The Here and Now (4 page)

“It never comes up. It won’t come up.”

“You say that and I believe you. I’m just saying he might not see it the way you do.”

I walk faster. “I can handle it,” I say. “We are allowed to have friends, you know. We’re supposed to have friends. We’re supposed to fit in.”

“We’re not supposed to have friends who look at us like that.”

I stop. I look at the flower bits on the sidewalk, under our feet, floating in puddles of yesterday’s rain. I’m gripping my books so hard my hands are sweating. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I can see Jeffrey feels bad. “Pren, I just don’t want you to …”

“I know,” I say.

“I don’t want them to …”

“I know.”

He glances around to make sure we are alone. “You know if any of these people find out the truth about us—no matter how nice and trustworthy they might seem—they will destroy you and destroy all of us.”

How many times have I heard those words? “I know,” I say grimly.

“Be careful?”

“I’m careful.”

Early that evening I hear the front door open and close. My mother is home, probably with dinner.

I finish my physics problem set and head downstairs.

Chicken, biscuits and coleslaw sit in bags on the kitchen counter. I get out two plates and two sets of silverware.

“Just take whatever you want,” my mom calls from the front hall, where she is going through the mail. “I’ve got to finish confirming appointments for tomorrow. I’ll heat some up and have it later.”

I leave the plates and silverware on the kitchen table. I’m hungry, but I’ll wait.

Most teenage girls probably try to avoid having meals with their moms, but I’m the opposite. I’m always trying to corral mine into something that looks like a family dinner. The fact that my mom avoids it probably just makes me do it more. I guess a person rebels where she can.

My father was the one who was so big on setting the table. He said family dinner was the backbone of civilization, and in our old life we sat down together night after night, five of us, then four of us, then three of us, even as the world was falling apart around us. That backbone didn’t hold up too well.

I had two younger brothers who died within a few months of each other in the third dengue fever epidemic—the one that become known as the blood plague—the year before we came here. It is one of those facts, as true and cold as any other. It seems to me like a failure of language that that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into
one word
. “Experience.” Just a regular old crowd of letters that doesn’t care about you or your brothers. I picture using that as my next hangman word.

It is almost impossible to think of that “experience” happening in the same life, in the same world we live in now.

My father, whom we called Poppy, survived the plague. I thought he was making the trip here with us, but he disappeared on the night before we left.

“He chose not to come,” my mother said, like it was just a case of cold feet or a more pressing obligation. But I know it wasn’t that. I may never know the truth, but I know it wasn’t that. I don’t bring it up with my mother anymore. I can’t bear the look on her face. He broke her heart too.

I go through the kitchen door to the deck beyond it. I lean on the railing and watch the sun go down. I search the sky for a crust of the moon.

I love this time of day. I love this time of year and the way our backyard comes to life with the wide white flowers of the dogwood trees and the clusters of daffodils that I myself
planted. I can smell the verbena wafting from the bushes along the garage.

I’ve been here for four years, and I still can’t get over how beautiful it is. At first it was all too jarring and strange for me to enjoy it—the sounds, the colors, the smells, the shocking sight of squirrels and birds and chipmunks, the fact of being allowed to be outside in the first place. But now I enjoy it every single day.

I am amazed by the lushness, the generosity of it, all the things you can eat and plant and pick, the places you can swim. People here act like the great things have already been lost, but they are wrong. They have so much still to lose.

I hear the sickening whine of a mosquito and I freeze. I listen for it with hyper-tuned ears, waiting for it to land, which it does, pure quivering evil on the wooden rail beside me. I fight back the impulse I learned as a very small kid: never let a mosquito get close enough for you to slap. Now I take a nasty pleasure in smashing them when I can.

Back where I come from, mosquitoes represented our most primitive fear, the central fear all the other fears orbited around. We zipped our nets and sprayed our toxic sprays and said our prayers and huddled in our dark, decaying houses because mosquitoes carried death. It’s hard to unlearn it, even now. They don’t bring disease to this place, but for us they still bring memories and awful dreams.

Not yet
. They don’t bring death here yet. I stare at the nasty speck in wonder and revulsion. We’re not afraid of the kinds of things people here worry about, like robberies and murders. Even the hurricanes and floods here are quaint compared to what is coming. This place seems almost laughably safe to us.
The mosquito is the thing to worry about when the world gets wetter and hotter. Because when that happens, the mosquito’s territory is everywhere and its season is always.

It’s a wisp of nothing, its life barely bigger than a day. It has no will, no feelings, no memories, and for sure no sense of humor. I stare at it in sick fascination, waiting for it to make its next landing on my arm or cheek or ankle.

Maybe it does have a will. How else can you explain the number of its victims? Millions of people with big lives and heads packed with memories and all the stuff they knew—the accumulation of thousands of years of human history.

