The Testaments

7

They say I will always have the scar, but I’m almost better; so yes, I think I’m strong enough to do this now. You’ve said that you’d like me to tell you how I got involved in this whole story, so I’ll try; though it’s hard to know where to begin.

I’ll start just before my birthday, or what I used to believe was my birthday. Neil and Melanie lied to me about that: they’d done it for the best of reasons and they’d meant really well, but when I first found out about it I was very angry at them. Keeping up my anger was difficult, though, because by that time they were dead. You can be angry at dead people, but you can never have a conversation about what they did; or you can only have one side of it. And I felt guilty as well as angry, because they’d been murdered, and I believed then that their murder was my fault.

I was supposed to be turning sixteen. What I was most looking forward to was getting my driver’s licence. I felt too old for a birthday party, though Melanie always got me a cake and ice cream and sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,” an old song I’d loved as a child and was now finding embarrassing. I did get the cake, later—chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, my favourites—but by then I couldn’t eat it. By that time Melanie was no longer there.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose. I was so young at that moment—just a split second ago, it seems—but I’m not young anymore. How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it. No more of that wide-eyed daydream gazing I used to do. I’ve become sharper, more focused. I’ve become narrowed.

Neil and Melanie were my parents; they ran a store called The Clothes Hound. It was basically used clothing: Melanie called it “previously loved” because she said “used” meant “exploited.” The sign outside showed a smiling pink poodle in a fluffy skirt with a pink bow on its head, carrying a shopping bag. Underneath was a slogan in italics and quotation marks: “You’d Never Know!” That meant the used clothes were so good you’d never know they were used, but that wasn’t true at all because most of the clothes were crappy.

Melanie said she’d inherited The Clothes Hound from her grandmother. She also said she knew the sign was old-fashioned, but people were familiar with it and it would be disrespectful to change it now.

Our store was on Queen West, in a stretch of blocks that had once all been like that, said Melanie—textiles, buttons and trims, cheap linens, dollar stores. But now it was going upmarket: cafés with fair trade and organic were moving in, big-brand outlets, name boutiques. In response, Melanie hung a sign in the window: Wearable Art. But inside, the store was crowded with all kinds of clothes you would never call wearable art. There was one corner that was kind of designer, though anything really pricey wouldn’t be in The Clothes Hound in the first place. The rest was just everything. And all sorts of people came and went: young, old, looking for bargains or finds, or just looking. Or selling: even street people would try to get a few dollars for T-shirts they’d picked up at garage sales.

Melanie worked on the main floor. She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart. She was always brisk and smiling, though on the lookout for shoplifting. After closing, she sorted and packed: this for charity, this for rags, this for Wearable Art. While doing the sorting she’d sing tunes from musicals—old ones from long ago. “Oh what a beautiful morning” was one of her favourites, and “When you walk through a storm.” I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now.

Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed: there was too much fabric, it was like the ocean, waves of cloth coming in and threatening to drown her. Cashmere! Who was going to buy thirty-year-old cashmere? It didn’t improve with age, she would say—not like her.

Neil had a beard that was going grey and wasn’t always trimmed, and he didn’t have much hair. He didn’t look like a businessman, but he handled what they called “the money end”: the invoices, the accounting, the taxes. He had his office on the second floor, up a flight of rubber-treaded stairs. He had a computer and a filing cabinet and a safe, but otherwise that room wasn’t much like an office: it was just as crowded and cluttered as the store because Neil liked to collect things. Wind-up music boxes, he had a number of those. Clocks, a lot of different clocks. Old adding machines that worked with a handle. Plastic toys that walked or hopped across the floor, such as bears and frogs and sets of false teeth. A slide projector for the kind of coloured slides that nobody had anymore. Cameras—he liked ancient cameras. Some of them could take better pictures than anything nowadays, he’d say. He had one whole shelf with nothing on it but cameras.

One time he left the safe open and I looked inside. Instead of the wads of money I’d been expecting, there was nothing in it but a tiny metal-and-glass thing that I thought must be another toy, like the hopping false teeth. But I couldn’t see where to wind it up, and I was afraid to touch it because it was old.

