Above (7 page)

“Why’d you go?” I ask. I keep my voice soft, tunnel-soft to cut the echo. She smells like sweet and fear-sweat, like flowers. Real flowers.

I’ve never asked her that since the first time she ran. The first time, she cried and cried, and I let her get away with not answering. Her left wing brushes my arm. My skin’s damp from running; it tickles, drags, and sticks.

“He was yelling.” Ariel stares at her clasped hands. Her voice is hot and hollow, every letter heavy as the last.

“Ari, what happened? Who did he think you were talking to?”
Who
were
you talking to?
I stay soft. I am soft and edgeless and quiet and kind. She doesn’t answer.

It could be Normal people, neighbors. It could be someone come in from Safe, shimmying up the drainpipe for god knows what reason. It could be herself, fake Tale-telling conversations like I used to have late at night, before I had an Ariel to talk to. But I know what Jack thinks.

Jack thinks shadows.

It couldn’t be
, I tell myself. It couldn’t. She was with me, in our house, the whole day. She couldn’t have let Corner in.
Except when you were sleeping, and thought she was sleeping too —

I lean my head on my tucked-in knees, close my eyes. Light bounces and sticks out its tongue behind them. Light won’t leave me the hell alone. “I yelled at him. I ran,” I say.

Nothing.

“They’re gonna think I left ’cause I was mad.” The space between my legs and my torso is dark and clean. My eyes don’t hurt for the first time all day.

“Sounds like you did,” she says, funny and tight.

“No —” and I look up, and the sunlight wipes that clean soft dark away. “Above’s not like Safe. You can get lost here.” I talk square at her pointed, skinny face so she knows I’m serious now, deadly serious. “There’s dangerous people out Above.”

Ariel looks at me a second. And then she laughs.

She laughs and laughs, leaned back against the inside of the red plastic tube, and it echoes so loud it’s hard to tell where the real thing stops and the ghost of her laughing begins. “Oh, Matthew,” she says, again and again. “Oh, Matthew —” until I start to get angry for real.

“Hey,” I say soft, then louder. “Hey, shut up. I came for you.”

She doesn’t stop like a bulb going dark but slowly, in sniffles and eye-wipes and the occasional gulp.
Not scared of me
, I realize, and my heart does a little bounce. But
Above they laugh at you
, Atticus’s voice said at lessons, his arms crossed, claws rattling each other with every shift of his weight.
Freak’s for teasing Above. Don’t ever stand to be teased.

She never laughed at me in Safe.

“Don’t laugh,” I say, softer than I meant to, and her face goes slack and small and edgeless and she puts her hands on mine.

“Oh, Matthew,” she says, real different now, and leans our foreheads together.

I breathe in spring. I breathe spring and gold and the smell of powdered honey, sweet as peaches on the back of your tongue. My eyes water. It’s a thousand kisses in a breath.

Five minutes or an hour and she leans back against the wall, pulls apart that quiet mixing of breath. The quiet stays inside me though, in a warm and steady ball just above my heart. I breathe into it. It keeps me warm.

I don’t know where we are. All the streets Above look the same, houses and houses and the blank blue sky, and the signs don’t mean a thing and there aren’t no walls or landmarks. I’ve broken the first rule of traveling Above: I wasn’t counting right, running like I was. I’ve lost the turns.

“I don’t know Above,” I tell her, wiping my nose on the knee of my jeans.

Ariel tugs a thread from the sleeve of her shirt, holds it up to the light. It shines silver. Iridescent. “I do.”

Ariel leads through the dying afternoon, and I follow.

We walk slow and steady through row after row of peak-roofed houses, green-brown lawns, shut blinds. My feet hurt after the first ten blocks and they hurt more after twenty, and the buildings, the streets, the sloped-round corners blur. There’s no nuances to Above; nothing close or made of comfort. The buildings hunch each away from the other, not one house touching the next, standoffish with bricked-up suspicion.

It takes me too long to realize it: We ain’t going back to Doctor Marybeth’s.

