Crossed

CHAPTER 43 KY

Everyone else sleeps.

If I wanted to run, now would be the time.

Cassia told me once that she wanted to write a poem for me. Did she ever get past the beginning? What words did she use for the end?

She cried before she slept. I reached out to touch the ends of her hair. She didn’t notice. I didn’t know what to do. Listening to her made me ache. I felt tears stream down my face too. And when I accidentally brushed Eli with my arm his face was wet where his tears ran down.

We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

I saw my parents kissing all the time. I remember one time when my father had been in the canyons and just come back. My mother stood painting. He came close. She laughed and drew a streak of water along his cheek. It glistened. When they kissed she wrapped her arms around him and let the paintbrush fall to the ground.

It was kind of my father to send that page to the Markhams. If he’d never done that, Patrick might never have known about the Archivists and couldn’t have told me the way to contact them in Oria. We would never have had the old scribe. I would never have known how to sort, or how to trade. I wouldn’t have been able to give Cassia her birthday poem.

I cannot let my parents go unmarked any longer.

Careful not to step on anyone, I feel my way over to the back of the cave. It doesn’t take long to find what I’m looking for within my pack — the paints Eli gathered for me. And a paintbrush. My hand closes around its bristles.

I open the jars of paint and set them in a row. Reach out again and make sure the wall is in front of me.

And then I dip the brush in and make a stroke above me on the wall of the cave. I feel some of the paint drip onto my face.

I paint the world, and then my parents in the middle of it, while I wait for the light to come. My mother. My father. A picture of her looking at a sunset. A picture of him teaching a boy to write. It might be me. In the dark I can’t be sure.

I paint Vick’s stream.

I paint Cassia last.

How much do we have to show the people we love?

What pieces of my life do I have to lay bare, carve out, and put before her? Is it enough that I have pointed the way to who I am?

Do I have to tell her how back in the Borough I was sometimes jealous and bitter about how different I was? How I wished I were Xander, or any of the other boys who got to keep going to school and who would at least have a chance to be Matched with her?

Do I have to tell her about the night when I turned my back on all the other decoys and only took Vick and Eli? Vick, because I knew he’d help us survive, Eli to appease my guilt?

I have to tell her the truth, but I haven’t even told it to myself.

My hands begin to shake.

The day my parents died I was alone on the plateau. I saw the fire come down. Afterwards, I ran to find them. That much is true.

When I saw the first bodies I was sick. I threw up. And then I saw that some things had survived. Not people, but objects. A shoe here. A perfect, unopened foilware meal there. A paintbrush with clean bristles. I picked it up.

Now I remember. What I’ve lied to myself about all along.

After I picked up the paintbrush and looked over and saw my parents dead on the ground, I didn’t try to carry them. I didn’t bury them.

I saw them and I ran.