“Yeah?” Loup smiled.
T.Y. peered at her with a crooked grin. “Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
He cleared his throat. “We better get down. We’ll get in trouble if we get caught up here.”
They clambered down the roof and climbed down the tree. T.Y. went first. Loup let herself drop lightly from the lowest branch. He reached to steady her, hands grazing her rib cage.
T.Y. blinked. “Whoa.”
She took a quick step backward. “Hey. Don’t.”
He put up his hands. “Sorry. It’s just…”
His words trailed away. Loup looked at the sky, looked at the lowering sun caught in the branches of the persimmon tree. She thought about her mother lying in the ground. She thought about Tommy. She thought about being alone, and knew she wasn’t good enough to pretend all the time. It was too easy to forget to be careful, too hard to keep people from touching her. And she didn’t want to be someone who was never touched. She looked at T.Y., his face uncertain and hopeful, brown eyes bright under his shock of curls. “Can you keep a secret?”
He crossed his heart. “Hope to die.”
Loup held out her hand. “Come here.”
In the room with the cots, she found Jane was gone. She dug in the duffel bag that held her meager belongings and showed T.Y. her most sacred artifact, the brittle, yellowing tabloid paper with the story about the Lost Boys. She couldn’t read all of it, but she knew the story by heart. It even had the name of the place in Mexico where her father was going written in the margins.
“That’s what my father was.”
T.Y. read avidly, eyes flickering back and forth. “Holy shit!” he breathed. He lifted his head, wide-eyed. “You’re a superhero!”
“A what?” Loup asked.
It was his turn to grab her hand. “Come on! I’ll show you!”
He led her to the basement, to the rec room with the Ping-Pong table and the TV with its collection of grainy, hissing videotapes and scratched, skipping DVDs, all of which had seemed a marvel to her. He bypassed the shelves of books and dug into a cabinet for a stash of well-thumbed comics.
“Here,” T.Y. said reverently. “Be careful; they’re really, really old.”
Loup turned the limp, worn pages, perusing the colorful panels. There were men and women in crazy costumes doing crazy things, shooting rays out of their eyes, changing shapes, sprouting claws, flying.
“They’re mutants,” T.Y. explained. “They’re like a new race.” He scooted closer to her, pointing. “That’s Wolverine, he’s my favorite. His bones are made out of adamantium, and he has awesome claws and fighting skills, and he heals super-fast. He’s, like, part animal, I guess, and he has super-hearing and super-smell. Do you?”
“No,” Loup said absently. “Good, I guess. Not super.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I just thought maybe.”
“No.” She handed him the comic. “Sorry.”
T.Y. took it reluctantly. “You don’t want to read it?”
“I kind of forgot how,” Loup admitted. “Maybe I’ll read it later. Is Anna a good teacher?”
He stared at her. “You don’t know how to read?”
“Well, I did, a little. Tia Sonia taught me before she died. I can spell my name. But then I got kicked out of school right away, and Tommy found his job at the gym…” Loup shrugged. “So I guess I’ll have to start over.”
“Don’t tell anyone!” T.Y. whispered urgently. “Especially Jane. She’ll make fun of you.”
Loup cocked her head. “Why?”
“Because they’ll think you’re stupid.”
“But I’m not,” she said patiently. “Not that way, anyway.”
His voice rose. “But they’ll think so!”
“So?” She thought, frowning. “That’s supposed to make me feel scared, right? That they would think I’m stupid even though I’m not?”
“Well, no… but yeah!”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
T.Y. blinked at her. “Whaddya mean, thanks?”
She’d never had to explain it to anyone, only ever had Tommy and her mother explain it to her. “I don’t get scared,” Loup said slowly. “So it kinda is like being stupid, but only in this one way. It means I have to think extra hard and be careful, but sometimes I forget. And sometimes I don’t understand what other people are feeling or what I’m supposed to be feeling because I just don’t know. See? So what you said, it helped me understand. That’s why I said thanks.”
“You’re bullshitting me.” T.Y. sounded uncertain.
“No.”
“Okay, prove it!” he challenged her.
“You want me to do something dumb on purpose?” Loup shook her head. “No way. I promised.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“T.Y.” Loup sighed, feeling more tired and sad than she ever had in her short life. “Think what you like, okay? Just promise me you won’t say anything. I guess I shouldn’t have told you. But I always had Tommy to tell me when I needed to think and be careful, and I won’t for a while. I screwed up right away, huh? I just thought it would be nice to have a friend.”
