State of Grace

by Hilary Badger

  ‘No!’ I shrill. ‘Don’t go.’

  Not now, in the day when everyone can see you. Not that I know how I’m going to make Dennis disappear, even in the prelight. It’s just, I’m sure that if he doesn’t stay hidden until I work it out then everyone’s going to find out how predotly I am.

  ‘Nah, I think I better …’

  I go to the bed and let the fruit spill out of my pockets all over the red-streaked sheets.

  ‘Look, I brought you stuff to eat.’

  Dennis’s hand is on the doorknob but he’s sort of interested, I can tell.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come and look.’

  When he comes over to the bed I say, ‘See? Plenty. Raspberries, peaches, mangos, everything.

  ‘Is fruit all you’ve got? No toast, or Froothoops?’

  Froothoops. I hear the word and straightaway think of Julius, without even knowing why.

  ‘If you don’t want this, I can bring you other food. There’s tamarillos. There’s rambutans.’

  ‘No thanks,’ says Dennis, turning for the door. ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Stay.’

  My arm swings out to grab him. I have him circled in creation’s most awkward hug. If he wanted to, Dennis could bust out of it. But he doesn’t. He lets me keep talking.

  ‘You have to. Just until prelight.’

  Dennis doesn’t seem to know what I mean by this, so I tell him, ‘Until night.’

  Dennis steps away from me. His hand goes to the doorknob again.

  ‘Why should I?’

  No-one can see you, I want to yell. Don’t you get that?

  But instead I say, ‘There are animals out there, you know.’

  Dennis looks sideways at me. ‘Like cats and dogs?’

  ‘Like lions and tigers. Bears as well.’

  Dot’s animal creations are as gentle and kind as Dot herself, it says so in the Books. But Dennis doesn’t know that. And something tells me he wouldn’t like meeting a bear. I’m not sure how I know that. I just do. It’s the same way Julius would feel, I find myself thinking.

  ‘If you wait, I’ll take you to the fringe myself,’ I say quickly. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  Dennis thinks about this. ‘Only as far as the trees?’

  I look away then. I guess he wants me to say I’ll take him to the gate. But there’s a whole lot of problems with that. One, we’re not meant to go into the fringe. Two – and this is the big one – there should be no such thing as a gate in the first place.

  So I decide to stall. I tell Dennis, ‘We’ll see.’

  A gate should not exist. But then, neither should Dennis. And if Dot can create a real boy to test me, there’s no reason she couldn’t also create a gate. That’s absolutely, totally believable, right? As far as going into the fringe goes, I’m going to have to think that one through.

  Dennis looks around the hut. Finally he says, ‘Okay. I guess I’ll stay.’

  I smile.

  A smile flickers to life on his face too.

  ‘But you can’t tell Nathe I was scared of bears.’

  ‘No way,’ I tell him. ‘Promise.’

  14

  WHEN FERN FINDS me, it’s practically prelight again and I’m on the path outside our huts. Heat rises up from and the stone and there’s all these ants turning busy circles at my feet.

  ‘There you are,’ she says. ‘You weren’t at the lagoon.’

  Or the newfruit grove, or anywhere at the same time as everyone else. After I left Dennis’s hut the second time, I filled my picking bag in the newfruit grove. Early, before too many other people arrived.

  The rest of the day, I kind of hung around the empty huts without going in or anything. Sometimes I walked to the orchard, other times just up and down the path. Going too far away from Dennis made me feel all precalm. I mean, what if he suddenly decided he didn’t care about bears anymore?

  Behind Fern, the path is all lit up with torches rammed into the soil. The light from the flames turns Fern’s hair into these long, pale, gold wires. She’s switched on, charged up, the same way the actual air around us seems to be.

  ‘Everyone’s over at Gil’s,’ Fern comes right up close, her smiling face kind of looming at me. ‘Something’s happening tonight!’

  ‘What do you mean, something’s happening?’

  A wind’s gusting. There’s a fizzing kind of smell and the near-prelight sky’s a heavy grayish-yellow.

  ‘Who’s everyone?’

  ‘Sage,’ Fern says. ‘Luna, Jasper, Drake. You know, everyone.’

