Astray (Gated Sequel)

by Amy Christine Parker

  “Were you out on the field during the fire drill, earlier?” I ask Cody.

  “Yeah.” He looks uncomfortable all of a sudden.

  “Did you see what happened?” I press, not sure if I really want to know, but incapable of stopping myself.

  “With Brent? Guy’s a loser, seriously.” He shakes his head.

  I was hoping that he hadn’t seen it. I was hoping that somehow he didn’t know. Because he didn’t exactly come running over to stick up for us.

  “I didn’t see you out there,” I say, and I can’t keep the disappointment, the hurt, out of my voice.

  “I wanted to come stand by you, but Mr. Goodwin wouldn’t let me. Then, before I could argue the point, it was over.”

  I nod, but I’m having trouble believing him.

  Cody must sense this, because he stops walking and looks at me. “If I could’ve gotten over to where you guys were in time, I’d have shut Brent up, I swear. I know that after today it seems like everyone’s determined to treat you like an outcast right along with all the other Meadows kids, but once people get to know you and see that you’re not like them, they’ll come around.”

  I know he thinks that what he’s saying will make me feel better, but it doesn’t. Why can’t he see that in a lot of ways I will always be like the others? Leaving the Community doesn’t make me different, at least not completely. I was just as devoted to Pioneer as they are. If I hadn’t seen Marie die … maybe I still would be. But if I tell him this, will it change the way he feels about me?

  We walk on in silence. Halfway through the lot Cody wraps his hand around mine. I love the way it completely covers my own. He steals a sidelong glance at me.

  “All right, cut it out. Quit looking at me like I might break. I’m fine, really,” I say when he keeps glancing at me.

  Cody’s mouth turns up at one corner and he raises an eyebrow. “Really? ’Cause your eyes are all puffy and your coat’s not buttoned right.”

  I glance down at my coat. I missed a button somewhere along the middle. I unbutton it, then button it again. There’s nothing I can do about my puffy eyes, though.

  I stand by the car and inspect myself in the window while Cody unlocks the door. I have to shake off any lingering weird feelings I have about the day. Emotionally whacked out is not a good way to show up for my counseling session with my parents and Mrs. Rosen, my counselor. It’ll go into overtime if any of them know today was hard for me.

  Something inside the car catches my attention. There’s a small, lumpy package covered in brown paper and tied up with red string lying on my seat. A present? Cody got me something for my first day. I look over the top of the car at him and grin. Sensing my stare, he glances up at me. “What?”

  “When did you do this?” I ask as I open my door. I throw my bag over the seat, settle into the car, and put the package on my lap.

  “Do what?” Cody plays at sounding confused as he opens the back door and puts his bag and coat on the backseat and I smile. I pull the string off and carefully unwrap the paper. I make a mental note to save it and the string—this is his first present to me, after all.

  Inside the paper is a small carved wooden owl. My stomach does a quick somersault. This isn’t from Cody. It’s from the Community—or worse, is it possible that it’s from Pioneer?

  “Do what?” Cody says again as he slides into his seat and closes his door.

  I let out my breath and it clouds up the air in front of me. The air inside the car is bitterly cold. It intensifies the chill I feel looking at the owl.

  “You’re mine, Little Owl.” Pioneer’s words are so clear in my head it’s like he’s speaking them out loud. I’m surprised Cody can’t hear it.

  Cody leans over when I don’t answer. He plucks the owl from the paper and stares at it. I don’t need to say who it’s from. I told him about my nickname. He knows immediately.

  “They broke into my car?” He sounds stunned. His mouth clamps shut for a second and he looks out the windshield at the parking lot, his eyes scanning the cars and the sidewalks.

  My teeth are chattering violently, which makes answering him hard. “Pioneer taught us all how to break into locked cars. He figured we might need to know … for the end of days.” I never expected the others to use this skill on Cody and me.

  I look down at the wrapping paper. There’s a neatly folded piece of lined notebook paper taped to the corner. A message.

  “Don’t read it,” Cody says. “Give it to me.” He rolls down his window and the air in the car gets even colder. “C’mon, we’ll throw it out.”

