down the hall, the sound of a metal rod scraping on the bars of our cells... no phone calls allowed and the only person I could think to call buckled over the stinking pail in her cell a few feet away, or with a guard pinning her to the wall with his crotch... oh man, why hadn’t they just put me in jail on our end of this fucking trip?
“Look, stay calm,” she said. “Remember your bag. We need those papers. The language keys are in there and I can’t work without those.”
“Stay calm, she says. You got a plan for this, Li’l Miss I Have a Plan for Everything?”
“Gather relevant data, formulate next steps, implement, return to original parameters,” she said, blinking innocently at me. “The usual.”
“Isn’t that what you said right before we tried to eat ten pounds of marshmallow bananas at your grandma’s house?”
“Shut up.”
How would it go down, I wondered. Did they have guns, or Tasers, or those tranquilizer things that, ironically, Johnny herself had invented? Nowhere you looked was free from her touch. Nowhere good. Nowhere bad. Eventually it would get all garbled and the history books would say she had invented electricity and screws and the horseless carriage and the letter E. Before dying at the tragic age of seventeen, I added. Good thing she’d started early.
Sweat kept breaking out on my skin in visible, tiny droplets, then evaporating, leaving me chilled. I wrapped up in my blanket and sweated and worried, teeth chattering. Would they tackle us? Shoot us? Quietly pull us aside? I doubted it, knowing what I knew about the Middle East, which wasn’t much, just a few dozen viewings of Aladdin with the kids; and the news now, shouting about Saddam, oil prices, embargoes, terrorist groups in the desert, the smashed Bamiyan Buddhas that Johnny had sobbed over. I barely knew what people looked like where we were going, even, except angry brown men with moustaches, and women in masks or veils. Just the stuff they showed on CNN. Jesus. Custody, I thought. We hadn’t done anything illegal except the faked passport. They weren’t going after real criminals, right? Just runaways. They had been told that.
Right?
It’s so tough to be young; it’s so tough that the only way I assume adults are able to function is that they have forgotten this, that they don’t remember a time when they didn’t know anything and knowledge was kept from them, and they railed at the gatekeepers. And whatever the gatekeepers were—time, bosses, parents, teachers, luck—they would not have remembered being young either. School was a fucking waste if all it did was let you graduate with a head full of questions and no way to get them answered. And always, always knowing less than Johnny.
And even so, she’d never be able to talk our way out of this. I looked down at my hands: a shine, then dull again. As if waves were crashing over me, cold, heavy. What if Rutger had let something slip to the news, what if wherever Mom was, she was watching CNN and wondering what the hell was going on, and why we were going to Morocco, of all places? She’d be trying to explain it to the kids—and the boys wouldn’t even be worried, they’d think it was an adventure, that I’d gone on vacation with Auntie Johnny. It would be Carla who would see through it, who would worry and cry and fret till her stomach hurt.
“How long till we land?” I asked Johnny, who was nipping at her water bottle and swirling it around her mouth, a nervous tic that had earned her an unfair reputation in the press as a wine snob.
“Three hours.”
Three hours and then the great unknown. Jail, a fifteen-hour flight back. The end of her plan and the end of the world. Or no. The end of... how did she say it? Not the world itself, but the world that didn’t have Them in it. The sky is not the sky; the light is not light.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEY DID IT when we landed, wordless, simply pulling us aside as we deplaned into an unbelievable blast of heat mixed with icy currents of air conditioning, swirling a weird cyclone of odours into the high ceiling—spices, sweat, lemon floor polish, cigarette smoke, coffee, trash. I got one glance at the sign that said Customs, in English and a dozen other languages, before we were herded away from it, separated from the rest of