  All my friends, in other words. And not one of them realising what’s really going on with me.

  ‘That’s okay. You go. I’ll just …’

  Fern’s bow lips mash down into a straight line. ‘Gil said to find you. He’s wants you to come. He’s been wondering where you are.’

  Brook probably told him about the orchard this morning. Scratch that. Brook definitely told him.

  ‘Are you going to hook up with Gil?’ Fern asks, all jittery and excited. She’s jumping around on the balls of her feet when normally she’d just be planted in one spot, still and serene. It’s like she’s soaking up whatever’s going on up there in the sky somehow.

  ‘Not tonight.’

  Fern squeals and grabs both my arms. ‘Oh my Dot! You hooked up with him already? How was it?’

  I give her my you-know look, even though Fern doesn’t know, not really, since she’s never hooked up with Gil or any guy, for that matter. She doesn’t ask anything else though. Despite how huge she thinks me hooking up with Gil is, she’s sort of distracted too. As in, her eyes are roaming all over the place. I guess that’s how she spots the deer running out of the shadows round the base of my hut. It’s this soft, brown colour with white speckles on its flanks. Its eyes are so deep and brown and clear they practically glow.

  ‘How gorgeous!’

  Naturally, Fern loves all Dot’s creatures but she especially loves the furry, long-eyelashed variety. She practically falls down my stairs and stretches out for a stroke, but the deer’s way too quick. It leaves my hut behind and disappears under Fern’s, next door, its tail just a flash of white behind it.

  ____________________

  Gil’s balcony’s totally jammed. There are people lounging on the stairs, sitting on the floor, cross-legged on the path out the front or curled up in the doorway. Gil himself is swinging in his hammock, one pale arm thrown over the side, those long fingers of his sort of stroking the wooden deck.

  Sage has snagged herself a floor cushion. Fern gets onto it right beside her. There’s no room for me, and anyway Sage is already whispering in Fern’s ear and holding her hand. So I’m left looking for somewhere to sit. It turns out the only free space is leaning up against Gil’s balcony railing, right beside Brook.

  ‘I saved this spot for you,’ he says. Which would be prenormal even if it weren’t for our meet-up in the orchard. I mean, Brook and I have always been friends but not, you know, best friends. ‘I haven’t seen you all day.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Brook asks.

  Luckily the wind starts up then, which kind of removes the need to answer. On the palm trees, every single frond is churning and the sky is empty. No birds, no bats, nothing. There’s hardly a torch left alight and when fat drops of rain start sploshing down, the last of them go out anyway. Down on the path there’s the smell of hot, wet stone even though the wind’s turned cold enough to dimple the skin on my arms. It isn’t going to rain the way it normally does, a quick downpour and then it’s over and all creation’s washed clean. Whatever’s happening now seems like a whole other kind of thing.

  And then there’s this flash. A branch of light cuts the dome of the sky in half. The branch is purple with a smell to it, like a fire just gone out or something. Then the light disappears and basically everyone on Gil’s balcony is screaming.

  Nearby, someone says, ‘Do you think Dot’s prehappy about something?
’

  A prenormal little flutter starts to work its way up my spine. The rain’s really sheeting down now, so heavy it makes all creation look white. Next, a crash. A boom really, which has to be the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.

  Dot’s more than a little bit prehappy. She’s so prehappy I swear she must be tearing creation apart. Then more purple flashes light the trees and the roofs of all the huts, including the one with Dennis inside. Dot knows he’s in there, naturally. She’s always watching. Maybe she thinks I’m not working fast enough at making Dennis disappear, that I’m not taking her test seriously? And now she’s whipping up all these rumbles and flashes just so everyone else will find out about him.

  Over on the hammock, Gil’s eyelids are flickering closed. Straightaway, Brook gets up and goes over there. He hovers around as Gil starts to rock, faster and faster until his whole hammock squeaks as it swings. He yells stuff out too, just like in the gazebo, the same stream of letters with only the odd, random word making sense. Gil throws his hands up to the balcony roof and tips his head back, tears rolling down his face as he screams out Dot’s name and tells her he’s listening.

