Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable,
erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are
controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.
—The Book of Shhh, p. 31
I once saw a news report about a brown bear that had accidentally been punctured by its trainer at the Portland circus during routine training. I was really young, but I’ll never forget the way the bear looked, an enormous dark blob, tearing around its circle with a ridiculous red paper hat still flopping crazily from its head, ripping into whatever it could get its jaws around: paper streamers, folding chairs, balloons. Its trainer, too: The bear mauled him, turned his face into hamburger meat.
The worst part—the part I’ve never forgotten—was its panicked roaring: a horrible, continuous, enraged bellow that sounded somehow human.
That’s what I remember as the raiders start flooding the house, pouring in through the shattered door, battering on the windows. That’s what I think of as the music cuts off suddenly and instead the air is full of barking and screaming and shattering glass, as hot hands push me from the front and from the side and I catch an elbow under my chin and another one in my ribs. I remember the bear.
Somehow I’ve surged forward in the panicked crowd that is flowing and scrabbling toward the back of the house. Behind me I hear dogs snapping their jaws and regulators swinging heavy clubs. People are screaming—so many people it sounds like a single voice. A girl falls behind me, stumbling forward and reaching for me as one of the regulator’s batons catches her on the back of the head with a sickening crack. I feel her fingers tighten momentarily on the cotton of my shirt, and I shake her off and keep running, pushing, squeezing forward. I have no time to be sorry, and no time to be scared. I have no time to do anything but move, push, go, can’t think of anything but escape, escape, escape.
The strange thing is that for a minute in the middle of all that noise and confusion, I see things super clearly, in slow motion, like I’m watching a film from a distance: I see a guard dog make a leap for a guy to my left; I see his knees buckle as he topples forward with the barest, tiniest noise, like a breath or a sigh, a crescent of blood spattering up from his neck, where the dog’s teeth tear into him. A girl with flashing blond hair goes down under the raiders’ clubs, and as I see the arc of her hair, for a second my heart goes totally still and I think I’ve died; I think it’s all over. Then she twists her head my way, shouting, as the regulators get her with pepper spray, and I see that she isn’t Hana, and relief rushes through me, a wave.
More snapshots. A movie—only a movie. Not happening, could never really happen. A boy and a girl, fighting to make it into one of the side rooms, maybe thinking there’s an exit that way. The door is too small for both of them to enter at once. He is wearing a blue shirt that reads PORTLAND NAVAL CONSERVATORY, and she has long red hair, bright as a flame. Only five minutes ago they were talking and laughing together, standing so close that if one of them had even tipped forward accidentally they might have kissed. Now they wrestle, but she is too small. She locks her teeth on his arm like a dog, like a wild thing; he roars, rages, grabs her by the shoulders, and slams her back against the wall, out of the way. She stumbles, falls, slipping, trying to stand up; one of the raiders, an enormous man with the reddest face I’ve ever seen, reaches down, knots his fingers around her ponytail, and hauls her to her feet. Naval Conservatory doesn’t get away either. Two raiders follow him, and as I run by I hear the thud of their clubs, the mangled sound of screaming.
Animals, I think. We’re animals.
People are shoving, pulling, using one another as shields as the raiders keep gaining, surging forward, swinging at us, dogs at our heels, batons whirling so close to my head I can feel the air whooshing on my neck as the wood twirls, twirls near the back of my skull. I think of searing pain, I think of red. The crowd is thinning around me as the raiders advance. One by one people are screaming next to me—crack!—and dropping, getting wrestled to the ground by three, four, five dogs. Screaming, screaming. Everyone screaming.
Somehow I’ve managed to avoid being caught, and I’m still rocketing through the narrow, creaking hallways, passing a blur of rooms, a blur of people and raiders, more lights, more shattered windows, the sound of engines. They’ve got the place surrounded. And then the open back door rises up in front of me—and beyond it dark trees, the cool and whispering woods behind the house. If I can make it outside . . . if I can hide from the lights for long enough . . .
I hear a dog barking behind me, and behind that, a raider’s pounding footsteps, gaining, gaining, a sharp voice yelling, “Stop!” and I suddenly realize I’m alone in the hallway. Fifteen more steps . . . then ten. If I can make it into the darkness . . .
Five feet from the door and sudden, shooting pain rips through my leg. The dog has got its jaws around my calf, and I turn and that’s when I see him, the regulator with the massive red face, eyes glittering, smiling—oh, God, he’s smiling, he actually enjoys this—club raised, ready to swing. I close my eyes, think of pain as big as the ocean, think of a blood-red sea. Think of my mother.
