THE PIPERS LOOK AT ME WITH EXPECTANT EYES, waiting to hear my words of wisdom.
“Ummm,” I say.
They nod eagerly in response, wanting more.
I rub my tired eyes. Just when I think I have a handle on this, everything shifts again.
“Is there somewhere I can sit alone for a minute?” I ask at the same moment a drop of water hits my head. I look up to see a hole in the ceiling above us that penetrates the two floors over us as well.
“Shouldn’t someone fix that?” I ask, as the girls take my hands and lead me to a door at the end of the hallway.
“They do,” one of the girls says. “But it just falls apart again. The whole building’s like that.”
“‘Things fall apart,’” I whisper to myself. “‘The centre cannot hold.’”
“Your room,” the second girl says, as she swings the door open.
“Great, thanks.” I force myself to smile at them before stepping inside and closing the door in their faces. The room is spare. A table with a drawer. A wooden chair by the window. When I sit on the edge of the bed, it creaks loudly in protest. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to focus. Trying to decide what to do next. Nothing comes to me. Except the thought that perhaps I should crawl under the bed.
I open my eyes. The walls are the color of GG’s oatmeal, which makes me hungry. And sad. Then the sun comes streaming through the grime-covered window, revealing a wedge of dust motes that Piper used to call fairy dust. I feel my lips twitch, as if trying to smile at the memory. Distantly, I know that I am building myself up toward finally saying good-bye. To letting Piper go.
And then Piper herself strides through the wall, as if even the bricks that compose it are unable to refuse her. She takes a few steps toward me, until she stands in the wedge of sunshine. The dust motes dance around her and the sun shines straight through her. She leaves no shadow. The bits of dust are more substantial.
I sigh heavily, and then slap my hand over my mouth, afraid that I will blow her away.
Piper laughs then. “Pollywog, haven’t you grown up at all?”
“Piper.” I finally allow myself to say it then, as I rush toward her with my arms open, half expecting her to slip right through them. But she doesn’t. Something—not Piper exactly—but something cold and hot at the same time hugs me back. I step out of the embrace quickly, less relieved than I expected to be.
“You certainly took your time getting here,” Piper says.
“I did?” I ask stupidly.
Piper rolls her eyes. “Yes. We’ve been waiting.”
“I’ve been waiting too!” I interrupt. “Well, waiting and trying to figure out if you were actually in here.”
“Please. Just because I’m stuck up here doesn’t mean I have no idea what’s going on below. You haven’t been waiting. You’ve been hiding.”
“I wasn’t!” I can hear the little-sister whine in my voice, but can’t quite conquer it.
“Calm down, Pollywog. It worked out fine. This is a town that bides its time. Nothing was going to happen until another fourth year rolled around again. I assumed you knew that. But when we came into August and you still hadn’t made your move, I decided it was time to take action. That’s why I sent LuAnn to shake you up a bit. And when you still didn’t come, I had to give up three more.”
“But Piper, I don’t even know what my move was supposed to be. Why couldn’t they have told me?”
“Pollywog, if you can’t say anything smart, just shut up and let me do the talking. Okay?”
I gulp and nod.
“Thank you. So, I know you’d love to do some catching up and all that fun stuff, but the girls are all worked up about getting the plan rolling, and it’s pretty high on my to-do list as well. How about we get that going first, and then we’ll kumbaya and braid hair and tell stories all night long.”
As the novelty of seeing Piper fades away, I can’t help but notice there’s something off about the way she’s talking. Not the sound or pitch of her voice, but the cadence. She’s talking faster and the words sound harsher than I remember. But this is Piper, I remind myself. Piper taking charge and leading the way once more.
I nod again.
“Here’s the plan. First we need to get rid of the guards. We’ll send them off the roof—make an example of them. Then we round up every person under eighteen and find them nice rooms here. They’ll be freaked out, but we won’t keep them too long.”
“No-oh,” I say, amazed to hear the word tumbling from my mouth. Piper seems amused.
“What is it, Pollywog? Feeling left out?”
I shake my head. “That’s not the plan. You said—you wanted . . .” My tongue twists as my half-wrecked brain races and sweats, trying to pull the exact memory into place. In my mind, I see the wheels of the tape recorder turn and then, at last, I am able to locate it. “You wanted to bring the reformatory down. Destroy it. That’s what you said. It’s evil. It’s wrong. You said that too. You can’t just kill all those guards the same way you did Ozzy.”