Every step we take goes farther and farther from the bits of Above I know: the careful paths Atticus and Mack drilled us to remember in our sleep, sewer to supply and back again. Every step makes me more and more lost, and Ariel doesn’t talk. Her back is straight and solid, even though in Safe she hunched down sad all the time. I don’t know what to think about that. I follow her. I count the turns.

They’ll think you ran away
, I tell myself, strong beats down as my feet hit the raggedy pavement.
They’ll
think!
You
ran!
A
-way! I close my eyes between the stirring weak streetlights — Jack-magic, those — and picture all this carved on Doctor Marybeth’s solid white door. The curving arc of a bee in flight, running. Doctor Marybeth and Whisper and Jack, opening the doors of safehouses to dead bodies, or set upon by shadows, shadows that burn them into bones, or dust, or nothing; caught by Whitecoats with their needles and papers and cold eyes.

“Where we going?” comes out before I know it.

We ought to go back. We need to go back.

“Somewhere Safe,” she says, and I follow, trip-footed, after.

The buildings get bigger. They lose their pointed roofs and grow to three stories, five stories, up. They get plainer too: Red brick turns into brown or white and smooth, the kind it’d take months of polishing to get for one cavern wall, and then they start melting together in rows. The road beside us is wider: more cars noise by like the sound of coming trains, and more people.
Don’t touch me
, I think at them as they pass, chattering and weaving and heads upturned to the darkened sky. I can tell my breath’s coming fast.

You belong here
, I tell myself over and over.
You grew up here. You’re nothing else but Normal.

A lady with a rattling blue cart passes by, leaving a gap, a gasp in the crowd. I reach through it and take Ariel’s hand. It’s warm, dry. Mine is damp and it holds too tight.

She doesn’t shake me away.

The streets have quieted and narrowed and settled again when Ariel stops, squares her shoulders, and takes me up a rounded, sloping walk to the double doorway of a towering brown building. There’s washing hanging on the balconies, little hoards of goods and chairs stacked up those white box walls.
Apartments
, I think, holding tight to her hand. Atticus had an apartment once; people and people living stacked up like soup cans, locked together inside a giant kitchen cabinet.

Ari opens the glass door and slips inside a room smaller than Doctor Marybeth’s bathroom: nothing but glass doors both ahead and behind, dark tile, yellow bug-stained light. It smells musty, like smoke and old food.

I slip a hand in my pocket. Find my matches. Hold on.

There’s a button beside the second door: no, racks and racks of buttons, and names in a long list beside them. The light behind them hums and spits in the dark. I raise my eyebrows at Ariel and she just flicks her eyes over like I’m a kid who doesn’t know right from left. She runs one finger down the list, kissing-distance away.

“Ari?”

“
Shh.
”

She does it until someone comes in with their keys, looks over at us and away again, and lets himself through the heavy glass door.

Ari waits ’til he’s around the corner, then catches the door with her foot, quick as shadowfall. It lands loud and heavy on her shoe. I’ve known her long enough to catch the grimace.

“Ari —” I say. She doesn’t even need to shush me this time. She just
looks
.

A few heartbeats later she opens it and slips through the gap between door and dirty wall. She holds it open for me, impatient, sharp like I’ve never seen her. “C’mon,” she says through her teeth. She’s annoyed at me, and I don’t know why.

No; it’s for not following the rules. Not knowing the rules of this, of here.
That ain’t fair
, I want to say, but this isn’t the time and it’s not the place. I bite it down and follow into the soft, dim hallway.

We go up thin-carpeted stairs, seven flights that give under my shoes in a way so much more kind and even than the rubber tire and rock of the common. Ariel opens the thick metal door at the top real soft, and closes it even softer behind us. Leads me into a hall with dull green carpet, dull beige walls; doors and doors and doors. She goes up and down the hall twice, hands stuck into fists, lips trembling around some word I don’t know the shape for. Talking to herself. Talking to someone else.

Who were you talking to?
my mouth shapes, but no. Not now.

