by Tahereh Mafi
That she loved me. Once.
“Please identify yourselves,” she says to our three guests.
Stephan speaks first.
“I’m Stephan Feruzi Omondi,” he says, reaching forward to shake her hand. “I’m here to represent the supreme commander of Africa.”
Stephan is tall and dignified and deeply formal, and though he was born and raised in what used to be Nairobi, he studied English abroad, and speaks now with a British accent. And I can tell from the way Juliette’s eyes linger on his face that she likes the look of him.
Something tightens in my chest.
“Your parents sent you to spy on me, too, Stephan?” she says, still staring.
Stephan smiles—the movement animating his whole face—and suddenly I hate him. “We’re only here to say hello,” he says. “Just a little friendly union.”
“Uh-huh. And you two?” She turns to the twins. “Same thing?”
Nicolás, the elder twin, only smiles at her. He seems delighted. “I am Nicolás Castillo,” he says, “son of Santiago and Martina Castillo, and this is my sister, Valentina—”
“Sister?” Lena cuts in. She’s found another opportunity to be cruel and I’ve never hated her so much. “Are you still doing that?”
“Lena,” I say, a warning in my voice.
“What?” She looks at me. “Why does everyone keep acting like this is normal? One day Santiago’s son decides he wants to be a girl and we all just, what? Look the other way?”
“Eat shit, Lena,” is the first thing Valentina has said all morning. “I should’ve cut off your ears when I had the chance.”
Juliette’s eyes go wide.
“Uh, I’m sorry”—Kenji pokes his head forward, waves a hand—“am I missing something?”
“Valentina likes to play pretend,” Lena says.
“Cállate la boca, cabrona,” Nicolás snaps at her.
“No, you know what?” Valentina says, placing a hand on her brother’s shoulder. “It’s okay. Let her talk. Lena thinks I like to pretend, pero I won’t be pretending cuando cuelge su cuerpo muerto en mi cuarto.”
Lena only rolls her eyes.
“Valentina,” I say. “Please ignore her. Ella no tiene ninguna idea de lo que está hablando. Tenemos mucho que hacer y no debemo—”
“Damn, bro,” Kenji cuts me off. “You speak Spanish, too, huh?” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m going to have to get used to this.”
“We all speak many languages,” says Nicolás, a note of irritation still clinging to his voice. “We have to be able to communi—”
“Listen, guys, I don’t care about your personal dramas,” Juliette says suddenly, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I have a massive headache and a million things to do today, and I’d like to get started.”
“Por su puesto, señorita.” Nicolás bows his head a little.
“What?” she says, blinking at him. “I don’t know what that means.”
Nicolás only smiles. “Entonces deberías aprender como hablar español.”
I almost laugh, even as I shake my head. Nicolás is being difficult on purpose. “Basta ya,” I say to him. “Dejala sola. Sabes que ella no habla español.”
“What are you guys saying?” Juliette demands.
Nicolás only smiles wider, his blue eyes crinkling in delight. “Nothing of consequence, Madam Supreme. Only that we are pleased to meet you.”
“And I take it you’ll all be attending the symposium today?” she says.
Another slight bow. “Claro que sí.”
“That’s a yes,” I say to her.
“What other languages do you speak?” Juliette says, spinning to face me, and I’m so surprised she’s addressing me in public that I forget to respond.
It’s Stephan who says, “We were taught many languages from a very young age. It was critical that the commanders and their families all knew how to communicate with one another.”
“But I thought The Reestablishment wanted to get rid of all the languages,” she says. “I thought you were working toward a single, universal language—”
“Sí, Madam Supreme,” says Valentina with a slight nod. “That’s true. But first we had to be able to speak with each other, no?”
Juliette looks fascinated. She’s forgotten her anger for just long enough to be awed by the vastness of the world again; I can see it in her eyes. Her desire to escape. “Where are you from?” she asks, the question full of innocence; wonder. Something about it breaks my heart. “Before the world was remapped—what were the names of your countries?”
“We were born in Argentina,” Nicolás and Valentina say at the same time.
“My family is from Kenya,” says Stephan.
“And you’ve visited each other?” she says, turning to scan our faces. “You travel to each other’s continents?”
We nod.
“Wow,” she says quietly, but mostly to herself. “That must be incredible.”
“You must come visit us, too, Madam Supreme,” says a smiling Stephan. “We’d love to have you stay with us. After all, you are one of us now.”
