Page 19 of Our Last Resort

The light moved, hitting me in the eyes. “And you,” the mother said. “You’re in pain? Look inward. You caused this. You did this to yourself.”

Before we could try to apologize or beg for more water, the door slammed shut.

We waited for the mother’s footsteps to fade away. Then, with my intact arm, I pushed against the door. Gabriel helped, presumably with both hands. When that didn’t work, we felt the four walls around us, looking for—what?

A window. A hole we could widen. A spoon to dig a tunnel. Anything.

The urge to scream rose in my throat, and, I assumed, in Gabriel’s.

But we didn’t scream.

Help wasn’t coming. We knew that.

Gabriel and I bent toward each other.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Not your fault.”

We waited. And waited. And waited.

Time was lost to me.

Finally, my arm went numb.

My ears buzzed. My skin was sticky, the inside of my mouth woolly.

And yet.

After a while, I did not hate it.

Being there, with this boy.

The darkness was ours. It was, in its own way, welcome. For the first time in ten years—a lifetime of too many words, of speeches, of rules, of Émile overexplaining everything to us, of mouths opening in castigation, of lips buzzing with sermons—words were not needed.

Gabriel’s rib cage shook against mine. Was he crying?

No.

Laughing again.

“Sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t. “It’s just—”

“The chicken?”

He couldn’t reply, but I felt the prickle of his hair on my shoulder as he nodded.

Incredible. I laughed, too. Not at the chicken thing. I was over that. But at this boy. Thisboy.In the darkness of the Secret Place, in this temple of fear, this boy found it in himself to laugh.

There was something unknown there. A lightness, a defiance. A part of himself he hadn’t surrendered to anyone. Something I needed in my life.

We waited some more.

In my head, I recited incantations. I sang silent songs. I repeated them over and over and over, until the words stopped making sense.

There was a groan. I didn’t understand immediately that the door was finally opening, that our time in the Secret Place was over.

The mother stood there. She was waiting for us to scamper.

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