Then I’m being jerked to the side, and I hear a crack and a yelp, the regulator saying, “Shit.” The fire in my leg stops and the weight of the dog falls off, and there’s an arm around my waist and a voice in my ear—a voice so familiar in that moment it’s like I’ve been waiting for it all along, like I’ve been hearing it forever in my dreams—breathing out: “This way.”
Alex keeps one arm around my waist, half carrying me. We’re in a different hallway now, this one smaller and totally empty. Every time I put weight on my right leg the pain flares up again, searing all the way into my head. The raider is still behind us and pissed—Alex must have pulled me to safety at just the right second, so the raider cracked down on his dog instead of my skull—and I know I must be slowing Alex down, but he doesn’t let me go, not for a second.
“In here,” he says, and then we’re ducking into another room. We must be in a part of the house that wasn’t being used for the party. This room is pitch-black, although Alex doesn’t slow down at all, just keeps going through the dark. I let the pressure of his fingertips guide me—left, right, left, right. It smells like mold in here, and something else—fresh paint, almost, and something smoky, like someone’s been cooking here. But that’s impossible. These houses have been empty for years.
Behind us the raider is struggling in the dark. He bumps up against something and curses. A second later something crashes to the ground; glass shatters; more cursing. From the sound of his voice I can tell that he’s falling behind.
“Up,” Alex whispers, so quiet and so close it’s like I’ve only imagined it, and just like that he is lifting me and I realize I’m going out a window, feel the rough wood of the windowsill grate against my back, land on my good foot on the soft, damp grass outside.
A second later Alex follows soundlessly, materializing beside me in the dark. Though the air is hot, a breeze has picked up, and as it sweeps across my skin I could cry from gratitude and relief.
But we’re not safe yet—far from it. The darkness is mobile, twisting, alive with paths of light: Flashlights cut through the woods to our right and left, and in their glare I see fleeing figures, lit up like ghosts, frozen for a moment in the beams. The screams continue, some only a few feet away, some so distant and forlorn you could mistake them for something else—for owls, maybe, hooting peacefully in their trees. Then Alex has taken my hand and we’re running again. Every step on my right foot is a fire, a blade. I bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying out, and taste blood.
Chaos. Scenes from hell: floodlights from the road, shadows falling, bone cracking, voices shattering apart, dissolving into silence.
“In here.”
I do what he says without hesitating. A tiny wooden shed has appeared miraculously in the dark. It’s falling apart, and so overgrown with moss and climbing vines that even from a distance of only a few feet it appeared to be a tangle of bushes and trees. I have to stoop to get inside, and when I do the smell of animal urine and wet dog is so strong I almost gag. Alex comes in behind me and shuts the door. I hear a rustling and see him kneeling, stuffing a blanket in the gap between the door and the ground. The blanket must be the source of the smell. It absolutely reeks.
“God,” I whisper, the first thing I’ve said to him, cupping my hand over my mouth and nose.
“This way the dogs won’t pick up our scent,” he whispers back matter-of-factly.
I’ve never met someone so calm in my life. I think fleetingly that maybe the stories I heard when I was little were true—maybe Invalids really are monsters, freaks.
Then I feel ashamed. He just saved my life.
He saved my life—from the raiders. From the people who are supposed to protect us and keep us safe. From the people who are supposed to keep us safe from the people like Alex.
Nothing makes sense anymore. My head is spinning, and I feel dizzy. I stumble, bumping against the wall behind me, and Alex reaches up to steady me.
“Sit down,” he says, in that same commanding voice he has been using all along. It’s comforting to listen to his low, forceful directives, to let myself go. I lower myself to the ground. The floor is damp and rough underneath me. The moon must have broken through the clouds; gaps in the walls and roof let in little spots of silvery light. I can just make out some shelves beyond Alex’s head, a set of cans—paint, maybe?—piled in one corner. Now that Alex and I are both sitting there’s hardly any room left to maneuver—the whole structure is only a few feet wide.
“I’m going to take a look at your leg now, okay?” He’s still whispering. I nod okay. Even when I’m sitting down, the dizziness doesn’t subside.
He sits up on his knees and draws my leg into his lap. It’s not until he begins rolling up my pant leg that I feel how wet the fabric is against my skin. I must be bleeding. I bite my lip and press my back up hard against the wall, expecting it to hurt, but the feeling of his hands against my skin—cool and strong—somehow dampens everything, sliding across the pain like an eclipse blotting the moon dark.
Once he has my pants rolled up to the knee he tilts me gently, so he can see the back of my calf. I lean one elbow on the floor, feeling the room sway. I must be bleeding a lot.
