Perfect Ruin

ladder into the clouds.”

She sits on the end of my bed and folds her legs. “Was I on top or on the bottom?”

“Next to me. It was a peculiarly wide ladder.”

She looks thoughtful.

“You were mad at me the whole way up,” I say.

“About that,” she says, dropping her hands into her lap. “Morgan, I’m sorry. I was being a child. I shouldn’t have been so vicious.”

“I shouldn’t have left without telling you,” I say.

“No, I understand. You didn’t want the competition when you met up with your secret Prince Wonderful.”

I throw my pillow at her and we burst into giggles.

Pen glances at my opened door, as though to be certain my mother isn’t nearby listening. Very quietly, she says, “What’s he like? Judas.”

“He’s …” I fall back against the mattress, considering. “Untrusting. And he seems sad.”

“Can’t imagine what about,” she says, caustic.

“I don’t believe he killed her,” I say. “I just don’t.”

“Well, you were alone with him in the cavern and you didn’t return hacked into bits, so there’s something to that,” Pen says. “Does Basil know?”

“Of course not. He’d never allow it.”

At the mention of my betrothed, I feel guilty. He proved trustworthy with my secrets the other day, and it’s wrong to keep things from him. I know this. But Judas isn’t my secret to keep. Telling Basil could hurt Judas more than it would hurt me.

“Maybe I’ll tell Basil once it’s safe,” I say. “When Judas is proven innocent.”

Pen laughs. “When will that be? According to what we’re supposed to know, he’s locked up in the courthouse right now while the jury selection begins. The king obviously has men searching for him. He’s going to be found and then he’s going to be found guilty.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe the real murderer will be caught.”

Pen crawls onto the bed and lies beside me, knocking her head gently against mine.

“Just be safe. You’re the only friend I’ve got.”

“You could make replacement friends,” I say. “Lots of people like you.”

“Awful beasts, the whole lot of them.” She wraps her arm around mine and squeezes.

“I’ll have to be careful, then,” I say.

“If anything happens to you,” she says, “I’ll kill him.”

I’m struck by the edge in her tone.

“Anyway,” she says, “I’m glad we’re not angry with each other anymore. In lieu of a festival of stars present, Thomas just wants to drag me around the city today. I was hoping you’d share in my misery. We can wear shell hats like the princess.” The king’s daughter is known for her sense of fashion.

“If we’re playing princess, we have to act as though we’re better than everyone,” I say.

“We are better than everyone,” she says. “Unlike the princess.” She shoulders me toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, get dressed. I’ll help you pick out an outfit. How you dress is a reflection on me.”

I end up borrowing her purple shell hat with synthetic fibers pinned to one side that are meant to mimic bird plumage. Basil stares at them while we’re pressed together on the train.

“You don’t like it?” I say.

“It’s just, I didn’t know birds could have pink feathers.”

“Birds are white, silly,” Pen says. “It’s just a decoration.”

“The birds we’ve seen through the scope are white,” Thomas says. “But I’ve read stories in which there were all sorts of species. Maybe there are pink birds in a different region. The ground has all sorts of climates.”

Pen huffs a pale blond curl away from her face. The train stops with a jolt and she breezes ahead of him, tugging me along. “Such an insufferable know-it-all,” she mutters. But I swear there’s a hint of a smile to go with the words.

The boys catch up to us and take our arms in tandem. Thomas kisses Pen’s cheek as she pertly raises her chin to accept. “It’s your day,” she tells him. “Where are we going?”

“The library first,” he says. “They’re having a sale.”

Most books on Internment aren’t for sale; we can borrow them from the library, and as the years go on and the spines begin to crack and the pages yellow, new editions are printed and the old ones are sold. When I was little, I was the first to borrow a newly printed library book and I hid it under my mattress. I wanted to know what it was like to own a new book for myself. One that hadn’t been worn down by someone else’s hands, with pages that hadn’t absorbed someone else’s spills.

After a week, guilt made me return it. I never borrowed that book again; I couldn’t bear to see it the victim of a stranger’s hands.

As we walk, Thomas and Pen gradually move a few paces ahead of Basil and me. Thomas whispers something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs. The shadows of clouds pass over them, and whatever Thomas was going to say to her next has been forgotten as he watches her. She’s a revelation in the sun, dazzling everywhere the light touches her. And not just today. Even when she’s sad, even when she sings off-key.

Basil touches one of the feathers. “Careful,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s not very you.”

I try to smile, but I’m still thinking about last night. I’m still thinking about the ground and if there are different kinds of birds. If things down there are mostly good or mostly bad. If they ever wonder about us.

Basil steals a kiss to my jaw, and I smile at my feet.

“There you are,” he says.

“I don’t mean to be distant,” I say, hooking my arm around his.

He stops our walking, and I realize that Pen and Thomas have stopped too. We’ve just passed the theater, and at the end of the block we can see what used to be the flower shop. It’s gray and splintered. The roof has caved in, and there’s a makeshift wire fence surrounding it now, with signs cautioning us not to approach.

Other passersby are staring at it, too.

“It’s depressing,” Basil says.

“Alice used to bring me here on the weekends when I was little,” I say. “It was one of her favorite places.”

Things aren’t the same. The patrolmen and this ruined building are proof of that.

After a few seconds, Thomas and Pen start walking again and we follow them. We go to the library and then to a tea shop. The day is full of light breezes and sweet aromas, but I cannot rid my hair of the smell of ash.

15

Each of us has a betrothed so that we won’t have to spend our lives alone. It leads me to wonder to whom the gods are married. The elements, perhaps. Or do they know something that we don’t about solitude?

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

AFTER CLASSES ON MONDAY, BASIL AND I spend time trying to skip stones on the lake. We don’t talk much; somehow that has stopped feeling so necessary.

As we sit on the grass, I watch the sunlight catch bits of gold in his hair and I think that he’s more