  His words snap me out of my daze.

  But I can’t help myself. I need to read it. I need to know for sure who left it. I unfold the note. The handwriting is Will’s. I’d recognize it anywhere. He left the owl. My breath comes out in a rush. I feel better immediately. Okay, so I don’t love the nickname, but Pioneer wasn’t the only one who called me Little Owl. Will sometimes did too. He was just trying to leave me a gift and didn’t know how to give it to me.

  “It’s okay, it’s from Will,” I tell Cody.

  “Okay? How is that okay? He broke into my car. He scared you.” Cody looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

  I don’t answer right away. I want to read the note to see if it’ll help explain. There are only six short sentences scrawled across the paper.

  You don’t belong with them. They’ve got your thinking all twisted. You may not see it now, but you will. Come back, Lyla. Please, before it’s too late. The end is still coming.

  Love,

  Will

  I feel my relief evaporate. I thought Will was changing, but it turns out that he’s completely recommitted to Pioneer and his apocalypse again, just like everyone else. How can he? How can he when he knows what Pioneer did to me? What he did to Marie? I crumple the note up.

  Cody grabs the note from me and smooths it out, reads it. I watch his jaw tighten as he does. A second later he throws it and the owl out the window. “He and I need to have a talk,” he says as he starts the car. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, the knuckles white. He backs up fast and then rips out of the parking lot, driving over the owl in the process. We speed past a few lingering news vans and their crews who are still packing up from the day. A few of the people peer into the car, but they don’t have time to figure out if we’re newsworthy or not, Cody’s going too fast.

  We speed through town and onto the road that’ll eventually lead us to where the Community is living now. We’re both quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I don’t like how angry Cody looks.

  “He’s just really confused about everything,” I say.

  “How can you defend him? What he did was seriously creepy. Breaking into my car. Leaving you some twisted gift he had to know would freak you out and then threatening you? You cannot be okay with this.” He takes his eyes off the road and stares at me. “Tell me you’re not okay with this.”

  I bite my lip. I’m not, but I can’t say so—not if it makes him think it’s okay to pick a fight with Will about it. It could end very badly for him if the rest of the Community gets involved. I just want to keep him safe. The last time Cody tried to defend me, back in the stables at Mandrodage Meadows, he almost got himself killed. Even if Pioneer is safely behind bars this time, Mr. Brown is still around … and Brian … and the other men. They would come to Will’s defense in an instant. They wouldn’t see hurting Cody as wrong, just self-defense. I shrug.

  Cody shakes his head. “That’s messed up, Lyla.”

  I stare out the window. I don’t know how to respond. Cody’s window is still down and the air inside the car gets even colder. I pull my legs into my chest and will my tears to go away. No matter how hard I try, I seem to keep making all the wrong choices. Figuring out how to be normal is so much harder than I thought.

  There is no safety outside of the Community.

  —Allison Hamilton, Lyla’s mother and member of the Community

  EIGHT

&
nbsp; The road that leads to my parents’ new place is uneven, hard-packed dirt—so much like the road that leads to Mandrodage Meadows that I keep expecting to see the guardhouse up ahead. Cody’s car shudders over every bump as we make our way closer to the groups of trailers and the large, dilapidated barn behind it.

  The sheriff says that the entire Community lives out here now, even Marie’s parents. I thought for sure that after all that happened in the Silo—after what I said happened to Marie and their son, Drew—they would leave the Community forever, but even they believe Pioneer over me. Their return to Pioneer hurts me more than most of the others’—enough that I asked Mrs. Rosen about it the last time we had a one-on-one session. She told me that if they accept the truth, then they also have to accept that they are partly to blame for what happened to Marie. They’re the ones who brought Drew and Marie to Mandrodage Meadows in the first place. Maybe that’s how Will feels about all that happened too? This should make what just happened with the owl less upsetting, but it doesn’t. It just makes me feel sad.

  This is my first visit out here. We used to meet at the hospital. At first because that’s where my mom was—she didn’t pull herself back together right away after the raid—and later because I guess we were so used to it that no one spoke up and suggested a change. That is, until last week, when my dad announced that he would like me to come and see their home.

