This means actually entering the room, walking past both tables. If my legs felt unsteady before, now I’m worried they’ll actually buckle at any second. Strangely, I can feel the texture of the men’s eyes differently. The women’s eyes are sharp, evaluating; the men’s eyes are hotter, stifling, like a touch. I’m having trouble breathing.
I go haltingly toward the stove, where Sarah is standing, nodding at me encouragingly, as though I’m a baby—even though she can’t be more than twelve herself. I stay as close as possible to the sink—just in case I do stumble, I want to be able to reach out and steady myself quickly.
The faces in the room are mostly a blur, a wash of color, but a few stand out: I see Blue watching me, wide-eyed; a boy, probably my age, with a crazy thatch of blond hair, who looks like he might start laughing any second; another boy, a little older, scowling; a woman with long auburn hair hanging loose down her back. For a moment our eyes meet and my heart stutters: I think, Mom. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that my mother could be here—that she must be here, somewhere, in the Wilds, in one of the homesteads or camps or whatever they’re called. Then the woman shifts slightly and I see her face and realize that no, of course it’s not her. She’s far too young, probably the age of my mother when I last saw her twelve years ago. I’m not sure I’d even recognize my mother if I saw her again; my memories of her are so fuzzy, distorted through layers of time and dream.
“Slop,” Sarah says as soon as I make it to the stove. I’m exhausted from the walk across the room. I can’t believe that this is the same body that used to do six-mile runs on an easy day, sprint up and down Munjoy Hill like it was nothing.
“What?”
“Slop.” She lifts the cover off the tin pot. “That’s what we call it. It’s what we eat when supplies run low. Oatmeal, rice, sometimes some bread—whatever grains we have left. Boil the shit out of it, and there you go. Slop.”
It startles me to hear a curse word come from her mouth.
Sarah takes a plastic plate—with ghostly silhouettes of animals still faintly visible on its surface, a kid’s plate—and piles a big serving of slop at its center. Behind me, at the tables, people have started talking again. The room fills with the low buzz of conversation, and I start to feel slightly better; at least that means some of the attention is off me.
“The good news,” Sarah continues cheerfully, “is that Roach brought home a present last night.”
“What do you mean?” I’m struggling to absorb the lingo, the pattern of speech. “He got supplies?”
“Better.” She grins at me, slides the top off the second covered pan. Inside is golden-brown meat, seared, crispy: a smell that almost brings me to tears. “Rabbit.”
I’ve never eaten rabbit before—never thought of it as something you could eat, especially not for breakfast—but I gratefully accept the plate from her, and can hardly stop myself from ripping into the meat right there, standing. I’d prefer to stand, actually. Anything would be better than having to sit down among all those strangers.
Sarah must sense my anxiety. “Come on,” she says. “You can sit next to me.” She reaches out and takes my elbow, steering me toward the table. This, too, is surprising. In Portland, in bordered communities, everyone is very careful about touching. Even Hana and I hardly ever hugged or put our arms around each other, and she was my best friend.
A cramp runs through me, and I double over, almost dropping my plate.
“Easy.” Across the table is the blond-haired boy, the one who looked as though he could hardly contain his laughter earlier. He raises his eyebrows; they’re the same pale blond as his hair, practically invisible. I notice that he, like Raven, has a procedural mark behind his left ear, and like hers, it must be fake. Only uncureds live in the Wilds; only people who have chosen, or been forced, to flee the bordered cities. “You okay?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. A whole lifetime of fears and warnings beat through me, and words flash rapidly in my mind: illegal, wrong, sympathizer, disease. I take a deep breath, try to ignore the bad feeling. Those are Portland words, old words; they, like the old me, have been left behind the fence.
“She’s fine,” Sarah jumps in. “She’s just hungry.”
“I’m fine,” I echo about fifteen seconds too late. The boy smirks again.
Sarah slides onto the bench and pats the empty space next to her, which Squirrel has just vacated. At least we’re at the very end of the table, and I don’t have to worry about being sandwiched next to someone else. I sit down, keeping my eyes on my plate. I can feel everyone watching me again. At least the conversation continues, a comforting blanket of noise.
“Go ahead.” Sarah looks at me encouragingly.
“I don’t have a fork,” I say quietly. The blond guy does laugh then, loud and long. So does Sarah.
“No forks,” she says. “No spoons. No nothing. Just eat.”
I risk glancing up and see that the people around me are watching, smiling, apparently amused. One of them, a grizzled, gray-haired man who must be at least seventy, nods at me, and I drop my eyes quickly. My whole body is hot with embarrassment. Of course they wouldn’t care about silverware and things like that in the Wilds.
I take the piece of rabbit with my hands, tear a tiny bit of flesh from the bone. And then I think I really might cry: Never in my whole life has anything tasted this good.
