The Here and Now Read Free Page B

Morgan Lowry’s bow tie?” She looks delighted about it.
    “No. I just got here.” Morgan Lowry’s bow tie is what passes for outrageous with us. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
    “Okay. Well, see you in there.”
    “Okay,” I say.
    I realize I stay one second too long on her eyes, and it makes her uncomfortable.
    I remember Cora from before. Everyone in our community came from roughly the same geographical area, and many of us knew each other in Postremo. We all have in common that we survived the plague, but none of us got through it unscarred. I remember the day Cora’s mother died. I remember her half-starved, half-crazy eyes when her aunt brought her and her brother to our house until the body could be lookedafter. I remember a few months later when her brother died too. I don’t want to remember these things right now, but I do. I have memories like this about at least a dozen of the kids here, and somewhere in them they have memories like this about me. Since we came here, the deepest conversation Cora and I have had is about my belt.
    “See you.” She waves awkwardly and disappears.
    I try to steel myself for a night of these kinds of conversations. Because these are the kinds of conversations taking place all over this room. No one talks about what really binds us together. The gap between what we say and what we feel is so big and dark that sometimes I think I’ll fall into it and just keep falling.
    At least, I think we feel it. I feel it. Does anybody else feel it? I don’t know and I won’t find out. We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn’t real.
    Sometimes I only hear what we don’t say. I only think the things I shouldn’t think and I remember what I should forget. I hear the ghosts in this room, all the people we lost in our old life who are crying out to be remembered. But we never do remember them. The whispers of things we feel and don’t say—I hear them too.
    Jeffrey puts a bunch of the little tables together, and a crowd of kids assembles, talking and flirting. He pulls a chair out for me and I sit down. I look at the people sitting around this circle. They are my friends. I care about them. This is my life. They are talking about their belts and their shoes and the car they want to get and the show they saw, and I can’t hear them because the ghosts are too loud.
    Around nine o’clock the chaperones help clear the tables to the sides of the room for dancing.
    Jeffrey gestures to me, so we dance to a sugary pop song. Other kids dance too. I see Katherine dancing with Avery Stone, who is a letch.
    If you pay attention, you see how awkward it is, how cautious and fearful we are of touching each other in the most casual ways. We can’t help it. We spent our tender years surrounded by plague. I see the regular kids at our high school always grabbing at each other and hugging people left and right. Not us. We have no path to walk between physical isolation and hooking up. There’s just the one and then the other, and I guess on account of the one, the other tends to be pretty jarring and impersonal.
    Adrian Pond asks me to dance. He holds me around the waist. He is tall and good-looking, and I don’t have any memories of him from our old life to haunt me. The song gets slower and he gets closer. His breath is warm in my ear.
    I want to feel something. I really do. But it’s only the absence I feel, just the wishing and wanting where there is nothing. I just feel lonely.
    I lean my cheek on Adrian’s shoulder. The lights over the buffet table blur and I close my eyes. I do something I should never, never do. I let myself think about someone else—a person I should never think about at a moment like this.
    For a few seconds I give in. I let myself imagine it is his cheek I feel on my hair. I imagine his hands on my waist. I imagine him holding me like somebody who really knows how to hold a