And she’d reply, “You were willing to take that step. You just realized you didn’t—shouldn’t—have to. It was the Powers’ responsibility.”
If I could forgive the others—Four for messing up with the whistle, Red for sneaking into the researchers’ office despite my warnings, Rainbow for slipping up during the evacuation and alerting the agents to my and Alpha’s swap—then I had to learn to forgive myself, too.
It was a work-in-progress.
Caro had us try all her favorite flavors at Yogurt Palace.
“Do I look like a Robin?” Alpha wondered, sprinkling cookie-dough balls into her frozen yogurt cup. “Or a Cassie?”
Caro squinted. “What about Dahlia? You could be a Dahlia.”
Alpha seemed to consider it, taking a spoonful of froyo. A dab landed on her nose. She wiped it off and I swore I saw her grin as she licked her finger clean.
She looked like a Hazel.
One by one, visitors stepped across the threshold. Not only my grandparents, but also Aunt Lina and our neighbors. Amber-Lynn and Imani. A work friend of Mom’s, a cousin I’d never talked to. Agent Sanghani.
At night, I thumped onto my bed and stared at the same ceiling I’d stared at when the others had been in this room, whispering thoughts back and forth. I imagined what Rainbow and Red and Four might be doing. By now, would they still be explaining their absences, their injuries, their clothes? Rainbow would’ve told her Tara the truth by now. Red might’ve put our hoodies side by side on her bed and wondered if she could ever tell them apart. Four might’ve done a million things that I’d failed to do—
But I didn’t need to wonder what they did at night.
The same thing Alpha and I did. They would lie on their beds and think about the rest of us.
It helped to know that when I felt alone, another Hazel did, too. She might be curled up in her desk chair in the next room or the next world, same as me. When I felt insecure, another Hazel was probably smiling nervously or pressing her palms against burning eyes, same as me.
I’d gained a sister and lost three best friends in the blink of an eye, but over time, I saw them in the mirror and wished them quiet good mornings. I felt them when I made a smart-ass comment, when I clapped a rhythm to distract whirling thoughts, when I laughed with friends or said something wrong and chewed my lower lip.
When I touched the doorknob to my therapist’s office.
When I hid a zit with strategically placed locks of hair and smiled at Four’s (at my own) reflection.
When I opened that email from Tara’s phone and set the attached group selfie as my background.
When I told myself the same kindnesses Red might tell me if she were here, and I tried to believe every word.
When I asked Director Facet for leniency for Torrance and the agents and knew Four would be intimidated by Facet and impressed by me for asking, and I felt a sliver of the same.
When I sat alone in my room and said the word “lesbian” aloud for the first time, shaky but certain.
When Alpha said she was keeping the name Hazel and I wrapped my arms around her neck and whispered, “Good.”
I sat side by side with her and Caro and planned the trip we would take—maybe that summer, maybe the summer after, maybe never because I would chicken out, and thought, Well, Rainbow probably doesn’t have any trips planned, either.
I made jokes I knew the others would’ve laughed at and smiled before even checking whether other people were smiling, too.
I didn’t know if I was making the right decisions.
I didn’t know if I was becoming the right Hazel.
But maybe there wasn’t a wrong Hazel to be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corinne Duyvis is the critically acclaimed author of young adult novels Otherbound, which Kirkus Reviews called “original and compelling; a stunning debut,” and On the Edge of Gone, which Publishers Weekly called “a riveting apocalyptic thriller with substantial depth” and which won the Neukom Institute Literary Arts award. She is also the author of the original Marvel prose novel Guardians of the Galaxy: Collect Them All.
Corinne hails from the Netherlands. She is a cofounder of the website Disability in Kidlit and the originator of the #ownvoices hashtag.
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