As I Wake (9 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Scott
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Psychology, #Love & Romance, #Cognitive Psychology, #Law & Crime
English, like Government, it’s another class I am lost in, startled by references to things everyone seems to know about but that I can’t remember. Today we talked about pastoral imagery, which seems to mean that sheep and grass are more than just sheep and grass.
I look at the poem again, and manage to get about twenty lines in before my eyes start to feel heavy. I like the idea of green grass, of open spaces. It sounds so free.
I wish I could see grass like that, green grass, I think, and wake up with a start, jerking up so hard my chair squeaks. I look around, but the attic is empty and I let out a sigh.
Relief, I tell myself, relief, and rub my eyes, tell myself to stop dreaming and listen.
Nothing.
I adjust my headset, flex my fingers over the keyboard, and then type “56-412 watches television and eats chips.”
After that lie—another one, already—I look at my own small foil packet. The bread is so heavy it’s poked through one corner, dense brown that can only be tamed through thick mustard.
I wonder where Morgan is. I wish—
No. I have got to stop doing this, I can’t drift away, I have to stay here. I’ve worked so hard. It has been all I ever wanted.
Thought I wanted.
“Ava,” he says quietly—he’s here, again—and I turn around, the chair wheezing protest. It was not meant to move so fast.
“You have to stop coming up here,” I say, but I don’t mean it, watching as he pulls the attic door closed, and my heart is pounding from him, just from him, and I know, I know, I know him, it is the beating of my heart.
But what if someone saw him come up here? I am in the attic and he is on the top floor, in his own apartment, an unheard of luxury, but there are SAT everywhere.
I talk to the one low-level watcher who lives on the first floor every week and she tells me what Morgan bought at the grocery store because he always stops by to say “Hello” since they have to wait in the same line together. She is sure he always gets sausages when she never gets any. She thinks he must know someone, or that he is a thief. She wants to get proof so she can get him sent away and get an extra card for rations every month.
Sometimes I think life outside the crèche is no better than life in it.
“Why can’t I come up here?” he says and comes closer, moving so he is standing in front of me, then kneeling so I can see into his eyes, he can see into mine, I try to turn away but he puts his hands on my knees, not hard, not hard at all, his touch is so gentle, his thumbs moving in a slow circle. I feel myself sinking into the touch, into him.
Into us, and that’s just it—I see him and I see me and him and we—I close my eyes.
“I have to listen to you,” I say, trying to make my voice strong, and when I open my eyes he smiles, a small, crooked smile, and says, “But I’m right here.”
“I can’t—” I say and my voice is cracking because I’m scared someone has seen us—him—that’s all, I’m not scared of him, I’m not scared of what I think when I see him. What I feel.
Alive.
“I think about you listening to me,” he says. “You hear everything, don’t you?”
I bite my lip because I do, of course I do, and I know what his breathing in bed this morning meant, I wrote “56-412 masturbates,” and then sat, fingers shaking before I gave in and touched myself, thinking of him and wondering—hoping—he was thinking of me.
“I can have you taken in,” I say and he draws back a little. The sun, filtered in through the small, dirty windows, catches his eyes. They are brown, ordinary, but the way he looks at me—no one has ever looked at me like he does. He looks at me like he sees something. Someone.
Me.
“All right,” he says, and puts his hands behind his head. “Go ahead.”
24.
WAKE UP.
I don’t want to, I want what’s next, I want to be there, with him, and I—
“Wake up,” I hear, and sit up, disoriented, my English book falling out of my Chemistry book and hitting the desk.
I was here. I was in class, I am in class. I wasn’t in an attic, I didn’t see Morgan. We didn’t talk, we didn’t do anything. But it—
It felt so real. Embarrassingly real.
Frighteningly real.
Alive real.
“What’s this?” the chemistry teacher says, and he’s the one who told me to wake up just now.
I heard it twice, though. He said it and then before . . . before it didn’t sound like a voice at all. It was something else, it was action, I was being pulled back, away.
“I said, what’s this?” the chemistry teacher says again, pointing not at my fallen English book, but at my notebook, at the little branching sticks with number and letters appended to them that I drew, a squiggle tagged C
3
H
6
N
6
O
6
.
3
H
6
N
6
O
6
.
“I don’t know.”
“You think you’re funny?” he says, voice rising on every word. “We’re studying chemistry here, and you—you think drawing the formula for a lethal explosive is a good idea?”
“I—”
“Go to the office right now!” he says, and strangely, his anger and the way everyone around me falls silent because it feels far more familiar than all the other classes I’ve sat through, like somehow I’m used to being silent in class.
To being scared.
In the office, I’m told to sit and wait, that Jane will be called.
“You know about Mr. Green’s son and what he did, of course,” the woman who calls Jane tells me when she gets off the phone.
When I stare at her blankly, she clears his throat and says, “I—Sorry, Ava. Why don’t you spend the rest of the period in the nurse’s office while we wait for your mother.”
It’s not a question.
I get up, but instead of going to the nurse’s office I head outside, wanting to get away from the school and whatever is going on with me. This morning, with Ethan, and then just now, what happened, what I dreamed—
No. What I know.
