Mel and I had three blankets, stolen from the dorms in the early days. One was a fuzzy blue polyester job. The other, a thick brown wool. The third, an obscenely cheerful pink quilt. Not the kind someone’s grandmother had lovingly made, but the bed-in-a-bag kind. Of course, Mel had stripped our mattress and neatly folded the blankets so the rounded edges showed.
I didn’t have the energy to bring Carter the blanket I’d promised him. I was cold and shaky. I could have used a blanket myself. Mel just stood there facing the shelves, positioning and repositioning the items with meticulous care.
So I just rested my head, closed my eyes, and waited to warm up on my own. A different kind of sister would guess how freaked out I was right now. She would wrap a blanket around my shoulders and stroke my hair. Maybe even put her arm around me while I cried. But instead of that nurturing sister I fantasized about, I had Mel. When I opened my eyes, I saw that she’d put her Slinky on the floor beside me.
I swallowed back my tears and smiled at her. “Thanks.”
**
By the time fourth meal rolled around, I’d located and repacked almost everything we needed in our backpacks. I wasn’t going to take any more chances. Our bags were once again stuffed and ready to go at a moment’s notice. And we wouldn’t be leaving the room without them. I started with the easy stuff. Our spare socks and underwear, for example, were all small when folded, so they were in the front, at the beginning of each color row. It had been a trick convincing Mel to let me pack them, but after about twenty renditions of “Red rover, red rover,” the underwear and the socks went into the backpacks.
The twelve bags of corn chips were the sole items on the shelf of orange things. The first aid kits should have been simple. The white plastic boxes sat side by side on the top shelf. They were empty. By the time I’d collected all of the Band-Aids and ointments, all the rolls of Ace bandages and tiny packets of aspirin, it was almost time to go to fourth meal.
I’d seen no sign at all of the map. It could be anywhere, tucked into a textbook or filed away with old tests. I tried not to panic. I had only vague ideas about what we were going to do on the outside. Find a car—there were certainly enough of them abandoned around town. Head north—the Tick outbreak had started in the Southwest, so I figured they were strongest there. If the Canadians had succeeded in securing their borders, maybe we could find sanctuary from the Ticks there.
I’d spent a lot of time staring at that map, trying to figure out where to go after we got off the Farm. Maybe I remembered the roads well enough to get us there. All the warm socks and antiseptic moist towelettes in the world wouldn’t help us if we couldn’t find our way out of Oklahoma.
I’d just finished flipping through my twelfth copy of Elements of Geology when I noticed Mel standing by the door. When I looked up, she said, “Jack Sprat could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean.”
“Okay.” I set the book aside and pushed myself to my feet. I handed her the pink backpack and swung the green one over my shoulder.
We left the room, but Mel stopped at the door across the hall, which Carter had left open a crack.
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean.”
I gritted my teeth.
“Jack Sprat—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. How did you even know he was there?”
She didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected her to, but when the only person you ever talked to was autistic, you asked a lot of rhetorical questions.
I gave the door a cursory knock as I pushed it open.
“I thought I told you to put a chair—” I broke off abruptly when I spotted Carter.
He was standing with his back to the door. He’d been in the process of pulling on a T-shirt, so his arms were stretched over his head and I could see the muscles of his back. He paused for a second in midmotion when he heard me speak.
Then he jerked the shirt the rest of the way down. “Hey, come on in. Is it time for dinner already?”
“Fourth meal,” I corrected automatically. “No one calls it dinner anymore.”
But my words sort of echoed unheard in my ears, because my brain was still stuck on the image of his bare back. On the scars.
The skin of his upper back and shoulders was riddled with them, six or seven on each side. All about the size of a nickel and various shades of red and pink, as though some had been healing for months and others were mere days old.
My hand went to my own neck, to a spot not far from my spine where the Ticks had implanted my chip when I’d first arrived at the Farm.
“Thanks for letting me stay,” Carter said.
His voice was overly loud, like he was determined to snag my attention from the bizarre scars.
I looked from his shoulder to his face, my eyebrows jacked up in obvious question.
His only response was to reach for the hoodie he’d draped over one of the lab tables. I noticed a mirror sitting on the floor, pointed in the direction of the door. I was about to ask about it when he picked it up and slid it into the pocket of his hoodie.