He flushed guiltily. “Tommy’s your brother?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s my real name, too.” T.Y. fiddled with the comic.
“Thomas Yorke. No one remembered what my parents called me, so Sister Martha named me after her grandfather, but then she said it felt too weird to call me by his name.” He looked up. “Do they know?”
“Sister Martha and Father Ramon?” Loup nodded. “Yeah.”
He blew out his breath. “Shit.” A bell clanged somewhere. “We better go; that means dinner.” T.Y. stood and put out his hand. “I’m sorry. Friends?”
Loup smiled. “Yeah.”
T.Y. tugged her to her feet, grunting at the unexpected effort it took. “Okay. Wow.” He paused. “On the roof… that’s what you meant, isn’t it? About not thinking. Because that was pretty stupid, standing up there like that. One slip, and sploosh.”
“I wouldn’t have slipped,” Loup said. “But yeah.”
He eyed her. “You do need a friend.”
TWELVE
The first days were strange.
It was a different world with its own rules. Loup was used to a simpler world. At home there was the diner, which was Grady’s domain, and there was the apartment with her mother and Tommy. There was the gym and its hierarchy, but it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t a part of it. It was Tommy’s world, and she was his little sister. As long as she stayed quiet and out of the way, no one noticed her. Even Miguel had gotten good at ignoring her.
Not here.
There was Father Ramon and Sister Martha and Anna, and all of them were very concerned about her well-being.
And there were the other kids.
Once, there had been more—dozens. Some had succumbed to the last wave of sickness; others had grown up and moved out. Now there were only eight. That was a good thing, she learned. It meant that fewer people were dying. In Sister Martha’s words, it meant that the mortality rate had tapered off, and that people were developing immune systems to cope with the sickness.
It still seemed like a lot of kids to Loup.
There were more boys than girls. In addition to T.Y., there was Mack and Diego—the boys who’d served as pallbearers and grave diggers at her mother’s funeral. There was impetuous C.C. Rider, named for an old song that he’d liked when he was little, bouncing up and down on those nights after the generator was shut down and Sister Martha brought out the ancient hand-cranked machine that played scratchy old recordings. There was scholarly Jaime in his glasses, and little Dondi, the youngest at seven.
Dondi’s name wasn’t really Dondi, either. That came from some incomprehensible, boring old comic strip about a boy with big, dark eyes and protruding ears.
For the girls, there was sharp-witted, sharp-tongued Jane—Crazy Jane, the nickname shared as a dour jest Loup didn’t get. There was sweet, dim Maria, who was in love with Diego. And there was Kotch, imperious Katya, already promising to turn into a tall, blond beauty.
“Kotch is a bitch,” T.Y. confided at the first dinner. “Don’t let her bother you.”
Katya rapped his knuckles with a serving spoon. “Shut up, bug!”
“Ow!”
“Children.” Father Ramon’s deep voice silenced them.
Loup learned that Mack’s name was a nickname, too. Mack the Knife.
“It’s an old song, too,” T.Y. whispered to her. “But that’s not how he got the name. He stabbed his father to death.”
“Why?” she whispered back.
“His old man beat his mother.” His whisper dropped an octave. “Killed her.”
They accepted her with wary curiosity. Her loss made her one of them. Some, especially Maria, offered genuine sympathy. But Loup was different, and in the company of her peers, she learned for the first time that children have a keen ability to recognize that which is other.
The routine was easy enough. In the morning, they had lessons with Anna from eight until noon. At noon, they helped serve a free lunch of rice and beans to needy parishioners. Once that was over and they’d helped clean up, they were mostly free until dinner.
Some of the kids did other things to help out. Mack was good at fixing things. Clever, organized Jane helped keep the dispensary in order. Jaime was fascinated by computers, of which the church had several in various states of disuse. They weren’t good for much, but Jaime tinkered with them and would talk about them at length to anyone who would listen.
“They used to be able to talk to one another,” he explained to Loup, stroking the hard plastic case. “They used to be able to do all kinds of things.” His eyes flashed behind his glasses. “I’ve read about it. Old manuals and newspapers. You could type on the computer and talk to someone in China, just like they were right there in the room with you.”