He exhales sharply, a quick sound between his teeth.
“Is it bad?” I say, too afraid to look.
“Hold still,” he says. And I know that it is bad, but he won’t tell me so, and in that moment I’m so flooded with gratitude for him and hatred for the people outside—hunters, primitives, with their sharp teeth and heavy sticks—the air goes out of me and I have to struggle to breathe.
Alex reaches into a corner of the shed without removing my leg from his lap. He fiddles with a box of some kind and metal latches creak open. A second later he’s hovering over my leg with a bottle.
“This is going to burn for a second,” he says. Liquid splatters my skin, and the astringent smell of alcohol makes my nostrils flare. Flames lick up my leg and I nearly scream. Alex reaches out a hand, and without thinking I take it and squeeze.
“What is that?” I force out through gritted teeth.
“Rubbing alcohol,” he says. “Prevents infection.”
“How did you know it was here?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.
He draws his hand away from mine and I realize I’ve been grabbing on to him, hard. But I don’t have the energy to be embarrassed or afraid: The room seems to be pulsing, the half darkness growing fuzzier.
“Shit,” Alex mutters. “You’re really bleeding.”
“It doesn’t hurt that much,” I whisper, which is a lie. But he’s so calm, so together, it makes me want to act brave too.
Everything has taken on a strange, distant quality—the sounds of running and shouting outside get warped and weird like they’re being filtered through water, and Alex looks miles away. I start to think I might be dreaming, or about to pass out.
And then I decide I’m definitely dreaming, because as I’m watching, Alex starts peeling his shirt off over his head.
What are you doing? I almost scream. Alex finishes shaking loose the shirt and begins tearing the fabric into long strips, shooting a nervous glance at the door and pausing to listen every time the cloth goes rippp.
I’ve never in my whole life seen a guy without a shirt on, except for really little kids or from a distance on the beach, when I’ve been too afraid to look for fear of getting in trouble.
Now I can’t stop staring. The moonlight just touches his shoulder blades so they glow slightly, like wing tips, like pictures of angels I’ve seen in textbooks. He’s thin but muscular, too: When he moves I can make out the lines of his arms and chest, so strangely, incredibly, beautifully different from a girl’s, a body that makes me think of running and being outside, of warmth and sweating. Heat starts beating through me, a thrumming feeling like a thousand tiny birds have been released in my chest. I’m not sure if it’s from the bleeding, but the room feels like it’s spinning so fast we’re in danger of flying out of it, both of us, getting thrown out into the night. Before, Alex seemed far away. Now the room is full of him: He is so close I can’t breathe, can’t move or speak or think. Every time he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to teeter for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.
“Hey.” He reaches out and touches my shoulder, just for a second, but in that second my body shrinks down to that single point of pressure under his hand, and glows with warmth. I’ve never felt like this, so calm and peaceful. Maybe I’m dying. The idea doesn’t really upset me, for some reason. In fact, it seems kind of funny. “You okay?”
“Fine.” I start to giggle softly. “You’re naked.”
“What?” Even in the dark I can tell he’s squinting at me.
“I’ve never seen a boy like—like that. With no shirt on. Not up close.”
He begins wrapping the shredded T-shirt around my leg carefully, tying it tight. “The dog got you good,” he says. “But this should stop the bleeding.”
The phrase stop the bleeding sounds so clinical and scary it snaps me awake and helps me to focus. Alex finishes tying off the makeshift bandage. Now the searing pain in my leg has been replaced by a dull, throbbing pressure.
Alex lifts my leg carefully out of his lap and rests it on the ground. “Okay?” he says, and I nod. Then he scoots around next to me, leaning back against the wall like I am so we’re sitting side by side, arms just touching at the elbows. I can feel the heat coming off his bare skin, and it makes me feel hot. I close my eyes and try not to think about how close we are, or what it would feel like to run my hands over his shoulders and chest.
Outside, the sounds of the raid grow more and more distant, the screams fewer, the voices fainter. The raiders must be passing on. I say a silent prayer that Hana managed to escape; the possibility that she didn’t is too terrible to contemplate.
Still, Alex and I don’t move. I’m so tired I feel like I could sleep forever. Home seems impossibly, incomprehensibly far away, and I don’t see how I’ll ever make it back.
Alex starts speaking all at once, his voice a low, urgent rush: “Listen, Lena. What happened at the beach—I’m really sorry. I should have told you sooner, but I didn’t want to frighten you away.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I say.
“But I want to explain. I want you to know that I didn’t mean to—”
“Listen,” I cut him off. “I’m not going to tell anyone, okay? I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything.”
