Once An Eve Novel Read Free Page A

Lilac beside her.
    Arden stripped off her long black shirt and stood before the dresser in her tank top, pressing a wet towel to her face and neck. “When I arrived and you weren’t here, I thought the worst,” I said, leaning against the bunk bed where I slept. The room’s flowered wallpaper was peeling in places, a few strips held up with tacks. “I thought the soldiers had found you. That you were being held somewhere, tortured, or …” I trailed off, not wanting to go on.
    Arden worked at her skin with the towel, clearing away patches of dirt on her arms. In the lantern light I could see each of her vertebrae, tiny pebbles trapped beneath her skin. I remembered her face the last day I had seen her, when we were hiding behind the shack. Her cheeks were full, her eyes alert. Now she was so thin her shoulder blades jutted out of her back. Fresh scabs dotted her scalp.
    “They never caught me,” she said, not turning around. She watched herself in the cracked mirror, her reflection split in half. “The day I left you by Marjorie and Otis’s house, the soldiers chased me through the woods. I got a lead on them when I reached the outskirts of town but there wasn’t anywhere to hide. I found this metal door in the street, a sewer, and went underground. I just followed the tunnels, moving through the sludge, and kept waiting for them to track me there. But they never did.”
    The giant dog lay at her feet, its chin resting on the floor. I kept my eyes on it, remembering all those warnings we’d heard at School about people being mauled by the packs of wild dogs roaming the woods. “Where’d you find him?” I asked, nodding at the animal, whose head was nearly as big as mine.
    “ She found me,” Arden laughed, setting down the towel. “I was roasting a squirrel. I guess she’d been separated from her pack and was hungry. So I gave her some food. And then she started following me.” She kneeled down, taking the dog’s head in her hands. “Don’t judge Heddy by her appearance—she’s really sweet. Aren’t you, girl?”
    Arden looked up at me, smiling, and I noticed the thick red scar that snaked down her collarbone and over her right breast. It was still bleeding in places. Just the sight of it made me wince. “You’re hurt,” I said, standing to get a closer look. “What happened? Who did this to you?” I grabbed her shoulder and turned her toward the light.
    Arden swatted me away. She fished the towel from the washbasin and covered her neck. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m here now and I’m not missing an arm or an eye. Let’s just leave it at that.”
    “Let’s not leave it at that,” I said, but Arden was already climbing into the bottom bunk. She threw herself down next to Lilac’s old dolls. Most of them were naked, their hair matted from years of neglect. “Arden,” I said again, pleading. “What happened?” The dog followed me to the ladder and whimpered, trying to get up on the mattress.
    Arden sighed. “You don’t want to know.” She pressed the wet towel to her chest, willing me away, but I didn’t move.
    “Tell me.”
    She turned to me, her eyes glassy in the lantern light. “I got lost,” she said, her voice soft. “That’s why it took me so long to get here. I went north out of Sedona and then I found Heddy. We’d been together a week when it got so hot I could barely walk during the day. Heddy kept darting under the bushes, trying to avoid the sun. Finally I decided we’d just wait out the heat wave. Find a place to rest.” She moved the wet towel over her cracked lips, sloughing off the dead skin. “We took our supplies into this underground parking lot. As we went down each ramp it got cooler, more bearable, but darker, too. I was trying to get this car door open when I heard a man’s voice. He was yelling, but nothing he said made any sense.”
    I lay down beside her, curling myself into a ball. Her mouth twisted into a half smile, and she looked up