only imagine what that just did to you.”
The smile I plastered onto my face was so wide, it actually ached. “No, I’m all right. Really. No delay necessary. Besides, if we push back this one, we might hit traffic and miss the Japanese embassy event.”
The embassy was reopening their Japan Information and Culture Center and had asked me to do the honor of introducing a documentary film by a fellow Japanese American Psi, Kenji Ota. To say I was excited was an understatement; I’d only met Kenji once in passing, but for weeks now I’d been looking forward to having the chance to connect with someone who’d come from a similar background and experienced the same things I had.
“Can we go through today’s schedule?” I asked. “Make sure I have it down?”
Mel squeezed my wrist reassuringly. “You’re amazing. I don’t know how you stay so strong in the face of all this. I meant what I said, though. I can ask about moving the event.”
I shook my head, my heart skipping at the thought. The second President Cruz’s director of communications suspected I couldn’t handle the stress of this job, I’d be taken off it. “There’s no need. I promise.”
“All right,” Mel said, looking just a little relieved. This would have been a nightmare for her to reschedule. She reached into her bag and pulled out a folder with the day’s date and began to run through our itinerary, matching hours to actions.
I dropped the phone back into my own bag, trying to find something to ward off the pressure building in my chest. It pushed at my ribs like it could split me open and reveal the raw mess inside.
Maybe I should have responded? Or would I have just bothered him more?
“Nine thirty a.m., the dean will introduce you….”
Next time? I was tempted to take the phone back out and reread Chubs’s message, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. My mind couldn’t stop whispering those two words, wouldn’t let go of that question mark—that one small symbol that had never existed between any of us before.
ONCE UPON A TIME, I went months without saying a word. More than a year, in fact.
It happened by accident at first—or not by accident, exactly. I still struggled to explain it, to justify why I silenced myself. It was as if the barbed wire that surrounded the rehabilitation camp had cut me so deeply the night we escaped, all the words in me had just bled out. I’d been so empty under my skin. So cold. Weak enough for shock to spill in and take over.
The truth is, some things go beyond words: The sound of gunshots thundering through the night. Blood staining the backs of thin uniforms. Kids facedown, slowly buried by the snow falling from the dark sky. The feeling of being strangled by your own hope in that second it escaped the fencing and left you behind to die.
The next few days I was just…tired. Unsure. Questions would come at me, and I would nod. Shake my head. It took so much energy. I was afraid of picking the wrong words out of the messy darkness inside my head. Scared to say something the others, the boys who had saved me, wouldn’t like.
Every second we spent driving in the van, I could see it: I would tell them I was hungry or cold or hurt, and they would decide I was a problem, just like my parents once had. The boys would leave me behind somewhere just as quickly as they had decided to take me with them that night we’d escaped.
But they didn’t. And, pretty soon after, I realized that they wouldn’t. But by then, it felt more comfortable to pick up that ratty notebook we shared and carefully choose my words. I could spell out the exact response I wanted, no mistakes. I could choose when I wanted to say something. I could have that much control over my life.
The problem was that I kept choosing silence. Over and over again, I let myself fall into the safety of its depths. Painful things could stay buried, never needing to be understood or talked through. The past wouldn’t come back to hurt me if I never spoke of it. The memory of snow and blood and screams couldn’t rise up and bury me in its freezing pressure, its dark. I wouldn’t need to admit to being scared or hungry or exhausted and worry the others. My silence