COULDN’T GET AWAY. SORRY. NEXT TIME?
“Hey, everything okay?” Mel asked, resting a hand on my arm. Her eyes were soft, searching. I had the stupidest urge to lean my head against her shoulder and shut my eyes, shut out the world
, until we got to where we were going.
She must have seen it in my face, because she quickly added, “Should we move the event? Even delaying it a few hours might help. I almost went into cardiac arrest, so I can only imagine what that just did to you.”
The smile I plastered onto my face was so wide, it actually ached. “No, I’m all right. Really. No delay necessary. Besides, if we push back this one, we might hit traffic and miss the Japanese embassy event.”
The embassy was reopening their Japan Information and Culture Center and had asked me to do the honor of introducing a documentary film by a fellow Japanese American Psi, Kenji Ota. To say I was excited was an understatement; I’d only met Kenji once in passing, but for weeks now I’d been looking forward to having the chance to connect with someone who’d come from a similar background and experienced the same things I had.
“Can we go through today’s schedule?” I asked. “Make sure I have it down?”
Mel squeezed my wrist reassuringly. “You’re amazing. I don’t know how you stay so strong in the face of all this. I meant what I said, though. I can ask about moving the event.”
I shook my head, my heart skipping at the thought. The second President Cruz’s director of communications suspected I couldn’t handle the stress of this job, I’d be taken off it. “There’s no need. I promise.”
“All right,” Mel said, looking just a little relieved. This would have been a nightmare for her to reschedule. She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder with the day’s date and began to run through our itinerary, matching hours to actions.
I dropped the phone back into my own bag, trying to find something to ward off the pressure building in my chest. It pushed at my ribs like it could split me open and reveal the raw mess inside.
Maybe I should have responded? Or would I have just bothered him more?
“Nine thirty a.m., the dean will introduce you….”
Next time? I was tempted to take the phone back out and reread Chubs’s message, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. My mind couldn’t stop whispering those two words, wouldn’t let go of that question mark—that one small symbol that had never existed between any of us before.
ONCE UPON A TIME, I went months without saying a word. More than a year, in fact.
It happened by accident at first—or not by accident, exactly. I still struggled to explain it, to justify why I silenced myself. It was as if the barbed wire that surrounded the rehabilitation camp had cut me so deeply the night we escaped, all the words in me had just bled out. I’d been so empty under my skin. So cold. Weak enough for shock to spill in and take over.
The truth is, some things go beyond words: The sound of gunshots thundering through the night. Blood staining the backs of thin uniforms. Kids facedown, slowly buried by the snow falling from the dark sky. The feeling of being strangled by your own hope in that second it escaped the fencing and left you behind to die.
The next few days I was just…tired. Unsure. Questions would come at me, and I would nod. Shake my head. It took so much energy. I was afraid of picking the wrong words out of the messy darkness inside my head. Scared to say something the others, the boys who had saved me, wouldn’t like.
Every second we spent driving in the van, I could see it: I would tell them I was hungry or cold or hurt, and they would decide I was a problem, just like my parents once had. The boys would leave me behind somewhere just as quickly as they had decided to take me with them that night we’d escaped.
But they didn’t. And, pretty soon after, I realized that they wouldn’t. But by then, it felt more comfortable to pick up that ratty notebook we shared and carefully choose my words. I could spell out the exact response I wanted, no mistakes. I could choose when I wanted to say something. I could have that much control over my life.
The problem was that I kept choosing silence. Over and over again, I let myself fall into the safety of its depths. Painful things could stay buried, never needing to be understood or talked through. The past wouldn’t come back to hurt me if I never spoke of it. The memory of snow and blood and screams couldn’t rise up and bury me in its freezing pressure, its dark. I wouldn’t need to admit to being scared or hungry or exhausted and worry the others. My silence became a kind of shield.
Something I could use to protect myself.
Something I could hide behind.
That was years ago now. I became known to the world for what I had said, not as the silent little girl with the shaved head and oversize gloves. I appeared on television screens and in front of crowds. She became a ghost, abandoned in the memories I no longer wanted to remember.
Words still seemed to sit a little heavier in my mouth than they did for other people. It was all too easy to slip back into those comfortable depths inside me, where there was quiet. Especially on days like that one, with the last lick of adrenaline making me antsy to move on to the next event.
