Sarah turns talkative again when the dishes are done and it’s time to outfit me with clothes.
She leads me to a small room I mistook for one of the bedrooms before. There are clothes strewn everywhere, masses of them, all over the floor and shelves. “This is the store,” she says, giggling a little and gesturing grandly with one hand.
“Where did all the clothes come from?” I move carefully into the room, stepping on shirts and balled-up socks as I do. Every inch of floor space is covered in fabric.
“We find them,” Sarah says vaguely. And then, turning suddenly fierce, “The blitz didn’t work like they said, you know. The zombies lied, just like they lie about everything else.”
“Zombies?”
Sarah grins. “That’s what we call the cureds, after they’ve had the procedure. Raven says they might as well be zombies. She says the cure turns people stupid.”
“That’s not true,” I say instinctively, and nearly correct her: It’s the passions that turn us stupid, animal-like. Free from love is close to God. That’s an old adage from The Book of Shhh. The cure was supposed to free us from extreme emotions, bring us clarity of thought and feeling.
But when I think about Aunt Carol’s glassy eyes, and my sister’s expressionless face, I think that the term zombies is actually pretty accurate. And it’s true that all the history books, and all our teachers, lied about the blitz; the Wilds were supposed to have been wiped absolutely clean during the bombing campaign. Invalids—or homesteaders—aren’t even supposed to exist.
Sarah shrugs. “If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
“Did Raven tell you that, too?”
She smiles again. “Raven’s super smart.”
It takes me a little bit of digging, but I finally find a pair of army-green pants and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt. It feels too weird to wear someone else’s old underwear, so I keep on the pair I’ve been wearing. Sarah wants me to model my new outfit—she’s enjoying this, and keeps begging me to try on different things, acting like a normal kid for the first time—and when I ask her to turn around so I can change, she stares at me like I’m crazy. I guess there isn’t much privacy in the Wilds. But finally she shrugs and swivels to face the wall.
It feels good to get out of the long T-shirt, which I’ve been wearing for days. I know I smell bad, and I’m desperate for a shower, but for now I’m just grateful for some relatively clean clothes. The pants fit well, low on my hips, and they don’t even drag too badly after I roll them at the waist a few times. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable.
“Not bad,” Sarah says when she turns around to face me again. “You look almost human.”
“Thanks.”
“I said almost.” She giggles again.
“Well, then, almost thanks.”
Shoes are harder. Most people in the Wilds go without during the summer, and Sarah proudly shows me the bottoms of her feet, which are brown and hardened with calluses. But finally we find a pair of running shoes that are just a tiny bit too big; with thick socks, they’ll be fine.
When I kneel down to lace up the sneakers, another pang goes through me. I’ve done this so many times—before cross-country meets, in the locker rooms, sitting next to Hana, surrounded by a blur of bodies, joking with each other about who’s a better runner—and yet somehow I always took it for granted.
For the first time the thought comes to me—I wish I hadn’t crossed—and I push it away instantly, try to bury it. It’s done now, and Alex died for it. There’s no point in looking back. I can’t look back.
“Are you ready to see the rest of the homestead?” Sarah asks.
Even the act of undressing and redressing has exhausted me. But I’m desperate for air, and space.
“Show me,” I say.
We go back through the kitchen and up the narrow stone stairs beyond the stove. Sarah darts ahead of me, disappearing as the stairs make a sharp turn. “Almost there!” she calls back.
A final serpentine twist, and suddenly the stairs are no more: I step into a blazing brightness, and soft ground underneath my shoes. I stumble, confused and temporarily blinded. For a second I feel as though I’ve walked into a dream and I stand, blinking, struggling to make sense of this otherworld.
Sarah is standing a few feet away from me, laughing. She lifts her arms, which are bathed in sunshine. “Welcome to the homestead,” she says, and performs a little skipping dance in the grass.