Plus One (36 page)

I thought about that. There was a small chance that she’d be a hero and public opinion would insulate her from political backlash. And then I recalled the power of the Day government over Night and I knew it was more likely she would be crushed.

Finally I said, “You’ll have your husband, and Fitz, and your health. And you’ll know you did the right thing. Given what my grandfather went through—where he is right now—that doesn’t seem too shabby.”

Sunday
12:00 Noon

Within twenty minutes the cops arrived on a police boat with their lights flashing and took me away. D’Arcy and Minister Paulsen were dropped off at Monroe Harbor, where he was free to go and she made her way home with a Day pass to see her little boy.

I spent those last twenty minutes flanked by Mr. Jones and Mr. Thomas, in the company of the person I valued more than life itself, while Ciel retreated to the bridge with Minister Paulsen. I knew she was going to put heavy pressure on him in the next month to find a technical solution to her “problem”—a technical solution he in fact already possessed and would have to hide from her. Everything depended on Ciel’s strength.

I wasn’t worried.

D’Arcy wasted too much time talking about how we would find a way to have the charges dropped, how his parents had friends who were powerful Smudge lawyers, how I couldn’t be tried as an adult, how if it came to a trial we’d win, and if we didn’t win, I would get off with time served. I had to stop him. It was like hearing Poppu’s oncologist talk about treatments we hadn’t yet tried that had near-zero probabilities of success, when all he wanted was to enjoy the last weeks as pain-free as possible, curled in his bed listening to me read, or reminiscing about all the beautiful places we had been together.

What D’Arcy didn’t understand was that I had gotten more than I dreamed possible when I’d stubbornly watched that heat-sealing plate descend on my finger. Poppu had not only held Fleur before he died, he’d seen Ciel again and he’d met Kizzie. Both Fleur and Fitz were with parents who loved them. The medical procedure that had killed Poppu would be exposed for what it was and—if there was any sense left on this planet—might be discontinued.

But most unexpectedly, I had met my desk partner. I’d grown to know and love the real person behind the drawings, and we had somehow snuck a moment of passion past a world designed to keep us apart.

“Will you tell Hélène thank you for me?” I asked D’Arcy, not revealing to Thomas and Jones that the thank-you was for returning Fitzroy to the hospital.

D’Arcy nodded, understanding perfectly. “She’s not half-bad when she’s being subversive.”

“And tell Jean that I only really started to fall in love with you when I saw what you might look like when you’re fifty.”

He laughed, and then got too serious and said the words I didn’t want him to say, but I knew he would. “I’m going to wait for you, Sol.”

I shook my head, having practiced what I would reply. “Always remember that I won’t hold you to that.”

“It’s my choice—”

“And if you change your mind, that’s fine.”

“You’re starting to infuriate me.”

I wasn’t fooling myself that there was only one person in the world for me or for D’Arcy. He was young and he was a Ray. I was a Smudge, and I had no future, even in the Night. If I got something as long as a five-year sentence, he’d be a different person at the end of it, with thousands of days spent living and working in the sunlight, while I might become stunted and isolated. He’d make friends, he’d grow into adulthood, he’d begin practicing medicine as a real doctor. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that no one else could ever attract him, that no one else deserved him. There was a smart, sunny girl out there right now somewhere, a Ray on a trajectory that would cross his path, a girl who made sense with him. I was just as glad not to know her this very minute, but she existed, and he would run into her, and with time I would accept it.

No, that was wrong. I wouldn’t accept it so much as continue to breathe, the way I somehow did after Ciel was taken away and Poppu began dying: fifteen inhalations a minute, twenty thousand times a day, eight million times a year, each breath a bit more work than it should be.

“You don’t have to think about it now,” I said. “Just remember someday, if you need it, that I didn’t ask you to wait.”

“May I kiss her?” D’Arcy asked Mr. Thomas, his voice irritated.

“As if this conversation isn’t torture enough,” Mr. Thomas replied.

D’Arcy took that as a yes. With the low September sun creating a sort of halo behind him that seemed pretty damned fitting, he held my jaw in his hands and pressed his lips on mine. He did it with such gentle authority that the only message I could possibly receive was “I’m going to wait for you.”

Acknowledgments

I wouldn’t have set a word of this book down if Eric Fama Cochrane had not challenged me to a novel-writing duel in the summer of 2011. The manuscript he produced was more fantastical than mine in every way.

The poem D’Arcy wrote on his desk was inspired by a 2011 online
Forbes
article by journalist Susannah Breslin about her cancer diagnosis.

Grady Hastings’s “What Is True Belongs to Me” speech is a composite of the thoughts and words of many authors more eloquent than I: Seneca, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Émile Zola, Walt Whitman, Thomas Paine, Clarence Darrow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Special thanks to Simon Boughton, Angie Chen, Sara Crowe, Susan Fine, Kate Hannigan, Linda Hoffman Kimball, and Carol Fisher Saller for insightful comments; to Sally Fama Cochrane for suggesting pinealectomies and for teaching me about the biological rhythms of Siberian hamsters; to Lydia G. Cochrane for French consultations; to Dan Carey and Dave Vargas for showing me around the University of Chicago steam tunnels; to Gary A. Becker for stargazing help; and to Dana Pietura, who makes me seem outwardly put together.

Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010

Text copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Fama

All rights reserved

First hardcover edition, 2014

eBook edition, February 2014

macteenbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Fama, Elizabeth.

    Plus one / Elizabeth Fama. — First edition.

       pages cm

    Summary: In an alternate United States where Day and Night populations are forced to lead separate—but not equal—lives, a desperate Night girl falls for a seemingly privileged Day boy and places them both in danger as she gets caught up in the beginnings of a resistance movement.

    ISBN 978-0-374-36007-8 (hardback)

    ISBN 978-0-374-36008-5 (e-book)

    [1.  Love—Fiction.   2.  Social classes—Fiction.   3.  Government, Resistance to—Fiction.]   I.  Title.

PZ7.F1984Pl 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2013028762

eISBN 9780374360085