The Invasion of the Tearling

“Fine. Christ.” Dorian closed her eyes. “Wake me up if he comes.”


Who? Lily almost asked, then answered herself: No names. She lit the small scented candle that sat on the table beside the armchair, then whispered to the house to turn off the overhead light. Shadows flickered on the walls, highlighting Lily as a matronly figure, an old woman in her rocking chair.

We’ve all done that walk.

She watched Dorian fall asleep. Her mind kept on trying to turn to Greg, to go over the evening, but Lily wouldn’t allow it. She would think about these things tomorrow, in the light of day … not now. But the images, the sensations, kept on coming, until she thought she might bolt from the chair and scream.

What would Maddy do?

But that was easy. Maddy wouldn’t have shied away from remembering. Maddy would have gone all the way through it. Maddy had always been tough, and Lily, who had been delighted at the idea of a younger sister, quickly became disenchanted when she realized that Maddy was never going to want to play any of the same games as herself: no dress-up, no beauty parlor, no cooking in the fake kitchen that sat in the corner of the living room. Maddy liked baseball, insisted on wearing pants. By the time she was twelve she was the best pitcher in the neighborhood, so good that the neighborhood boys not only allowed her to play in their impromptu baseball league but always picked her first.

But being a tomboy was only part of it. Maddy was much smaller than Lily, tiny and pixie-like, but she had no tolerance for bullshit. She was unable to keep silent, even when silence would save her trouble or pain. Their elementary school had had two bullies, and by the time Maddy started sixth grade, she had dealt with both of them. In eighth grade, she took several suspensions for arguing with the canned government information being peddled by her history teacher. Maddy was born to be a defender of the weak, of the helpless. Maddy was the first to tell Lily that millions of people were living outside the fences that surrounded Media, people who didn’t have enough food, people who owed so much money that they would never be free of their debts. Until then, Lily had had no idea that not everyone lived the way their family did. Dad told her the truth as well, but many years later, when Lily was fifteen. Even though Maddy was the youngest, Dad had clearly told her the truth of things long before.

The woman, Dorian, moaned in her sleep, jerking Lily back to the present. Drops of sweat gleamed on Dorian’s forehead in the candlelight. Lily cast around and found the bowl of melted ice she had brought up earlier. She hauled herself from the chair, wincing, dipped a towel in the cold water and wrung it out, and then placed it gently on Dorian’s forehead. The towel turned warm almost immediately, and Lily dipped it again, replaced it. She should get Dorian some aspirin. But no, the doctor had left some pills for fever. Lily seemed unable to feel sure of anything. She’d been at her father’s sickbed, but she didn’t know how to take care of sick people. The nurses and machines had done all of the work. Toward the end, when Dad was pumped full of drugs, he had asked for Maddy, and Lily couldn’t bring herself to explain where Maddy was, to make him go through it again. She had told him that Maddy was down the hall, talking to the doctor, but Dad kept on asking, right until the end. They had a special bond, Dad and Maddy, and because that bond seemed to have always been there, Lily had no time to develop resentment. Dad took Maddy to Phillies games in the summer, and he would sit with her in his study at night, the two of them reading endless books together. Even though Maddy was two years younger than Lily, she was the first to learn to read on her own. This was the crucial difference between the two of them, and the crucial similarity between Maddy and Dad: Maddy cared deeply about things.

“If we could be better people,” she would say, “if we could care about each other as much as we do about ourselves, think about it, Lily! Think what the world would be!”

Lily would nod, for this sounded good in theory, but Lily had no such deep drives; anything she cared about was discarded as uninteresting two months later. Maddy’s passions were exhausting. They demanded not only interest but commitment and effort. Sometimes Lily had wished that Maddy would just think about boys and clothes and music, as all of Lily’s friends did, as Lily did herself.