now.
As Liam crawls by her, Ruby grips his hand and pulls him back around, stealing a quick kiss. It leeches some of the tension from his face, but doesn’t erase it completely.
“Be careful,” she whispers.
“Who? Me?” The smile he sends her actually makes my stomach do an unexpected swoop, too. He’s no Lucas, but he’s what Mrs. Orfeo would call “easy on the eyes.” I wonder if this Liam, the one with the bright eyes and sly smiles, is the Liam the others know and recognize—not the distant, defensive one with his back up against the wall.
The others have been gone for less than a minute when Ruby turns to me and says softly, “I’m sorry about all that in the car. The truth is, he does want to help—it kills him to know what’s going on with the Reds. He’s just…fighting his way back from fear.”
“I know how that is.” The words are barely a whisper, but she catches them. Ruby nods, turning back to watch the safe house. There is something instantly validating, something that fills the cracks in me, about how her immediate response isn’t, You? or even a look of surprise. I find that I can finally breathe again.
“You know, the most poisonous thing about the camps wasn’t really our time there,” she begins slowly, “it’s how they tricked us into being afraid of the world outside of them.”
“The world is kind of rotten, as far as I can tell,” I argue.
“It is and it isn’t, but it’s always been that way, even before all this. We just were conditioned into a routine, so everything else feels overwhelming in comparison.” Ruby shifts so her weight is off her walking cast. “When I got out of Thurmond, I could barely stand to be around the others: Liam, Chubs—sorry, Charlie—our friend Zu. I couldn’t stand their attention, or to be touched.”
“No problem there anymore,” I note.
She gives a little smile, lifts one shoulder into a shrug, as if to ask, Do you blame me? “Part of it was being trapped in the fear of what I could do, but when I think about it now, I realize it was an issue of control. I couldn’t control my abilities, I couldn’t control the way the world reacted to me, I couldn’t even control whether or not I lost the people I cared about. The thing is, there’s plenty about life none of us will ever be able to control. You have to let uncertainty become your normal. And that just takes time. You have to give yourself permission to let it take time, without beating yourself up about it.”
“I don’t have time,” I remind her.
“You will, but I get it.” Ruby glances over. “When I was having a hard time, when I didn’t think I was ever going to find solid ground, the only thing that helped was focusing on the people around me, instead of whatever fears were chasing each other in my head. If I couldn’t find the courage to protect myself, I could find it for them, protect them the way you protected me, the way you protected all the girls in our cabin.”
I barely remember that Sam.
“You want to know the real reason they never let us touch or talk to each other if they could help it? It made us strong. If you have people who love you, you can fall back on them when you’re afraid.”
She reaches over, takes my hand, waits until I’m looking at her before she says, “It may feel like you’re alone, but we’re here with you now. We will always be here for you. That is a certainty.”
The promise hollows me out at my center; isn’t the fact that she’s here now, that she had someone watching for my name to appear in a system, that she came without being called, proof enough? It takes away whatever weight has had my stomach in its grip for the past few weeks, and leaves room for something else to come rushing in. “Ruby—”
The sound of a rattling engine cuts me off and sharpens Ruby’s attention on the world around us. She motions for me to get down, and—walking cast and all—crawls over to the edge of the fence, where it meets the open driveway at the house’s garage.
I try to stay as low as I can without losing my own view of the white van as it comes down the road, its brakes screeching to a stop just outside of