The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  “Everybody here is,” he says. “We’re a sort of…home for wayward Resonants.”

  “They all resonated out here in the Wastes after the war,” Carrie explains. “Tuan and these guys find them and bring them here.”

  “Not all of them,” Tuan says. “We only have so much room. And some we don’t get to in time.”

  “Carrie helps,” chirps a girl in an oversized University of Arizona football jersey. “She brought me here.”

  Carrie blushes and looks at her shoes. The girl sees her opportunity and rushes over to hug her. These moments of sweetness and vulnerability from Carrie keep catching Emmeline off guard.

  “Let’s get you all some food,” Tuan says. He eyeballs Carrie’s outfit. “And some clothes. You look like ass.”

  Clothing, it turns out, is one resource they haven’t run short on. The retail stores were stocked up for the holidays when the mall shut down, and there’s enough Brooks Brothers and Laura Ashley to keep everyone comfortably, if unfashionably, clothed. There’s a barter market on upcycled outfits made by the handful of residents with an eye for design. Fashion subcultures have developed: pseudo-punk tearing and staples as stitching, glam pirate aesthetics, maximum skin exposure.

  “We picked here because it was easier than trying to get a hundred houses up and running again,” Tuan explains. “Heating and cooling, air filtration, plumbing. The mall’s practically its own grid. It’s like a spaceship in the suburbs.”

  “There’s a sick bay up in the Metro Mattress on the second floor,” Carrie tells Alyssa. “They’ve patched me up a bunch of times. Maybe you can give them some tips.”

  “I bet it’s a horror show,” Alyssa says, but there’s a note of excitement in her voice. She’s been disconnected the whole way out, and Emmeline figures she’s used to being more useful. She asks one of the suit-wearing boys to take her right there while the rest of them head to the food court.

  “Don’t get your hopes up for Arby’s or whatever,” Tuan says. “We burned through most of the food supplies in the first couple weeks, anything that wasn’t spoiled. The saddest thing was, when we still had it, no one knew how to cook anything. You’d be amazed how many ways you can fuck up a frozen Burger King patty.”

  “So what do you eat?” Emmeline asks.

  “We raise vegetables in the atrium,” he says. “A couple kids can transmute raw material into organics for proteins. It’s not good, but if you cook it right, it’s edible.”

  At the counter of a Johnny Rockets, a teenage boy in an apron and hairnet serves them each a tray of broccoli studded with cubes of something spongy that reminds Emmeline of the tofu her mother used to force on them when she got on a health kick. It’s drowned in a brown sauce that’s thick and salty and is the greatest thing Emmeline can remember eating. She wolfs it down, eliciting a respectful nod from Tuan, and sheepishly goes back for seconds. “It’s really great,” she tells the kid behind the counter, who goes tomato red as he refills her tray. As she goes back to her seat, she notices kids leaning over the railings of the mezzanine, watching them. They’re watching Hayden, Emmeline corrects herself, and to prove her point, a trio of girls approach Hayden with a poster and a Sharpie.

  “I’m in the band, too,” Rafa says through a mouthful of broccoli, but the girls don’t seem to hear him or care.

  “My parents kicked me out as soon as they figured out what I was,” Tuan says, answering a question no one has asked. “Some of these kids lost their folks in the war. Rest of our folks didn’t want us. So fuck all that. Blood’s got nothing to do with family anyway. Not anymore.”

  There has to be some word past friendship, short of family, Emmeline thinks, that accounts for the bonds these kids have. She thinks about Kimani, her almost-mother, and how often her mind strains at the borders of language, wishing she had the proper term for the enormous love she felt, a word that wouldn’t wipe away the memory of her real mother but put the two in a mutual orbit, memory and presence in a constant spiral around her heart.