  Then there’s another flash, another crash, practically on top of each another. Around me, everyone’s talking at once.

  What’s going … Gil can hear Dot … did you know?

  Suddenly there’s this wave of people surging across the balcony. Everyone decides they’ve got to get close to Gil, all at exactly the same time. When the sky lights up again, I see Brook trying to calm everyone down. An elbow slams into my shoulder. From every direction there are faces coming towards me, sweating and squealing, teeth and the whites of eyes flashing in the prelight.

  Then Gil stands up. The balcony goes completely quiet, like the noise from the sky has somehow sucked the sound out of us. Gil holds up his arms and a purple flash in the sky lights him from behind.

  His eyes snap open and he says, ‘Dot wants me to share something with all of you.’

  It looks like Brook’s going to make some kind of comment but the silence doesn’t last long enough to let him. The entire balcony wants to know what Dot said.

  ‘Some creations don’t love Dot as much as they should,’ Gil announces.

  I can hear people asking each other how that could even be possible. The concept of predotliness is totally new to everyone apart from me, Gil and Brook.

  ‘Dot wants us all to look out for predotly creations. Anybody who exposes one will be chosen on completion night.’

  My head has a floating feeling, like it’s not attached to my neck properly or something. Now the talk on the balcony is all about what predotliness is and how to find it.

  Except I’m not saying anything. I’m focusing on getting off Gil’s balcony as fast as possible. There’s this feeling kind of boiling up inside me. I can’t identify it, not completely.

  The sky flashes and rumbles overhead. Then the wind gusts up. It rattles the roof of Gil’s hut so that one whole edge lifts up then crashes back down again. Gil’s entire hut looks like it’s coming apart. Any hut might, including the one with Dennis inside.

  I find myself remembering that Dennis isn’t much bigger than Julius. He’s all alone in that hut, small and precalm too, most likely.

  And out of nowhere I think, Not again, I can’t let it happen again.

  Fern comes towards me from out of the mass, her eyes all big and glittery. She’s talking to me but I can’t hear her properly. Or more to the point, I’m not listening. I’m trying to make sense of that last thought. Dennis, Julius … I can’t let what happen again?

  ‘Did you know Gil could talk to Dot like that?’ Fern repeats. ‘Come over with me.’

  Something’s telling me to leave Gil’s hut right now. I have to get to Dennis. I guess it’s because I want to help Dennis disappear. You know, before anyone finds out about me and him and Dot’s test. Before I’m exposed.That has to be it, right?

  ‘Wren?’ Fern trills, her round face hovering so close to mine our noses are practically touching.

  I push her out of the way, literally shove her aside.

  ‘I can’t now,’ I hear myself snap as Fern recoils.

  ‘I’ll come talk to Gil!’

  It’s Luna. She rushes forward, pulling Fern with her. Somehow Luna scrambles onto someone else’s shoulders until she’s right in front of Gil, kissing him directly on the mouth like the two of them are going to hook up right there on the balcony.

  ‘I tasted Dot. I really did,’ she squeals.

  Then everyone wants to kiss Gil, and Brook’s trying to stop them all by making a barrier with his arms.

  I force my way through and kind of tumble down the stairs. Out on the path, the rain’s coming down sideways but I don’t even care. All I want to do is run and run and only stop when I make it to Dennis.

  15

  AT LEAST WHEN I’m running, I’m not thinking about why I’m running in the first place. My feet slide everywhere on the slick path but all that matters is putting distance between me and Gil’s hut, and getting closer to Dennis. Until somebody comes up behind me.

  Brook, I think, turning around. He has this way of popping up right when I’m feeling my most precalm.

  Except it isn’t Brook. It’s Blaze, grabbing onto me so I have to stop running.

  ‘I went to Gil’s,’ he says.

  I give my arm this big shake but apparently not hard enough for Blaze to let go of me or anything.

  ‘Brook said he saw you run off.’

  Brook misses nothing, I swear.

  There’s a flash and a roll, still close together. The wind has turned quiet things noisy. Shutters slam, roofs creak and huts groan and shudder on their stilts.

