Annabel: A Delirium Short Story Read Free Page A

of feeling. Skinny Thomas, the boy I used to see sometimes hanging around the house, careful to pretend to be reading. How did he become this pudgy, hard-faced man, with hair gelled over a pink scalp, with lines etched deep into his face?
    That’s what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable—and all the time we’re being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.
    “It will happen soon. As early as this week. Are you ready?”
    My mouth is dry. The rope is still too short by seven feet. But I nod. I can make the drop, and with a little luck, I’ll hit a deep spot in the water.
    “You’ll go north from the river, then head east when you hit the old highway. There will be scouts looking for you. They’ll take care of you. Got it?”
    “North from the river,” I say. “Then east.”
    He nods. He looks almost sorry, and I can tell he thinks I won’t make it. “Good luck, Annabel.”
    “Thank you,” I say. “I can never repay you. . . .”
    He shakes his head. “Don’t thank me.” For a second we stand there, staring at each other. I try to see him as he once was: the boy Rachel loved. But I can hardly remember Rachel, now, as she was when I last saw her. Strangely, I can more easily picture her as a girl, always a little bossy, always demanding to know why she couldn’t stay up and what was the point of eating green beans and what if she didn’t want to get paired, anyway? And when Lena came along, she bossed her around, too; Lena trotted behind her like a puppy, eyes wide, observing, her fat thumb stuck in her mouth.
    My girls. I know that I will never see them again. For their own safety, I can’t.
    But there is a small, stubborn, stone part of me that still hopes.
    Thomas picks up the hose coiled in the corner. “I told them you needed to be punished, so we could talk,” he says. He looks almost sick as he aims the nozzle at me.
    My stomach rolls. The last time I was hosed was years ago. I cracked a rib, and for weeks I ran a fever of more than a hundred, floating in and out of vivid dreams of fire, and faces screaming at me through the smoke. But I nod.
    “I’ll make it quick,” he says. His eyes say: I’m sorry.
    Then he turns on the water.

then
     
    The girl behind the register was giving me the fish eye.
    “You don’t got no ID?” she said.
    “I told you, I left it at home.” I was starting to get antsy. I was hungry—I was always hungry back then—and I didn’t like the way the girl was looking at me, with her big bug eyes and the patchwork gauze on her neck, almost showing off the procedure, like she was some war hero and this was her injury to prove it.
    “Haloway your pair or something?” She turned his credit card over in her hands, like she’d never seen one.
    “Husband,” I snapped. She shifted her eyes to the place where my procedural scar should have been, but I had carefully combed my hair forward and jammed a wool hat down over my ears, so my entire neck was concealed. I shifted my weight, then realized I was fidgeting too much.
    Scene: IGA Market on Dorchester, three days after the bust at Rawls’s. Piled on the conveyor belt between us, the source of all the tension: a tin of instant hot cocoa, two packets of dried noodles, ChapStick, deodorant, a bag of chips. The air smelled stale and yeasty, and after the brutal winds of the streets, the store felt as hot as a desert, and as dry.
    Why did I use his card? To this day, I don’t know. I don’t know whether I was getting overconfident, or whether, just for a moment, I wanted to pretend: pretend that I wasn’t a runaway, pretend that I wasn’t squatting in an unfinished basement with six other girls, pretend that I had a home and a place and a pair, just like she did, just like everyone was supposed to.
    Maybe I was already a little tired of freedom.
    “We’re not supposed to take cards without an ID,” she said after a long minute. I’ll never