  Alyssa has found her happy place, organizing and labeling supplies in the mall’s makeshift medical wing. Hayden allows a group of kids to talk them into playing a set in the center concourse. “I feel like a pop star from the nineties,” they say to Carrie as they rally the troops to load in gear from the bus. Emmeline doesn’t necessarily want to join Carrie looking for clothes; the idea of spending a couple hours apart is certainly tempting. She also has to admit her clothes are not in the best shape, so they set off exploring.

  The first clothing store they pass specializes in bridesmaid and prom dresses, but they go in anyway. Emmeline holds up a bright yellow dress with puffy arms for Carrie, who winces. Emmeline tosses it aside and keeps searching the rack. She finds something navy blue that she can imagine her mother might have worn. “This might work for you,” she says. “It’s almost black.”

  “I don’t always wear black,” Carrie says. “You’ve only seen me in this one outfit.”

  “One black outfit,” Emmeline says.

  “I want T-shirts and jeans,” Carrie says. “This mall has got to have an Old Navy or something.”

  “I’ll give you five bucks to try this dress on,” Emmeline says.

  “What am I going to do with five bucks?”

  “I thought that’s how you work,” Emmeline says. “You do jobs for money. Like a mercenary.”

  “I don’t do jobs for money,” Carrie says. “I get paid most of the time, but that’s not why.” Carrie holds out a dark red dress that flares out at the waist. Emmeline takes it, running the cloth through her hands.

  “That color’s good,” Carrie says. “For you.”

  “Short sleeves,” says Emmeline. She hands it back.

  “It’s a hundred fucking degrees out,” Carrie says.

  “I don’t wear short sleeves.” Rather than try to explain, she rolls up the sleeve of her sweater and shows the scars above her bracelet. Carrie takes her forearm in her hands and inspects it the way a jeweler inspects a diamond, looking for a flaw.

  “Water burn?” she says. Emmeline nods. Carrie lifts her shirt to expose her midsection. There are two puckered scars, like eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Stab wounds,” she says. “Bayonet from when we liberated the camp at Alta Mons in Virginia. The guards were Civil War reenactors. They were shooting at us with fucking muskets.” She reaches her left hand around the side of her head and pulls her hair up and back. When it’s held taut, Emmeline can see a line snaking from her temple along the back of her skull. “Kenny, the other guy in my Bloom, accidentally hit me with a bolt when we were evacuating…Detroit, maybe. Could have been Buffalo. Some place that sucked to begin with. Thandi had to drag me out of there. I was unconscious for hours.”

  “Thandi who you decommissioned,” Emmeline says. “And Kenny who is probably still after us.” Carrie nods. “Is there a lesson in all this?” Emmeline asks, rolling her sleeve back down.

  “They’re just scars,” Carrie says. She lets her hair fall back and folds the navy dress over her arm. “We all get hurt, and we all get up.”

  Emmeline continues along the dress racks, but all the dresses are for summer weather. She wonders who it is she’s hiding the scar from and if there isn’t something beautiful about it that she’s misunderstood her whole life.

  “Why’d you bring us here?” she asks Carrie.

  “The dress store?” Carrie says. “I thought it’d be funny. Seriously, I want to find a Gap or something.”

  “Here, to this mall,” Emmeline says. “We could be there already.”

  Carrie picks another dress off the rack, a floral print Emmeline can’t picture her ever wearing. “I wanted to give you the option,” she says. “You’re older than the other kids, but you could stay if you want. You could stop here and stay.”

  “What about your job?” Emmeline says. “What about whatever I�
�m supposed to do?”

  “You could forget all of that,” Carrie says. “Spend some time today, think about it. In the morning, if you want to keep going, we keep going. If you want to stay, we leave you here and I tell Fahima I couldn’t finish the job.”

  Emmeline considers what she’d be giving up if she stayed here, but she has so little conception of what anyone wants from her. She thinks about her role in the Pulse, how important that had been and how much it changed things. If she could do something on that scale again, she owed it to the world to do it. Except she can’t say the Pulse had been a good thing. It set all this in motion. People died because of it. She wonders if she can judge a thing like that, if she can take in the full scope.