  I have to shout so Blaze can hear me. ‘And you care because?’

  Since the pond, I’ve had zero interest in talking to Blaze. I’ve done everything I could to avoid it. And then came the whole falling out of the hammock thing and our little encounter after. That made me want to act like the guy was never even created.

  Blaze, all intense and quiet with his goodnight rhymes and prenormal eyes. Blaze, who acted funny when I suggested hooking up, which is something Dot created us to want. Just being close to him makes me feel prehealthy in the stomach.

  Then, straight out, Blaze says, ‘You see things. I know you do.’

  Another flash. Another roll. Blaze is leaning in towards me now. Between the rain and the clouds and the whipping wind, I can hardly see him. But I can feel him, right up close, breathing on the top of my wet head.

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  He makes a grab for my other arm and I’m all caught up trying to pull away. There’s this crack as a branch shears off a tree and circles through the air.

  Then, gentler, Blaze says, ‘Come inside.’

  ‘I’m not going back to Gil’s.’

  ‘No, my hut.’

  ‘I need to be somewhere.’

  ‘Now? You know storms are dangerous.’

  Storm.

  Now Blaze says it, I remember the word. There hasn’t been a storm since we were created, and there’s no mention of them in the Books. It’s just one more word I shouldn’t know, and yet I do. I’m not telling Blaze that though. I can hardly admit it to myself.

  Anyway, there on the path in the rain, me and Blaze are stuck. We can’t move because I won’t come to his hut and he won’t let me not come. According to him, it’s not safe to go anywhere or do anything now there’s a storm. I’m in the middle of wondering whether we’re going to stay like this all night when an even bigger gust of wind blows up. This time it’s so strong it snaps an entire tree. There’s a creaking sound and then I swear to Dot the palm on the edge of the orchard comes crashing down on top of the empty huts. Wood splinters. Two, maybe three, roofs have split.

  Dennis’s? It’s too wet, too prelight, too precalm to see anything. All I can do is feel things and hear things, like the rain stinging my face and chunks of wood colliding in the air.

>   Blaze grabs me again and this time I’m totally sure he’s not going to let go.

  ‘Come to my hut,’ he yells.

  ‘No.’ Rain runs in these thick rivers down both our faces. ‘I have to do something first.’

  ‘Okay,’ Blaze says. ‘Then I’m coming too.’

  ____________________

  I couldn’t tell you which one of us is less enthusiastic. Maybe Blaze, when he figures out we’re running towards the wrecked huts instead of away from them. In fact, he calls me prenormal and presmart and pre-pretty much everything else you can think of. I don’t answer and I don’t stop.

  Now I’m about to tell him about Dennis, now that there’s no way I can get out of it, I just want us to get there.

  Naturally, Blaze doesn’t want to go inside Dennis’s hut. He stands on the path shouting his head off, but I just barge past him up the stairs. I guess he has to follow me then. Inside, the shutters are banging in the wind and the rain’s coming in. Dot’s portrait’s on the floor in pieces but the roof ’s all there, intact, above our heads.

  All I can see of Dennis is his face, a pale circle in the prelight. It’s streaked with dirt and what looks a whole lot like tears.

  There’s a lot of things it would make sense for Blaze to do right then. Go over and check if Dennis is real, for one.

  Turn to me and say, ‘Where did he come from?’ or ‘How did he get here?’ or ‘What’s going on?’

  Anything, really, except for what he does, which is step out of the way and wait for me to go over to Dennis.

  Dennis wipes his nose with his sleeve and draws a long, deep ragged breath. I’m pretty sure he’s going to start crying again.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ he says. ‘Only little kids are scared of storms.’

  I tell Dennis what happened with the tree and how the huts next door might be wrecked but the hut he’s in is completely okay. He thinks about it. Then he straightens out his rumpled sungarb and smiles.

  In a low voice, I say to Blaze, ‘He’s leaving. He’s going to disappear.’

  But Dennis comes over to Blaze and sticks out his little hand. I guess Blaze doesn’t do the right thing though because Dennis suddenly grabs Blaze’s hand in his. Then he sort of pumps Blaze’s hand up and down.