“You know what I can’t stop thinking about? Jude never knew any of this. He’s alive out there, I can’t tell you how, but I figured it out, and he wants me to find him in the mountains. But I keep thinking that, even if I did find him and told him everything I’ve learned, he wouldn’t understand it in the same way I do now. I don’t know how that can be.”
“Nobody’s got the same mind. Nobody perceives the same.”
I nod. “The Prophet said stars were God’s eyes and all that time I knew he was wrong, but I believed him. How is that possible? Belief shouldn’t be compatible with lies, but is.”
“Did you know any of this stuff six months ago?” he asks, and when I shake my head he says, “If another Prophet came, you’d be ready. You have weapons.”
I hold up my hands, but he shakes his head. “I’m not talking about those kinds of weapons.”
“I know some facts about stars, but that doesn’t even begin to answer everything. There’s still too much I don’t know.”
“You know what I heard the other day?” he asks. “I was listening to the radio in the car and I had to pull over, just to listen. They said scientists think there might be other universes, maybe an infinite amount of universes. Maybe a new universe forms every second. And these universes might have different versions of ourselves, making different choices and leading totally different lives. Problem is, nobody knows if any of those theories are true, but that doesn’t discourage the scientists. The way they see it, if we keep looking, one day we’re bound to find out. We have to be happy to keep searching and not knowing all the time.”
“You’re talking about God.”
“No,” he says. “I’m talking about anything you can’t see.”
I shake my head. “That’s not what Angel thinks.”
“I know what Angel thinks. I’m talking about what you think. It’s my opinion that you shouldn’t deny your mind the chance to stretch, to go places, simply because you don’t have evidence. I think it’s high time you figure out what you think.”
? ? ?
That night, with the dark of the jail unchinked by even a single pinprick of light, I lie on my thin mattress and consider this. I’m realizing that I’m the only person I never asked my questions to. I never thought I could count on my own answers.
I think about the universe, and the earth, and the stars, and I ask myself a question.
Is Charlie there?
No.
But is something there?
Maybe.
Maybe.
? ? ?
In the morning, Benny drops an envelope off at my cell. Inside is an official notice that my parole meeting is on the 15th. My eighteenth birthday. Three days from now. I have prepared myself for it, how I’ll look over my shoulder at the meeting room door, hoping Dr. Wilson will show. But he won’t. Waiting with held breath for their decision to fall, which will crash over me like a chest of broken china. Denied, they will say in their voices of metal. I’ll be shackled by some brusque guard who will drive me to Billings and dump me in a group cell block of muscled women with face tattoos and rotten teeth. And suddenly every good thought this place managed to inflate inside me will be punctured, because that cell door will clang shut behind me and nothing will be my choice again. The future is locked in place.
I’ll have to say good-bye to Angel, whose work getting me into the Bridge Program will have been for nothing, and Benny and Miss Bailey and Rashida and Tracy, and everyone at juvie I’ll miss when I’m gone. I wonder if Dr. Wilson will say good-bye. I wonder if I’m useless to him now that he knows I will never give him the truth he wanted.
And I wonder if I’ve really lived out my life. If, even when I’m eventually free, a year or two or five from now, I’ll still be trapped, just like my parents were in their trailer park lives, in the drudge of everyday, the weeds in the backyard that never died, the rusted-out truck that broke down every morning. The only thing that blurred that to the periphery was the Prophet, who cast a new kind of clean light on their lives with every step he took closer to them.
And I almost understand now how you can be so trapped you’ll throw the whole world away just to get free.
But I didn’t understand it then, the last time I saw the Community, before the fire ate it all and ruined everything. That night, there was no room for anything but one thought: get Constance. Save her.
? ? ?
Jude lifted Constance in his arms. She was bucking and fighting, her screams cutting through the empty house. We ran down the stairs and Jude wrenched the back door open with his free hand. Standing in the doorway was my father. I only saw his face for a moment because Jude kicked the door closed and shouted, “Run!”
We tried the front door, but it was no good. They were all there, filing out of the Prophet Hall and into the courtyard. From their fists hung lanterns. In their eyes burned hatred.