“Were you watching our door?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “Good thing, too, since you were about to leave without me.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I lied.
“So how’s Melanie doing?”
I could take a hint as well as the next girl, so I let him distract me.
“In general? Like, how’s your family, I haven’t seen you in a while?”
He chuckled, pulling the hoodie over his simple gray T-shirt and then giving the hem a little tug. “Actually I meant, how is she now? You said before if she couldn’t handle it, you’d make me leave.”
“She’s fine,” I said tightly. Then I admitted, “Actually, she pretty much insisted we invite you.”
“I’ll have to thank her.”
I hesitated for a moment, then nodded toward the door. “She’s waiting out in the hall.”
He followed me out the door and we found her standing a few feet away staring down the hall as she bobbed slightly on her toes. She tapped her ring fingers against her thumbs.
It was one of her self-stimulating behaviors. Watching Mel now—trying to see her through the eyes of a stranger—I was more aware than ever of our similarities and our differences. I could do a fair job imitating her unique behaviors, enough so that I could pass for her if I needed to. But she’d never pass for me.
As Carter walked up to her in the hall, I felt that familiar protectiveness well up inside of me. She watched him in that odd, crowlike way she had, head tilted to the side, as if she was looking at him through only one eye and then, only half interested.
Carter just nodded a little and said, “Hey, Mel, you still have your Slinky?”
She’d been wearing it on her wrist like a bracelet. Now, she slipped it off and clutched it in front of her in both hands, thumbs threaded through the center. She held it up to show him and then shifted her hands up and down so it seesawed from one hand to the other.
Carter laughed. “Yeah. I thought so.”
Mel’s gaze jerked to mine for only an instant. “Red rover, red rover, let Carter come over?”
I knew exactly what she was asking and it made my heart pound. “No,” I told her firmly, praying she’d let it drop. “Jack Sprat, remember, Mel?”
“Red rover?” she repeated.
I searched my brain for another nursery rhyme about food. “Hot cross buns. One a penny, two a penny,” I said, improvising. “Don’t you want a hot cross bun?”
Actually, the idea made even my mouth water a little. Hot food of any kind was pretty rare on the Farm.
“Red rover,” she repeated firmly and this time I didn’t argue, because she started walking toward the stairs and that was something.
When we reached the stairs, Mel hung back a couple of steps, just like I’d trained her to do, while I opened the fire door, paused, and listened carefully. The stairwell was one of those completely open jobs. If you stood at the top and looked over the railing, you could see down all seven floors, all the way to the basement. I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out one of the pebbles I kept there, then tossed it down the center shaft of the stairwell. The stone pinged off the railing several times. The clicks and clanks of its trip down echoed up to us and then there was silence. No scuffling of feet or heads peeking out to look up.
“Okay, come on,” I said.
Mel shuffled forward. Carter followed at the rear, looking at me with eyebrows raised as if impressed. “Neat trick. You ever hear anything?”
“Once or twice.” I kept my voice pitched low. “There are a couple of other staircases in the building we could take. I don’t like the idea of being trapped in such a confined space.”
It was a risk we took being on the seventh floor. There were a lot of steps between us and freedom. There was always the potential of being trapped in the building, but I figured it was worth it if it meant we could sleep at night without fear of someone breaking into our room. Besides, six flights of stairs wasn’t the only thing between us and freedom.
Tromping down the steps behind Mel, I slipped my hand into my pocket and rubbed one of the pebbles between my thumb and forefinger. These tiny stones gave me the illusion of control. It wasn’t real, but I clung to it nevertheless. Was that brave or just stupid?
“So, why don’t you call it dinner anymore?” Carter asked from behind me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like dinner anymore. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: those words imply the food is different. Like breakfast should be bacon and pancakes. Or eggs. Lunch should be big turkey sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes, maybe a bowl of soup on the side.” My mouth started watering just thinking about it. I nearly made a slurpy sound, then felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment.
“So what would it be?” Carter asked.
“What?” I asked in surprise.
“What kind of soup? If you could have any kind, what would it be?” There was a playful quality to his voice that made me feel . . . I don’t know. Grumpy, maybe.