Now I knew what she meant about it sounding stupid. Anything sounds reasonable until you have to explain it to someone. I wondered if this was why she got so famously short-tempered on her lecture tours. “With something white or yellow on top, but not a face or a hat. I thought maybe it was a skull, later. Why? What did you see?”
“‘Bout the same.”
I sat on the ground, looking at her feet instead of her face to spare my neck. Her scuffed black-and-white off-brand Nikes half-full of playground sand next to my equally scuffed off-brand Converse.
She kicked ferociously at the sand. “I’m an idiot. Should have stayed in the house. Wasn’t thinking at all.”
“Good one,” I said. “Some prodigy.”
“If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said ‘some prodigy,’ I could literally afford to send another spaceship to Mars.”
“Yes, but I’m always justified. You sound scared,” I said.
“You too.”
“I don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I said, more sharply than I meant. “And I don’t think you really do either. That’s what scares me. You being scared.”
She fell silent, swinging, not looking at me. I thought again, unable to help it, about the day we’d met. Which I couldn’t even remember.
We were eight and nine when I learned the whole story. We had been dancing to Thriller, hopping and twisting through the sprinkler in her parents’ backyard, trying to moonwalk on the wet grass. The hose we had unwisely left exposed on the dark patio stones produced a blood-heat shower stinking of metal, evaporating in seconds off our sunburned skin.
“Joanna!” her mother called from the house, or maybe it was the au pair. “Snack!”
“Coming!” Johnny yelled. We turned off the record player—a beautiful, vintage machine in a real wood cabinet—and were stopped at the glass doors by another shout, this one actively hostile. Johnny rattled the handle.
“Change before you come in! And don’t track in any dirt!”
“But we’re clean! We were in the sprinkler!”
No one came to unlock the door. Johnny sighed.
I stripped like a snake behind a topiary and whipped into my dry clothes, then trotted across the hissing flagstones to see Johnny wrestling with her wet t-shirt; for the first time I saw the scar on her back, a shining coin stuck to her golden skin. Then it was gone, covered with the silkscreened face of Optimus Prime.
Inside, we speared grapes and cheese with toothpicks, like grownups.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Feta.”
“And what’s this?”
“Smoked gouda, I think.”
I gulped my strawberry milk and said, “And what’s that thing on your back?”
Said like that, I expected her to get mad, or go quiet, or just cry. Instead, to my surprise, she answered me.
“It’s from the same thing as the scar on your shoulder,” she said.
I blushed. I always had a shirt on when we played, even when we were swimming. I thought no one outside my family knew of it. “Mom said I was born with that.”
“You weren’t,” she said. “I wasn’t born with mine either. We were shot.”
“We were what?”
She finished her Snapple in lingering sips as she looked out the window, telling the story to the backyard instead of me, exhaling fake peach as she spoke.
ONCE UPON A time, she said, spinning the Snapple lid like a top, there was a charity choir performance at City Hall, and lots of inner city kids—such as myself—had attended because it was free, and a few kids whose parents had donated lavishly to the charity—such as herself—had also attended, and it so happened that a group of domestic terrorists selected the event for participation in negotiations with the federal government. They segregated the children into a store closet as hostages, ejected the adults, and installed men at exits and entrances, which they welded shut.
Their wish, they said, was no loss of life.
News helicopters hovered, sparring with the police ’copter till threatened with obstruction of justice; for days the government negotiators asked our captors to let us go, then begged, cajoled, threatened. One child from the choir died early on—diabetic, they said. Then another: unknown causes. Then another and another: dehydration. And when eight of us had died the Army sent in men with guns and it all went wrong.
We were the only survivors.
And even so, it was a very near thing: a round went through the door, then through Johnny, then attempted to go through me, where it stuck against my shoulderblade. They operated on her first because she had lost so much blood; me next, because they had to phone