Plus One (2 page)

I snatched my phone from him with my good hand. “Sol Le Coeur.” My last name means “the heart” in French, but I deliberately pronounced it wrong, as if I didn’t know any better: Lecore.

His mother said, “You will go for an X-ray and come back here, Miss Lecore.”

Wednesday
6:30 a.m.

The pill they had given me was beginning to kick in. I felt a light fog settle in my mind as the X-ray technician walked me back to the treatment area. The boy was there but his mother was gone. I sat on the edge of the cot, unsteady. My finger was blessedly numb and I was very, very relaxed. I wanted to lie down and go to sleep for the day, but I couldn’t afford to rest: I had to get treatment and somehow find that baby.

After the technician left, the boy rolled the tray table over. There was a sheet and a pen on it.

“I … uh … the triage nurse forgot a release form,” he said. “You need to sign it.”

I looked at the paper. It was single-spaced, fine print, and I was in no condition to read.

“Give me the ten-words-or-less version. I’m not a Legal Apprentice.”

He huffed, as if I were a complete pain in the ass, and then counted on his fingers: “You. Allow. Us. To. Look. At. Your. Medical. Records.” He had nine fingers up.

He did it so quickly I felt a surge of anger at the realization that, yeah, the mama’s boy was smart. I grabbed the pen and said, “Hold the paper still.” I signed my name as if I were slashing the paper with a knife.

He put his hand out. “Now, may I see your phone again?”

I took it from my pocket and smacked it into his palm.

“Thank you.”

He scrolled through. He was looking for something.

“You’re underweight,” he commented. “You should get help for that.”

You’re right,
I thought.
How about a home healthcare worker, a shopper, a chef, a housekeeper, and a bookkeeper? Oh, and a genie to make Poppu well enough to eat meals with me again. But silly me: the genie can take care of it all while Poppu and I eat foie gras.

“Are you taking any medications?” he asked, after my silence.

“Guess.”

He looked up at me without lifting his head, as if he were looking over glasses. “Aside from melatonin and vitamin D.”

“No.”

His eyes drifted down to the phone again. “Do you want to think about it?”

“No!”

“It says here you took Modafinil four hours ago.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. He waited.

“I did,” I finally said. I didn’t bother to say it had been forced on me.

“Do you have trouble staying alert?”

The wild child surged in my gut. “It’s repetitive-motion factory work, after a full night of school. I wonder how alert you would be.”

He studied my phone again, his brow furrowed. “Sixteen years old. Seventeen in a few days. You should be acclimated to your schedule, if you’re sleeping enough during the day and taking your CircaDiem.”

I pinched my lips together.

He looked up at me. “So, you can’t stand your job.”

I rolled my eyes and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I had nothing to say to this guy. All I needed was for him to fix me up enough to be functional. The injury was supposed to be my ticket to the Day hospital, not an opportunity for psychoanalysis by some smug Day boy.

“What did you do wrong to get assigned to labor?”

There was something implied in the question, wasn’t there? He thought I was a thug, with a criminal record, maybe. But I couldn’t think straight. The adrenaline from the injury was gone, and I was feeling woozy from the tranquilizer.

His mother came in, and I didn’t exist again.

“It’s a tuft fracture,” he said to her as they studied the X-ray with their backs to me. “Does she need surgery?”

“Conservative treatment is good enough.”

Good enough for a Smudge,
I thought.

“Remove the nail and suture the nail bed,” she went on. “Repair of the soft tissue usually leads to adequate reduction of the fracture.”

I closed my eyes and drifted off as she rattled through the medical details. “Soft-tissue repair with 4-0 nylon, uninterrupted stitches; nail-bed repair with loose 5-0 chromic sutures…”

*   *   *

The boy’s bangs blocked my view of his face when I came to. I had trouble focusing for a minute, and my thoughts were thick. Luckily there was no chance I’d have to talk to him. He was working with such concentration on my finger he hadn’t even noticed that I was watching him. It was sort of touching that he was trying to do a good job with a Smudge, I thought stupidly. But then I realized, who better to practice on?