  There are no gates or walls. There is just a barn surrounded by woods on one side and acres and acres of dead grass and half-frozen earth on the other. I study the trailers all lined up like aluminum-sided dominoes. I try to imagine how my family and friends feel about living here now, in a place so vulnerable.

  In the end it doesn’t matter. The truth is that they have no other options. Mandrodage Meadows is in Pioneer’s name, which means that he owns the land and every house and building on it. The Community pooled its resources, every ounce of income we earned went into one account that was also in Pioneer’s name, so after the raid, everything was seized and we were left with basically the clothes on our backs and not much more. If it hadn’t been for the Freedom Rangers’ mission to raise money online for the Community, my parents and everyone would have basically been homeless. Still, this place is barely a step above that. I think of Will, Heather, Brian, and Julie having to come back here after school today, and my stomach starts to hurt. Nothing about their lives seems good. I have Cody and his family, but what do they have?

  The closer we get to the trailers, the stronger my urge to run away gets. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because despite all of the obvious ways this place is different from Mandrodage Meadows, it seems to be startlingly similar in other ways. There are identical wooden plaques by every trailer’s porch light, with the last name of each family engraved on them just like the ones on our old houses. And the barn is positioned at the end of the trailers just like our clubhouse was positioned down past our houses. And maybe it’s also the way that every trailer looks exactly the same. The only way to figure out whose place is whose is to read the plaques. My parents’ trailer ends up being the fourth one on the left-hand side, right in between Heather’s and Will’s trailers. Cody pulls to a stop beside it.

  I look over at him. His eyes meet mine, and he looks so concerned, so unsure of me all of a sudden. Does he think I’m changing my mind about leaving the Community behind? That that’s why I wouldn’t let him confront Will? Is he right to worry? Is that older, weaker part of me winning without me even realizing it? My head starts to pound. I want to tell him to turn around and drive us out of here. But I can’t. These counseling sessions aren’t optional. They’re required by the child welfare people assigned to the Community’s case. If I miss one, they could pull me out of Cody’s house.

  “Look, I’m sorry about before,” Cody says, his voice still tight. “I just don’t like when they mess with you like that.”

  He stresses the word “they,” but he means Will. I ignore it. I don’t want to start arguing with him. This is the first time we’ve ever come remotely close to fighting.

  “Want me to stick around? Go in with you?” he asks. He still sounds tense, but he’s trying to make things better between us now too. “I think I should. I don’t like the idea of you being here alone.” He makes a move to turn off the car.

  I shake my head. “No, Mrs. Rosen is here.” I point to her car. “I’ll be fine. Really,” I say.

  Still, I’m kind of hoping that he’ll insist on staying anyway, even if I am worried about him running into Will at some point, but he doesn’t. Boys aren’t the best mind readers.

  “Dad’s got me working the phones at the station while you’re here. But I’ll be back as soon as I can. Have Mrs. Rosen wait with you till then, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, and make a show of busying myself with gathering my things. I’m trying to stall for just a few seconds longer.

  “See you later,” I say when I can’t stall any longer.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about … before. You know I’m just trying to protect you, right?”

  I nod. That’s what I was trying to do too. Protect him.

  I half smile and quickly climb out of the car before he can lean over and try to kiss me goodbye. I don’t want anyone here to see that. And I don’t think I could kiss him back knowing that one of them could be watching. I shut the car door quickly. The thumping it makes as it connects with the car sounds overly loud. I jump. It’s so quiet. I look up and down both rows of trailers. No one’s outside—that I can see. The windows on most of the trailers are dark.

  I walk to the end of my parents’ trailer and peer around the corner at the barn. There are lights on inside. It’s dark enough already that the soft yellow glow from them leaks out of a dozen cracks and spaces in the wood siding. I cock my head to the side and listen. There’s a low murmuring coming from that direction, I can’t make it out exactly, but the rhythm and tone is all too familiar. People are chanting in there. I almost get closer to make sure, but then I hear the trailer door creak open behind me and I turn in time to see my mom appear in the doorway, her face bright and open and warm, the way it used to be sometimes when the world was still supposed to end. I guess for her that’s still the case, so maybe it makes perfect sense.

