Dark Parties (5 page)

That’s when I heard the siren. Ethan shouted for me to hide. I should have been standing next to him. But I did what he told
me; I found a pocket created by crossed beams and I waited and watched. The police cuffed him and dragged him away.

They released him the next day, but Ethan is the new kind of missing. His body is still here, but there’s a part of him
that’s vanished. A part the government stole and I can never get back.

“Susan?” A man touches my arm, and the memory slips away. I turn toward him and he scans my face.

“Sorry,” he says, hands up in apology. “My mistake.”

I follow the man into the coffee shop and walk over to Ethan. “Hi,” I say.

He jumps. Even though he’s surrounded by people, he’s very much in his own space. I kiss him on the cheek. Scattered in front
of him are pages of sketches: a steaming chipped mug of coffee, a perfectly drawn set of hands, a pair of lips, and an intricately
sketched skirt, detailing every fold in the floral material.

“Hi,” he says, and shuffles his sketches together.

“These are great,” I say, taking the chair next to him and slipping a sheet from the pile. He has drawn an eye in minute detail.
It stares unblinking from the page. From the wrinkles at the corner, the shading on the eyelid and the long lashes, I know
it’s a woman’s eye. The tiny jagged lines in the white of the eye hint at sleepless nights. I can even sense sadness somehow.
I survey the other patrons and quickly spot Ethan’s model, a young woman slumped over her mug. Her eyes are welling with tears.

“You should be studying art,” I say, and take a drink of his coffee; it’s cold.

“I don’t want to talk about this again.” Ethan’s words have sharp edges. “The art school closed, so that’s that.”

“Look at these.” I pull page after page from his pile. “You are so talented.”

“What about you? Do you really want to study nursing?” he asks, snatching the pages from me.

“That’s my assigned job. It’s as good a job as any.” I have no idea what made the Job Allocation Panel think I’d be a good
nurse. I heard that 50 percent of graduates were assigned to health-care jobs, so maybe it has nothing to do with the résumé
package I submitted. “But you already had plans. You were going to be a great artist.”

“What do you want me to do?” He slumps in his chair.

“Get angry. Do something.” I’m louder than I intend. Time seems to stop for a second and all heads turn toward me. Ethan frowns
and shakes his head ever so slightly. My nostrils flare. I curl my lips into a smile to show everyone that everything’s all
right. Don’t stand out. Don’t make a scene. Don’t do anything to embarrass your dad. It’s the way I was raised.

Ethan scoots closer to me. “This opportunity with National Re-Design won’t come along for years, if ever. It’s a good job.
I start tomorrow and that’s the last I want to hear about it.” He collects his sketches in his open sketch pad and closes
the cover. He lowers his voice. “I’ll leave the protesting to you and Sanna.”

I can see the hurt in his eyes. He thought I told him everything. But he didn’t know anything about Sanna’s and my plans.
“I wanted to tell you,” I whisper. “I’m sorry, Ethan.” I hear sniffles. It’s Ethan’s eye model. Tears dot the woman’s cheeks.
“I should have told you, but I knew you wouldn’t like it.” I glance at Ethan and then back at the woman. “I didn’t want you
to feel pressured. I only wanted you to be involved if you wanted to. I didn’t think you would, so I—”

He holds up his hand to stop my string of excuses. “I can’t be a part of anything like that. You didn’t tell me because you
knew I’d try to talk you out of it.” And now the gap between us has widened again. How could he rebel against the Protectosphere
when generations of Harrisons have helped build and maintain it? Ethan’s father and older sister are engineers. His uncle
works in the plant that makes Protectosphere panels. His mother is employed as a weather monitor—maintaining the filtering
system and monitoring the weather program.

“But, Ethan, I think we can—”

“Not another word, Neva.” He looks around. “I don’t want to know anything about it. I wish you’d stop this nonsense with Sanna.”

The crying woman wipes her eyes on a lacey handkerchief and stands. She arches her back and I can see her full, round pregnant
belly. Ethan touches my chin and turns my face toward him. He whispers, “Do you understand how dangerous it is? If the government
finds out… my God, Neva, your father. What were you thinking?”

“How can you sit back and let them rob us of our future?” I try to keep my voice low, but the pressure inside me is building.

“Not the future I want.” He reaches for my hand and I let him take it. “I want us to get married and start a family.”

“Don’t be silly,” I say, but I can tell by the look on his face he’s serious. “We just graduated.” I try to withdraw my hand,
but he pulls it closer to him.

“Let’s stop wasting time.” He’s kissing the place behind my ear. The place he knows drives me crazy. “Courtney and Kieron.
Sara and Neil. Jasmine and David. They’re all getting married. Sara’s already pregnant.”

I try to focus on what he’s saying, not what he’s doing. “What about our vow? We promised. We can’t give in to the government.
Not now…” I stop talking because he’s not listening. He’s wrapping his arms around me, secretly caressing the side of my breast.
My body flushes.

“Ethan, please,” I say, but I’m happy for my body’s response. He kisses a line from my ear to the nape of my neck. I enjoy
the sensation until I think of Braydon. “Ethan.” I wriggle free.

He clears his throat. “We’re adults now, Neva. We need to start acting like ones.”

Where’s all this coming from? “Some arbitrary date on the calendar and some ceremony doesn’t mean—”

“Neva, I need to tell you something,” he interrupts. But he doesn’t say anything. He removes his watch and places his hand,
palm-side up, on the table. There’s a thin red line, like a cat scratch, hidden among the blue veins in his wrist, the place
usually covered by his watch.

“What’s that?” I ask, and reach out to touch it, but he turns away. “Ethan?”