What I remember.
Not that this Ethan is one I know, not that he’s someone I remember. No one here—except for Morgan and Clementine—reaches into that strange, hazy place inside me. In my head.
But still, somehow, someway, I remember a different Ethan. A different Jane. It’s like some people—Jane, Sophy, Olivia, Greer, Ethan—that are in this Ava’s life were . . .
Were somehow, and in very different ways, in memories that I’m not supposed to have.
Were in a life I know better—deeper, truer—than this one.
When I get outside, I look for Jane’s car even though I know it won’t be here yet. It isn’t. There is nothing to see but a guy sitting on the white stone bench by the street, watching me.
Morgan.
When he sees me looking, he stands up. Walks toward me, stepping carefully across the road. He doesn’t look like he belongs here. There is something not quite right about him; the way he walks, as if every step pains him, and how he looks around, as if everything he sees is unknown, not terrifying but new.
“I know you,” I say, and he smiles like I have given him the world.
“I would have come sooner,” he says. “You know that, don’t you? I just—it was hard to find you.”
“Why?” I say, and his mouth opens, but no sound comes out. The world flutters, then drifts.
Shifts.
25.
WAKE UP.
I sit up, startled and blinking, and realize I’ve slid off the orange chair again. I know it’s nothing but bad color and creaks and cracks, but to slide right off it?
I’ve got to stop falling asleep. I’ve got to stop sitting up at night staring at my hands and thinking about what I’ve typed. About Morgan.
I’ve got to stop wondering—wishing. I know what happens to people who do, poor Olivia with her heart in her eyes even as her brains were clubbed across the floor for not saying who she was sleeping with, Olivia dying as Greer stood next to me, shaking but watching without blinking.
You don’t question what happens, not ever, and I don’t want to die.
But he’s here. I know it, can hear him before I see him, and when I turn around Morgan is in the attic again. Sitting right next to me. Looking at me.
I have to report this. Report him. I haven’t done it yet, but I will, I will.
My fingers don’t move. Don’t type.
“You must have fallen off the chair,” he says, and I see there is a shirt tucked under me, soft fabric wedged near the edge of my head, as if someone has tried to slip it under me. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Yes, I sleep,” I say, and shove his shirt back at him, trying not to notice how soft the cloth is and failing. I have to stop this. I have to.
Something is off with him. I can’t afford clothes like his. Even if I do well, I could serve the government for ten, fifteen years—a lifetime—before I would even be let into the stores that sell shirts like his.
It takes a long time to move past being crèche. I was told that before I started training, reminded of it every day, in the years it took for me to make the few friends I have: Greer, Olivia, and Ethan. The three people who didn’t mind talking to me even though they came from where I want to be and I’m from where no one wants to go.
“You look tired,” Morgan says, as if we are talking, as if he wants to talk, and I stare at him because we—he—can’t talk to me like this. I’m a listener now, I clawed my way out of a bed shared by four, in a hall shared by hundreds, to be someone. To be here. To listen to him, who has more than I can ever hope for and doesn’t seem to care that he’s so close to being lost. To disappearing.
“Why are you here?” That is the one thing I can’t work out. I know there are always some who must test the government, that they can’t help themselves. But he does not organize protests in his apartment, doesn’t have dinners with careful conversations that will have to be picked apart. He goes to school, he reads, he eats. He lives.
I don’t know why he is being watched. But then, I am not supposed to know. He just is, like most everyone is at one time or another, and I am not even supposed to think about it. I am just supposed to listen. To be invisible to him, and report on what I hear.
I am not supposed to be sitting here watching him look at me. Watching him lean toward me.
But I am.
I am, and I wait, hoping for something I can’t even name but that I know. That I have been waiting for all my life.
He touches me, a feather-light brush of his skin down my arm, a spark I feel even through the roughness of my shirt.
I don’t mind being cold, or hungry, or sitting for hours and hours. It is familiar, it is the way things are. But this; the way he talks to me, looks at me, and now, the way he’s touching me—those things and the way they fill my heart—
These things I do not know. I just want them.
Want him.
I touch him like he is touching me, tracing my fingers up his arms, resting my hands on his shoulders. His eyes widen, then flutter closed, as if I overwhelm him.
He is so warm. He has steam heat in his rooms, I have heard their hiss and hum, and I can draw the layout of his apartment, his life there, in my sleep.
I can’t draw anything now. I am lost, the two of us sliding together, as if the floor was part of a puzzle we needed to lock us together.
“Ava,” he says, and then he kisses me.
I don’t know how to kiss him back, but I want to, I have seen his mouth in my mind every time I close my eyes, so familiar, so—so gorgeous.
He cups my face in his hands and there are freckles on his face, his nose, a few dotted on his cheeks, and there are gold flecks in his eyes.
“This is crazy,” he says, but there is wonder in his voice, gladness and nothing more. He is not afraid of me, he is ready for me, for this.
“Yes,” I say, because it is, but I don’t pull away. I let a lifetime of planning, of training, go in a moment, a heartbeat, and there is nothing in me that wants to stop.
It is my first kiss and yet it feels like I’m coming home.
“Come downstairs with me,” he says afterward.
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