“Good, huh?” Sarah says, but I can’t do anything but nod. Suddenly I forget about the roomful of strangers and all the people watching me. I tear at the rabbit like an animal. I shovel up a bit of slop with my fingers, suck them into my mouth. Even that tastes good to me. Aunt Carol would absolutely flip if she could see me. When I was little, I wouldn’t even eat my peas if they were touching my chicken; I used to make neat compartments on my plate.
All too soon the plate is clean, except for a few bones. I drag the back of my hand across my mouth. I feel a surge of nausea and I close my eyes, willing it away.
“All right,” Raven says, standing abruptly. “Time for rounds.”
There’s a flurry of activity: people scraping away from their benches, bursts of conversations I can’t follow (“Laid traps yesterday,” “Your turn to check Grandma”), and people are passing behind me, releasing their plates noisily into the basin, then stomping up the stairs to my left, just past the stove. I can feel their bodies, and smell them, too: a flow, a warm, human river. I keep my eyes closed, and as the room empties, the nausea subsides somewhat.
“How are you feeling?”
I open my eyes and Raven is standing across from me, leaning both hands on the table. Sarah is still sitting next to me. She has brought one leg to her chest, on the bench, and is hugging her knee. In this pose, she actually looks her age.
“Better,” I say, which is true.
“You can help Sarah with the dishes,” she says, “if you’re feeling up to it.”
“Okay,” I say, and she nods.
“Good. And afterward, Sarah, you can take her up. You might as well get a feel for the homestead, Lena. But don’t push it, either. I don’t want to have to drag your ass out of the woods again.”
“Okay,” I repeat, and she smiles, satisfied. She’s obviously used to giving orders. I wonder how old she is. She speaks with such easy command, even though she must be younger than half the Invalids here. I think, Hana would like her, and the pain returns, knifing just below my ribs.
“And Sarah”—Raven is heading for the stairs—“get Lena some pants from the store, okay? So she doesn’t have to prance around half-naked.”
I feel myself going red again, and reflexively start fiddling with the hem of my shirt, tugging it lower down my thighs. Raven catches me and laughs.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.” Then she takes the stairs two at a time, and is gone.
I used to be on dish duty every night at Aunt Carol’s house, and I got used to it. But washing dishes in the Wilds is another story. First there’s the water. Sarah leads me back through the hall, to one of the rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen.
“This is the supply room,” she says, and for a moment frowns at all the empty shelves and the mostly used bag of flour. “We’re running a little low,” she explains, as though I can’t see that for myself. I feel a twist of anxiety—for her, for Blue, for everyone here, all that bone and thinness.
“Over here is where we keep the water. We pull it in the mornings—not me, I’m too small still.” She’s over in the corner by the buckets, which now I see are full. She hefts one up by its handle with both hands, grunting. It’s oversized, nearly as big as her torso. “One more should do it,” she says. “A small one should be okay.” She toddles out of the room, straining, with the bucket in front of her.
I find, to my embarrassment, that I can barely lift one of the smallest buckets. Its metal handle digs painfully into the palms of my hands—which are still covered in scabs and blisters from my time alone in the Wilds—and before I’ve even reached the hallway I have to set the bucket down and lean against the wall.
“You okay?” Sarah calls back.
“Fine!” I say, a little too sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let her come to my rescue. I heave the bucket in the air again, advance forward a few halting steps, place it on the ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. By the time I reach the kitchen, I’m out of breath and sweating; salt stings my eyes. Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t notice. She’s squatting at the stove, poking around at the fire with the charred end of a wooden stick, coaxing it higher.
“We boil the water in the mornings,” she says, “to sanitize it. We have to, or we’ll be shitting a river from breakfast to dinner.” In her last words, I recognize Raven’s voice; this must be one of her mantras.
“Where does the water come from?” I ask, grateful that she has her back to me so that I can rest, momentarily, on one of the nearest benches.
“Cocheco River,” she says. “It’s not too far. A mile, a mile and a half, tops.”
Impossible: I can’t imagine carrying those buckets, full, for a mile.
“The river’s where we get our supplies, too,” Sarah rattles on. “Friends on the inside float them down to us. The Cocheco crosses into Rochester and then out again.” She giggles. “Raven says that someday they’ll make it fill out a Purpose of Travel form.”
Sarah feeds the stove wood from a pile stacked in the corner. Then she stands up, nodding once. “We’ll just warm the water a little bit. It cleans better when it’s hot.”
On one of the high shelves above the sink is an enormous tin stockpot, big enough for a child to bathe in comfortably. Before I can offer to help, Sarah hefts herself onto the basin—balancing carefully on its rim, like a gymnast—and stands, removing the pot from the shelf. Then she hops off the sink, landing soundlessly. “Okay.” She brushes hair out of her face; it has come loose from its ponytail. “Now the water goes into the pot, and the pot goes on the stove.”