Page 25 of Our Last Resort

Gabriel put down his stack. He placed a hand on my pamphlets and left it there until I looked up.

“I mean,” he whispered, “outside. Of here.”

Here we go,I thought.

Gabriel and I craved the same things, always.

Well. We had until that point.

But this time I would have to say no. I would have to tear myself away from him.

I couldn’t imagine tearing myself away from him.

“Cool,” I said.

I picked up an empty cardboard box. Gabriel snatched it from my hands.

“Hey!”

“Just listen to me.”

Gabriel liked to flirt with the idea of mischief, but he’d never taken it past the talking stage.Imagine grabbing two pieces of bread instead of one. Imagine getting up during Assembly and just leaving. Imagine a mother tells you to clean all the windows and you just say no. Imagine just saying no. Imagine, imagine, imagine.

It seemed to excite him, this flicker of rebellion trapped in his obedient body. The memory of the day he had laughed at Assembly like a flash of something else, a glimpse into a new world he couldn’t bring himself to explore.

I tried to reason with him: “We shouldn’t—”

“Let me talk.”

A mother appeared in the doorway.

“What’s all this chatter in here?”

I took the box back from Gabriel and placed it on the table with the requisite reverence. “Sorry,” I said.

The mother—nameless, beige clothing, hair in a bun—glared at us for a couple of seconds.

“I’d better not hear anything else,” she said.

I nodded vigorously.

The mother walked away.

Once the sound of her steps had retreated into the distance, Gabriel pulled me to a corner of the room.

“Come here.”

More pamphlets were waiting. They needed to be unwrapped and checked for typos, one by one (Émile insisted), then organized in stacks of twenty.

Gabriel and I knelt and pretended to work.

“We wouldn’t have to stay out long,” he whispered.

I considered him. His eyes were shiny, his skin blotchy. Did he have a fever?

“Gabriel,” I said, my voice a string tethering a helium balloon to earth. “We can’t.”

He rubbed his eyes.

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