I couldn’t focus on any one thing, no matter how hard I tried. The two dozen rows of people in front of us became an indistinct haze of color and small, shifting movements. I lost the thread of whatever Penn State’s steely-haired dean of admissions was saying, the same way I struggled to keep up with the campus tour he’d given us earlier. Now even his dark skin and blue seersucker suit were smearing at the edge of my vision.
I tapped one high heel down, brought the other up, tapped that down, brought the other up, working off the lingering buzz of nerves from the car ride in. I closed my eyes against the warm sunlight, but opened them again just as quickly when I only found the image of the old woman’s snarling face there.
The air wept with moisture, so thick with late-summer heat it gave the sky a silky coating. My thick hair rebelled, swelling against the hold of the bobby pins, just at the edge of slipping out of its careful style. A drop of sweat rolled down the ridges of my spine, gluing my blouse to my skin.
Mel gripped my arm, her nails digging into me. I came back to myself all at once, pushing up onto my feet and letting the world open around me again.
The scattered applause wasn’t even loud enough to echo back off the columns of the large building behind us, the one the dean had called Old Main. Not a good sign when it came to their interest level, but I could win them over. Being a freak meant that people were more than willing to stare at you for a while.
I stepped through the shadow cast by Old Main’s clock tower. Setting my shoulders back, I licked my teeth to make sure there was no lipstick on them and lifted my hand in a wave.
The dean stepped away from the podium, which rested on top of a temporary platform that had been built out over the steps that led down to the grassy seating area. He swept his hands toward it as I approached, inviting me forward with an encouraging smile I forced myself to return.
I didn’t need encouragement. This was my job.
The meager applause was lost again, this time to the music that poured through the speakers on either side of the bottom step down on the grass—some kind of fight song, I guessed. While I waited for the words to load on the teleprompter, I cast a quick glance around the audience, making sure to avoid looking directly into the fleet of news cameras positioned off to the right of the stairs.
“Good afternoon,” I said, my hands grasping the lip of the podium. I hated the way my voice sounded as it blasted out of speakers—like a little girl’s. “It’s an honor to be here with you today. Thank you, Dean Harrison, for giving me the opportunity to address your incredible new class and inviting me to celebrate the reopening of your illustrious university.”
I sincerely doubted there had been any invitations involved—Mel pitched all of these events based on population models and where she thought we would get the most media play. She always seemed to know just the right way to threaten someone to get a No magically transformed into an enthusiastic Yes.
Every speech was carefully altered at its beginning and end to fit the venue. These slight adjustments were the only variations in the usual routine. My
grip on the podium relaxed as I settled into it. I swept my gaze back and forth, trying to take the crowd’s temperature. Beyond the row of reporters, all scribbling on notepads or half-hidden by the phones they were using to snap photos, there was an array of people, spanning almost the full range of ages.
Parents and other family members filled the very back rows. Farther in were the men and women a decade past what you might expect from typical college freshmen. All of them were trying to recover the educations they’d been forced to abandon when the majority of universities had gone bankrupt at the height of the Psi panic.
Then there were those my age, even a little younger. They sat behind the reporters, their thumb-size buttons visible on their shirts, as they were meant to be at all times. Many green buttons, fewer blues, and even fewer yellow ones like my own. And, scattered between them all, white.
I glanced down at the podium, pausing in my speech for a quick breath. Blank. The word slipped through my mind, as unwelcome as it was ugly. These were the ones who had elected—or had parents who had elected for them—to get the “cure” procedure. Specifically, the ones who had received surgical implants to halt and effectively neuter their brain’s access to the abilities they acquired when they survived IAAN.
“We truly are the lucky ones,” I continued. “We have survived the trials that the last decade has brought to our country, and they have united us in ways that no one could have predicted. Of course, we have all made sacrifices. We have struggled. And from that, we have learned much—including how to trust one another again, and how to believe in the future of this nation.”
There was a loud, sharp cough from the far left end of the front row. It was just pointed enough to draw my gaze as I took a quick sip from the sweating water glass that had been left for me.
Two teenagers sat just behind the police officer standing watch over the left side of the audience. One, a girl with brown skin, glowing in her yellow silk sundress, had stretched her long legs out in front of her. They were crossed at the ankles, just above her strappy sandals. Her head had lolled to the side, her long ponytail of curly black hair spilling over her shoulder. The metallic-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses had dipped down the bridge of her nose, revealing more of her features: full brows and high, slanted cheekbones. She also had what I assumed were beautiful, wide eyes, but there was no way to really confirm it, given that I’d apparently talked her right into a nice nap.