He pauses. I feel him turn to look at me, but I keep my eyes fixed on the darkness in front of us.
“I don’t care about that,” he says, lower. Another pause, and then: “I just don’t want you to hate me.”
Again the room seems to be shrinking, closing in around us. I can feel his eyes on me like the hot pressure of touch, but I’m too afraid to look at him. I’m afraid that if I do I’ll lose myself in his eyes, forget all the things I’m supposed to say. Outside, the woods have fallen silent. The raiders must have left. After a second the crickets begin singing all at once, warbling throatily, a great swelling of sound.
“Why do you care?” I say, barely a whisper.
“I told you,” he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making the hair prick up on my neck. “I like you.”
“You don’t know me,” I say quickly.
“I want to, though.”
The room is spinning more and more quickly. I press up more firmly against the wall, trying to steady myself against the feeling of dizzying movement. It’s impossible: He has an answer for everything. It’s too quick. It must be a trick. I press my palms against the damp floor, taking comfort in the solidity of the rough wood.
“Why me?” I don’t mean to ask it, but the words slide out. “I’m nobody. . . .” I want to say, I’m nobody special, but the words dry up in my mouth. This is what I imagine it feels like to climb to the top of a mountain, where the air is so thin you can inhale and inhale and inhale and still feel like you can’t take a breath.
Alex doesn’t answer and I realize he doesn’t have an answer, just like I suspected—there’s no reason for it at all. He’s picked me at random, as a joke, or because he knew I’d be too scared to tell on him.
But then he starts speaking. His story is so rapid and fluid you can tell he has thought about it a lot, the kind of story you tell over and over to yourself until the edges get all smoothed over. “I was born in the Wilds. My mother died right afterward; my father’s dead. He never knew he had a son. I lived there for the first part of my life, just kind of bouncing around. All the other”— he hesitates slightly, and I can hear the grimace in his voice—“Invalids took care of me together. Like a community thing.”
Outside, the crickets pause temporarily in their song. For a second it’s like nothing bad has happened, like nothing has happened tonight out of the ordinary at all—just another hot and lazy summer night, waiting for morning to peel it back. Pain knifes through me in that moment, but it has nothing to do with my leg. It strikes me how small everything is, our whole world, everything with meaning—our stores and our raids and our jobs and our lives, even. Meanwhile the world just goes on the same as always, night cycling into day and back into night, an endless circle; seasons shifting and reforming like a monster shaking off its skin and growing it again.
Alex keeps talking. “I came into Portland when I was ten, to join up with the resistance here. I won’t tell you how. It was complicated. I got an ID number; I got a new last name, a new home address. There are more of us than you think—Invalids, and sympathizers, too—more of us than anybody knows. We have people in the police force, and all the municipal departments. We have people in the labs, even.”
Goose bumps pop up all over my arms when he says this.
“My point is that it’s possible to get in and out. Difficult, but possible. I moved in with two strangers—sympathizers, both of them—and was told to call them my aunt and uncle.” He shrugs ever so slightly next to me. “I didn’t care. I’d never known my real parents, and I’d been raised by dozens of different aunts and uncles. It didn’t make a difference to me.”
His voice has gotten super quiet, and he seems almost to have forgotten that I’m there. I’m not exactly sure where his story is going but I hold my breath, afraid that if I even so much as exhale he’ll stop speaking entirely.
“I hated it here. I hated it here so much you can’t even imagine. All the buildings and the people looking so dazed and the smells and the closeness of everything and the rules—rules everywhere you turned, rules and walls, rules and walls. I wasn’t used to it. I felt like I was in a cage. We are in a cage: a bordered cage.”
A little shock pulses through me. In all the seventeen years and eleven months of my life I have never, not once, thought of it that way. I’ve been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven’t considered that they’re also penning us in. Now I see it through Alex’s eyes, see what it must have been like for him.
“At first I was angry. I used to light things on fire. Paper, handbooks, school primers. It made me feel better somehow.” He laughs softly. “I even burned my copy of The Book of Shhh.”
Another shock pulses through me: Defacing or destroying The Book of Shhh is sacrilege.
“I used to walk along the borders for hours every day. Sometimes I cried.” He squirms next to me, and I can tell he’s embarrassed. It’s the first sign he has given in a while that he knows I’m still there, that he’s talking to me, and the urge to reach out and grab his hand, to squeeze him or give him some kind of reassurance, is almost overwhelming. But I keep my hands glued to the floor. “After a while, though, I would just walk. I liked to watch the birds. They would lift off from our side and soar over into the Wilds, as easily as anything. Back and forth, back and forth, lifting and curling through the air. I could watch them for hours at a time. Free: They were totally free. I’d thought that nothing and nobody was free in Portland, but I was wrong. There were always the birds.”