“Can I play with it?” I asked Neil.

“Play with what?”

“That toy in the safe.”

“Not today,” he said, smiling. “Maybe when you’re older.” Then he shut the safe door, and I forgot about the strange little toy until it was time for me to remember it, and to understand what it was.

Neil would try to repair the various items, though often he failed because he couldn’t find the parts. Then the things would just sit there, “collecting dust,” said Melanie. Neil hated throwing anything out.

On the walls he had some old posters: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, from a long-ago war; a woman in overalls flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs—that was from the same olden-days war; and a red-and-black one showing a man and a flag that Neil said was from Russia before it was Russia. Those had belonged to his great-grandfather, who’d lived in Winnipeg. I knew nothing about Winnipeg except that it was cold.

I loved The Clothes Hound when I was little: it was like a cave full of treasures. I wasn’t supposed to be in Neil’s office by myself because I might “touch things,” and then I might break them. But I could play with the wind-up toys and the music boxes and the adding machines, under supervision. Not the cameras though, because they were too valuable, said Neil, and anyway there was no film in them, so what would be the point?

We didn’t live over the store. Our house was a long distance away, in one of those residential neighbourhoods where there were some old bungalows and also some newer, bigger houses that had been built where the bungalows had been torn down. Our house was not a bungalow—it had a second floor, where the bedrooms were—but it was not a new house either. It was made of yellow brick, and it was very ordinary. There was nothing about it that would make you look at it twice. Thinking back, I’m guessing that was their idea.

8

I was in The Clothes Hound quite a lot on Saturdays and Sundays because Melanie didn’t want me to be in our house by myself. Why not? I began to ask when I was twelve. Because what if there was a fire, said Melanie. Anyway, leaving a child in a house alone was against the law. Then I would argue that I was not a child, and she would sigh and say I didn’t really know what was and was not a child, and children were a big responsibility, and I would understand later. Then she’d say I was giving her a headache, and we would get into her car and go to the store.

I was allowed to help in the store—sorting T-shirts by size, sticking the prices on them, setting aside those that needed to be either cleaned or discarded. I liked doing that: I sat at a table in the back corner, surrounded by the faint smell of mothballs, watching the people who came in.

They weren’t all customers. Some of them were street people who wanted to use our staff washroom. Melanie let them do it as long as she knew them, especially in winter. There was one older man who came in quite frequently. He wore tweed overcoats that he got from Melanie and knitted vests. By the time I was thirteen, I was finding him creepy, since we’d done a module on pedophiles at school. His name was George.

“You shouldn’t let George use the washroom,” I said to Melanie. “He’s a perv.”

“Daisy, that’s unkind,” said Melanie. “What makes you think so?” We were at our house, in the kitchen.

“He just is. He’s always hanging around. He’s bothering people for money right outside the store. Plus, he’s stalking you.” I might have said he was stalking me, which would have caused serious alarm, but that wasn’t true. George never paid any attention to me.

Melanie laughed and said, “No he isn’t.” I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

There was another person who was in and out of the store quite a lot, but she wasn’t a street person. I guessed she was forty, or maybe closer to fifty: I couldn’t tell with older people. She usually had on a black leather jacket, black jeans, and heavy boots; she kept her long dark hair pulled back, and she didn’t wear makeup. She looked like a biker, but not a real biker—more like an ad of a biker. She wasn’t a customer—she came in through the back door to pick up clothes for charity. Melanie said the two of them were old friends so when Ada asked, it was difficult to say no. Anyway, Melanie claimed that she only gave Ada items that would be hard to sell, and it was good that people would get some use out of them.

Ada didn’t look to me like the charitable type. She wasn’t soft and smiling, she was angular, and when she walked she strode. She never stayed long, and she never left without a couple of cardboard boxes of castoffs, which she stowed in whatever car she’d parked in the alleyway behind the store. I could see these cars from where I sat. They were never the same.

