It was getting dark by the time Mr. and Mrs. Woodard came home, the sky a layered wash of gold, peach, and blue. Addie insisted on splitting the babysitting money with Hally. When I commented on it, she shrugged.
I had to agree. Robby and Will—they switched twice more during the course of the afternoon—both adored her. Even Lucy had followed us to the door, asking if Hally was coming back next time. Whatever her mother had said about Hally—and, judging from the way the woman looked at her when she came home, it hadn’t been anything good—seemed to have slipped from Lucy’s mind.
Turned out we lived in the same direction, so Hally said she’d walk with us. We set out into the evening sun, the air dripping with humidity and mosquitoes. It was only April, but a recent heat wave had driven the temperature to record highs. The collar of our uniform flopped damply against our neck.
They walked slowly, silently. The dying sunlight lifted traces of red from Hally’s black hair and made her tan skin seem even darker. We’d seen people with her coloring before—not often, but often enough to not make it overly strange. But we’d never seen anyone with quite her shape of face, her features. Not outside of pictures, anyway, and hardly even then. We’d never seen anyone act like she’d acted toward Will and Robby, either.
She was half-blood. Half-foreign, even if she herself had been born in the Americas. Was that the reason for her strangeness? Foreigners weren’t allowed into the country anymore—hadn’t been for ages—and all the war refugees who’d come long ago were now dead. Most foreign blood still existing in the country was diluted. But there were groups, people said. There were immigrants who’d refused to integrate, preserving their bloodlines, their otherness, when they should have embraced the safety the Americas offered from the destruction wreaked by the hybrids overseas.
Had one of Hally’s parents come from a community like that?
“I wonder,” Hally said, then fell quiet.
Addie didn’t press. She was too wrapped up in her own thoughts. But I was listening, and I waited for Hally to continue.
“I wonder,” she said again after a moment. “I wonder who’s going to be dominant when they settle, Robby or Will.”
“Hmm?” Addie said. “Oh, Robby, I think. He’s starting to control things more.”
“It’s not always who you think it is,” Hally said, lifting her eyes from the ground. The little white gems studding her glasses frames caught the yellow light and winked. “It’s all science, isn’t it? Brain connections and neuron strength and stuff set up before you’re even born. You can’t tell those things just by watching people.”
Addie shrugged and looked away. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She changed the subject, and they chatted about school and the latest movie until we reached Hally’s neighborhood. There was a big black wrought-iron gate leading into it, and a skinny boy about our age stood beyond the bars.
He glanced up as we neared, but didn’t say anything, and Hally rolled her eyes when she noticed him. They looked alike; he had her tan skin and dark curls and brown eyes. We’d heard about Hally’s older brother, but we’d never seen him before. Addie stopped walking a good dozen yards from the gate, so we didn’t really get a close look at him today, either.
“Bye,” Hally said over her shoulder and smiled. Behind her, the boy finished inputting something into a keypad and the gate yawned open. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Addie waved. “Yeah, tomorrow.”
We waited until Hally and her brother were almost out of sight before turning and heading homeward, this time alone. But not really alone. Addie and I are never alone.
Addie kicked our feet as she walked.
I said.
Addie hesitated.
Not where people might see.
Addie’s irritation mounted inside us. She let a car rattle by, then darted across the street. She didn’t complete her sentence, but she didn’t need to.
They might turn out like us.
For years, our parents had struggled to discover why their daughters weren’t settling like normal. They blamed everyone from our preschool teacher (too unstructured) to our doctors (why was nothing working?) to our friends (had they settled late? Were they encouraging this strange behavior?). In the darkest hours of the night, they fired blame at each other and themselves.
But worse than the blame was the fear—the fear that if we didn’t settle, there would come the day when we weren’t allowed home from the hospital. We’d grown up with the threat of it ringing in our ears, dreading the deadline of our tenth birthday.
Our parents had begged. We’d heard them through hospital doors, pleading for more time, just a little more time: It will happen. It’s already working. It’ll happen soon—please!
I don’t know what else happened behind those doors. I don’t know what convinced those doctors and officials in the end, but our mother and father emerged from that room exhausted and white.
And they told us we had a little more time.
Two years later, I was declared gone.
Our shadow was long now, our legs heavy. Strands of our hair gleamed golden in the wan light, and Addie gathered them all into a loose ponytail, holding it off our neck in the unrelenting heat.
I said, fusing a smile to my voice.
Addie said.
she said.
Neither of us mentioned all the ways in which Lyle wasn’t fine. The days when he didn’t want to do anything but lie half-awake in bed. The hours each week he spent hooked up to the dialysis machine, his blood cycling out of his body before being injected back in.
Lyle was sick, but he wasn’t hybrid sick, and that made all the difference.
