“Wherever you were,” Ben said slowly, “we were there, too.”
The words stung. Because they were true and because someone else said practically the same thing to me: You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. That someone else suffered the ultimate loss. All for my sake, the cretin who must be reminded, again, that she’s not the only one. Life is full of little ironies, but it’s also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
Time to change the subject. “Did Ringer leave?”
Ben nodded. Stroke, stroke. The bear was bugging me. I tugged it from his arms.
“I tried to send Poundcake with her,” he said. He laughed softly. “Ringer.” I wondered if he was aware of how he said her name. Quietly, like a prayer.
“You know we have no backup plan if she doesn’t come back.”
“She’ll come back,” he said firmly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because we have no backup plan.” Now an all-out, full smile, and it’s disorienting, seeing the old smile that lit up classrooms and hallways and yellow school buses overlaid on his new face, reshaped by disease and bullets and hunger. Like turning a corner in a strange city and running into someone you know.
“That’s a circular argument,” I pointed out.
“You know, some guys might feel threatened being surrounded by people smarter than they are. But it just makes me more confident.”
He squeezed my arm and limped across the hall to his room. Then it’s the bear and the big kid down the hall and the closed door and me in front of the closed door. I took a deep breath and stepped inside the room. Sat beside the lump of covers. I didn’t see him but knew he was there. He didn’t see me but knew I was there.
“How did he die?” Muffled voice buried.
“He was shot.”
“Did you see?”
“Yes.”
Our father crawling, hands clawing the dirt.
“Who shot him?”
“Vosch.” I closed my eyes. Bad idea. The dark snapped the scene into sharp focus.
“Where were you when he shot him?”
“Hiding.”
I reached to pull down the covers. Then I couldn’t. Wherever you were. In the woods somewhere off an empty highway, a girl zipped herself up in a sleeping bag and watched her father die again and again. Hiding then, hiding now, watching him die again and again.
“Did he fight?”
“Yes, Sam. He fought very hard. He saved my life.”
“But you hid.”
“Yes.” Crushing Bear against my stomach.
“Like a big fat chicken.”
“Not like that,” I whispered. “It wasn’t like that.”
He slung the blankets aside and bolted upright. I didn’t recognize him. I’d never seen this kid before. Face ugly and twisted by rage and hate.
“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to shoot him in the head!”
I smiled. Or tried to, anyway. “Sorry, Sams. I have dibs.”
We looked at each other and time folded in on itself, the time we had lost in blood and the time we had purchased in blood, the time when I was just the bossy big sister and he was the annoying little brother, the time when I was the thing worth living for and he was the thing worth dying for, and then he crumpled into my arms, the bear smushed between us the way we were trapped between the before-time and the after-time.
I lay down next to him and together we said his prayer: If I should die before I wake . . . And then I told him the story of how Dad died. How he stole a gun from one of the bad guys and single-handedly took out twelve Silencers. How he stood up to Vosch, telling him, You can crush our bodies but never our spirit. How he sacrificed himself so I could escape to rescue Sam from the evil galactic horde. So one day Sam could gather the ragtag remnants of humanity and save the world. So his memories of his father’s last moments aren’t of a broken, bleeding man crawling in the dirt.
After he fell asleep, I slipped out of bed and returned to my post by the window. A strip of parking lot, a decrepit diner (“All You Can Eat Wednesdays!”), and a stretch of gray highway fading into black. The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.
On the highway, beside an SUV that had run into the median strip, starlight glinted off the unmistakable shape of a rifle barrel, and for a second my heart stopped. The shadow toting the gun darted into the trees and I saw the shimmer of jet-black hair, glossy and perfectly, annoyingly straight, and I knew the shadow was Ringer.
Ringer and I didn’t start off on the right foot, and the relationship just went downhill from there. She treated everything I said with a kind of icy contempt, like I was lying or stupid or just crazy. Especially when Evan Walker came up. Are you sure? That doesn’t make any sense. How could he be both human and alien? The hotter I got, the colder she got, until we canceled each other out like either side of a chemical equation. Like E=MC2, the kind of chemical equation that makes massive explosions possible.
Our parting words were a perfect example.
“You know, Dumbo I get,” I told her. “The big ears. And Nugget, because Sam is so small. Teacup, too. Zombie I don’t get so much—Ben won’t say—and I’m guessing Poundcake has something to do with his roly-poly-ness. But why Ringer?”
Her answer was an icy stare.
“It makes me feel a little left out. You know, the only gang member without a street name.”
“Nom de guerre,” she said.
I looked at her for a minute. “Let me guess, National Merit Scholar, chess club, math team, top of your class? And you play an instrument, maybe a violin or cello, something with strings. Your dad worked in Silicon Valley and your mom was a college professor, I’m thinking physics or chemistry.”
She didn’t say anything for a couple thousand years. Then she said, “Anything else?”
I knew I should stop. But I was in now, and when I go in, I go all the way in. That’s the Sullivan way. “You’re the oldest—no, an only child. Your dad is a Buddhist, but your mom is an atheist. You were walking at ten months. Your grandmother raised you because your parents worked all the time. She taught you tai chi. You never played with dolls. You speak three languages. One of them is French. You were on the Olympic development team. Gymnastics. You brought home a B once and your parents took away your chemistry set and locked you in your room for a week, during which time you read the complete works of William Shakespeare.” She was shaking her head. “Okay, not the comedies. You just couldn’t get the humor.”