There was a third kind of person who came into The Clothes Hound without buying anything. These were the young women in long silvery dresses and white hats who called themselves Pearl Girls and said they were missionaries doing God’s work for Gilead. They were a lot creepier than George. They worked the downtown, talking to street people and going into shops and making pests of themselves. Some people were rude to them, but Melanie never was because she said it served no purpose.

They always appeared in twos. They had white pearl necklaces and smiled a lot, but not real smiling. They would offer Melanie their printed brochures with pictures of tidy streets, happy children, and sunrises, and titles that were supposed to lure you to Gilead: “Fallen? God Can Still Forgive You!” “Homeless? There Is a Home for You in Gilead.”

There was always at least one brochure about Baby Nicole. “Give Back Baby Nicole!” “Baby Nicole Belongs in Gilead!” We’d been shown a documentary about Baby Nicole at school: her mother was a Handmaid, and she’d smuggled Baby Nicole out of Gilead. Baby Nicole’s father was a top-brass super-nasty Gilead Commander, so there had been a huge uproar, and Gilead had demanded her return, so she could be reunited with her legal parents. Canada had dragged its feet and then caved in and said they would make every effort, but by that time Baby Nicole had disappeared and had never been found.

Now Baby Nicole was the poster child for Gilead. On every Pearl Girls brochure there was the same picture of her. She looked like a baby, nothing special, but she was practically a saint in Gilead, said our teacher. She was an icon for us too: every time there was an anti-Gilead protest in Canada, there would be the picture, and slogans like BABY NICOLE! SYMBOL OF FREEDOM! Or BABY NICOLE! LEADING THE WAY! As if a baby could lead the way on anything, I would think to myself.

I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her. I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back. The teacher had said I was callous and should learn to respect other people’s rights and feelings, and I’d said people in Gilead were people, and shouldn’t their rights and feelings be respected too? She’d lost her temper and said I needed to grow up, which was maybe true: I’d been aggravating on purpose. But I was angry about the C.

Every time the Pearl Girls came, Melanie would accept the brochures and promise to keep a pile of them at point of sale. Sometimes she would even give some of the old brochures back to them: they collected the leftover ones for use in other countries.

“Why do you do that?” I asked her when I was fourteen and taking a greater interest in politics. “Neil says we’re atheists. You’re just encouraging them.” We’d had three modules in school on Gilead: it was a terrible, terrible place, where women couldn’t have jobs or drive cars, and where the Handmaids were forced to get pregnant like cows, except that cows had a better deal. What sort of people could be on the side of Gilead and not be some kind of monsters? Especially female people. “Why don’t you tell them they’re evil?”

“There’s no point arguing with them,” said Melanie. “They’re fanatics.”

“Then I’ll tell them.” I thought I knew what was wrong with people then, especially adult people. I thought I could set them straight. The Pearl Girls were older than me, it isn’t as if they were children: how could they believe all that crap?

“No,” said Melanie quite sharply. “Stay in the back. I don’t want you talking to them.”

“Why not? I can deal—”

“They try to con girls your age into going to Gilead with them. They’ll say the Pearl Girls are helping women and girls. They’ll appeal to your idealism.”

“I would never fall for that!” I said indignantly. “I’m not fucking brain-dead.” I didn’t usually swear around Melanie and Neil, but sometimes those words just slipped out.

“Watch the potty mouth,” said Melanie. “It makes a bad impression.”

“Sorry. But I’m not.”

“Of course not,” said Melanie. “But just leave them alone. If I take the brochures, they go away.”

“Are their pearls real?”

“Fake,” said Melanie. “Everything about them is fake.”

9

Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting. What I mean is, she didn’t smell to me like my mother.

One of my favourite books at the school library when I was younger was about a man who got himself into a wolf pack. This man could never take a bath because the wolf pack scent would wash off and then the wolves would reject him. With Melanie and me, it was more like we needed to add on that layer of pack-scent, the thing that would tag us as us—us-together. But that never happened. We were never very snuggly.

Also, Neil and Melanie weren’t like the parents of the kids I knew. They were too careful around me, as if I was breakable. It was like I was a prize cat they were cat-sitting: you’d take your own cat for granted, you’d be casual about it, but someone else’s cat would be another story because if you lost that cat you would feel guilty about it in a completely different way.

