“Oh, I don’t know the details, don’t worry. But things get around fast in our community. Basia keeps her ear to the ground. She knows Erica Muller and had a passing familiarity with Max Langer. He and the mine made the news, of course, but we filled in the rest from her. That’s why I knew I could trust you.”
Amid the bustle of the station, I slumped on the hard wooden seat, unconvinced. “But I didn’t even—why did you?—”
“Because people can change, Lou,” Rebekah said over the roar of the approaching Green Line train and the mellifluous voice ushering us onto it. “I did, so it’s fair to assume you did, too. Isn’t that wild?”
“It is kind of wild.”
“Right?”
“What… What happened to him?” I asked against my better judgment, crowding onto the half-full car and sliding onto the hard plastic seat next to Rebekah. I clutched the pole as the train jerked into motion, taking us closer to Rebekah’s townhouse in Brighton. I glanced warily at the passengers on either side of me, hoping they couldn’t overhear. “I mean, we all knew he went to the mines. But did he?—”
“You don’t have to look so nervous,” Rebekah said. “I don’t mind talking about it. These things should be talked about.”
These things.Like they were a case study out of a sociology textbook instead of a love story. But maybe that’s how she had to train herself to look at it in order to move on.
Move on. Move on. Move on.Even the very train wheels beneath me seemed to be murmuring it as they spirited me away down the tracks.
“I didn’t even look,” Rebekah confessed. “I didn’t want to know, and what could I do, anyway? If my parents found out I was searching for him, we could lose what little we still had to cling to. Plus, I had my sisters to think about.”
“But—” I closed my eyes.
“The mines are a death sentence, Lou. You know that.”
Of course I knew. And I knew that with just one less stroke of luck—without Max Langer—that was how my own story—ourstory—would have ended, too. Good God, we owed that man a lot. And I hoped that wherever he was—on earth or otherwise—he had some good tequila.
“Did you love him?” I finally asked because let’s face it, that’s what I really wanted to know.
Rebekah answered with conviction. She’d thought about this. A lot. After all, she’d had time. “I was only sixteen, Lou. I didn’t know what love was. And neither did he.”
Did you not?“But did you?—”
“What do you want me to say?” Rebekah cut me off. “I think of it, and of him, every single goddamn day. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened. I wanted to die for a long time afterward. I came close to making it happen, and at that school, I wasn’t the only one.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as if she were speaking directly to the cosmetic dentistry ad plastered above the seat on the other side. “I still spend a lot of nights lying awake racking my brain for just one thing I could have done differently, one thing that could have saved him and me. But that’s pointless because this isn’t the pastanymore. It’s the present. And we can only take it all—all of our anger, all of our regret, and all of our compassion—and give it to the ones we can help right now. Because they’re the ones who need it.”
I clamped down on my lip, hard, as if a sob might escape if I didn’t. I knew Rebekah was talking about her own story, and she was right, but?—
“Tell you what,” Rebekah said, green eyes suddenly alive again as if the prospect of action were the only thing that could drag her out of the dark depths of memory. “I have an idea.”
“Is there anything you’d like me to call you?” I asked the teen boy slumped in the upholstered chair in the dusty, repurposed church basement, because one of the first things I’d learned here was that you didn’t ever ask a slave their name. Too much of a potential trigger. You only gave them the option to use one.
“No, miss.” The typical answer.
When I first saw him, crumpled near the clinic’s back entrance like discarded laundry, I had to gently push back the sleeve of his filthy jacket to see that the arm beneath it ended just below the elbow. The skin was rough and puckered where the limb had been severed, recent, not fully healed either. Whoever had patched him up had done it in a hurry, and not in a hospital. It was amazing they’d even bothered to fix it instead of disposing of him right away.
In other words, he’d been lucky. Or good. Or both.
“Call me Lou. I’m going to touch you now, but this is a safe space and I’m a trained medical volunteer, so there’s nothing to worry about. Okay?” He nodded, and I gently smoothed back thesandy curls bloodily matted to the gash across his face to get a better look. Now it was my turn to bite my tongue.
After all, stories were some of my favorite things in the world. But this was a don’t-ask-don’t-tell clinic, where such stories—including mine—went untold. Like what this boy’s owners were like, or how he’d managed to evade them. After all, the chips hadn’t come out yet, much as I prayed for the day they would. Much as I prayed for?—
Well. Back to the task at hand: inspecting the slave boy’s wounds. The whip gash across his cheek and nose looked fresh, as if the overseer had decided to try looking him in the eye for once while doing it. But more urgent were the untreated burns cratered on his palm and verging on infection, maybe from being forced to pick up scorching tools or chemicals bare-handed. Burns not unlike my own.
Fuck this world.
He flinched but said nothing as I applied a rose-scented salve—the same one Ivy had given me way back when—to the worst of the burns, then bandaged them the right way, mentally cataloging the steps, determined to get a gold star, or at least not fuck up completely. Rebekah and I had bet each other a pedicure on what I’d become first: a competent medical professional or a competent barista. The verdict was still out.
The slave boy whimpered, clamping down on his lip as if he’d expected to be punished for that small noise.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Let it out. You can cry here. You can scream. You can tell me to go fuck myself if you want. I don’t care.”