I closed my eyes. Normally I’d be cooking a late dinner for Poppu at this hour of the morning. Then I would read to him to distract him from the pain, and crawl into my bed with no time or energy left for homework. I sluggishly reassured myself that I had left him enough to eat and drink by the side of his bed. Everything made him sick lately, everything except rice and pureed, steamed vegetables. But what if he had trouble using the bedpan alone?

“Poppu,” I heard myself murmur.

“What did you say?” The boy’s voice was far away.

“Poppu.”

*   *   *

When I awoke again, my finger was bandaged, and the apprentice and his mother were huddled together, whispering in French. I heard the words “
la maternité
”—the maternity ward—and I allowed my heavy eyelids to fall, pretending to sleep.

“… I’ve had to do this before. It’s a trivial inconvenience.”

“Is the baby being reassigned to Day?” the boy asked.

“The mother is a Smudge.” She said the word “Smudge” in English, and I wondered, groggy, whether there was a French equivalent. “Her son will be a Smudge. Being the Night Minister does not mean she can rise above the law.”

“Of course,” the boy said. “And she wouldn’t be able to raise her own child if he were reassigned to Day.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, as if his observation had taken her aback. “I suppose. Yes.”

“So why are we moving the baby to the Day nursery?”

“She asked for him not to receive the Night treatment. That much influence the Night Minister does have.”

In a moment, I stirred on the gurney and took a deep, sighing breath to announce my return to the conscious world. When I opened my eyes, the boy and his mother were staring at me, standing ramrod straight. The clock over the boy’s shoulder said quarter past eight. I smiled, probably a little dreamily, in spite of everything. It was
daytime
, and I was
out of the apartment
. My half-baked plan was succeeding so far, in its own fashion.

An Hour Guard came to the doorway with his helmet under his arm. He had the Official Business swagger that’s so ubiquitous among ordinary people who are granted extraordinary authority.

No,
my heart whispered.

“Is this the girl who broke curfew?”

“Pardon me?” the mother said.

I stared at the boy until he glanced my way.
You didn’t
was my first thought, followed by a swift
Why?

He pinched his lips together and looked back at the Guard, who had pulled out his phone and was reading it.

“Curfew violation via self-inflicted wound?”

“Yes, she’s the one,” the boy said. His cheeks had ugly red blotches on them. “Her name is Sol Lecore.”

Little Doe

I was a freshman the night they took Ciel away, and he was a senior. It was the beginning of the school year, and I had chosen a seat in the back of my class. If you’re going to sleep through lectures and skip the readings, it’s rude to do it from the front row. I’m at least a thoughtful reprobate.

My first period, American history, had started normally enough. I was busy drawing on my desk as the teacher droned on about the flu pandemic of 1918. That was the year the population divided into Day and Night, during the second wave of the disease. They teach you the same curriculum in first grade and sixth grade, so it seemed pointless to listen in ninth grade. The picture I had drawn was a landscape, and a pretty fine piece of art, if I did say so myself. It was a view from inside the Council Overhang at Starved Rock, looking out at a stand of trees. I could draw that scene from memory; I’d been there so many times as a kid.

There weren’t many parks in Illinois that a Night family could visit for just a quick twelve-hour trip, leaving Chicago after dusk and arriving safely home before curfew at dawn. But Poppu was outdoorsy back when he could see, and he wanted us to learn to hike on the weekends, and to experience nature as he did when he was a child—or as much as we could with only flashlights and the moon to guide us. Starved Rock, despite its hiking trails worn by tourist traffic and graffiti on the layered sandstone, was still nature, and only one hundred fifty kilometers away by bus.