A little hump grows under the back of her shirt, and then she shakes herself, shakes it and my hand off her pale little arm and knocks, three knocks on one of the plain brown doors.

There’s a shuffle, a mutter. The lock clicks from somewhere inside.

When it opens it’s a girl with red hair, a deep fake-color red all standing up straight from the middle of her shaved-sides head. Her skin’s almost Freak-thin, pale enough to see the blue, tired veins under her dark eyes. One hand’s in her pocket. Where people keep their matches.

Her eyes don’t look like Safe.

There’s no brand at my shoulder. I don’t have fire.
Get behind me
, I want to say,
let me handle this
, but I don’t know what I’m handling, and the words stick like cold toast in my throat.

The girl doesn’t look at me. She looks at Ariel, and her face is smooth and hard as crab shell.

“Bee,” I think I hear Ariel say, blurry and small.

“Hey, baby,” the girl says and takes that hand out of her pocket, rubs it tired along her skinny, nubbly scalp. “Welcome home.”

W
HISPER’S
T
ALE

Whisper always whispered. From when she was small.

There were ghosts living (well, not
living
, she laughed) in the attic of her old redbrick house, and they toppled the umbrella stand, stole the silverware, kicked the pipes, and gossiped when she slept. Whisper’s mama cried and carried on and got a prescription for female troubles. Whisper’s papa denied he heard any such thing, but he spent most of his day at The Company and slept like a dead body himself. Whisper’s big sister got quiet and grave and talked lots about windspeeds and coincidence. Whisper was little, and Whisper heard voices. So Whisper whispered back.

The ghosts (she said, and smiled so her wrinkles folded and stretched) didn’t expect any of that. They stopped their rattling, paused mid-kick, plucked air instead of pinches under the bedsheets at night. “I’ll send you to bed without supper,” Whisper scolded them, the worst punishment she knew, and after a month of prospector’s silence they whispered back.

It was okay when she was a child. Little girls with imaginary friends were little girls who didn’t need to be minded. When she was too old for dolls, she would sit with the phone to her ear for hours, and her sister and mother made suffering faces and let her talk to the air. But once she finished school and all her girlfriends were Missus Something, whispering got hard.

There were ghosts in the trees and ghosts in the alleys, but the shiny new apartments built for respectable young women did not have any ghosts, and the ghosts who were her best friends were firm about not leaving. Ghosts can be strong about their places (she told me) and sometimes don’t even quit ’em when the house goes down. So she stayed in the old attic room, and that was what made the trouble.

There were no young men, you see. Young men weren’t much conversation after years and years of ghosts, who swore and laughed and told you dark true things (and I begged Whisper to tell me the dark true things, but she only smiled a little sad smile and shook her head). Whisper’s father thought there ought to be young men; there comes a time (Whisper said, and the lines came out sharp in her face even by lamplight) when respectable young women need to be out of their fathers’ houses for the good of all involved. He introduced her to the sons of neighbors and bought her tickets to community center dances and even had words with the shy young banker down the street.

So when he walked by her attic door that last night, he thought it was young men.

He beat the door open roaring, his face red like gunfire and fists ready for whatever young man his grown-up daughter was whispering to in that giggling, singsong voice. But it wasn’t no young man, and fathers can’t see the ghosts in the walls.

Whisper’s father brought in the same doctor who had helped her ma with the female trouble. The doctor sat Whisper in his office, took her pulse and made her breathe into a tube, asked her about her dreams and whether she had boyfriends, and pronounced her Sick.

They sent her to the hospital that same morning.

Whisper was part of General Population: That meant that she was Sick, but not scary or a Freak or someone who couldn’t be let out of her room. In General Population there were other Sick girls. They talked to walls too, except for her roommate, who didn’t talk at all, but pointed to stray sentences in books and newspapers to ask you for the salt. They told her about midnight visits from angels and colors shifting bright inside the potted plants.

No
, said the ghosts, who had heard of Whisper through a chain of whispering that stretched from her attic to the hospital in the park.
We don’t think those things are really there.