little wonder in her voice. “But I would be hurt if that’s what you really believed—that life is worth nothing. Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean my life is worth nothing. I had you and Adam, didn’t I? You’re the piece of me that goes on.”
“Of course I read Shakespeare,” Red said, ignoring the rest of Mama’s statement. She didn’t want to be the one to go on. She wanted her mama to live. “My mother is a distinguished Shakespeare professor. How could I not?”
She’d read several plays in secret, because she wanted to understand her mother, but she didn’t want Mama the Professor quizzing her about it.
Mama put her arms around Red, crying now. “I always thought there was so much space between us, and as you got older it seemed the gulf got wider and wider. But you were always trying to close the gap, weren’t you? I see that now. I wish I’d seen it sooner.”
Red didn’t say anything, couldn’t, because all her tears were choking her and she didn’t want to weep, not now. And she realized that Mama must have been just as certain as Red that Red wouldn’t get sick, or else Mama wouldn’t have put her arms around Red’s neck like that and breathed so close to her face. Red was going to live, and instead of triumphant victory it suddenly felt like a horse she’d have to drag with her all the rest of her days. The only consolation in being a survivor was that you’d survived.
Adam came into the kitchen then, carrying his too-heavy pack and looking clueless, Red thought. It annoyed her that he didn’t know what had just happened, the decisions that had been made, and it annoyed her that the thought was unreasonable. How could he know if he wasn’t there when they were all talking about Red and Adam leaving Mama and Dad behind to die? But there he was, with his stupid face not knowing anything and rubbing her raw because he was giving them all that put-upon look he did so well.
“I am ready for the unreasonable trek,” Adam said, sighing. “I still think this is dumb.”
“Well, I don’t want to hear about how dumb you think it is because it’s just going to be you and me until we get to Grandma’s house and I’m not listening to you whine for that long,” Red snapped.
Adam glanced from Dad to Mama to Red. “What’s going on?”
Red was going to say there was no time for a recap, and she didn’t want to drag it out anyway. Wasn’t everything terrible enough without running over the same ground again? But then there was a sound, a very unexpected sound, and they all froze.
“Truck,” Red said. “It’s a truck, it’s one of those patrols coming to see if there are any survivors. It just turned in at the bottom of the drive. We’ve got to go now.”
But Adam was doing the Adam thing—the opposite of what she wanted him to do, always—and moving out of the kitchen and into the living room and toward the front windows when she wanted to slip out the back door and across the expanse of their lawn and into the woods before anyone noticed them.
“Don’t go up there, you idiot!” Red hissed, and then Dad and Mama followed him and she threw her hands up in the air.
They apparently all wanted to be caught, but Red wasn’t going to be caught by anyone. Her pack was prepped and on and she was leaving. She would like it better if Adam came with her because it was nice to have someone with you in the woods, in case you got lost or hurt. But she would go without him. She would.
And she would go without saying a proper good-bye to her parents if she had to because they all knew how they felt and love was in their heart and all of that bullshit (it’s not really bullshit, though, it’s true but I can’t think about it now because it hurts, it hurts so much to leave them, Red thought) and nobody would blame her if she just went because they all knew how Red felt about the soldiers, about the