She tries to write a note to her, in case—to read when she’s older. But she is unable to put down on that page anything more than the biggest, most obvious thing: You were loved.
In the gym, no one is sleeping. Twenty-six kids are awake in the dark, four fewer than the day before. A belief has spread among some of them that sleep itself is the poison, the cause and not the effect. How can you catch it if you never close your eyes? Mei is lying in her cot, shaking beneath her blanket. They are stiff, those blankets, as rough as old coats. She is holding her phone to her chest like a cross. Someone is whispering in one corner. Someone is crunching candy in the dark.
Into this wide space, the sirens rise quietly, muffled by the windowless walls. But the faint scent of smoke soon slips into the gym.
“Do you smell that?” says the voice of one of the boys on the other side of the room. Mei can see his silhouette against the green glow of the exit sign. He is pressing his hands to the door, feeling for heat.
There is a rising of voices as the word travels through the room: fire. The smack of bare feet hitting the polished wood floor.
“We need to get out of here,” someone is saying.
The voice of the guard out front calls into the room: “Everyone stay calm,” he says, as always, from a great distance. Those guards are afraid to breathe the same air as the kids. “The fire is way up in the woods, but we’re keeping an eye on it.”
A tide of protest goes up in the gym. They can hear the wind growing outside. There’s a need to see what is happening out there, how near or far that fire might be.
Some of the kids begin to crowd near the front door. The guard backs away. “You need to obey the perimeter,” he says.
But the smell of the smoke is getting stronger.
“What do they care if we burn alive?” says Matthew, as Mei slips her shoes on, her backpack.
Matthew tries it first. He walks quickly toward the guard.
“Stop,” says the guard, but it is suddenly obvious to everyone watching: that guard is afraid to touch him. Matthew keeps going—he walks right out the front door.
And then the crowd realizes it, too. Never before has Mei felt so connected to these other kids, to the force of them all walking out the door, quick and firm, on only the strength of their minds, as if crossing hot coals. There is a terror and a thrill, that sudden sense of purpose. She can hear the guard calling for help on his radio.
When the wind hits their faces, some tear off their masks right away, let them float off behind them like freed birds. Who knows how many of these kids carry the sickness already, the thing multiplying in their bloodstreams, even now, awaiting its moment to bloom?
But for now, on this night, they feel fine—fine!—and what they do is they run. All of them. Even Mei, her backpack pounding against her spine, and the air, slightly smoky, rushing into her throat. The wind is so violent it swallows her breath—a Santa Ana.
If the guard is calling after them, not one of them can hear his voice, too loud is the weather in their ears.
Matthew will know what to do next—this is the idea that propels her toward him in the dark. She stops where he stops, which is in the shadows of the back entrance to the library, a boy, tall and skinny, a stranger, really, leaning against a wall.
“Where can we go?” she says. Her breaths are coming fast from the sprint.
The fire is more distant than she had imagined: a slight glow, tended by helicopters, way up high in the woods. It seems suddenly clear that the fire is not what is making them run.
“I don’t know,” says Matthew. He keeps looking around. His face is half hidden in the shadows cast by the streetlights. “I don’t know.”
The other kids are streaming past, footsteps crunching quickly in the dark.
“This was stupid,” says Matthew. He is rubbing his hands together. “They’ll send a SWAT team here any second.”
But a surprising idea is forming in Mei’s head. The start of a whisper is coming up from her throat: “I think I know a place,” she says.
“What?” he calls in the wind.
Louder this time: “I know where we can go.”
She will never know the meaning of that flash of surprise on his face—the same way the boys sometimes looked at her as a child, when she revealed how fast she could run across a soccer field.
He asks no questions.
The two of them just go.
What a rush it is to provide this boy with the exact thing that is needed.
The lawn, when they get there, is wet beneath their shoes; this grass always so much healthier than the grass in other yards, no matter the drought. A row of white roses is blowing in the wind, the petals a confetti on the grass.
“I babysit here,” says Mei. The Mercedes is gone from the driveway, but the porch light is on. “They’re out of town.”
It is surprising how easy this is: as easy as turning that key, as quick as one finger punching the code for the alarm system.
Inside, the air smells like clean laundry—and like safety, too, as if no trouble can come to a home so well kept. The feeling is in the marble countertops of that enormous white kitchen, the abundance of copper pots. It’s in the miniature succulents arranged in mason jars, one in each windowsill. It’s the way the wood floors shine beneath the overhead lights, which run on a timer to make it look like the house is occupied, which, for now, it is.
“We have to take off our shoes,” says Mei.
Matthew looks skeptical, but he kicks off his sandals, one held together by tape—none of the other boys wear sandals like his. She tries not to notice how dirty his feet are as they sink into the creamy white rug in the living room.
“Where are they, anyway?” he says, while she sets his sandals on a rack in the closet, as if to say in tableau: At least we kept our shoes in the proper place. “Maybe they knew something we didn’t.”
“They’re just on a cruise,” says Mei.
Matthew laughs a private laugh. His mask now gone from his face, it’s the first time that she has really noticed his mouth, the thin lips, the beginnings of a mustache, his teeth packed tight as tile, the overcorrection of braces.
“Do you ever wonder why they need such a huge house?” he says. “I mean, what do they do with all these things?”
He lifts a small sculpture of a bird from its spot on the piano. He flies it around like a kid.
“Be careful,” she says.
Maybe they shouldn’t have come here.
Over the fireplace hangs a gleaming honey-colored guitar, someone’s signature laced across the belly. It’s not for touching—this is what she’s been telling the little girl who lives here, two years old, just beginning to understand what you can and cannot do. No touching, repeats the girl whenever she passes that guitar, no touching. But here is Matthew, reaching up for a strum.
“Oh,” says Mei. “Um, can you leave that alone?”
It’s the wrong thing to say. How embarrassing, this concern for material objects, but also: the way her voice goes up at the end, like a question, like maybe he shouldn’t be touching it?
“Relax,” he says. “Aren’t they in the middle of the ocean?”
His whole body is moving. His fingers are snapping. His feet are tapping. There is a feeling of adventure in the way he pauses to play drums on the coffee table like it’s a dashboard, the way he climbs onto the little girl’s rocking horse, the absurd bend of his long legs at the sides. And it’s a little contagious—it is—his wildness.
“I just want to close the curtains,” says Mei. “So the neighbors won’t see us.”
There are a lot of windows.
Afterward, she finds Matthew in the kitchen—with a bottle of wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other.