Another thing: the kids from school had pictures of themselves—a lot of pictures. Their parents documented every minute of their lives. Some of the kids even had photos of themselves being born, which they’d brought to Show and Tell. I used to think that was gross—blood and great big legs, with a little head coming out from between them. And they had baby pictures of themselves, hundreds of them. These kids could hardly burp without some adult pointing a camera at them and telling them to do it again—as if they lived their lives twice, once in reality and the second time for the photo.

That didn’t happen to me. Neil’s collection of antique cameras was cool, but cameras that actually worked were non-existent in our house. Melanie told me that all the early pictures of me had been burnt up in a fire. Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did.

Now I’m going to tell you about the stupid thing I did, and the consequences of it. I’m not proud of how I behaved: looking back, I realize how dumb it was. But I couldn’t see that at the time.

A week before my birthday, there was going to be a protest march about Gilead. Footage of a new batch of executions had been smuggled out of Gilead and broadcast on the news: women being hanged for heresy and apostasy and also for trying to take babies out of Gilead, which was treason under their laws. The two oldest grades in our school had been given time off so we could go to the protest as part of World Social Awareness.

We’d made signs: NO TRADE WITH GILEAD! JUSTICE FOR GILIBAD WOMEN! BABY NICOLE, GUIDING STAR! Some kids had added green signs: GILEAD, CLIMATE SCIENCE DE-LIAR! GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!, with pictures of forest fires and dead birds and fish and people. Several teachers and some volunteer parents were going to come with us to make sure nothing violent happened to us. I was excited because it would be my first-ever protest march. But then Neil and Melanie said I couldn’t go.

“Why not?” I said. “Everyone else is going!”

“Absolutely not,” said Neil.

“You’re always saying how we should defend our principles,” I said.

“This is different. It’s not safe, Daisy,” said Neil.

“Life isn’t safe, you say that yourself. Anyway lots of teachers are coming. And it’s part of school—if I don’t go, I’ll lose marks!” This last part wasn’t exactly true, but Neil and Melanie liked me to have good grades.

“Maybe she could go,” said Melanie. “If we ask Ada to go with her?”

“I’m not a baby, I don’t need a babysitter,” I said.

“Are you hallucinating?” Neil said to Melanie. “That thing will be crawling with press! It’ll be on the news!” He was tugging at his hair, what was left of it—a sign that he was worried.

“That is the point,” I said. I’d made one of the posters we’d be carrying—big red letters and a black skull. GILEAD=DEATH OF THE MIND. “The whole idea is to be on the news!”

Melanie put her hands over her ears. “I’m getting a headache. Neil is right. No. I’m saying no. You will spend the afternoon at the store helping me out, period.”

“Fine, lock me up,” I said. I stomped off to my room and slammed the door. They couldn’t make me.

The school I went to was called the Wyle School. It was named after Florence Wyle, a sculptor of olden times whose picture was in the main entrance hall. The school was supposed to encourage creativity, said Melanie, and understanding democratic freedom and thinking for yourself, said Neil. They said that was why they’d sent me there, though they didn’t agree with private schools in general; but the standards of the public schools were so low, and of course we should all work to improve the system, but meanwhile they did not want me getting knifed by some junior drug pusher. I think now they chose the Wyle School for another reason. Wyle took strict attendance: it was impossible to skip school. So Melanie and Neil could always know where I was.

I didn’t love the Wyle School, but I didn’t hate it either. It was something to get through on my way to real life, the shape of which would become clear to me soon. Not long before, I’d wanted to be a small-animal vet, but that dream came to seem childish to me. After that I’d decided to be a surgeon, but then I saw a video of a surgery at school and it made me nauseous. Some of the other Wyle School students wanted to be singers or designers or other creative things, but I was too tone-deaf and clunky for that.

