“What do you mean?” I ask.
She gives me a hard look from the corner of her eye. “You just see it a lot, is all. Little country girls get thrown in here.” She waves to the other girls, and I know in that gesture she’s acknowledging their differences, their different-shaped eyes, some ringed in charcoal-like lines, their different lips with shades of sparkle and shine adhered to them. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t be the first time I got a roommate who had a problem with it.”
“I’m not looking at them because I’m scared,” I say. “It’s just . . . for all those years, I never saw anybody different from me. The Prophet didn’t believe it was possible, all these people living side by side. He told us people who didn’t look like us were evil.”
She nods her head knowingly. “Yeah. There are plenty of people out there who think the same thing.”
“There was a boy I knew,” I say tentatively, and I know I’m speaking almost too quiet to be heard above the din of the cafeteria, but I can’t speak louder because it feels wrong bringing him to life in this place. “His name was Jude. He lived in the forest. I met him when I was fourteen.”
Angel puts down her plastic fork. “He was your boyfriend?”
I nod, though I never called him that.
“And he was a different color?” she asks, wariness palpable in her voice.
I nod again.
“And what happened to him?” The way she asks it, I know she already knows the answer.
I look straight into the miniature blue discs inside each of her eyes, inside the angry folds of her face, and tell her. “They killed him,” I whisper. “I think they really killed him.”
Chapter 10
The night we met was warm, stars hot in a black sky. I sprinted through the trees with tears tumbling down my face. I was fourteen, and I had decided I was going to run away.
I knew I must’ve been one of the first to ever leave the Community. The Prophet taught us that our little clearing was protected by God, that if we ever left, the Gentiles would hunt us down with their bullets and heat-seeking missiles and poison gas, that on every telephone pole in every city hung wanted posters with our faces. He said that every Gentile knew the name Minnow Bly, and they cursed it.
Earlier that night, I’d fought with Vivienne, my father’s third wife. I’d dropped a dish during washing, and she stuck out her rigid finger and gave me that tired old lecture about how it was almost time for me to marry and no man would want me if I didn’t arrange myself into the shape of a good woman. “Fine, then I won’t marry!” I said, and she reminded me that the job of a Kevinian woman was to marry. If a woman doesn’t marry, what’s the purpose of her? I threw down my dishrag right then, because I knew everybody else agreed with her.
I was out of breath from running. A stitch in my side made me gutter to a stop at the edge of a clearing.
My footfalls were almost silent over the scattered, dead pine needles, but he noticed. The boy, sitting on the front porch of his family’s handmade cabin. I had never seen someone like him for so many reasons, for the way his shoulders fell back easy as he stripped pine needles from a twig, for the way his feet sat bare and dusty inside the rolled hems of homespun trousers, for the way his skin was a brown color I hadn’t seen since we moved to the Community. I could feel the window through which I viewed the world—no larger than a pinhole back then—broadening somewhere at the back of my mind just by looking at him. I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough. I wanted to stare at him for lifetimes, the perfect pores of him, his high eyebrows serene, like he’d never seen how angry God could be.
His eyes found me where I stood, sheltered in the shadows. There was a quiet moment when neither of us spoke, each of us standing with a new tension in our backbones, his shocked forehead, my parted lips and fingers splayed to my sides.
“Are you one of those cult people?” he asked after a moment.
My lips snapped shut. “We’re not a cult.”
“That’s not what my daddy says.”
“Well, I’d know, wouldn’t I?”
He squinted at me. “You sure look like a cult person.”
I glanced down at my long navy dress, belled at the elbows and waist. I touched my little white bonnet self-consciously.
“And you look like a ragamuffin,” I responded. “Don’t you have shoes?”
“I got ’em. I just don’t wear ’em unless I need to.” He buried his toes in the fallen pine needles. “You’re not supposed to be here. There’re signs all along our land. ‘Keep Out,’ ‘Private Property,’ ‘No Trespassing.’ Didn’t you see ’em?”
I remembered the livid black and red signs speared to tree trunks with railroad spikes. “I saw.”
“Then why didn’t you keep out? Cain’t you read?”
I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth and pressed my teeth together.
“You cain’t read?” he asked, quieter.
“And you can?” I asked.