“Who did?”
“Wouldn’t you feel better,” Mindy asked, “if you just got your punishment over with? I know Allie would feel better.” Her eyes widened in sudden inspiration. She scooted to the edge of the couch. “What if you just put the rock in your mouth for five minutes? I’d tell everyone it was a whole half hour.”
“Not five seconds,” Harper said. “Oh, and Mindy? Next time you’ve got an infected bladder?”
Mindy stared at her with apprehensive, ready-to-be hurt eyes.
You can piss off, Harper said in her mind, but in real life she only sighed and said, “Forget it,” and slipped back into the ward.
She really didn’t have the right temperament for vicious comments. The few times in her life she had said truly nasty things to people, it had left her with a bad flavor in her mouth. A stone couldn’t taste any worse.
3
Harper got it again—and she got it worse—the next evening, at first meal.
There was already a line, wrapped halfway around the inside of the cafeteria, when she came in out of the dark, snow melting in her hair. She had half run from the infirmary, with a shrieking wind at her back the whole way. She couldn’t feel her ears and was desperately hungry from the first whiff of maple syrup and oats.
Half the camp was already seated, and the room was loud with conversation and spoons scraping in bowls. It was so loud Harper didn’t hear Gail Neighbors at first, didn’t know someone was talking to her until Gillian Neighbors poked her in the ribs to get her attention.
The Neighbors twins were right behind her, side by side. They wore matching red turtlenecks, an unfortunate wardrobe choice that suggested a resemblance to Thing One and Thing Two from the Dr. Seuss book.
“Allie didn’t eat all day yesterday,” Gail said. Harper was pretty sure it was Gail doing the talking—she was the one with the pointy chin.
Harper turned her back on them. “If she doesn’t want to eat, that’s up to her. No one is making her starve.”
One of the sisters yanked on her sleeve and Harper had to glance back.
Gillian looked a lot less friendly than Gail. Her lips were a thin white line. She hadn’t shaved her head recently and her scalp was blue with five o’clock shadow.
“Is it true it would only cost you half an hour with the stone to make amends?” Gillian asked.
“That and my dignity.”
The two sisters did not reply. Harper turned her back on them once more. The line edged slowly forward.
“You’re a real stuck-up bitch,” one of them said softly.
This time, Harper did not glance back.
“You know, some people think—” said the other, and was shushed by the first.
Harper did not care what some people thought and did not dignify this comment with a response.
She didn’t know Allie was on mess duty, dishing out scoops of oatmeal, until she reached the counter. Allie still had the rock in her mouth, Harper could tell by the way she pursed her lips.
Allie lifted her gaze and stared at Harper with watery, loathing eyes. Then she reached under the counter, found a smooth, egg-shaped lump of granite, put it in a bowl, and held it out to her.
Harper set down her tray and walked away, the Neighbors sisters shrieking with laughter.
4
Late at night—or early in the morning, depending on how you cared to look at it—Nick gave lessons in how to speak without words, and Harper was his attentive pupil, in the lonely classroom of the infirmary.
If anyone had asked why Nick was staying in the infirmary, instead of with his sister in the girls’ dorm, or with the men in the boys’ dorm, Harper would’ve said she wanted to keep him under observation. She would’ve claimed she was worried about a late-developing inguinal hernia as a result of his appendectomy in the summer. The word inguinal would be frightening enough to shut down any further questions. But there were no questions, and Harper suspected that few people gave any thought at all to where Nick slept. When you had no voice, you had no identity. Most people took no more notice of the profoundly deaf than they did of their own shadows.
They sat across from each other on Nick’s cot, in their pajamas. Harper kept three buttons undone below her breasts to show the ripe pink globe of her belly, and when they were finished practicing sign for the night, Nick popped the cap off a Sharpie and drew a smiley face on it.
What are you going to name her? Nick asked. He tried to ask in sign language, but she lost the thread and he had to write it down.
“A boy,” she said with her hands.
He pressed both palms on the bulging gourd of her stomach, closed his eyes, and inhaled gently. Then he signed, “Smells like a girl.”
“How girls smell?” she asked, her hands finding the words automatically—a fact that produced a small flush of pride.
He gave her a confounded look and wrote: like sugar & spice & everything nice, duh.
You can’t really smell if it’s a girl, she wrote back.
People who have lost 1 sense, he scrawled, become stronger in the others. Don’t you know that? I smell LOTS of things other peeple don’t.
Like what?
Like there’s still something rong inside Father Storey. Now his gaze was solemn and unblinking. He smells sick. He smells . . . too sweet. Like flowers when they rot.
Harper didn’t like that. She had known a doctor in nursing school who claimed he could smell death, that the ruination of the body had a particular fragrance. He insisted you could smell it in someone’s blood: a whiff of things spoiling.
The moss-colored sheet between the ward and the waiting room twitched, and Renée Gilmonton ducked through, holding a bowl covered in tinfoil.
“Norma sent me over with a glop of oatmeal for the sick ol’ kid,” Renée said, crossing to Nick’s bed and sinking down on the mattress, directly across from Harper. Renée mined one pocket of her parka and came up with something else wrapped in tinfoil. “I figured he wasn’t the only little guy who might be in the mood for a snack.” Nodding at Harper’s distended belly.
Harper half expected to peel back the foil and find a rock inside. Eat that, bitch, Renée would tell her, and then get on your knees and repent for Mother Carol. But of course it wasn’t a rock, she could tell even before she unwrapped it, just from the weight. Renée had brought her a biscuit with an improbable smear of honey in the middle.
“Allie ought to be ashamed,” Renée went on. “Giving you a rock instead of breakfast. You’re well into your second trimester. You can’t be skipping meals. I don’t care what she thinks you did.”
“I let her down. She trusted me not to do something stupid and I screwed her.”
“You were trying to get medical supplies to care for your pa tients. You were trying to collect them from your home. No one can forbid you to go home. No one can take your rights away from you.”
“I don’t know about that. The camp voted to put Ben and Carol in charge of things. That’s democracy, not tyranny.”
“My. Black. Ass. That wasn’t any real election. They took a vote after an hour of singing and everyone was spaced out in the Bright. Most of the camp were so blitzed they would’ve voted for a top hat and believed they were electing Abraham Lincoln.”
“The rules—”
Renée shook her head. “This isn’t about rules. Don’t you know that? This is about control. You went home to get medical supplies—to help people. To help Carol’s own father! Your real crime wasn’t breaking a rule about leaving camp. Your real crime was deciding for yourself what would be best for the people in your care. Only Carol and Ben get to decide what’s best for the people in Camp Wyndham now. Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn’t say is that voice belongs to her. There’s only one song to sing these days—Carol’s song—and if you aren’t in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.”