He falls silent for a while, and I think maybe he’s done with his story. I wonder if he’s forgotten about my original question—why me?—but I’m too embarrassed to remind him, so I just sit there and imagine him standing at the border, motionless, watching the birds swoop above his head. It calms me down.
After what seems like forever he starts talking again, this time in a voice so quiet I have to shift nearer to him just to hear. “The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I hadn’t been to watch the birds at the border in years. But that’s what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast. . . .” He shakes his head. “Just a flash, and then you were gone. Exactly like a bird.”
I don’t know how—I hadn’t intended to move and hadn’t noticed moving—but somehow we’ve ended up face-to-face in the dark, only inches apart.
“Everyone is asleep. They’ve been asleep for years. You seemed . . . awake.” Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. “I’m tired of sleeping.”
My insides are lifting and fluttering like they’ve done what he said and been transformed into swooping, soaring birds: The rest of my body seems to be floating away on massive currents of warmth, as though a hot wind is pushing through me, breaking me apart, turning me to air.
This is wrong, a voice says inside of me, but it isn’t my voice. It’s someone else’s—some composite of my aunt, and Rachel, and all my teachers, and the pinchy evaluator who asked most of the questions the second time around.
Out loud I squeak, “No,” even though another word is rising and lifting inside of me, bubbling up like fresh water sprung from the earth. Yes, yes, yes.
“Why?” He’s barely whispering. His hands find my face, his fingertips barely skim my forehead, the top of my ears, the hollows of my cheeks. Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame. “What are you afraid of?”
“You have to understand. I just want to be happy.” I can barely get the words out. My mind is a haze, full of smoke—nothing exists but his fingers dancing and skating over my skin, through my hair. I wish it would stop. I want it to go on forever. “I just want to be normal, like everybody else.”
“Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?” The barest whisper; his breath on my ear and neck, his mouth grazing my skin. And I think then I might really have died. Maybe the dog bit me and I got clubbed on the head and this is all just a dream—the rest of the world has dissolved. Only him. Only me. Only us.
“I don’t know any other way.” I can’t feel my mouth open, don’t feel the words come, but there they are, floating on the dark.
He says, “Let me show you.”
And then we’re kissing. Or at least, I think we’re kissing—I’ve only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: This is like music or dancing but better than both. His mouth is slightly open so I open mine, too. His lips are soft, the same soft pressure as the quietly insistent voice in my head that keeps saying yes.
The warmth is only growing inside of me, waves of light swelling and breaking and making me feel like I’m floating. His fingers lace my hair, cup my neck and the back of my head, skim over my shoulders, and without thinking about it or meaning to, my hands find his chest, move over the heat of his skin, the bones of his shoulder blades like wing tips, the curve of his jaw, just stubbled with hair—all of it strange and unfamiliar and gloriously, deliciously new. My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it’s the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first day of real autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke—like the end and the beginning of something all at once. Under my hand I swear I can feel his heart beating out a response, an immediate echo of mine, as though our bodies are speaking to each other.
And suddenly it’s all so ridiculously and stupidly clear I feel like laughing. This is what I want. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.
When he finally pulls away it’s like a blanket has come down over my brain, quieting all my buzzing thoughts and questions, filling me with a calm and happiness as deep and cool as snow. The only word left there is yes. Yes to everything.
I really like you, Lena. Do you believe me now?
Yes.
Can I walk you home?
Yes.
Can I see you tomorrow?
Yes, yes, yes.
The streets are empty by now. The whole city is silent and still. The whole city might have wound down into nothing, burned away while we were in the shed, and I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. The walk home is fuzzy, a dream. He holds my hand the whole way and we stop to kiss twice again in the longest, deepest shadows we can find. Both times I wish the shadows were solid, had weight, and they would fold down around us and bury us there so we could stay like that forever, chest to chest, lip to lip. Both times I feel my chest seize up when he pulls away and takes my hand and we have to start walking again, not kissing, like suddenly I can only breathe correctly when we are.
Somehow—too soon—I’m home, and whispering good-bye to him and feeling his lips brush mine one last time, as light as wind.
Then I’m sneaking into the house and up the stairs and into the bedroom, and it’s not until I’ve been lying in bed for a long time, shivering, aching, missing him already, that I realize my aunt and my teachers and the scientists are right about the deliria. As I lie there with the hurt driving through my chest and the sick, anxious feeling churning through me and the desire for Alex so strong inside of me it’s like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.