s not mad.

He’s fearless. He’s fighting back.

He’s allowed.





ELEVEN


Olympia is keeping secrets.

She’s done it for years now, almost as long as she can remember. She was doing it at the Jane Tucker School for the Blind, and she thinks it’s possible it was even before then. In the house she was born. Maybe even the minute she was born. She’s read enough books to know that it’s not totally shameful to keep secrets and that some secrets are better kept in the interest of maintaining balance with the other people around you.