“Please.” Piper smirks at me. “I had nothing to do with Ozzy. In fact, I’m annoyed with you for making him jump like that. He was one of the few who actually saw me all the time and remembered me too. It was only that way for those who loved me, you know, and he truly did.”
“That’s not possible,” I say, although it’s what I already suspected. I was with Ozzy when he jumped. And he’d been talking about the terrible things he’d done to the inmates here, and I’d been so angry just thinking about it. . . .
“Pollywog, where did you go? Are you daydreaming or just stalling?”
“No.” I say it louder this time. I always hated that nickname. I never protested because there had been affection behind it, even if it was also used to remind me of my place. But now it is nothing but condescension. “I’m not stalling. I’m making a new plan. A different plan. It’s a simple one too. We’re just going to leave this place and never come back.”
Piper takes two steps toward me and then shoves me with both hands, which seems to penetrate my chest. I flop back onto the bed and she stands above me. “Don’t be stupid. We can’t just leave. The rats need to be fed.”
“The rats?” I can’t help but look around. Nothing is there, but I now have that itchy feeling of something crawling over me.
“You can’t see them,” Piper explains impatiently. “They’re in the walls, the air, in everything. They are this place. They run it. They rule it.”
“Not anymore,” I say, trying to sound more certain than I feel. “That’s the way Lachman did things, but we don’t have to continue it. We can just leave and they can starve.”
Piper gives my cheek a quick little tap-tap-tap with the tips of her fingers. “Think, Skylar. Just try and think what the consequence of that might be and how it would affect everyone out there.”
“It would be the end of Gardnerville,” I say. It’s true. I already know it. It doesn’t seem like a tragedy to me. “I don’t care. We could leave. Like you always wanted. We could see the world. Maybe it would even be good for us.”
Piper turns away from me then. She wraps her arms around herself and shivers. “You could leave. I can’t. Before I couldn’t exist outside this town and now . . .” She looks my way and our eyes meet for an instant and I see the old Piper there. Not this strange ghostly version of her, but the Piper that I grew up with.
“Why, Skylar?” Tears fill her eyes. “Why couldn’t you just let that train carry me away? It’s what I wanted—to choose when I would disappear. But you couldn’t let me go, and you plucked me from the air and brought me here on the back of another girl. What’s even worse, though, is that you left me. Left me with the rats. And they took me in and gave me what they could to replace what I’d lost. They made me one of them. That part was easy; I was already half rat, you could say, and that’s what I’d been trying to escape. If you had only let me go, I’d already be gone. I’m here, though, broken and patched back together with too many pieces missing, but I’m here and this time . . . I’m not leaving without a fight.”
And scary Piper is back.
I hold my hands up, surrender style. “I don’t want a fight. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to come home.”
In a blink, she is softer again. “You should leave. Take that boy you like and don’t look back.”
“I can’t just go home and pretend this never happened.”
“Of course you can’t. You need to leave this whole town. Leave me and the little Pipers and the rats to work everything out, and you won’t have to worry about it, because you’ll be gone. Isn’t that what you always wanted? To leave this place? To see the wonders of the world?”
No, it’s what you wanted. That’s what I should say. But we are one and the same, so maybe a part of me wanted it too. And for a second, I can feel what it would be like to leave.
My hand tucked securely inside Foote’s larger hand, our feet walking in step together, out of the room and away from the cold of the reformatory, until we are standing on the platform of the train depot, boarding a train. I look at him and ask, “What are we doing?” He doesn’t answer. He can’t. His eyes are vacant and he seems to be lost inside some sort of dream. I know the dream. It’s a dream of all the places the train could take us. I am having the same dream. And it’s lovely. I am happy to remain lost in it all the way through the tunnel and then to whatever else lies beyond it, but the blast of the train’s whistle shakes me awake.
Except it’s not a train whistle. It’s the buzz of the reformatory gates in front of me. I was ready to walk through and leave the reformatory as easily as I’d entered. And Foote too. He stands beside me, just as I’d imagined him, sleepy-eyed and lost.
Piper did this. Even now I can feel her in my head. We were one and the same after all. What she wanted, I wanted. But it had never worked the other way around.
I’d forgotten that too.
