Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.
I learned to tell stories from my mom. “Your dad’s not feeling well today,” she’d say. She’d say, I had an accident. She’d say, Remember what happened. You’re a clumsy girl. You walked into a door. You tripped and stumbled down a staircase. My favorite story: He doesn’t mean to.
She was so good at telling stories that I started to believe them after a while. Maybe I was clumsy. Maybe it was my fault, for provoking him.
Maybe he really didn’t mean to.
There were stories, too, about a girl who got pregnant before her cure. Caroline Gormely—she lived down the street from me, in our neighborhood of boxy, identical-looking houses. Her parents only found out after she swallowed half a bottle of bleach and was taken to the emergency room. One day she was around, riding the bus home from school, pressing her nose to the glass, the window fogging with her breath. And one day she wasn’t anymore.
My mom told me she’d been taken somewhere to be cured, shipped off to a different city where she could start again. Her parents had disowned her. She would likely end up working sanitation somewhere, never paired, carrying the blight of the disease around her like a scar. You see what happens, my dad said, when you don’t listen?
What about the baby? I’d asked my mom.
She hesitated for only a second. The baby will be taken care of, she said. And she meant it: just not in the way I thought.
The lab tech’s uniform is big on me, so big I feel like a kid playing dress-up. But it will work. I don’t rush. A good story needs pacing, deliberateness. I take my time finding a small fabric mask, which I slip over my face, and rubber gloves. I lock the doorknob before I slip back out into the hall. No sense in risking the discovery of the nurse, who is now curled up on the linoleum, breathing deeply, like a child.
I clip her ID on my uniform, knowing no one will check it. You need to give people the broad strokes, the things they’re expecting: the main characters and the buildup.
And the climax, of course. A good story always needs a climax.
None of the homesteaders blamed me for the Thief’s escape, as I had worried they would, even after the kitchen knife was discovered to be missing. Everyone assumed he had broken out somehow, that he had managed to loosen the restraints himself and had stolen the knife before sneaking out. The hard-liners, the ones who had wanted to see him killed, gloated: he was no good, he might be back to murder them in their sleep, they’d have to keep constant tabs on the food stores now. Should have offed the no-good Scavenger when they’d had a chance.
I almost spoke up. I would have confessed, but I was too scared that I would get turned out, abandoned in the Wilds.
The Thief had promised to be back by noon, but noon came and went, and by the time the homesteaders were finished with their rounds and Blue’s breathing sounded like a rattle in her chest, when she was breathing at all, I knew that he had lied to me. He would never be back, and Blue would die, and it was all my fault. I couldn’t cry about it because I’d learned never to cry, even as a little girl. Crying was one of the things that set my dad off, just like laughing too loud, or smiling at a joke that didn’t include him, or acting happy when he was miserable, or miserable when he was happy.
I remember Lu watched Blue while I went for some air, even though I could tell she didn’t think it would do any good. Everyone was walking around me like I had some kind of disease, or like I was in detonator mode and might fracture at any second into shrapnel. That was the worst: knowing they thought she was going to die too.
I still wasn’t used to the Wilds, and I didn’t like them then. I was used to rules and fences, rivers of pavement and parking lots, order everywhere. The Wilds were vast and dark and unpredictable, and reminded me of back home and my dad’s rage, hanging like a low weight over everything, leaving no room to breathe, pressing us into submission. Later, I learned that the Wilds did obey certain rules, did contain a certain kind of order—raw and bare and beautiful.
Only humans are unpredictable.
I remember: a high moon, the weight of fear, the strangle-squeeze of guilt. A cold wind, bringing unfamiliar smells.
The crack of a branch. A footstep.
And suddenly there he was: The Thief emerged from the woods, looking ten years older than he had when he left, soaking wet. He was carrying a backpack. For a second, I couldn’t believe he was real. I thought I must be dreaming.