The new and amusing thing about the drawing on my desk was that another student had started adding to it in a class after mine. On the first night I had drawn the mouth of the cave, rocky and arched, and the silhouette of most of the trees by the time the bell rang. The next night the drawing had changed. Someone had added the moon for me—a gigantic, textured ball. No, on second thought it wasn’t the moon … was it supposed to be the sun? But every Smudge in the world had seen the sun through windows before we went to bed, and in movies and photographs, and this was not how we would have drawn it, even abstractly. This was a roughly spherical orb, with an envelope of short, hairlike appendages poking out around it. I’d smiled then at having an anonymous partner in crime. It was expertly shaded to give it depth, and the appendages were so intricate it must have taken an entire period to finish it.

Before class ended, I’d added more trees outside of the overhang, intertwined and reaching for the sky. As an afterthought, I’d drawn an arrow pointing at the orb, and I’d written:

Moon.

Sun
.

Alien ship descending to wreak havoc on planet earth?

Now, sitting down at my place on the third night, my heart quickened to see that my query had been answered.

Yes, in a way. Spanish flu virion.

The handwriting looked masculine to me: it was print, not script, half upright and half slanted to the left, which I’d once read was a sign of independence mixed with reserve. The letters were small, which was supposed to mean the writer was academic, or a thinker. Even though I was left-handed, my handwriting leaned violently forward, and the letters weren’t uniform in size, which supposedly meant insecurity and impulsiveness, with a tendency toward hysteria. I got back up from my seat, ignored the teacher when he paused his lecture to moan, “
Please
sit down, Sol,” and went to the bookcase to pull out the dictionary. A “virion” was the infective form of a virus particle. I took my seat again. The student had also embellished the landscape with a beautiful doe in front of the trees, looking directly at the viewer, head erect with alertness, ears cocked. There was an arrow like mine pointing to it, saying,

Actual deer I have seen near the Council Bluff. What shall we name her?

At the bottom of the desk, he had scrawled, “Class is obviously killing us both with boredom.” Below that some jerk had written, “Get a room.” I erased the comment and gave the deer a name:

Petite Daine.

Which means “little doe” in French.

There was shouting in the hall, and a jarring thud, like someone had been tossed against our classroom wall, and every kid turned to look out the open door. A couple of men in neatly tailored black suits walked briskly past, and then two policemen followed behind, dragging a struggling student. It was all so quick that I couldn’t see who it was they were manhandling.

“Where are you taking him?” I heard the contralto, raspy voice of the computer science teacher ringing above all the others from the direction of Ciel’s first period class. I got out of my chair instinctively. I knew what was happening in my gut, even though I didn’t want to believe it.

“Close the door, Sol,” my history teacher said, as if that’s why I’d stood up.

A voice blurted in the hall, “I didn’t do anything!” It was Ciel, and he sounded panicked.

I ran out of the room and screamed, “Ciel!”

It’s burned into my memory the way he looked back at me in that hallway, his shoulders scrunched up to his ears because of the force of the burly cops yanking him, his shaved head making him look like so much more of a thug than he really was. This was my brother, who washed and folded our laundry, and arranged Poppu’s clothing by color in his drawers and closet so that he could dress himself without anyone’s help. I exploded into a sprint in his direction. A teacher grabbed me, locking her arms around me at the level of my elbows. I shouted that it was a mistake, that he was the gentlest person in the world, and, “
You don’t know him!”
Useless arguments when dealing with the police.

Ciel was almost out of the building, still struggling. I couldn’t see his face.

“I love you, Sol!” he screamed, as if he would never be able to say it again.

Wednesday
10:30 a.m.

“Since when does an emergency room trip count as breaking curfew?” I shouted through the thick acrylic wall.

The Hour Guard lifted a black phone handset on his side, indicated for me to pick up the receiver next to me, and spoke calmly. “The doctors thought there was enough circumstantial evidence to investigate. They’re just doing their job. If you’re innocent you shouldn’t mind the inconvenience.”

“Their job is to heal people, not put them in jail.”

And who was he kidding? It wasn’t doctors who had done this, it was the freaking Medical Apprentice, whose gut I would sucker punch if our paths crossed again.