“I didn’t hate you,” I choke, the words so thin and strained that they twist out of shape. “I don’t hate you. Or maybe I did. Once. Because I hated myself. And because I was so lonely. When you disappeared I had nothing left but myself. No one.”
I dry my eyes again, roughly; push my fingers up against them so I can rest in darkness for a few seconds.
“That’s why I can’t leave her there. Don’t you see? It’s not that I want to be the hero, to run in and save the day, it’s that she’s out there all alone. And you’re right—it is my fault. I’m guessing she stopped taking her meds so she could take painkillers, because she saw how much I wanted her to stay. It’s my fault she’s sick again and I can’t … I can’t just leave her there.”
Something in my chest has slackened. Old scar tissue, hardened and petrified. I’m not sure if that means it’s bleeding or healing. Emmy closes her eyes, then opens them again. The green in them flashes brighter when they’re red with tears.
“OK,” she says. “Then let’s do it.”
“You don’t have to come with me,” I say.
Emmy gives a faint smile.
“Yes,” she says, “I do. And you can’t stop me.”
“I probably could,” I reply, smiling back at her with trembling lips. “If I tried.”
Emmy opens the door.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get our boys and go.”
I walk up to her and stop.
This isn’t a movie. In a movie we would have hugged and been best friends again, now and forever. That’s never going to happen. I think I’ll be living with this dull pain for the rest of my life. I’ll never get back what we used to have.
But maybe that doesn’t have to be such a bad thing.
Maybe we can still live with each other, in some way, shape, or form.
“I’m glad you didn’t drown with me,” I say.
She nods slowly.
“I’m glad you didn’t drown,” she replies.
NOW
The square hits me as a shock, even though I know what to expect. The blackened car parts and sooty, withered greenery are an open wound in the silent village, a postapocalyptic vision in the middle of a tattered postcard.
The smell of ash and burning metal still hangs in the air. The school looms like a monster on the short edge of the square. The explosion was clearly the last straw for one of the doors, which seems to have fallen off its hinges completely.
We stop at the bottom of the front steps.
“Wait,” says Emmy.
She steps forward and stands completely still. Listens intently.
I do the same. Try to hear something, anything.
Footsteps.
Laughter.
Breaths in the darkness.
Not a sound.
Emmy looks around.
“We’ll stick together,” she says. “No one goes anywhere alone. No one goes off to look around. Not even in pairs. OK?”
I look her in the eye and nod.
“OK,” I say.
She gives me a quick, closed-mouth smile, surprisingly sincere.
“Then let’s go,” she says, and I follow her up the steps and into the school.
It’s warmer in here than outside—inexplicably so, given all the empty window frames and open doors. Beyond the pat of our soles on the broken glass, it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
When we open the door to the first classroom, it swings open quietly, no arguments. The classroom looks like it did the last time I was here. With Tone. The desks in neat rows; the alphabet posters on the walls, with letters in capitals, lowercase, and cursive; a slightly smaller chart of times tables next to the blackboard at the front.
Empty.
We move on through the other classrooms without saying anything. They’re almost the same as the first, only with different charts on the wall.
When we reach the last classroom, Emmy stops abruptly in the doorway.
Suddenly I’m struck by an image of Tone crouching under a desk, stony-faced, her head twisted to one side and her wild eyes fixed on us—or else hunched on a desk, her back bent, eyes glimmering under a dirty fringe, like something dangerous and alien. A monster.
I hate myself for thinking it, and even more for the fear that those crystal-clear images inspire within me; how they make my heart race and my mouth dry.
I can’t let myself fear Tone.
“What is it?” I ask Emmy quietly.
I swallow down my acrid fear and look past her shoulder. Someone has tossed the chairs around and flipped the desks. One of the little wooden chairs is completely destroyed.
Emmy takes a few steps into the room. She stops by the smashed chair, then turns. When I follow her eyes, I see a mark on the wall. It’s dark and uneven, a browny-red sweep over the peeling light yellow paint. It looks recent.
A slender, writhing chill plants itself at the pit of my stomach. My eyes sting.
What has she done to herself?
It’s impossible to fend off the image that pops into my head; of Tone, her ankle wounded and bleeding, her eyes empty, clumsily smearing throbs of blood over the wall.
Emmy turns to look at me. I clench my teeth as hard as I can and just nod.
None of us says anything, but we keep much closer together as we walk back along the corridor to the classrooms on the other side. We try to dodge the shrapnel on the floor, sneaking through as quietly as we can. There’s still no sound to be heard, beyond our own anxious breaths.
The rest of the classrooms seem untouched. But I start to notice something. The way the glass is lying on the ground looks almost as though somebody has already walked on and through it: some shards have been crushed and trodden down into the ugly green linoleum floor; others lie swept to one side in piles. Together they make an almost invisible, meandering trail.
I say nothing. I’m not even sure what I’m seeing.
We get back
