Meanwhile, I am drowning in details. I have nothing to write with anymore, so I’ve taken to carving numbers in a space of dirt I’ve cleared of leaves.
I’ve got rocks holding down pages of a few articles, and June’s notebook is open in the middle of the area, and I’m standing over them all, writing numbers that jump out at me in the dirt with a long stick. I use June’s equations as a guide, plugging in the data from the study. I’m so engrossed in this, the numbers ordering themselves in my head, and not quite aligning how I expect them to. It’s this unsettled feeling I’m trying to grab on to. It’s not the numbers I have. It’s the thing that’s missing.
“What are you looking for?” Cameron asks. He’s right behind me, and when I turn around, I see Casey not too far away, leaning against a tree, watching me work. I don’t know how long they’ve been standing there, watching me this way.
“I don’t know. But something is wrong. Something is missing.”
They look at me very carefully, with heads tilting toward me, toward the numbers on the ground. “What’s missing?” Casey asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how the data was selected and sorted, but I can’t make it fit. And I won’t know unless I can get in the database and see what she used.”
I know who I sound like: June. Convincing people her motives were altruistic. But they led to chaos, to death, to this.
Casey eyes the dirt. “This means something to you?”
I feel Cameron looking at me, and I get the meaning in Casey’s words. This was June’s thing. I’m just a shadow of her, but I can feel it in me, this talent. I’ve wasted it, but it’s there.
I use my feet to dig into the dirt, swiping it back and forth, reducing it all to nothing again.
We hear the trucks rumbling up the hill when the sun is still in the sky, and Cameron motions for us to stay very still. I hold my breath, begging them not to turn down this road, but they rumble past us. A steady stream of vehicles moves by over the next thirty minutes, and we wait another hour still, until the sun is low and the shadows are long and the mosquitoes come out for blood.
Cameron takes his shirt off to wipe the car down again, and I get a better look at his back this time. The scar is long and white and raised, and I wonder if maybe the cut on my rib cage will eventually turn itself into the same.
Casey is packing up her bag and checking our site when Cameron turns back around, catches me staring. And I don’t want him to think it’s for any other reason. “Looks like it hurt,” I say.
He puts his shirt back on quickly. “Do me a favor, Alina. If you ever decide to stab me, don’t do it in the back.”
“Deal,” I whisper, and I quickly look away.
We walk with everything we currently own—that is, everything that fits in Casey’s bag and the school uniforms we’re still wearing—down the dirt road, and eventually Cameron points out what he calls “the main office,” which to me looks like more of a trailer than an office. It sits in the middle of the construction site, between four partially built homes—skeletons with roofs, in various degrees of completion.
Cameron unlocks the trailer door for us, though I’m sure we could’ve gotten inside in countless other ways. And the first thing I’m met with is the scent of cigarettes and sweat. Casey flicks a light switch, and a fluorescent rectangle on the ceiling buzzes to life. The carpeting is covered in muddy orange footprints. There’s a desk with chairs on either side and a small table near a smaller refrigerator. I opt to stay outside. I wonder what my first foster home was like—if it was full of scents and dirt and the remainders of real people—or if it was more like my island. I can’t remember. But I’ve seen the envelopes, the letters, that led to my removal from that place. I’ve read about the lives that June had ruined; I’ve felt their need for revenge. It wasn’t safe for me out there, within reach. If they left me there and something happened, they’d be at fault. I see it now, the fine line of my imprisonment. That perhaps we are all victims of circumstance. Products of both chaos and fate.
There’s a monitor on the desk, and Casey walks straight for it, seemingly unaffected by the odor.
“If you’re going to stand out there,” Casey says, “at least keep an eye out for anyone coming.”
I turn around, my back to the room now lit by the unnatural white glow, and I stare out at the twilight. We’re not in the mountains anymore, but possibly we’re at the edge of them—the roads rose and dipped on our drive, the trees became denser the farther we got from the highway. Cameron and Casey talk behind me, but not to me, and I imagine myself disappearing—walking straight into the distance, nobody to stop me; or standing right here, fading to nothing. They’d look up, and I’d be gone.
I could do it, if I wanted. I’ve earned their trust, and I could run. It’s becoming more and more clear that I will never shake her skin—that I will always be seen as June Calahan living inside the shell of Alina Chase to everyone else.
But not right here. Right here, when I look over my shoulder and Cameron catches my eye and smiles, when Casey barks a command in my direction—listen for cars—it’s only to me.
The world is big, and we are small.
But maybe this is enough.
I’m lost in a daydream—me in a yard somewhere, standing like this, and laughter from the cabin behind me, and a deep voice calling my name—it’s so real I can feel it taking shape inside me, and I know how dangerous this is, I know. How hope can spread, how it multiplies when you linger in it. How it works its way into your life, before you remember that it’s not real. How insidious hope can become if you let it.
I’m deep within this dream, so I must not hear Cameron the first time. Because his hand is suddenly on my shoulder and his voice is in my ear. “Alina,” he says, and the vision is gone, replaced by the sound of Casey’s fingers typing on the keyboard, the floor that creaks below us, the smell of the cigarettes and sweat. “Check out the home sites with me?”
He doesn’t grab my hand, but his passing body has the same effect, pulling me along.
We walk toward the half-built homes. One, with a door and green paper covering the roof and walls. One, just a foundation and the start of a wooden frame. The other two completely framed, but without windows, without drywall. I can see through the beams of the houses in sections—a hallway from this perspective, but step to the left and the wood lines up, and I can see into another room. Cameron steps through the doorway of the closest one onto the solid, wooden floor.
The whole place smells like sawdust, with the scent of something faintly burning.
“Do you smell that? Like a fire?” I ask.
“Left behind from a saw on wood, probably. The heat from the friction almost makes it burn,” he says.
The scent sets my heart on edge. Like the candles on my birthday cake—like something changing, a passage of time. It’s been only five days, but it feels like a lifetime we’ve spent running.
Cameron heads down the hall, but I check out the rooms off to the sides. Perfect squares, empty and exposed. The walls will go here and be painted, and the wood floor will be hidden. I can picture a couch here, against the wall, maybe blue. And a black-and-white picture hanging on the wall behind it. And me, sitting there with a book, legs crossed at the ankle … light footsteps down the hall, the sound of my mother humming before she comes into view …
I’ve got to stop this. This dreaming of possibilities that can never be.