Mr. Patchett shouldn’t have sent someone to get a rifle. He should’ve sent someone to get JOHN. He could’ve saved Harold.
“Maybe so,” Don said, who was reading the place mat upside down. “We were in a helluva rush, though. And it was a good thing we moved fast, as it turned out. If we were even two minutes slower, Harold might’ve coughed it all up. Then instead of one dead kid, we’d have a camp full dead kids, and dead grown-ups, too.” He set his mug down on the table with a glassy clink. People were up on their feet, filling the room with a lot of loud, happy conversation. It was time for chapel. Harper felt the familiar bunched knot of dread tightening in her stomach. Another song was coming, another harmony she wouldn’t be able to join, another overwhelming blast of noise and light.
“I guess that’s all of it,” Renée said. “The sad ballad of Harold Cross.”
Harper didn’t want to go, and so when she spoke, it was more to stall for time than anything else. “Maybe not quite all. There is one thing I’m wondering about. What was in his notebook? Did anyone ever find out?”
“I’ve wondered that myself,” Don said, getting to his feet. “It never turned up. Maybe he had it on him when he was kilt. If so, it didn’t reveal the location of camp, or this whole place would be burnt to the ground by now.” He clucked his tongue, shook his head. “I don’t expect we’ll ever know. Some mysteries ain’t ever gonna be solved.”
DECEMBER
10
Two sisters, Gail and Gillian Neighbors, were having a spat.
They shared a single bottle of red nail polish, which had gone missing, and each accused the other of losing it or maybe hoarding it. They were twins and barbaric with each other by nature. Gillian already had a twisted nipple, and when Harper separated them, Gail was clutching a dirty sock to a bloody nose. Gillian had jammed her thumb at least an inch up one nostril.
Harper patrolled the dorm, asking around. It felt good to think about someone else’s problems. Better than worrying about lights-out, when she would lie in her cot, desperate to sleep and sick at the thought of what might happen when she did.
She figured Allie would know who, if anyone, might’ve helped themselves to the nail polish (the shade was called “Incendiary,” which the Neighbors twins didn’t seem to realize was funny). Allie and another girl were playing rummy on a stack of suitcases. Harper wandered over and stood behind this other girl, Jamie Close, and waited to be noticed.
“I’m glad I’m not sleeping next to her,” Jamie Close was saying to Allie.
Jamie was one of the older Lookouts, nineteen going on twenty. She had close-set eyes and an upturned nose, which conspired together to give her an unfortunate swinish mien.
“Sleeping next to who?” Allie asked absentmindedly over her cards.
“You know: Nurse Sunshine.” Jamie went on, “She woke up coughing smoke last night. Did you hear her? I’m, like, burn already, so some of us can sleep. I’m, like—”
Allie stepped on Jamie’s foot, hard. A child might’ve imagined it was an accident; a very small, very naive child. Jamie stiffened and went silent.
After a moment, Allie’s gaze drifted up and she appeared to see Harper for the first time. “Hey! What’s going on, Nurse Willowes?”
“The Neighbors twins lost a bottle of nail polish. Just asking around to see if either of you might have seen it.”
Jamie Close sat rigidly on an upturned bucket. Her T-shirt was hiked up to show the tramp stamp on the small of her back: a tattoo of the Confederate flag, above the word REBEL. She didn’t have the nerve to look back at Harper. “Sorry, ma’am. I don’t do nothin’ with my nails but chew on ’em.”
Allie looked like she wanted to say something—her eyes were apologetic and worried—but she just opened her mouth and closed it and shook her head.
Harper smiled effortfully, thanked them, and walked off. Her Dragonscale pulsed with a disagreeable warmth, in a way that made her think of someone breathing on coals.
11
She dreamt she wore a gown of wasps and woke when they began to sting.
The basement was stuffy and dim in the late morning and she lay motionless, still feeling wasp-stung: on her collarbone, on the inside of her left thigh, between two of her toes.
Harper pressed her chin into her chest, looking down, and saw a red spot burning through her T-shirt above her left breast, as if someone were pressing the tip of a cigarette into the cotton . . . from the inside. A silky thread of white smoke trickled up from the growing burn. Harper watched, in a state of horrible lassitude, as the hole expanded, the edges a bright orange lacework. At last she rubbed it out with her thumb and brushed the sparks off her chest.
Her body throbbed from nearly a dozen of those wasp-sting burns. She flapped back her blanket, to see if her clothes were burning anywhere else, and a gush of black smoke drifted toward the ceiling. She was reminded of her childhood fascination with smoke signals. What would this message translate to? Probably: Help, I am going to be burned alive.
Enough, she thought.
She sat up, very carefully, iron bedsprings creaking. She did not want to wake anyone, did not want to cause any trouble. In those first moments, she was not clear about what she meant to do, only that she didn’t want to have to talk to anyone about it. That enough indicated some kind of decision, but it was not immediately clear to her what she had decided.
In the next bed, Renée slept on her side, deep in her own dreams, smiling at some imagined event. Harper half had an urge to lean over and kiss her forehead, to have one final moment of physical contact. Final moment? Harper found she couldn’t look at Renée for long. Enough represented some kind of betrayal of their friendship. Enough was going to hurt Renée, would leave her—what? Bereft was the word that came to mind. Bereft and enough went together like bride and groom.
Harper considered packing The Portable Mother and her clothes into her carpetbag, but enough was a destination that required no baggage. Enough was a reverberation deep inside her, a kind of ringing emptiness, as if she were a steeple in which a bell had been solemnly struck. Ask not for whom it tolls.
She rose and paced across the cool, dusty concrete. Harper paused at the bottom of the steps for a look back at the maze of cots, a labyrinth of sleeping women. In that moment she loved them all, even awful Jamie Close with her ugly mouth and upturned nose. Harper had always wanted a tough friend like Jamie, someone rude and mouthy, who would cut a bitch for talking smack. She loved Renée and the Neighbors girls and little Emily Waterman and Allie and Nick. Nick most of all, with his bottle-glass-green eyes and articulate hands, which drew words on the air like a boy wizard sketching spells.
She climbed three steps to the door, eased the latch up with a click, and slipped out. She blinked at the watery sunlight. She hadn’t seen any in a while and it hurt her eyes.
The sky was high and pale, like the dingy canvas roof of a circus tent. She went up more steps, trailing wisps of smoke behind her. The ’scale had burned holes in her sweats, holes all through her Rent T-shirt. She had seen Rent with Jakob and he had held her hand while she wept at the end. She was surprised to find herself longing for Jakob now, for the wiry strength of his arms when he held her around the waist. It didn’t seem to matter that the last time she had seen him he had been waving a gun at her.