some people, as no one knew who had fired it, and whether what had lodged inside me was explosive and might have maimed the surgeon.
Recovery was in the same hospital room, infrequently separated by the blood-smelling curtain. We shared our nightmares for weeks, staring in mute pain at each other when we woke, brown eyes meeting green. Our mothers bonded, superficially but tightly. The round, as it turned out, had not been explosive.
“The end,” she said.
I stared at her. She told good stories, and I was old enough to know that that sometimes meant she could recap a movie she’d seen or a book she’d read, and sometimes it was an original work for our month-long games of pretend in Braeside Ravine. But which was it this time?
I thought as hard as I could about that dim, violet scene. Had that really been her, that glimpse of blonde hair, clear mask? Or had it been a dream? “That didn’t really happen,” I said.
“It did,” she said.
I hesitated. There was something... the sickly, lemony smell of the hospital, the rusty smell of soaked bandages. My kindergarten teacher sending a card with an animal on the front... a hedgehog or porcupine, its leg in a cast. And there had been a little girl who talked like a grownup. Hadn’t there? “Mom said I had to have surgery...”
“That’s true.”
“You were there,” I said. “I mean, were you there? Are you sure? How come I don’t remember that?”
“Because many anaesthetic drugs cause retrograde amnesia, so you might not remember the period in City Hall at all, and because most people have incomplete memories before the age of approximately seven,” she said. “I’m mostly eidetic, which means I don’t have that problem. I remember everything. You’re not just dumb.”
“I already knew that.”
But of course, when your best friend was the world’s most famous child prodigy, it bore repeating. I felt dumb for even needing her to explain it. “It just means early,” she insisted. “Not better.” I knew she was lying, though. She hadn’t even spoken till she was three years old—that wasn’t early. Her parents hadn’t taken her to the specialists to see if she was gifted; they were worried she was the opposite.
But when she decided—and not before—there came the torrent of words, the books, the tours, the newscasts, the patents. All her parents could do was get out of the way, shading their eyes against her light, as the labs and observatories began to go up, till her very name became shorthand for young genius—a piano Chambers, a math Chambers. Nothing that applied to me, to the ordinaries, the anti-Chamberses.
Now, sitting on the swing and still avoiding my gaze, she said, “I don’t even know if I would tell you if I did know. It might be dangerous for you to know.”
“Dangerous how? Should you be out here without security? Do you even have security right now?”
“I hate security.”
“Well I don’t care what you hate, if we’re in danger.”
She fell silent.
I stood up, dusted myself off. “Is that what you wanted me to come here for?”
“I’m sorry.” She looked up at me; her lips were chewed red and raw and I felt my anger waver for a second, replaced with the old love, or maybe just pity. I thought about that dark time at City Hall, and the dark times afterwards, unable to help it. For a long time I’d thought it was a darkness that we carried inside us, whole and complete, like a stone; but it was more like a coat, something we wore and couldn’t take off, always visible in how we moved through the world. Our fear of small things, large things, made-up things. The way it took forever to trust someone. The way we clocked exits now when we went to an unfamiliar place, glancing at each other, knowing we were doing it. We’d never be able to train ourselves out of any of it.
I pointed again, and she finally looked up at the right place on the horizon, then started back, nearly toppling out of her swing. The northern lights danced, surging like waves, punctured by stars so bright and hot they barely twinkled. There was another faraway roar, the scream of a big plane passing.
“See? Told you they were out tonight,” I said, pleased by her surprise. “They were out yesterday, too. Nice: more blue and purple than usual. I even saw a shooting star.”