“Congratulations,” I say. More cameras go off—click, click, click—like another miniature volley of fireworks. Every time I blink, I see bursts of color behind my eyelids. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Happy for us, you mean,” he says. His hair—which he gelled and combed so carefully—has over the course of the night become increasingly unruly, and migrated forward, so a stray lock of hair falls over his right eye. I feel a rush of pleasure. This is my life and my place: here, next to Fred Hargrove.
“Your hair,” I whisper. He brings a hand automatically to his head, patting his hair into place again.
“Thank you,” he says. Just then a woman I recognize vaguely from the staff of the Portland Daily shoulders up to Fred.
“Mayor Hargrove,” she says, and it gives me a thrill to hear him referred to that way. “I’ve been trying to get a word with you all night. Do you have a minute—?”
She doesn’t wait to hear his response but draws him away from me. He turns his head over his shoulder and mouths, Sorry. I give him a small wave to show that I understand.
Now that the fireworks are done, people flow back into the ballroom, where the reception will continue. Everyone is laughing and chattering. This is a good night, a time of celebration and hope. In his speech, Fred promised to restore order and stability to our city and to root out the sympathizers and resisters who have nested among us—like termites, he said, slowly eroding the basic structure of our society and our values.
No more, he said, and everyone applauded.
This is what the future looks like: happy pairs, bright lights and pretty music, tasteful draped linens and pleasant conversation. Willow Marks and Grace, the rotting houses of Deering Highlands, and the guilt that compelled me out of the house and onto my bike yesterday—all of it seems like a bad dream.
I think of the way Willow looked at me, so sadly: They got you, too.
They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.
The last, wispy fingers of smoke have dispersed. The green hills of the golf course are swallowed in purple shadow.
For a second I stand on the balcony, enjoying the order of it all: the trimmed grass and carefully plotted landscape, the pattern of day into night into day again, a predictable future, a life without pain.
As the crowd on the terrace thins, I catch the eye of a boy standing at the opposite side of the deck. He smiles at me. He looks familiar, although for a moment I can’t place him. But as he begins moving toward me, I feel a jolt of recognition.
Steve Hilt. I almost don’t believe it.
“Hana Tate,” he says. “I guess I can’t call you Hargrove yet, can I?”
“Steven.” Last summer I called him Steve. Now it seems inappropriate. He is changed; that must be why I didn’t recognize him at first. As he inclines his head toward a waitress, depositing his empty wineglass on a tray, I see he has been cured.
But it is more than that: He is heavier, his stomach a round swell under his button-down shirt, his jawline blurring into his neck. His hair is combed straight across his forehead, the same way my dad wears it.
I try to remember the last time I saw him. It might have been the night of the raid in the Highlands. I had gone to the party mostly because I was hoping to see him. I remember standing in the half-dark basement while the floor thudded with the rhythm of the music, sweat and moisture coating the walls, the smell of alcohol and sunscreen and bodies packed into a tight space. And he had pressed his body against mine—he was so thin then, tall and skinny and tan—and I had let him slide his hands around my waist, under my shirt, and he had leaned down and pressed his lips against mine, opened my mouth with his tongue.
I believed I loved him. I believed he loved me.
And then: the first scream.
Gunfire.
Dogs.
“You look good,” Steven says. Even his voice sounds different. Again, I can’t help but think of my father, the easy, low-belly voice of a grown-up.
“So do you,” I lie.
He tips his head, gives me a look that says both Thanks and I know. Unconsciously, I withdraw a few inches. I can’t believe that I kissed him last summer. I can’t believe that I risked everything—contagion, infection—on this boy.
But no. He was a different boy back then.
“So. When is the happy event? Next Saturday, isn’t it?” He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels.
“The Friday after.” I clear my throat. “And you? You’ve been paired, then?” It never occurred to me last summer to ask.
“Sure have. Celia Briggs. Do you know her? She’s at UP now. We won’t be married until she’s finished.”
I do know Celia Briggs. She went to New Friends Academy, a St. Anne’s rival school. She had a hook nose and a loud, rattling laugh, which made it always sound as though she was fighting a bad throat infection.