“Where do you go?” I ask.
“Library most days, but I’ve read all those books practically. They have to bring books in for me from the county library, but my newest ones aren’t here yet. So today, I guess it’ll have to be the TV room.”
When the bell rings, we walk together to a small concrete-walled room with stains on the carpet and a television sitting on a low wooden stand covered in peeling wood-printed plastic. The couch in front of the TV is already full of girls, but they scoot off when Angel comes in. “You know,” I say, sitting beside her, “everyone here is so scared of you. But you don’t seem that tough to me. Bet you’re all talk.”
She snorts. “You’re funny.”
Angel takes the TV remote and presses some numbers until the picture changes. In the center of the screen, a blue ball hangs suspended on an ink-black background. The black is impossibly black, and the ball is laced with wisps of white.
“What’s that?” I ask.
Angel turns to look at me, her forehead bunched up. “Earth.”
“Our world?” I shake my head. “It looks like that? How’d they get a picture of it?”
“A spaceship or satellite or something.”
The camera zooms in to the surface and I shut my eyes. When I open them, the camera is beneath the ocean, a dark wilderness of shadows and pockets of blue light. It is vast, much vaster than I ever imagined. My brain is stunned watching it, taking in all the endless blue.
“All right, Angel. Enough science shit.” Rashida snatches the remote from Angel’s hand. “I’m switching it to my show.”
“Don’t even try, Rashida,” Angel says lazily.
Rashida stands with her fists on her hips. “You ain’t gonna beat me up, Angel. You like me too much.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really,” Rashida says. “I see you admiring my fine body day after day.” She does a quick twirl and slaps her butt. “Too bad I got a boy on the outs. Else, you and me’d make a cute couple.”
Angel cocks her head. “Please, Rashida, you look like a bunch of chopsticks got tied together with a rubber band.”
Rashida gasps, her hand flying to her hair, tied back into a puffy bun. “Angel, someday you gonna come asking for me and I’m gonna say, ‘Bitch, I don’t think so, you had your chance.’”
Angel laughs.
Rashida falls heavily into one of the ragged, duct-taped armchairs and punches a number into the remote. The image of the ocean is replaced by a picture of tanned girls shouting at each other.
“Give that back,” Angel says, tackling Rashida in the armchair and grappling for the remote.
The screen starts flicking through channels and the pictures fire past so quickly, my brain can barely keep up. An advertisement with a car driving through a forest. And an impossibly perfect-looking family eating dinner. A woman in a doctor’s coat talking to the camera. And—a man with a graying beard in a khaki prison jumpsuit.
“Stop!” I shout.
Rashida and Angel freeze where they’ve been shouldering for the remote and look at me sideways. It’s the loudest I’ve spoken since I got here. Most of these girls haven’t heard me say a single word.
“Go back.”
Rashida clicks back a few channels. “There,” I say.
My father’s face peers up from the screen. I slide off of the couch and sit on my knees, so close to the television I can see the tiny squares that make up the screen. My father shuffles slowly into a courtroom, his hands and ankles fastened to a chain around his waist. His beard has grown. Photographers and news people line the back of the courtroom, flashbulbs firing every few seconds.
“Samuel Bly will be the first of the leaders of the Kevinian cult to stand trial,” a woman’s voice narrates. “The DA is assembling a case against him that includes charges of statutory rape, accessory to statutory rape, endangering a minor, assault, and manslaughter. Bly was reportedly second in command to church leader Kevin Bilson, a self-described prophet who led the group into the woods twelve years ago.”
The image changes to a picture of the Community, perfectly preserved in a layer of snow and encircled in yellow police tape bright enough to shock the senses. The snow is so unbroken and white, it hardly seems anything unusual happened there, until strange shapes begin to reveal themselves beneath the snow. A large triangle betrays what was once a roof and, just as suddenly, the shapes of fallen-down houses start to materialize, a dozen of them, in a ring.
At the corner of the shot hangs a noose, drifting lazily in the wind. My throat closes at the sight of it.