I shake Foote, softly at first and then as hard as I can until his eyes flutter open.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Foote, it’s me, Skylar.” I stare at him, trying to figure out if he’s still half asleep. He seems totally aware now, even looking around. “Foote, are you okay?”
He turns to me with a funny squint on his face. “Foote. That’s my name, right? It’s weird, but it feels familiar.”
The reformatory shouldn’t be working this quickly. And even if it has, memory loss is not one of the side effects. I wonder if Elton slipped him something, but that would’ve kicked in long ago.
I pull the broken tape from my pocket, using it as a touchstone that might trigger another memory.
I RAN (SO FAR AWAY) the label reads.
Then, finally, the last piece falls into place. Now it makes sense that over the course of four long years I never once remembered the truth of Piper’s origin. And I also know the source of Foote’s sudden memory loss.
It’s me.
I forget things. I’ve always forgotten things. The more I take from others, the more I lose of myself.
After everything I’ve done today, I should be the one who doesn’t remember her own name. But Foote protected me from that; he took it and, in doing so, lost himself.
“Go,” I tell Foote, pushing him through the gates. “Run.”
He takes a few steps and then stops, turning back to me. “Aren’t you coming too?”
“I have to do something,” I tell him. “I’m not sure what, but I gotta do it.”
“Okay, that sort of makes sense,” Foote says kindly, but it’s clear he’s now just humoring the crazy girl.
And even though it’s not the best time, I don’t know if I’ll get another, so I quickly add, “You probably don’t remember this, but you were right. You told me you felt like you were from here, and it’s true—you were. My mom knew your mom. We were friends. Well, we were babies, so we didn’t really have friends, but we shared a carriage and that’s how you got lost. Or taken. It was a fourth year and these birds took you from the carriage and carried you out over the mountains.”
Foote stares at me.
“It probably doesn’t make sense right now, but it will later. Just remember it, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” he answers, and this time there’s no kindly condescension.
“Now go!” I reach toward Foote to give him another push when it occurs to me that I have no idea what’s going to happen next and I may never see him again. Grabbing hold of his shirt, I pull him down a bit and then stand on my tiptoes to meet him halfway so that I can give him a big wet kiss to remember me by . . . I hope.
He kisses me back—briefly—before I pull away.
A goofy smile fills his face. “That was nice.” The smile dims as he squints at me. “What was your name again?”
I don’t want to tell him only to have him forget it again; my heart might break if I have to say it more than once. So instead I channel the dangerous dame from The Maltese Falcon. “What would you do if I didn’t tell you? Something wild and unpredictable?”
Foote grins, quickly getting the reference, but he doesn’t respond as I expected with Spade’s answer of “I might.” Instead he plucks two of the best lines from the movie and links them together all while doing the best Bogart impression I’ve ever heard. “You’re good, you’re very good. The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.” The gates buzz again, getting ready to close and reminding me that this is maybe not the best time to flirt. I leap back, not wanting Foote to get caught on the wrong side of the gates. “Go,” I urge him once more.
He stumbles back a few steps, his brow furrowed in confusion. The gates slide shut between us.
“Run,” I remind him, before turning away.
“Wait,” Foote calls. I stop. “Do I . . . We’re friends, right? That didn’t end when we were babies?”
A choking, aching laugh escapes me. “Yeah, we’re friends.”
Foote nods. “Well, good lu—”
I quickly cut him off. “Don’t say it. You’ve given me enough luck already.”
He stares at me, as if trying to figure me out, but with a shake of his head says, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“Wrong movie,” I answer. “That’s Casablanca.”
He shrugs and then pulls his hat down low so that it covers his eyes. “The endings are similar, though. He doesn’t get the girl either time.” As Foote turns and finally begins to walk away, I stifle the urge to tell him to pretend that Brigid and Spade find the Maltese falcon they’d been searching for and live happily ever after. Except I suddenly recall that when Spade says the line about “the stuff that dreams are made of” he’s referring to the Maltese falcon . . . which in the end he finds out is a fake. I can’t help but think of Piper then and all the time I’ve spent searching for her. Even when I finally found her, she wasn’t what I’d been looking for. It’s looking more and more like I’m not gonna get the girl I’d wanted either.
That’s not an ending I’ll accept, though, and that’s why I watch Foote walk away until he disappears from view, and then with even more dread than the last time, I brace myself to reenter the reformatory.