“It’s a tracking device. They implanted it after I was arrested.” His back is to me so it feels as if I’m eavesdropping. I
can’t have heard him right. A tracking device? “They said that they will track my movements. If I go a year without any other
incidents then they will remove the device.”

I don’t want him to turn around. I don’t want him to see the shocked look on my face. If I’m with him, the police know exactly
where to find me. He feels contaminated. I cross my arms tight across my chest. He’s waiting for me to say something, but
my mouth is dry.

“I can’t be caught gathering with other people with tracking devices,” he continues. “If they see a cluster of us together
for too long, they’ll bring us in.”

I look around. Are they watching us now? I want him to take it back. Tell me it’s a joke. He used to have such a wicked sense
of humor. He regularly reset the clock in our history class ahead fifteen minutes so we got out of school early. He always
slipped in later and changed it back so the teacher was none the wiser. He was always doing little pranks like that. But when
he turns toward me, I can see it’s no joke. His eyes appear darker, haunted, next to his pale skin. “How could you keep this
from me?”

“Because of that.” He points to my face. “That look.”

I try to change my expression, but my face feels set in stone.

“So much is changing, Neva. I wanted—no,
needed
—us to stay the same.” He moves in for a kiss. I am repelled, but I force myself to give him a quick peck on the lips.

“I love you,” he says.

“Why are you telling me this now?” I search his eyes for something familiar.

“I don’t want this to happen to you,” he says, glancing at the thin red line on his wrist. I don’t know if he means the
tracking device or the way that it has drained the life out of him.

I caress his tiny scar with my finger. I can feel it there, right below the surface of his skin, a thin square. “Does it hurt?”

He shakes his head.

“I didn’t know that the government had started—”

“Me neither.”

“We’ve got to tell everyone. The government can’t do—”

“Please, Neva, no. I was forbidden to tell anyone.” He takes my hands in his. “Promise me.”

I nod. I wish he hadn’t told me. I can’t look at him without wondering who else is listening and watching and tracking our
every move. I want to tell him everything will be all right, but that would be a lie. I don’t want to touch him anymore.

“Neva, eventually you’re going to have to face facts. This is the future we get, and it’s not so bad.” He fumbles in his tan
canvas backpack, the same one he’s carried since kindergarten. He removes a few crumpled sheets of paper and smoothes them
on the table in front of us. It’s a printout of the morning news. “When are you going to realize you are in the minority?”
He points to a headline. “See, people support the Protectosphere. They want more government protection. Why can’t you just
be happy with the way things are?”

I read the headline: N
IGHTTIME
V
ANDALS
P
AINT
C
ITY
R
ED WITH
P
LEA FOR
H
ELP
. I grab the papers and read as
fast as I can. According to the story, these vandals wrote the words “Protect Us” more than one hundred times throughout the
City. The police are quoted as saying they believe it’s a plea for the government to strengthen the Protectosphere. Some right-wing
Protectosphere-loving group has claimed responsibility.

“Oh, my God.” I collapse into my chair. The government has transformed our protest into a statement of support. All our work
last night—our planning for weeks—hijacked.

“Neva, what’s the matter?” He’s reaching for me, but I wrench myself away. I stumble backward, knocking my chair to the floor.
Everyone stares at me.

“I’ve got to go.” I wad the story in my fist and dash out of the coffee shop.

“What the hell happened?” I ask when Sanna opens her front door. I shove the printout into her chest. She takes the papers
and studies them.

“Don’t know.” She shuts the door behind her, and we sit on the top step of her front stoop. “This is a colossal catastrophe.”

“How did they erase… I don’t understand.” I shake my head as if trying to jostle the pieces into place.

“All that work for a big zilch.”

“Worse than nothing. Now it seems there’s growing support for the Protectosphere.” I can’t stop picturing someone wiping out
all our hard work, making our statement of freedom the government’s rallying cry.

Sanna and I sit side by side staring at the boarded-up
houses across the street. I remember when those houses had families. Someone has stolen the plywood from the lower windows.
The houses don’t seem solid anymore.

We don’t speak. I don’t know what we expected to happen.

Sanna leaps to her feet. “What we’re forgetting…” She’s pacing as she’s talking; I can almost see the pinwheels spinning in
her brain. “Oh, God, Nev, this is really awesome. What we’re forgetting…”

I’m leaning forward, feeling her excitement build. “What?
What?
”

“Someone has seen our message. They had to coordinate the cleanup. There must have been these manic calls zinging back and
forth last night. They cared enough to counter our attack. Don’t you see?”

And the part of me that was deflated gets a breath of air. She pulls me to my feet. “We’ve got to check it out. See for ourselves.”

We take a train and exit into the stale air of the City. I know where I want to go. I lead Sanna toward the embankment. I
follow the same path that Nicoline and I took last night.

As we walk along, I’m almost afraid to look. I grab Sanna’s arm. I can’t believe it. “Over there. On the bench.” We slow down,
but we don’t stop. We nudge each other again and again. We are trying not to smile, but we must look like we are in pain by
restraining our euphoria. P
ROTECT
U
S
. The words I wrote in red still remain, but someone has book-ended the red with bold, block capital letters—N
O
and F
EA
R—in a brownish gray paint. Someone has littered the walkway with flyers that say “No Protect Us Fear!” Someone has scratched
the words into the stone of a statue and etched it on the wood of a bench. Our slogan has multiplied. If we had wings, we’d
be flying.

“What have you done?” my mom asks as she bursts into my bedroom. It takes me a moment to wake up, but only a moment. Mom’s
eyes are wide, her face is flushed.

“What?” I sit up. It’s morning already. Yesterday’s events come flooding back. Sanna and I felt like superheroes, for a few
hours at least. Until we saw the cleaning crews with their high-pressure washers and wire brushes removing our messages. Never
mind. It was a small victory and that is more than most people ever get.