His voice echoed around the clearing. Tears fell from the bridge of my nose and cleared a path through the blood on his cheek. “Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun?” he continued.
“The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus,” I began, but Jude had stopped singing. He was struggling to breathe.
“But smiles are made dear, for people like us,” I sobbed.
His eyes slid shut, and I heard the Prophet pronounce, “The Rymanite is dead,” and my father’s impossibly strong arms pulled me from the ground.
“No!” I screamed, jerking against my father’s grip, but he didn’t let go.
The ground was so frozen, the blood just pooled on the surface and rolled over to where they were standing, touching the hems of their dresses and pants. They backed away from it, like death was catching.
And I beat against my father’s arms the way I should’ve years and years before, because all I wanted was to keep looking into Jude’s face, but by then the tears were obscuring my vision, and the white-hot rage was coloring my periphery, and so I contented myself with sobbing his name over and over so if he lived, he’d know I was still there.
The last thing I remember, before they dragged me away, was looking into the woods and catching sight of Waylon, his face a half-moon behind the trunk of a tree. He must have followed us. His mouth was open in a silent scream, fingers gripping his face like claws.
His eyes latched onto mine. I opened my mouth and screamed.
“RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”
Chapter 54
I wake up the day of my parole hearing, and around me the world is acting as if everything is normal. It’s not. It’s my last day in juvie. The last day I’ll drink powdered soup in this cafeteria, the last time I’ll observe this procession of girls in orange, the last time I’ll see Angel for who knows how long, the last day I’ll go to reading class. I sit beside Rashida on our upturned buckets around Miss Bailey’s rocking chair as she opens up The Giver and begins to spell out the story of a boy who learns to see the world as much more than he’d ever imagined.
Jude is waiting for me, right now. While Miss Bailey reads, I bring to mind the directions he gave me to the cave where he’s living: south of the bend in the big river, near the heron pond where we fished once. The place he wants us to spend the rest of our years, the cave in the wild where he thinks we’d be safe.
A knock comes from the classroom door. Benny peeks her head inside the room. “Miss Bailey, Minnow is needed upstairs.”
“Can’t it wait until after class?” Miss Bailey asks.
“No, it’s important. Official . . . prison business.”
She sighs. “Fine. Go ahead.”
I stand and walk with Benny out of the classroom. She’s acting strange, glancing around corners before she enters hallways, and her pace is much quicker than usual. I have to hop to keep up with her.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Shh,” she hisses. “Can’t you tell we’re doing something covert?”
When we arrive at my cell, the door is open and Angel stands beside my bed, her hands clasped in front of her.
“Happy birthday!” she says, gesturing toward the bunk.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We pulled some strings,” Angel says. “I told you I run this place. Go ahead. Open your presents.”
On my bed, there is a small collection of items. One of them, unwrapped, is a book with a picture of space on the cover. “I got you your own copy of Cosmos,” Angel says. “You’ll need your own wherever you’re heading next. Benny helped me order it.”
I stroke the book and look up at her. “Thank you,” I whisper.
“And Benny got you a Spanish doubloon.”
Inside the folds of Benny’s hand is a rough-edged gold coin. I take it between my stumps. “What is it?”
“It’s just a replica,” Benny says. “Back in pirate times, if you lost a limb, the captain would pay you. A missing hand got you thirty doubloons. Not a replacement, more of an acknowledgment of something lost. It was the sense of justice, more than anything. Figured you deserved a little compensation.”
I smile at her, a warm feeling rushing up from my stomach.
“Thanks, Benny,” I say, slipping the coin onto the copy of Cosmos.
The last gift on my mattress is a shoebox. The lid has already been removed and placed to the side. Inside, I can see only a mound of crumpled gold tissue paper.
Lightly, I dig through the jumble of paper till my stumps touch something cold. I push the paper aside and see them. Two hands made of silver. My mind can’t make sense of them, but my heart is drumming hard against my ribs, like it recognizes them. Even in the artificial light, they gleam. The fingers are thinner than real fingers, leaner, like knobby twigs.
“That doctor of yours is pretty full-service,” Angel says. “House calls, obstruction of justice, the whole nine.”
“What are these?” I ask.