“Fuck,” I whisper.
“Fuck,” she whispers back, a smile creeping onto her face. And, inside that smile is the knowledge that some things are just too sad, too screwed up. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but shouting “Fuck” with your best friend at the top of your lungs.
Chapter 52
In the morning, a moth flies into my cell, a floating gray piece of barely anything, rising and falling with irregular wing beats. It finds the flat rectangular fluorescent light set into the ceiling and immediately starts banging itself against the beveled plastic.
I stand and crawl up onto Angel’s bunk, waving my arm toward the moth to knock it away. “What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Help me,” I tell her, my eyes still trained on the crooked gray body. “Capture it. Set it free.”
“Why?”
“It’s going to kill itself up against that light,” I say. “That’s what they do. They think it’s the sun.”
Angel looks at me in that clench-eyed way that tells me she knows we’re brushing against something important, something from the past. She puts her book away and leans out toward the middle of the room, palms curved in cupped shapes. She swings once, then again, and the moth is inside her closed hands.
She leans back onto the bed, bending her fingers to make a crack so I can see its beating wings, held together by scales and veins. Angel carefully swings off the bunk. At the bars, she lowers her hands, then throws them in the air so the moth can fly out of the cell.
“It’s gone,” Angel says. “It’s free now.”
But I shake my head. “It’ll only do it again, somewhere else.”
“You can’t prevent that,” she says. “You know that, right? It’s not your job. It never was.”
And it’s then that I know she can tell what’s just fallen into the fingers of my mind: the rememberings I’ve kept back for months, those frozen moments pushed to the dark corners of my mind. The night Jude and I went back to the Community. The night when everything, all of it, came tumbling down.
? ? ?
That night, the entire world was frozen, including the air, which seemed to hold all things suspended. I looked to my left, where Jude stood, his breath a milky curtain before him. All around, the rigid trees groaned with human-like voices, their insides frozen in the position they’d held themselves before winter hit. I imagined how it might’ve gone, one night in November, they were sleeping and suddenly their entire bodies became stuck like steel. I felt like I’d been in that position all my life, frozen. And, now, suddenly, I could pick my head up and face the winter sky and glimpse the tops of trees and move my body in any motion I chose.
We knew we’d arrived at the Community by the tiny squares of dull orange light that materialized through the trees, windows of houses where I knew nobody was home. I could smell the purple smoke. They’d be in the Prophet Hall, and he’d be silly with the smoke, face inflamed, eyes tense and bright.
We circled to the back of my house. In their coops, chickens cooed at us just like they always did at someone they thought might feed them. Jude turned the handle of the back door. We passed bedrooms, the empty kitchen, and climbed the small rickety stairs to the maidenhood room. Jude pushed aside the sliding lock and the door creaked open. Inside, it was dark, but I could make out a small body lying on a pallet. She lay over the covers, her back a slim white sickle in the darkness.
“Constance,” I whispered.
She flipped around, her blond braid tucked between her neck and shoulder. Her lips parted almost imperceptibly.
“You’re back,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said, taking a step into the room.
“To marry the Prophet?”
“No,” I said, in disgust. “No.”
“Then why?”
“To rescue you. To take you with me. To tell you about what it’s really like out there.”
“We know all that.”
“No, you don’t. You only know his lies.”
“He doesn’t lie.”
The room was freezing but I noticed Constance’s cheeks were flushed. Sweat dappled her forehead. Something about her was different. Something about her had changed.
“Minnow,” Jude said, his voice low. “Look at—”
“Who’s he?” Constance interrupted, eyes darting to Jude for the first time.
“He came with me to save you from this place. That’s what I want you to know. There’s life outside, Constance. There are people, chances to be happy. Jude and I are going away from all this . . . this madness. And I want you to be there with us.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I’m getting married.”
“But you don’t have to. You can escape.”
Constance’s lips turned up at the edges. “But, I don’t want to escape. I want to marry him.”