I had some friends at school: gossiping friends, girls; homework-trading friends, some of each. I made sure that my marks were stupider than I was—I didn’t want to stand out—so my own homework didn’t have a high trading value. Gym and sports, though—it was all right to be good at those, and I was, especially any sports favouring height and speed, such as basketball. That made me popular when it came to teams. But outside of school I led a constricted life, since Neil and Melanie were so jumpy. I wasn’t allowed to stroll around in shopping malls because they were infested by crack addicts, said Melanie, or hang out in parks, said Neil, because of the strange men lurking there. So my social life was pretty much a zero: it consisted entirely of things I would be allowed to do when I was older. Neil’s magic word in our house was No.

This time, though, I wasn’t going to back down: I was going to that protest march no matter what. The school had hired a couple of buses to take us. Melanie and Neil had tried to head me off by phoning the principal and denying permission, and the principal had asked me to stay behind, and I’d assured her that of course I understood, no problem, and I would wait for Melanie to come and pick me up in her car. But it was only the bus driver checking off the kids’ names and he didn’t know who was who, and everyone was milling around, and the parents and teachers weren’t paying attention and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to come, so I switched identity cards with a member of my basketball team who didn’t want to go and made it onto the bus, feeling very pleased with myself.

10

The protest march was thrilling at first. It was downtown, near the Legislature Building, though it wasn’t really a march because nobody marched anywhere, they were too jammed together. People made speeches. A Canadian relative of a woman who’d died in the Gilead Colonies cleaning up deadly radiation talked about slave labour. The leader of the Survivors of Gilead National Homelands Genocide told about the forced marches to North Dakota, where people had been crowded like sheep into fenced-in ghost towns with no food and water, and how thousands had died, and how people were risking their lives walking north to the Canadian border in winter, and he held up a hand with missing fingers and said, Frostbite.

Then a speaker from SanctuCare—the refugee organization for escaped Gilead women—spoke about those whose babies had been taken away from them, and how cruel that was, and how if you tried to get your baby back they would accuse you of disrespecting God. I couldn’t hear all the speeches because sometimes the sound system cut out, but the meaning was clear enough. There were a lot of Baby Nicole posters: ALL GILEAD BABIES ARE BABY NICOLE!

Then our school group shouted things and held up our signs, and other people had different signs: DOWN WITH GILIBAD FASCISTS! SANCTUARY NOW! Right then some counter-marchers turned up with different signs: CLOSE THE BORDER! GILEAD KEEP YOUR OWN SLUTS AND BRATS, WE GOT ENOUGH HERE! STOP THE INVASION! HANDJOBS GO HOME! Among them there was a group of those Pearl Girls in their silvery dresses and pearls—with signs saying DEATH TO BABY STEALERS and GIVE BACK BABY NICOLE. People on our side were throwing eggs at them and cheering when one hit, but the Pearl Girls just kept smiling in their glassy way.

Scuffles broke out. A group of people dressed in black with their faces covered started smashing store windows. Suddenly there were a lot of police in riot gear. They seemed to come out of nowhere. They were banging their shields and moving forward, and hitting kids and other people with their batons.

Up to that time I’d been elated, but now I was scared. I wanted to get out of there, but it was so jam-packed I could hardly move. I couldn’t find the rest of my class, and the crowd was panicking. People surged this way and that, screaming and shouting. Something hit me in the stomach: an elbow, I think. I was breathing fast and I could feel tears coming out of my eyes.

“This way,” said a gravelly voice behind me. It was Ada. She grabbed me by the collar and dragged me behind her. I’m not sure how she cleared a path: I’m guessing she kicked legs. Then we were in a street behind the riot, as they called it later on TV. When I saw the footage I thought, Now I know what it feels like to be in a riot: it feels like drowning. Not that I’d ever drowned.

“Melanie said you might be here,” said Ada. “I’m taking you home.”

“No, but—” I said. I didn’t want to admit that I was scared.

“Right now. Toot sweet. No ifs and buts.”

I saw myself on the news that night: I was holding up a sign and shouting. I thought Neil and Melanie would be furious with me, but they weren’t. Instead they were anxious. “Why did you do that?” said Neil. “Didn’t you hear us?”

“You always said a person should stand up against injustice,” I said. “The school says that too.” I knew I’d crossed a line, but I wasn’t about to apologize.

