Malorie(50)

Doesn’t Malorie get it?

Tom waves. He didn’t mean to do it. It just happened. The woman, older than him but not quite as old as Malorie, nods back. She’s walking toward him. He’s walking toward her.

He thinks he’s got to say something, because he’s electrified by this moment. His face is still red from being hit and yet he’s as excited as he’s ever been.

He realizes, suddenly, ecstatically, how true this is.

This really is the most liberated he’s ever felt in his life.

And all he had to do was walk out on Malorie to find it.

He makes to speak, he opens his mouth, but the woman slides open the door to her right and slips into the cabin.

She closes the door.

He wonders if there’s someone in there who makes endless rules, too. He wonders if she closes her eyes in there, pretends she didn’t just have them open in the hall.

Tom smiles. Wow. It feels good.

He removes his gloves and hoodie. He doesn’t want them anymore. He lets them fall to the floor of the hall just as he would let his clothes fall to the side of his bunk back in Cabin Three of Camp Yadin.

It feels great.

He slides the door open at the end of the car. He closes his eyes.

Doesn’t Malorie get it? The man told them what to do. What was safe. And Tom is doing it. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there’s ever been to it. They don’t have to stay in their room the whole trip. They don’t have to wear their folds and their gloves. They don’t have to be so scared.

But Malorie has no sense of this. No instincts at all.

The thought of it makes him mad again. Madder. But he doesn’t want to be angry. He wants to be free.

He passes between cars. Opens the next door. Lets it slide closed behind him.

He opens his eyes.

Another hall. Doors to his left. People hiding like Malorie hides. Tom isn’t going to hide anymore. Tom isn’t going to live by Malorie’s rules anymore. Tom isn’t ever going back to Camp Yadin again.

He pauses. His heart beats powerfully with the realization that he really isn’t ever going back again.

Back to the only place they’ve ever really called home.

Never going.

Back.

Again.

“Good,” he says.

A door opens to his left. A man steps out. He closes the door behind him.

“Hello,” he says.

Tom can hardly believe it. It’s what the world is like in his sister’s books. People step out their front doors and wave to one another and ask how their days have been.

“How’s your day been?” Tom asks.

The man, much older, eyes him suspiciously. Is it because he wonders what a sixteen-year-old is doing walking the train alone? Does the man think Tom is being unsafe? Can he tell Tom was just slapped?

Tom brings a hand to his face.

“Good,” the man says. He doesn’t move. Just stands in front of the closed door to his room as if Tom might slip inside and take something.

Tom passes him. He reaches the end of the car, looks back, sees the man still standing there, still facing him. Only now his eyes are closed.

Tom closes his own. Opens the door. Steps between the cars.

And stops.

He pulls his glasses from his pocket and places them on his face.

The air swirls here. A small cyclone between cars. Windy enough to blow a blindfold from a face if you don’t have it tied tight enough.

The wind goes up the short sleeves of his shirt, down the neck.

It feels incredible. Standing outside as the world whips by. He’s not walking. He’s not rowing. He’s not being told what to do.

He opens his eyes. He turns his head to the left.

Through the glasses, his glasses, he sees the world passing.

Trees. Signs. They don’t stay in sight quite long enough for him to read. But he sees letters. Outside. In the real world.

He smiles.

This is incredible.

He looks right.

More of it, only the horizon seems to stretch into forever in this direction.

Are there any creatures out there? Is he looking at one now? Through the glasses he made? The exact kind of glasses that could be written about in the census man’s book of discoveries?

The feeling is overwhelming. Who cares if he got slapped? He almost wants to thank Malorie for doing it. He wants to thank her for giving him reason to leave her side.

Indian River.

The city name comes to him in giant letters, surrounded by trees and street signs. He imagines Indian River has horizons like the one he’s looking at now. Endless sights and a lot of people who want to see them.

Athena Hantz.

A woman who doesn’t think like Malorie. A woman who thinks like him.

The world passes. Greens and browns. Signs. Homes. A fence.

It’s wonderful.

Tom feels like he could do anything. Absolutely anything he’s ever wanted to.

The door opens in front of him. He looks to see a man coming toward him, a man with his eyes closed. But this isn’t just any man. This is Dean Watts.

Tom steps aside, watches as Dean Watts, the owner and creator of this very train, passes him, opens the next door, steps through, and slides it closed again.

The feeling is unbelievable. Like he’s fooled even the smartest man on the train. The man who brought the train back from the dead.