It is unfair. People versus mosquito. Who should win? We built rockets and cathedrals. We wrote poems and symphonies. We found a passage through time. And yet. We also wreck the planet for our own habitation and the mosquito will win. Unless we succeed in changing course, it will win.

Maybe it does have a sick sense of humor. I smash it under my palm. It will win, but not yet.

I see my mother through the kitchen window. I go back in and wash my hands. I see she’s managed to thwart my table setting by getting a sole plate and hunching over the kitchen counter to eat.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Good. Yours?” She’s eating quickly and she doesn’t look up.

“Okay.”

“Listen, I got another call from Mr. Robert this morning.” She’s focusing on her coleslaw. “According to him, you followed a stranger for four blocks yesterday and asked her about her rain boots.”

“Oh, right.” I should be contrite, but remembering it, I’m kind of excited. “She had my old boots! You know, the bright blue rubber ones hand-painted with ladybugs and parrots and geckos? Do you remember them? I loved those!”

She’s picking at her chicken. “Prenna, the point is, that is red-flag behavior, and you know it.”

It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. There are so many clothes now. But by the 2070s there was almost nothing new being made, and by the 2080s we were all wearing recycled stuff, a lot of it recycled from now. By the late 2090s, by the time we left to come here, most of it was in tatters. I’ve seen sweaters and scarves and jackets just like ones we wore. I once saw a man in a plaid vest across the street, and I followed him around for an hour thinking he could be my dad. That was red-flag behavior too.

“They aren’t like my boots. That’s what was so amazing. They
are
my boots. They are unmistakably one of a kind. I’ve always wondered who painted them. That’s why I couldn’t help asking. It was this twelve-year-old girl. She didn’t look so great—I don’t think she’d brushed her hair since Christmas. And she wasn’t very nice either, come to think of it. But she was the artist! Pretty incredible. I guess your artist is never exactly who you want her to be.”

My mother looks up at me exactly once to indicate she is not enjoying my story. Katherine liked it better when I told her.

“Mr. Robert also mentioned he’d like you to do two extra counseling sessions this week and take the Saturday shift helping out at the office.”

“Seriously?”

“Prenna.”

“It was totally harmless.” I think a change of subject is in order. “So, how’s Marcus doing?” I ask, taking my plate to the table.

“He’s, well … he’s alive.” She starts putting the food away. I know she won’t say more, and really, she can’t say more. I can only imagine how hard it must be to go to her job at the community clinic every day and watch a boy with kidney failure not receive dialysis.

My mom got her medical training at the end of a golden age of technology, so it’s got to be frustrating not to have so many basic things here. The leaders mostly won’t take on big equipment that requires special training or certification. But these are not my mother’s decisions to make, as she sometimes tells me.

She used to be a respected doctor and researcher, according to my dad, in charge of her own lab. It’s hard to picture that now. Here she mostly does paperwork and schedules appointments. She came here wanting to prevent the plagues, and I’m sure that’s what she cares about most, but I can see how the rules make it complicated. I don’t think she’s in charge of anything now.

I know this must be depressing for her, but not because she tells me so. She never argues, never complains. She rarely says much of anything at all, except to scold or caution me. She is an exemplary community member in that way. She eats and she works and she cleans up the house and she eats again and she reads, maybe, and she goes to sleep. Under her mosquito netting—that is her only quirk, her only concession to the past.

She’s been through terrible things. Sometimes I think she’s
lost the idea of love. For her I think it’s another luxury. It just makes it harder when you lose people.

No, that’s not true. She loves me. I can see it in her face sometimes. It mostly takes the form of fear, when I say something or do something I shouldn’t.

I set out two bowls and two spoons and a pint of ice cream. I sit down at the kitchen table, hoping she’ll notice. I feel like at least one of us should hold on to what little we have left of our family.

She finishes washing her one dish and fork and turns to go. “Good night, sweetheart.”

Unfortunately, I am alone in feeling that.

Love,
Prenna

FOUR

“Did you finish problem set C yet?”

Ethan rarely announces himself when he calls me. No
Hey
or
Hi
or
How’s it going?
It’s like in his mind we are engaged in a perpetual conversation that happens to be quiet a lot of the time.

I take a breath. I dread it’s him and I’m glad it’s him and I’m especially glad he can’t see my face. I sit at my desk in my bedroom shuffling through my physics papers. “Yeah.”

“Tricky, didn’t you think? Those last two?”

“Um …” I find the paper. They hadn’t been. Should they have been? “Sort of. Not too bad.”

“Of course not, Henny. They were only tricky for the normal people.”

I recoil a little but say nothing. I know I find school easier than most people. I am self-conscious about it. I’m not sure why I am this way—if it’s because of my father’s energetic homeschooling or if it’s just a quirk of my brain. Sometimes I
wonder if it’s the reason they let me come here. To a different person I would say something like “I already got to this section in a summer school class,” but I had vowed the first week I met Ethan never to tell him any inessential lies. He pays too much attention and has a strange gift for catching me in them.