“What’s our next move?” said Melanie, not to me but to Neil. “Daisy, could you get me a water? There’s some ice in the fridge.”

“It might not be so bad,” said Neil.

“We can’t take the chance,” I heard Melanie saying. “We need to get moving, like yesterday. I’m calling Ada, she can arrange a van.”

“There’s no fallback ready,” said Neil. “We can’t…”

I came back into the room with the glass of water. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Don’t you have homework?” said Neil.

11

Three days later there was a break-in at The Clothes Hound. The store had an alarm, but the burglars were in and out before anyone could get there, which was the problem with alarms, said Melanie. They didn’t find any money because Melanie never kept cash there, but they took some of the Wearable Art, and they trashed Neil’s office—his files were scattered over the floor. They also took some of his collectibles—a few clocks and old cameras, an antique wind-up clown. They set a fire, but in an amateur way, said Neil, so the fire was quickly put out.

The police came around and asked if Neil and Melanie had any enemies. They said that no they didn’t, and everything was okay—probably it was only some street people after drug money—but I could tell they were upset because they were talking in that way they had when they didn’t want me to hear.

“They got the camera,” Neil was saying to Melanie as I was coming into the kitchen.

“What camera?” I said.

“Oh, just an old camera,” Neil said. More hair-tugging. “A rare one, though.”

From then on, Neil and Melanie got more and more jittery. Neil ordered a new alarm system for the store. Melanie said we might be moving to a different house, but when I started asking questions she said it was just an idea. Neil said No harm done about the break-in. He said it several times, which left me wondering what sort of harm actually had been done, besides the disappearance of his favourite camera.

The night after the break-in, I found Melanie and Neil watching TV. They didn’t usually really watch it—it was just always on—but this time they were intent. A Pearl Girl identified only as “Aunt Adrianna” had been found dead in a condo that she and her Pearl Girls companion had rented. She’d been tied to a doorknob with her own silvery belt around her neck. She’d been dead for a number of days, said the forensic expert. It was another condo owner who’d detected the smell and alerted the police. The police said it was a suicide, self-strangulation in this manner being a common method.

There was a picture of the dead Pearl Girl. I studied it carefully: sometimes it was hard to tell Pearl Girls apart because of their outfits, but I remembered she’d been in The Clothes Hound recently, handing out brochures. So had her partner, identified as “Aunt Sally,” who—said the news anchor—was nowhere to be found. There was a picture of her too: police were asking that sightings be reported. The Gilead Consulate had made no comment as yet.

“This is terrible,” said Neil to Melanie. “The poor girl. What a catastrophe.”

“Why?” I said. “The Pearl Girls work for Gilead. They hate us. Everyone knows that.”

They both looked at me then. What’s the word for that look? Desolate, I think. I was baffled: why should they care?

The really bad thing happened on my birthday. The morning started as if things were normal. I got up, I put on my green plaid Wyle School uniform—did I say we had a uniform? I added my black lace-up shoes to my green-socked feet, pulled my hair back into the ponytail that was among the prescribed school looks—no dangling locks—and headed downstairs.

Melanie was in the kitchen, which had a granite island. What I would have liked instead was one of the resin-and-recycled tops like those in our school cafeteria—you could see down through the resin to the objects inside, which in one counter included a raccoon skeleton, so there was always something to focus on.

The kitchen island was where we ate most of our meals. We did have a living-dining area with a table. That was supposed to be for dinner parties, but Melanie and Neil didn’t throw dinner parties; instead they threw meetings, which had to do with various causes of theirs. The night before, some people had come over: there were still several coffee cups on the table, and a plate with cracker crumbs and a few wizened grapes. I hadn’t seen who these people were because I was upstairs in my room, avoiding the fallout from whatever it was I had done. That thing was evidently bigger than simple disobedience.

I went into the kitchen and sat down at the island. Melanie’s back was to me; she was looking out the window. From that window you could see our yard—round cement planters with rosemary bushes in them, a patio with an outdoor table and chairs, and a corner of the street at the front.

