Melanie sits in her chair and waits. Then she stands up and waits at the door with her face to the mesh. Then she walks up and down, hugging her own arms. She’s confused and excited and very, very scared.
Something new is happening. She senses it: something completely outside of her experience. When she looks out through the mesh window, she can see that Sergeant isn’t closing the doors behind him, as he goes from cell to cell, and he’s not wheeling the children into the classroom.
Finally her door is unlocked. She steps back from it as it opens, and Sergeant and the other man step inside. Sergeant points the gun at Melanie.
“You forget your manners?” he asks her. “Sit down, kid.” Something happens to Melanie. It’s like all her different, mixed-up feelings are crashing into each other, inside her head, and turning into a new feeling. She sits down, but she sits down on her bed, not in her chair.
Sergeant stares at her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “You don’t want to piss me off today,” he warns Melanie. “Not today.”
“I want to know what’s happening, Sergeant,” Melanie says. “Why were we left on our own? Why didn’t the teachers come? What’s happening?”
“Sit down in the chair,” the other man says.
“Do it,” Sergeant tells her.
But Melanie stays where she is, on the bed, and she doesn’t shift her gaze from Sergeant’s eyes. “Is there going to be class today?” she asks him.
“Sit in the goddamn chair,” Sergeant orders her. “Sit in the chair or I swear I will fucking dismantle you.” His voice is shaking, just a little, and she can see from the way his face changes, suddenly, that he knows she heard the shake. “Fucking—fine!” he explodes, and he advances on the chair and kicks it with his boot, really hard, so it flies up into the air and hits the wall of the narrow cell. It bounces off at a wild angle, hits the other wall and crashes down on its back. Sergeant kicks it again, and then a third time. The frame is all twisted from where it hit the wall, and one of the wheels comes right off when Sergeant kicks it.
The other man just watches, without saying a word, while Sergeant gets his breath back and comes down from his scary rage. When he does, he looks at Melanie and shrugs. “Well, I guess you can just stay where you are, then,” he says.
The two of them go out, and the door is locked again. They take the other kids away, one by one—not to the classroom, but out through the other door, the bare steel door, which until now has marked the farthest limit of their world.
Nobody comes, after that, and nothing happens. It feels like a long time, but Melanie’s mind is racing so fast that even a few minutes would feel like a long time. It’s longer than a few minutes, though. It feels like most of a day.
The air gets colder. It’s not something that Melanie thinks about, normally, because heat and cold don’t translate into comfort or discomfort for her; she notices now because with no music playing and nobody to talk to, there’s nothing else to notice. Maybe it’s night. That’s it. It must be night outside. Melanie knows from stories that it gets colder at night as well as darker.
She remembers her book, and gets it out. She reads about Hector and Achilles and Priam and Hecuba and Odysseus and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Helen.
There are footsteps from the corridor outside. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her? To take her to the altar and give her to the goddess Artemis?
Someone unlocks Melanie’s door, and pushes it open.
Miss Mailer stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.”
Melanie surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. She’s going to run to Miss Mailer. She’s going to hug her and be hugged by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body. Then she freezes where she is.
Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.
Miss Mailer is alarmed. “Melanie?” She takes a step forward.
“Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Please, Miss Mailer! Don’t! Don’t touch me!”
Miss Mailer stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She drops to her knees, then falls full-length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills all the room and all her mind and all her thoughts, and all she wants to do is . . .
“Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!” Miss Mailer doesn’t move.
“Fuck off, or I will dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate.
Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. She’s dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.
“Oh God!” Miss Mailer blurts. She gets it at last. She rummages in her bag, which Melanie didn’t even notice until now. She takes something out—a tiny bottle with yellow liquid in it—and starts to spray it on her skin, on her clothes, in the air. The bottle says Dior. It’s not the usual chemicaclass="underline" it’s something that smells sweet and funny. Miss Mailer doesn’t stop until she’s emptied the bottle.
“Does that help?” she asks, with a catch in her voice. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think . . . ”
It does help, a little. And Melanie has had practice at pushing the hunger down: she has to do it a little bit every time she picks up her book.
This is a million times harder, but after a while she can think again and move again and even sit up.
“It’s safe now,” she says timidly, groggily. And she remembers her own words, spoken as a joke so many times before she ever guessed what they might actually mean. “I won’t bite.”
Miss Mailer bends down and sweeps Melanie up, choking out her name, and there they are crying into each other’s tears, and even though the hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow, she wouldn’t exchange this moment for all the other moments of her life.
“They’re attacking the fence,” Miss Mailer says, her voice muffled by Melanie’s hair. “But it’s not Hungries, it’s looters. Bandits. People just like me and the other teachers, but renegades who never went into the western cordon. We’ve got to get out before they break through. We’re being evacuated, Melanie—to Texas.”
“Why?” is all Melanie can think of to say.
“Because that’s where the cure is!” sobs Miss Mailer. “They’ll make you okay again, and you’ll have a real mom and dad, and a real life, and all this fucking madness will just be a memory!”
“No,” Melanie whimpers.
“Yes, baby! Yes!” Miss Mailer is hugging her tight, and Melanie is trying to find the words to explain that she doesn’t want a mom or a dad, she wants to stay here in the block with Miss Mailer and have lessons with her forever, but right then is when Sergeant walks into the cell.
Three of his people are behind him. His face is pale, and his eyes are open too wide.
“We got to go,” he says. “Right now. Last two choppers are loaded up and ready. I’m real sorry, Gwen, but this is the last call.”
“I’m not going without her,” Miss Mailer says, and she hugs Melanie so tight it almost hurts.
“Yeah,” Sergeant says. “You are. She can’t come on the transport without restraints, and we don’t got any restraints that we can use. You come on, now.”
He reaches out his hand as if he’s going to help Miss Mailer to her feet. Miss Mailer doesn’t take the hand.
“Come on, now,” Sergeant says again, on a rising pitch.
“I’m not leaving her,” Miss Mailer says again.