  “Come on,” says Carrie. “I think I saw a Hot Topic downstairs. They do great outfits for the young and brooding.”

  Not sure whether Carrie’s talking about Emmeline or herself, Emmeline follows.

  The band plays nine songs: four of their bigger hits from the first couple albums, three new songs, and two teenybopper pop covers Hayden taught the band that afternoon. The set runs forty minutes, but it’s twice that long before Hayden can extricate them from the crowd.

  “You need to find me a place where I can hide,” they tell Carrie. Rafa and Kristal decide to hang out with the fans while Jerrod, stricken with the munchies, scopes out the food court for snacks. Hayden pokes Rafa in the chest with a finger before they leave. “Jail. Bait.” Carrie wonders if Rafa is a huge slut or if these are roles they play on the road, easy ways of being with one another.

  She leads Hayden to the third floor, where there’s a security office with a door that locks. Inside, there’s a wall of nine monitors and posters listing the maximum penalties for shoplifting. Carrie sits in the high-backed armchair in front of the monitors and presses buttons on the keyboard until they all come to life, casting a gray pallor over the small room. Hayden glistens with sweat, their hair askew after the pogo dance they did during the encore’s rendition of “Call Me Maybe.”

  “You know I’m really proud of you, right?” Carrie says.

  Hayden looks at her and rolls their eyes dramatically. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Out of all of us, you became exactly who you were supposed to be,” Carrie says. “None of it affected you.”

  “It all affected me,” says Hayden.

  “It didn’t stop you,” Carrie says. “That’s all I meant.”

  “Did you know there’s a thing your face does when you’re not telling me something?” Hayden asks, touching the corner of Carrie’s mouth. “A pout of your lips right here. You do it when you talk about Miquel. You do it when you talk about the war.”

  “And now.”

  “No,” Hayden says, “but I thought I’d mention it right this minute. So what are you leaving out?”

  “I’m worried we’re into something too big,” Carrie says.

  “We might be,” Hayden says. “I don’t know, because you haven’t told me anything about what we’re doing. Or why I haven’t talked to you in forever. Where have you been, Carrie?” Hayden strains their neck forward, nodding and breathing through clenched teeth. “It’s been three fucking years.” It’s a quiet shout, a reprimand and an accusation. Carrie’s first impulse is to push against it, to shout back.

  “It’s hard to see you,” she says. “It reminds me.”

  “Bryce was there, too,” Hayden says. “He gets to see you all the time.” They’re pleading, as if Carrie can give them back those years. Bryce was there. Hiding in the woods for days while guards from Topaz Lake tracked them down with dogs. Watching the fighting break out at Bishop from a hotel, trying to decide if it was safe to go back to Chicago, even to contact Waylon and let him know they were okay. But Bryce had wisely noped out when they joined up to free the camps and encouraged Carrie to do the same. Carrie insisted it was about Miquel when it wasn’t. Bryce took a ride back to Chicago. He and Waylon had started building the support structures people would need after the war was over. He went and did the hard work while Carrie and Hayden did the easy, ugly work of revenge, and when that was done, Hayden found their way out, too. Only Carrie went back.

  “I don’t like thinking about it either,” Hayden says. “But you could have called. We could have been working through it together.” She hasn’t talked to Hayden, but she’s talked to Bryce about Hayden. She knows Hayden’s done more to work through those months than she has; her solution was to avoid the subject.

  “I know,” she says. Hayden weighs this to see if it’ll pass as an apology and decides it’s the best they’re likely to get.

  Hayden tents their fingers, and because Carrie knows Hayden, she knows some version of what they’re about to say. “Listen. Let’s fuck off out of all this. Fuck Phoenix. Let’s load everybody back into the bus and go. You can tend the sick and lame. I can preach to the masses. Or we can get drunk and fuck groupies. Take a couple weeks. The whole shitty world will be here when we get back.”