“Morning,” I said. Melanie whipped around.

“Oh! Daisy!” she said. “I didn’t hear you! Happy birthday! Sweet sixteen!”

Neil didn’t turn up for breakfast before it was time for me to leave for school. He was upstairs talking on his phone. I was slightly hurt, but not very: he was very absent-minded.

Melanie drove me, as she usually did: she didn’t like me going to school by myself on the bus, even though the stop was right near our house. She said—as she always said—that she was on her way to The Clothes Hound and she might as well drop me off.

“Tonight we’ll have your birthday cake, with ice cream,” she said, her voice rising at the end as if it was a question. “I’ll pick you up after school. There are some things Neil and I want to tell you, now that you’re old enough.”

“Okay,” I said. I thought this was going to be about boys and what consent meant, which I’d heard enough about at school. It was bound to be awkward, but I would have to get through it.

I wanted to say I was sorry for having gone to the protest march, but then we were at the school and I hadn’t said it. I got out of the car silently; Melanie waited until I was at the entrance. I waved at her, and she waved back. I don’t know why I did that—I didn’t usually. I guess it was a sort of apology.

I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I? It was normal. Normal is like looking out a car window. Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance. You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth.

A few of my homework friends sang “Happy Birthday” to me in the cafeteria while we were having lunch. Some of the others clapped.

Then it was the afternoon. The air was stale, the clock slowed down. I sat in French class, where we were supposed to be reading a page from a novella by Colette—Mitsou, about a music-hall star hiding a couple of men in her wardrobe. As well as being French, it was supposed to be about how terrible life used to be for women, but Mitsou’s life didn’t seem so terrible to me. Hiding a handsome man in her closet—I wished I could do that. But even if I knew such a man, where could I stash him? Not in my own bedroom closet: Melanie would catch on right away, and if not, I’d have to feed him. I gave that some thought: What sort of food could I sneak without Melanie noticing? Cheese and crackers? Sex with him would be out of the question: it would be too risky to let him out of the closet, and there wasn’t room for me to cram myself in there with him. This was the kind of daydreaming I often did in school: it passed the time.

Still, it was a problem in my life. I’d never gone out with anyone because I’d never met anyone I might want to go out with. There seemed to be no way that could happen. Boys from the Wyle School were not possible: I’d gone through grade school with them, I’d seen them pick their noses, and some of them had been pants-wetters. You can’t feel romantic with those images in your mind.

By this time I was feeling glum, which is one of the effects a birthday can have: you’re expecting a magic transformation but then it doesn’t happen. To keep myself awake I pulled hairs out of my head, in behind my right ear, just two or three hairs at a time. I knew that if I pulled out that same hair too often I risked creating a bald spot, but I had only begun this habit a few weeks before.

Finally the time was up and I could go home. I walked along the polished hall towards the front door of the school and stepped outside. There was a light drizzle; I didn’t have my raincoat. I scanned the street: Melanie wasn’t waiting in her car.

All of a sudden Ada appeared beside me, in her black leather jacket. “Come on. Let’s get in the car,” she said.

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“It’s about Neil and Melanie.” I looked at her face, and I could tell: something really bad must have happened. If I’d been older I would’ve asked what it was right away, but I didn’t because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I’d read, I’d come across the words nameless dread. They’d just been words then, but now that’s exactly what I felt.

Once we were in the car and she’d started driving, I said, “Did someone have a heart attack?” It was all I could think of.

“No,” Ada said. “Listen carefully and don’t freak out on me. You can’t go back to your house.”

The awful feeling in my stomach got worse. “What is it? Was there a fire?”

“There’s been an explosion,” she said. “It was a car bomb. Outside The Clothes Hound.”

“Shit. Is the store wrecked?” I said. First the break-in, and now this.

“It was Melanie’s car. She and Neil were both in it.”

I sat there for a minute without speaking; I couldn’t make sense of this. What kind of maniac would want to kill Neil and Melanie? They were so ordinary.

“So they’re dead?” I said finally. I was shivering. I tried to picture the explosion, but all I could see was a blank. A black square.