Page 30 of Trade
I sink to my butt and stretch my legs straight in front of me. As soon as the weight is off them, my feet begin to throb. I was vaguely aware that they hurt, but now I feel every chafed bit, every twinge. I untie my laces and yank my swollen feet free. My socks are damp.
Exhaustion drapes over me like a weighted blanket. My last ounce of energy leaked out when I took off my boots. All I can do is watch Dalton make camp. He gives me the canteen, and while I drink, he gathers branches from under the nearby trees. I can’t see him, but I hear twigs snap under his boots and the curses he mutters under his breath after a dull thunk.
He builds a log-cabin fire just like in Kephart’sCamping and Woodcraft, laying two parallel sticks as a base and placing tinder and kindling in between to make a box. He lights it with a ferro rod from his bulging side pocket. Once he gets the flames going, I scoot closer on my butt.
It’s getting cold, almost as cold as the walk-in refrigerator in Food Services. We went on a school trip to the kitchens in fourth grade, and the undisputed highlight of the day was being allowed into the refrigerator for a few seconds.
He grabs a few more things from his pack and then collapses next to me, totally unconcerned with personal space.
“Eat.” He passes me another parchment-wrapped package and grabs the canteen from the ground between my legs. I’m too hungry to complain about him being too close, and besides, the fire is beginning to warm my feet, but the rest of me is shivering. It’s nice to have a warm body beside me.
There is more jerky in the package, and it tastes even better now that I’m starving. I tear through it so quickly that I almost don’t save him any.
“Here,” I offer the last strip to him. He shakes his head. His mouth is full of something.
I start to rewrap what’s left, and he grabs my hand. “That wasn’t enough,” he says. “Finish it.”
My temper flares. “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
He snorts. “Take it,” he says, grabbing my hand, curling open my fingers, and pressing pieces of what he was eating into my palm.
I sniff it. It smells sweet and has a dry, rubbery texture. I lick a slice with the tip of my tongue, but I don’t taste anything. “What is it?”
“Dried apple.”
I’ve had apples, but only a few times at Administration parties. One Christmas, all of us kids got our own baked apple that had been stuffed with brown sugar and raisins. To this day, it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever eaten.
I pop the apple into my mouth and chew. It’s tough, and not as sweet as I remember, but it isn’t soaked in melted sugar and butter either. It’s so good that I hum. Dalton sucks in a breath. Maybe the hum did sound more like a moan. He dumps the rest of his slices in my hand.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask before shoving another piece in my mouth.
“Yeah. I am,” he says. His voice is gravelly. The fire lights his face as he watches me chew. His eyes are dark pools, his lips slightly parted.
I’m suddenly aware of a needy tenderness between my legs. Back by the dogwood, I’d been into it, more into it than I’ve been with Bennett in years. Why did I stop? Because I want to be in charge?
I’m on the Outside in the middle of the dark, hours from the bunker, alone except for the man who bought me. I have no food of my own, no tools, no water. I’m not in charge.
My brain yo-yos again from excitement to confusion to an instinctual fear that makes me feel very, very small. Is the yo-yoing because of the oxygen from the fresh air? Or because my whole schema is broken? Up is down; good is bad; everything I thought was true is a lie.
And every few minutes, I have an epiphany about something that’s been staring me in the face all along. Like, for example,allof the kids didn’t get their own baked apples. Just those of us who lived on the upper levels with dads who were heads of department. Cecily has never had an apple, nor Amy or Alan or anyone I worked with in the atrium.
Not Meghan.
She might get an apple now, now that she’s got herself a head of department, and she’s out of the unmarried dorm.
Now that she’s safe.
Like I was.
I pass the last two slices back to Dalton and wrap my arms around my knees. The fire has grown, and it heats my front, but I still shiver. I watch numbly as Dalton tucks away the empty parchment and removes a rusty tin from his pack. He pries it open and grabs a handful of the contents, dried herbs that tickle my nose, and tosses them onto the fire.
As it burns, a thick smoke rises into the air, and I can tease out the notes—rosemary, lavender, and cedar. We grow the herbs in our kitchen garden exhibit, and we have a dwarf cultivar of Atlas Cedar in our tree collection. I always thought it was funny as a kid—having a dwarf version of a tree named for Atlas. We’d never even consider drying and burning them. Dad’s voice echoes in my head.Fire, airborne disease, and panic. The smell is lovely, though, sharp and heavy and sweet.
“Are the herbs religious?” I ask. I know white sage was used in rituals by indigenous peoples of North America, and Catholics burned frankincense and myrrh, made from resin harvested from the Boswellia tree andCommiphora myrrha, neither of which we have in our collection. The first gen believed religion inevitably creates schisms, so those practices weren’t passed down to the second gen.
“No. They keep the bugs away.” Dalton looks over and his lips soften. “And they smell good.”
They do. I breathe deeper to take more in and end up yawning like a sea lion.
