“Where do you want to be?” she asked. “When it happens.”
There was a framed picture on your desk. It was too dark to make it out, but I didn’t need to. I knew which one it was. It was the photo Dad took of him and Mom standing side by side, drenched in sweat and grinning madly, giving the camera a goofy thumbs-up. Just behind them was the side of a white moving van. Looking closely, you could see my hands reaching up into the van while you handed me a cardboard box. It was the day we moved to Black River.
“Anywhere but here.”
24
HANNAH AND I sat on the hill overlooking the park. Below us, hundreds of infected circled a bonfire. The hum of their conversation mixed with the smell of smoke and roasting meat.
“The Ferris wheel was your idea, wasn’t it?”
I looked away from the fire and found Hannah watching me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Greer told me. I was standing by one of the booths with Ren and Makela when he ran up and said, ‘Card said we should take a ride on the Ferris wheel. Just me and you. Together.’ He was all jumpy when we got on. Talking a mile a minute. But then we got to the top of the wheel, and our car stopped. It was so beautiful, with the lights and all the people, that it even shut him up. Before we got moving again, he leaned over and kissed me.”
She drew her legs up to her chest, hugging them.
“It lasted about two seconds before we both started laughing. He said he didn’t know if he had any cousins, but he was pretty sure that kissing me was like kissing one of them. I told him I’d rather be kissing Snow Cone.”
She smiled a little at the memory.
“Every time I close my eyes, I want to be back there at the top of the Ferris wheel, but I end up on the bridge instead. Was it like that with you and . . .”
I nodded. She moved closer and laid her head on my shoulder.
“Does it get better?”
“Sometimes it goes away for a while,” I said. “But it always comes back.”
“Not for much longer, I guess,” she said. “Not for you.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
A few guys managed to bring down a small tree at the edge of the park. The crowd cheered as they dragged it over and hauled it up onto the fire, branches and leaves and all.
“Who was he really?” Hannah asked. “Before.”
“It doesn’t?matter.”
“It does.”
“Why?”
Hannah was quiet a moment. “Because I want to know all of him,” she said. “And once you forget . . .”
Down below, the bonfire leaped higher as it consumed its new fuel. Leaves curled and turned to ash. What could I do? Tell her that when I met Greer, practically the first two words out of his mouth were “mongrel” and “trash”? Or that half a second after that, his big brother pinned my arms behind my back so Greer could give me a black eye? Or that they’d done the same thing to Luke Tran and Rashawn Walken and to a dozen other kids like us? Telling Hannah any of that felt like killing him all over again.
“That other Greer—” I said, “—that wasn’t him.”
We watched the fire until it died down and the crowd thinned, wandering off into the dark. Eliot waved up to us, and then the others fell in behind him and he led them back toward the high school.
“How much time is left?” Hannah asked.
I looked at the moon hanging just above the tree line. Pretty soon the sun would be coming up over Lucy’s Promise. “Not long.”
We started down the hill side by side. Hannah took my hand and held it tightly. The feel of her skin, warm and slightly rough against my own, was still so new. We passed the remains of the bonfire and crossed the park. In the days since the riots the rubble had been cleared away and the worst scars in the grass had been filled in. Softened by the moonlight, Monument Park looked almost like new.
“We moved into the school’s auditorium after you left,” Hannah said. “There’s more room and we can get away from everybody else. One day Freeman came by and gave us a copy of Hamlet. He said no one could truly understand what it meant to be human until they’d read Shakespeare.”
“Sounds like something he’d say.”
“So we started reading it which, of course, led the kids to actually wanting to perform it. Maybe it’s crazy, but I thought it’d be good for them. Take their minds off things. Turns out Makela was born to be on the stage.”
We came up out of the park and started along Magnolia Street.
“Makela?”
“I know,” Hannah said. “I thought it would be Astrid, but as soon as Makela got onstage, it was just obvious. She’ll be playing Hamlet, of course. Tomiko is Ophelia. I’m playing the queen.”
“So you’re an actor now.”
She laughed. “I was going to say no, but then I started reading it, and—have you ever read Shakespeare?”
“A little.”