We walked in silence, inner and outer. I felt the dark, brooding mists of Addie’s thoughts drifting against my own. Sometimes, if I concentrated hard enough, I fancied I could almost grasp what she was thinking about. But not today.
In a way, I was glad. It meant she couldn’t grasp what I was thinking about, either.
She couldn’t know I was dreading, dreading, dreading the day Will and Robby did settle. The day we’d go to babysit and find just one little boy smiling up at us.
Lupside, where we’d lived for the last three years, was known for absolutely nothing. Whenever anyone wanted to do anything that couldn’t be taken care of at the strip mall or the smattering of grocery stores, they went to the nearby city of Bessimir.
Bessimir was known for exactly one thing, and that was the history museum.
Addie laughed quietly with the girl next to us as our class stood sweating outside the museum doors. Summer hadn’t even started its true battle against spring, but boys were already complaining about their mandatory long pants while girls’ skirt hems climbed along with the thermostat.
“Listen up,” Ms. Stimp shouted, which got about half the class to actually shut up and pay attention. For anyone who’d grown up around this area, visiting Bessimir’s history museum was as much a part of life as going to the pool in the summer or to the theater for the monthly movie release. The building, officially named the Brian Doulanger History of the Americas Museum after some rich old man who’d first donated money for its construction, was almost universally referred to as “the museum,” as if there were no others in the world. In two years, Addie and I had gone twice with two different history class
es, and each visit had left us sick to our stomach.
Already, I could feel a stiffness in our muscles, a strain in Addie’s smile as the teacher handed out our student passes. Because no matter what it was called, Bessimir’s history museum was interested in only one thing, and that was the tale of the Americas’ century-and-a-half-long battle against the hybrids.
The blast of air-conditioning as we entered the building made Addie shiver and raised goose bumps on our skin but didn’t ease the knot in our gut. Three stories tall, the museum erupted into a grand, open foyer just beyond the ticket counter, the two upper floors visible if one tilted one’s head back and stared upward. Addie had tried it the first time we’d entered. We’d been thirteen years old, and the sight of it had crushed us with the weight of all that history, all the battles and wars and hatred.
No one looked up now. The others because they were bored. Addie because we never again wanted to see.
Addie’s friend had abandoned her for someone who could still laugh. Addie should have gone after her, should have forced a smile and a joke and complained along with everyone else about having to come to the museum yet again, but she didn’t. She just drifted to the back of the group so we didn’t have to hear the guide begin our tour.
I said nothing, as if by being silent I could pretend I didn’t exist. As if Addie could pretend, for an hour, that I wasn’t there, that the hybrid enemies the guide kept talking about as we entered the Hall of Revolutionaries weren’t the same as us.
A hand closed around our shoulder. Addie whirled to fling it off, then flinched as she realized what she’d done.
“Sorry, sorry—” Hally put her hands up in the air, fingers spread, in peace. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” She gave us a tentative smile. We only had this one class with her, so it hadn’t been difficult for Addie to avoid her since last night.
“You surprised me,” Addie said, shoving our hair away from our face. “That’s all.”
The rest of the class was leaving us behind, but when Addie moved to catch up, Hally touched our shoulder again. She snatched her hand back when Addie spun around, but asked quickly, “Are you all right?”
A flush of heat shot through us. “Yes, of course,” Addie said.
We stood silently in that hall a moment longer, flanked by portraits of all the greatest heroes of the Revolution, the founders of our country. These men had been dead for nearly 150 years, but they still stared out at Addie and me with that fire in their eyes, that accusation, that hatred that had burned in every non-hybrid soul all through those first terrible warring years, when the edict of the day was the extermination of all those who had once been in power—all the hybrid men, women, and children.
They said that zest had died over the decades, as the country grew lax and trusting, forgetting the past. Hybrid children were permitted to grow old. Immigrants were allowed to step foot on American soil again, to move into our land and call it their own.
The attempted foreign invasion at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the start of the Great Wars, had put a stop to that. Suddenly, the old flame burned brighter than ever, along with the new vow to never forget—never, ever forget again.
Hally must have seen our gaze flicker toward the oil paintings. She grinned, her dimples showing, and said, “Can you imagine if guys still went around wearing those stupid hats? God, I’d never get done making fun of my brother.”
Addie managed a thin-lipped smile. In seventh grade, when we’d had to write an essay on the men framed in these paintings, she’d tried to convince the teacher to let her write about the depictions from an artistic viewpoint instead. It hadn’t worked. “We should get back to the group.”
No one noticed as Addie and Hally slipped into place at the edge of our class. They’d already made it to the room I hated most of all, and Addie kept our eyes on our hands, our shoes—anywhere but on the pictures hanging around us. But I could still remember them from last year, when our class had studied early American history and we’d spent the entire trip in this section of the museum instead of just passing through, as we were now.