  I lean over as I pass Cody’s car and wave at him. He waves back and slowly starts to back up and out onto the path between the trailers. Fleetingly, I think about running after the car and away from my parents—escaping—but then my dad joins my mom at the door and calls out my name. I turn back toward the trailer and try not to think about what my mom’s sudden attitude change and the chanting in the barn mean.

  “Oh, honey, we’ve missed you so much,” Mom says as she pulls me into a gentle hug, leaving space between us like she’s afraid I’ll resist if she gets any closer. Her hair brushes against my cheek and the soft tickle of it triggers a thousand different flashes of memory. The nights when I had nightmares or was afraid of a storm, when she would tuck herself around me like a seashell and whisper-sing songs in my ear until I fell back asleep; the days when she would slip a note inside my pocket telling me how much she loved me; the cool cloths she used to drape across my neck while I was out tending the Community’s gardens in the summer heat. But overlapping those memories are newer ones like the night of the false alarm, when she went into the Silo without me; the day I told her we needed to leave Mandrodage Meadows, the moment I begged her to go with me and she chose to stay with Pioneer—to die—instead. I can still see her face when she left the Silo that last day, so detached and disappointed. I hold on to this image. It helps keep me on alert.

  I pull out of her hug and push past her into the trailer. Mrs. Rosen’s not inside.

  “Where’s Mrs. Rosen?” I ask. “Her car’s outside.” It feels weird to be alone with my parents.

  Dad shuts the trailer door. “Brrr, it’s getting downright bitter out there. Our counseling session doesn’t officially start for a few more minutes, so Mrs. Rosen walked over by the Rang
ers’ trailers to see if she could get a clearer signal for her phone. She had to take a call from her office. Want the nickel tour while we wait for her?”

  I look around me. The trailer’s long and narrow, a giant rectangle chopped up into rooms. The main living area is right inside the door, with an attached kitchenette. It smells strange, like dust and mildew and something else, some kind of plastic. I don’t like it. There’s an old sofa with worn-to-the-stuffing arms and lumpy cushions sitting along the wall opposite the door, with a rectangular pine coffee table in front of it. By the kitchenette is a card table with three folding chairs. There’s a mason jar with an evergreen branch sticking out of it, my parents’ sole attempt at warming up the space. And just above the table hangs Pioneer’s picture, the same one that used to hang above our old kitchen table back in Mandrodage Meadows. I look away quickly. It feels like the photo’s alive somehow. “I’m always watching over each and every one of you so I can keep you on the right path.” These words, the ones Pioneer used to say over the development’s intercom system every morning after the wake-up chimes and every evening right before we went to bed, echo in my ears. I want to walk over and rip it off the wall, to stomp it into a million pieces. My hands start to sweat even though they’re still cold. I ball them into fists and walk out of the kitchenette and peer down the hall.

  My mom and dad come to stand on either side of me. “Back there are the bedrooms. Take a look at the first one on the left. We’ve made it up for you.”

  There’s a tiny bathroom just before I get to the first bedroom. I look in just long enough to see my pale face reflected in the mirror. My eyes are too wide, my mouth clenched tight.

  I peer into my bedroom. There’s a narrow bed against the far wall, with my old quilt covering it and dozens of my drawings on the wall above it. I move into the room and run a finger along the squares of fabric on the quilt as I study the sketches they’ve put up. There’s one of my parents on a picnic blanket beside the lake. There’s also one of Will sitting on one of the split-rail fences by the corral with his blond hair falling across one eye. I remember when I drew that one. It was the night he kissed me for the first time. The only other one with a person in it is the single sketch I drew of my sister, Karen, when I was about ten and scared to death because I was starting to forget her face. In it she’s jumping rope. I’d added her brown shoes—the ones my mom still keeps—to her feet even though she never wore them to play. It doesn’t look much like her. Her body is lopsided and too long in the legs, but when I look at it, I can remember her a little better, even now.