“Oh shit,” Noel muttered, eyeing the knife in Gabi’s white-knuckled grasp. “Oh, man, I shouldn’t have said anything.” He made to slide off the stool, but Gabi rounded the counter and placed herself in his path.
“No, tell me. He did say something about my mother, about me being thrown out like trash. What did he mean by that?” Noel sank back down onto the stool and buried his head in his hands, raking them through his messy hair. “You can’t come here and say those things and not tell me the rest,” Gabi insisted.
“Okay,” he said, dropping his hands. “But can you please go back over there? You’re kind of scary right now.” Gabi grudgingly retreated to her station at the cutting board but kept the knife in a loose grip. “Okay, so, you know how my mom works at the Care Center, right? On the Returned wards and sometimes Pediatrics?”
Gabi nodded. Vera Sutton rode the same bus as Gram to the Care Center, though her shifts were longer and more frequent since she was a full-time nurse who often worked labor and delivery. Vera Sutton always made sure Gram arrived safely at the lobby when the plaza was slick with ice and Gabi wasn’t there to accompany her. Nurse Sutton was usually there when Gabi came in for her checkups, or when she had one of her crises and needed to be admitted for an oxygen treatment. She had a way of talking to Gabi, explaining things to her so she wouldn’t be afraid.
“So, one night, a couple of years before my dad died, I heard my parents talking,” Noel continued. “Mom was tired. She’d been on the kids’ ward all day and all of the night before. With you.” Gabi nodded again. There were a lot of nights like that. “I remember that Mom was talking loud, venting to my dad about work. She was saying how it was hard for her to do her job when she didn’t know all the facts. My dad kept trying to comfort her, but she was crying. ‘That little girl,’ she kept saying, ‘that poor little girl is sick from something, and no one knows what it is. They say it’s because she was premature, but that’s not true. I was there.’ I couldn’t hear my dad so well, since he was talking low, trying to calm her down. She got quieter too, eventually. I knew you from school, and I was curious, because my mom never gets that upset about work.”
Gabi was shaking. The kitchen was too hot. She had on too many clothes. She wanted to reach out and cover Noel’s mouth with her hand, not in retribution for all the times he’d done the same to her but to keep an essential thread from being pulled, unraveling what remained of her world.
“Are you okay?” Noel asked uneasily. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I’m fine. What did you hear, Noel?” Gabi whispered, though he was right to be concerned. She might pass out and drop to the floor like a bag of rocks at any moment, just as she’d done on the ninth floor. But she had to hear him say it first. “Tell me.” Noel kept his eyes on the countertop, chewing his lip savagely before he spoke.
“She said she knew the thing about you being premature wasn’t true because she was with Brother Lowell’s wife the night she lost her baby. I didn’t know what that meant at first, like maybe somebody took you for a while or something, but then she said, ‘Therese’s baby died.’ Then Mom told my dad that Brother Lowell’s wife left the Care Center a few days later with you.”
Gabi’s knees gave out and she collapsed, bruising her tailbone as she crashed to the floor.
“Gabi!” She could feel Noel more than see him in the hot crackle of guilt that radiated toward her. Everything made her sick: the smell of the soup, the nearness of Noel, and the awful words ricocheting around the kitchen to pierce her again and again. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you okay? Say something!” Noel tapped her cheek with his palm.
“Why are you doing this? Why do you hate me so much?” Gabi choked out. “Why don’t you just leave so you can go tell Bradley all about it?” She was choking on hot, humiliating tears. How could it be true that Noel’s parents, Noel himself, and even Bradley Fiske knew all of this before she did? Was it the ultimate game? A way of hurting her in a way that would leave a permanent mark?
“What? No! I don’t hate you, Gabi, I swear. I was just messed up after my dad died. I felt angry at everybody, and Bradley’s so angry all the time too. He was just someone to be angry with, I guess. By the time I stopped feeling like that, I didn’t have any other friends left besides him and Geoff.” His words poured out of him like heavy marbles from a tipped box, scattering to lost corners. Noel dropped to his knees beside her. “Can I do something?” He cracked his knuckles convulsively. “I can’t leave you here like this. Please let me help.”
Gabi looked at him through the salty sting of her tears. There was only one thing she needed now.
“Do you have a car?”
JUST ABOUT everyone in the fellowship had cars. There were plenty to go around since the Strain more than halved the population. Some of the survivors had even built houses out of them, using their stripped shells for foundations and the interiors for furniture. Due to the impossibly high price of gas, cars were only used by councilmembers and when the worst weather conditions made walking to one of the
