“It was just me and my mom.” I stared out the window, at the drop-off just a yard away, its height steadily growing as the car climbed into the mountains. I remembered the feeling of her breath in my ear, her fingers tickling my sides. “She used to do this thing on my birthday. She’d wake me up with breakfast and sing: ‘Today, today is a very special day . . . today is somebody’s birthday . . .’” Heat crept into my cheeks as I sang, my voice thin and shaky.
“When’s your birthday?” Caleb drummed his fingers on the wheel, continuing the beat. “I’ll remember to sing it to you.”
“I don’t know. We didn’t have birthdays at School.” All the days were the same, one after the next after the next. I had eaten the sweet apple bread they sometimes served, secretly imagining a candle stuck in its top, just like the cakes I’d seen in those library books. “Who knows the date anyway?”
Caleb pressed the pedal below the wheel, speeding us forward. “I do.”
“Oh yeah?” I smiled, not believing him. I combed my hair with my fingers. “What day is it then?”
“June first!” he said. “It’s a new month.” He rapped his knuckles on the wheel. “Now let’s see . . . when should your birthday be? You’re too argumentative to be a Sagittarius . . .”
“I am not argumentative!” I cried. “And what is a Sagittarius?”
Caleb smiled playfully. “Sensitive, hmm. Maybe you’re a Cancer. How about something in July?”
“Why would you say I’m sensitive? What are you even talking about, Cancer? Isn’t that a disease?”
In the late afternoon light, I could see the tiny bubbles on his nose, where the skin was peeling from the sun. “Astrology is a joke anyway, it’s for the loonies.” He circled his finger around his temple and crossed his eyes.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I want it to be in August,” I said. “That was when School would change its schedule. We’d begin our English courses. I always liked that month.”
“Fair enough.” Caleb smiled. “August twenty-eighth?”
“Sure,” I said. I sat there in silence for a moment, a small, secret smile spreading across my face. After all those years of reading about birthdays in books, of seeing the pages of children blowing out cakes with candles, of being told by Headmistress Burns that School kept track of our age only—that the actual day was of no importance—I finally had one. August twenty-eighth.
The car climbed up the twisting roads, the engine groaning as the sky beyond the glass turned a flat white. It grew colder the higher we went, and we pulled the clothes from the trunk and wrapped ourselves in jackets, pants, and boots, now blanketed in the familiar smell of mildew. The sun hid behind the thick layer of gray clouds.
I studied Caleb’s hands on the wheel, or the way his right foot pressed the pedal on the floor, wondering when and how he’d learned to drive. The monotonous hum of the car hypnotized me. My thoughts returned to School, to Ruby and Pip, to the long room with the beds.
“My friends are all back there, at School. There has to be some way to get them out.”
Caleb scratched at the back of his head, where his dreadlocks met the skin. He was bundled in a thick brown jacket like the one he wore the night of the raid, its collar lined with yellowed wool. “There’ll be more resources in Califia. Maybe then.”
He didn’t say anything for a while, instead gazing through the front window at the road, which was now strewn with thin branches and dried leaves, its dirt path giving way to rocks. The car pitched and heaved on the uneven surface.
Finally he cleared his throat. “What are your friends like?”
“Pip is funny,” I began. “Those first years I was in School, I was so scared the plague would come through the wall or wild dogs would get in. Everything was terrifying. Whenever I tried to complain to her she would skip off onto the lawn, dragging me with her. Stop it! she’d say. You’re ruining my fun! Then she’d make a face to get me to laugh. Something like . . .” I pulled down the skin on my cheeks the same way Pip used to, exposing the red lower rims of my eyeballs.
Caleb laughed and held up his hand, blocking me from view. “Stop, please.”
“And Ruby is the one to tell you if your hair looks like it’s been through a windstorm, but she’s also the first to yell at anyone else if they try to. Very loyal.” I stared out the window. The road snaked up, up, hugging the side of the mountain until it disappeared from sight. Caleb turned the knobs for heat, fiddling with the vents, but only cold air came out.
“I know people like that. Some of my friends are still at the camps.”
I was about to ask Caleb more, but the car came to a sudden halt and the air thickened with the smell of smoke. I brought it into my lungs and coughed. After a moment of confusion, our chests heaving, we finally stumbled outside.
Something in the front of the car was burning, thin gray columns drifting up from the front. Caleb waved the smoke from his face. He lifted the hood, wincing as his fingers touched the hot metal, and inspected the blackened box inside.