  Carrie wants to think this way, but she knows that even Hayden doesn’t believe what they’re saying. They want to keep Carrie safe. They don’t want her to come back to the fight because this time there might not be a moment of clarity. This might be the time Carrie doesn’t come back.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Carrie says. Hayden stands up and comes to her. They wrap their arms around her, and it feels as if Hayden changes the shape of their body so that more of it can be in contact with Carrie’s. As if Hayden could fuse Carrie’s broken parts back together like scraps of soap into something useful again.

  “Come with me. We’ll figure it out.” Hayden’s embrace loosens, and it’s a way to give Carrie the space to decide. She knows Hayden would run out of here if she said yes. The look in Hayden’s eyes says they’d do anything for her right now, and she kisses Hayden because it’s the only thing that makes sense to her. When she stops, Hayden closes their eyes and looks hurt.

  “Are you sure? You are my best friend, and I have to be so careful with you. Are you sure?”

  Carrie wants to say yes, but she isn’t sure of anything. She kisses Hayden again, not to move things forward but to hold them where they are. Their lips come apart, and Hayden says her name in a way that could mean anything, that strains under the possibility it holds. Carrie opens her eyes again, and before she can speak, she sees a flicker of motion on one of the monitors. She puts her hands on Hayden’s shoulders, moving them aside so she can confirm what she’s seen.

  “Oh, shit,” she says. “Where’s Emmeline?”

  The feeling of air on the bare skin of her arms is something people take for granted. It’s a thing about being normal: you never think of it as being made up of parts, things that can be separated out. For some people, there’s only the experience of being without the need to analyze constantly, without the pressure to also look in at yourself and your experience from outside or above. For Emmeline, this little thing is thrilling and new, the sense of her arms exposed not only to the air but to eyes, to a million people. It’s terrifying, but she can also feel strength in carrying it. Some weights make you stronger. Certain burdens hold you up.

  Tuan finds Emmeline in a Foot Locker, trying on sneakers. She’s evaluating them on the basis of what they’d be like for running, which is entirely new to her. He sits down on the bench next to her. There’s a mirror attached to the legs, angled up so she can see the shoes she’s trying on. Tuan bends down, looking into it, picking broccoli from between his teeth. “You want to go see a movie?” he asks. “We have, like, twenty movies we show on repeat. Whatever was playing here when it happened.”

  “Anything good?” Emmeline asks.

  Tuan shrugs. “Once you’ve seen something a hundred times, it’s past good or bad. It’s like the Beatles. You hear them all the time, and you know them, but nobody like loves them.”

  “My dad loved the Bea
tles,” Emmeline says. Sometimes she says things about him when she can’t remember if they’re true. As if she’s trying them out. As if the sound of them out loud would tell her something about their truth value.

  “Oh,” Tuan says.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmeline says. “You probably don’t like talking about parents.”

  He shrugs again. “Don’t mind. It doesn’t make me sad or anything. My parents were assholes, that’s all. They weren’t going to kill me in my sleep or anything. But they didn’t want me. They didn’t know what to do with me. I doubt they’re any more broken up about me running away than I am. Sometimes it’s easier for everybody.”

  “If it helps, both my parents are dead,” Emmeline says.

  Tuan gives her a strange look and busts out laughing. “How would that help?” he asks.

  Emmeline thinks about how much she wants to fit in here, maybe more than she wanted to on the bus. She’s adopted the mannerisms and speech patterns of someone younger than herself, joshing and shoving in the preflirtatious way kids do. And now offering up her dead parents like a membership card. It isn’t funny enough to laugh about, but it makes her smile.

  “Come on,” Tuan says, standing up. “Let’s go see what’s playing.”

  * * *

  —

  They arrive as the lights are going down. The theater’s full enough that they have trouble finding seats together, climbing over legs to get to the middle. The coming attractions title card appears on the screen.

  “Oh, come on, Nyla,” one of the kids yells back at the projectionist’s booth.