There aren’t a lot of photographs salvaged from back then, of course. But the reconstructionist artists had spared no detail, no grimace of pain or patch of peeling, sunburned skin. And the photos that did exist hung heavily on the walls. Their grainy black-and-white quality didn’t hide the misery of the fields. The pain of the workers, little more than slaves, who were all our ancestors. Immigrants from the Old World who’d suffered back there for so many thousands of years before being shipped across a turbulent ocean to suffer anew in another land. Until the Revolution, when the hybrids finally fell.
The room was small, with only one entrance and exit. The crush of the other students made Addie hold our breath. Our heart thumped against our ribs. Everywhere she turned, we bumped into more bodies, all moving, some shoving each other back and forth, some laughing, the teacher scolding, threatening to start taking down names if they didn’t show a little more respect.
Addie shouldered our way through the room, for once not caring what the others might think. We were one of the first to get through the door. And we were going so fast, lurching past the others, that we were the first to hit the water.
Three
Addie slammed to a halt. The girl behind us couldn’t stop her momentum quite as well and plowed into us. We crashed forward onto the ground, our skirt and part of our blouse immediately getting soaked in the stream of water gushing through the room. The water?—
“What the hell?” someone said as Addie scrambled back onto our feet, our knees and elbow aching from taking the brunt of our fall.
The water barely reached our ankles now, but there was no saving our shirt, though Addie hurried to wring it out. No one was paying attention anyway; everyone stared openmouthed at the flooded exhibit hall. This was one of the largest rooms in the museum, filled with artifacts from Revolutionary times encased under glass and period paintings on the walls. Now it was also filled with several inches of murky water.
The guide whipped out a walkie-talkie and sputtered something. Ms. Stimp tried her best to usher everyone back into the room we’d just left, which was connected by a low step and remained dry—for now. Wherever the water was coming from, it was getting worse, spilling over the ground, soaking people’s socks—dirty water that would surely stain the white walls.
The lights flickered. People screamed—some sounding genuinely terrified, others with almost a laugh in it, like this was more excitement than they could have hoped for.
“It’s those pipes,” the guide growled under her breath, stalking past us. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes so bright they seemed almost wild. “How many times have we said to get those pipes fixed?” She clipped her walkie-talkie back to her skirt, then raised her voice and said, “Please, if everyone would just come back around through this room—”
The lights went out, cloaking everything in darkness. This time, they didn’t come back on. But something else did—the sprinklers. And with them, the earsplitting blare of an alarm. Addie clapped our hands over our ears as water sprayed down into our hair and ran over our face. Somewhere in the museum, something had caught on fire.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to get everyone back onto the bus. There weren’t too many other visitors at the museum on a hot Friday afternoon, but enough to form a sizable crowd as everyone poured out of the museum doors, confused and still clutching ticket stubs in their hands, mothers herding small children before them as they went, men with dark stains on their pant legs where they’d dragged in the water. Some of them were soaked through. All of them were complaining or demanding answers or refunds or just staring dumbly at the museum.
“Electrical fire,” I heard a woman say as Addie made our way back to the bus. “We could have all gotten electrocuted!”
By the time we got back to the school, our blouse was still damp and no longer completely white, but talk had turned from the museum flood to
the end-of-year dance, still more than a month away. And when Ms. Stimp, frazzled and irritated, turned off the lights in the classroom and popped in a video, a quarter of our class went surreptitiously to sleep, even though we were supposed to be taking notes.
I said as Addie stared blankly at the screen. Bessimir was proud of so many things in that museum—those paintings; sabers and revolvers salvaged from the Revolution; an authentic war poster from the beginning of the Great Wars, dated the year of the first attack on American soil. It urged citizens to report all suspicions of hybrid activity. Teachers didn’t mention it in class, but I could imagine the finger-pointing that must have occurred. People back then couldn’t have been so different from people today.
Addie said.
Addie sighed, resting our chin in one hand and doodling the girl in front of us—who slept with her mouth half-open—with the other. It wasn’t like we needed to actually watch the movie to fill out a page or two of notes. We’d covered the Great Wars of the twentieth century so many times we could recite the major battles, rattle off the casualty counts, quote the speeches our president had given as we’d fought off the attempts at invasion. Eventually, we’d proven too strong for them, of course, and their attention had turned back to their own continents, chaotic and ravished. That was what war did. What hybrids did. What they were doing, even now.
Addie said finally.
On television, an airplane dropped bombs on an indistinct city. The boy sitting beside us yawned, his eyes drooping shut. We didn’t have much footage of the latter part of the Wars, since they’d happened so far away, but what we did have was shown over and over again until I wanted to scream. I could only imagine what we’d be subjected to if there had been such a thing as TV news during the invasions a few decades earlier.