“We are better than everyone,” she says. “Unlike the princess.” She shoulders me toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, get dressed. I’ll help you pick out an outfit. How you dress is a reflection on me.”
I end up borrowing her purple shell hat with synthetic fibers pinned to one side that are meant to mimic bird plumage. Basil stares at them while we’re pressed together on the train.
“You don’t like it?” I say.
“It’s just, I didn’t know birds could have pink feathers.”
“Birds are white, silly,” Pen says. “It’s just a decoration.”
“The birds we’ve seen through the scope are white,” Thomas says. “But I’ve read stories in which there were all sorts of species. Maybe there are pink birds in a different region. The ground has all sorts of climates.”
Pen huffs a pale blond curl away from her face. The train stops with a jolt and she breezes ahead of him, tugging me along. “Such an insufferable know-it-all,” she mutters. But I swear there’s a hint of a smile to go with the words.
The boys catch up to us and take our arms in tandem. Thomas kisses Pen’s cheek as she pertly raises her chin to accept. “It’s your day,” she tells him. “Where are we going?”
“The library first,” he says. “They’re having a sale.”
Most books on Internment aren’t for sale; we can borrow them from the library, and as the years go on and the spines begin to crack and the pages yellow, new editions are printed and the old ones are sold. When I was little, I was the first to borrow a newly printed library book and I hid it under my mattress. I wanted to know what it was like to own a new book for myself. One that hadn’t been worn down by someone else’s hands, with pages that hadn’t absorbed someone else’s spills.
After a week, guilt made me return it. I never borrowed that book again; I couldn’t bear to see it the victim of a stranger’s hands.
As we walk, Thomas and Pen gradually move a few paces ahead of Basil and me. Thomas whispers something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs. The shadows of clouds pass over them, and whatever Thomas was going to say to her next has been forgotten as he watches her. She’s a revelation in the sun, dazzling everywhere the light touches her. And not just today. Even when she’s sad, even when she sings off-key.
Basil touches one of the feathers. “Careful,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me.”
“I didn’t think so. It’s not very you.”
I try to smile, but I’m still thinking about last night. I’m still thinking about the ground and if there are different kinds of birds. If things down there are mostly good or mostly bad. If they ever wonder about us.
Basil steals a kiss to my jaw, and I smile at my feet.
“There you are,” he says.
“I don’t mean to be distant,” I say, hooking my arm around his.
He stops our walking, and I realize that Pen and Thomas have stopped too. We’ve just passed the theater, and at the end of the block we can see what used to be the flower shop. It’s gray and splintered. The roof has caved in, and there’s a makeshift wire fence surrounding it now, with signs cautioning us not to approach.
Other passersby are staring at it, too.
“It’s depressing,” Basil says.
“Alice used to bring me here on the weekends when I was little,” I say. “It was one of her favorite places.”
Things aren’t the same. The patrolmen and this ruined building are proof of that.
After a few seconds, Thomas and Pen start walking again and we follow them. We go to the library and then to a tea shop. The day is full of light breezes and sweet aromas, but I cannot rid my hair of the smell of ash.
15
Each of us has a betrothed so that we won’t have to spend our lives alone. It leads me to wonder to whom the gods are married. The elements, perhaps. Or do they know something that we don’t about solitude?
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
AFTER CLASSES ON MONDAY, BASIL AND I spend time trying to skip stones on the lake. We don’t talk much; somehow that has stopped feeling so necessary.
As we sit on the grass, I watch the sunlight catch bits of gold in his hair and I think that he’s more handsome than the prince. The prince, like his sister, is always at the height of fashion. He’s always polished and there are rumors that he wears cosmetics in his images. But there’s nothing more real than sunlight on skin.
Feeling brave, I push forward and kiss him. He pulls me on top of him, and, laughing, we fall into the grass.
I rest my forehead on his, trying to line up our noses and mouths so we’re at a perfect parallel. He slides his hands up my sleeves and I have the distant sense that Judas is watching us. I wonder if he and Daphne were ever like this.
I try to dismiss the thought, but too late I’m thinking of her body on the train tracks and how awful her final moments must have been.
“Kiss me?” I say, and he does. It’s so easy now. It roots me to this place, makes me feel at home.
I rest my arms on his chest and draw back so I can look at him. He pushes my hair behind my ears and says, “You look worried.”