Juliette’s smile vanishes. Gone too soon is the wistful, faraway look on her face. She says nothing, but I can sense the anger and sadness boiling over inside her.
Too suddenly, she says,
“Warner, Castle, Kenji?”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Ms Ferrars?”
I merely stare.
“If we’re done here, I’d like to speak with the three of you alone, please.”
JULIETTE
I keep thinking I need to stay calm, that it’s all in my head, that everything is going to be fine and someone is going to open the door now, someone is going to let me out of here. I keep thinking it’s going to happen. I keep thinking it has to happen, because things like this don’t just happen. This doesn’t happen. People aren’t forgotten like this. Not abandoned like this.
This doesn’t just happen.
My face is caked with blood from when they threw me on the ground and my hands are still shaking even as I write this. This pen is my only outlet, my only voice, because I have no one else to speak to, no mind but my own to drown in and all the lifeboats are taken and all the life preservers are broken and I don’t know how to swim I can’t swim I can’t swim and it’s getting so hard. It’s getting so hard. It’s like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what’s the point of screaming if you’ll never be heard and no one will ever hear me in here. No one will ever hear me ever again.
I’ve learned to stare at things.
The walls. My hands. The cracks in the walls. The lines on my fingers. The shades of gray in the concrete. The shape of my fingernails. I pick one thing and stare at it for what must be hours. I keep time in my head by counting the seconds as they pass. I keep days in my head by writing them down. Today is day two. Today is the second day. Today is a day.
Today.
It’s so cold. It’s so cold it’s so cold.
Please please please
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
I’m still staring at the three of them, waiting for confirmation when, suddenly, Kenji speaks with a start.
“Uh, yeah—no, uh, no problem,” he says.
“Certainly,” says Castle.
And Warner says nothing at all, looking at me like he can see through me, and for a moment all I can remember is me, naked, begging him to join me in the shower; me, curled up in his arms crying, telling him how much I miss him; me, touching his lips—
I cringe, mortified. An old impulse to blush overtakes my entire body.
I close my eyes and look away, pivoting sharply as I leave the room without a word.
“Juliette, love—”
I’m already halfway down the hall when I feel his hand on my back and I stiffen, my pulse racing in an instant. The minute I spin around I see his face change, his features shifting from sc
ared to surprised in less than a second and it makes me so angry that he has this ability, this gift of being able to sense other people’s emotions, because I am always so transparent to him, so completely vulnerable and it’s infuriating, infuriating
“What?” I say. I try to say it harshly but it comes out all wrong. Breathless. Embarrassing.
“I just—” But his hand falls. His eyes capture mine and suddenly I’m frozen in time. “I wanted to tell you—”
“What?” And now the word is quiet and nervous and terrified all at once. I take a step back to save my own life and I see Castle and Kenji walking too slowly down the hall; they’re keeping their distance on purpose—giving us space to speak. “What do you want to say?”
But now Warner’s eyes are moving, studying me. He looks at me with such intensity I wonder if he’s even aware he’s doing it. I wonder if he knows that when he looks at me like that I can feel it as acutely as if his bare skin were pressed against my own, that it does things to me when he looks at me like that and it makes me crazy, because I hate that I can’t control this, that this thread between us remains unbroken and he says finally, softly,
something
something I don’t hear
because I’m looking at his lips and feeling my skin ignite with memories of him and it was just yesterday, just yesterday that he was mine, that I felt his mouth on my body, that I could feel him inside me—
“What?” I manage to say, blinking upward.
“I said I really like what you’ve done with your hair.”
And I hate him, hate him for doing this to my heart, hate my body for being so weak, for wanting him, missing him, despite everything and I don’t know whether to cry or kiss him or kick him in the teeth, so instead I say, without meeting his eyes,
“When were you going to tell me about Lena?”
He stops then; motionless in a moment. “Oh”—he clears his throat—“I hadn’t realized you’d heard about Lena.”
I narrow my eyes at him, not trusting myself to speak, and I’m still deciding the best course of action when he says
“Kenji was right,” but he whispers the words, and mostly to himself.
“Excuse me?”
He looks up. “Forgive me,” he says softly. “I should’ve said something sooner. I see that now.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“She and I,” he says, “it was—we were nothing. It was a relationship of convenience and basic companionship. It meant nothing to me. Truly,” he says, “you have to know—if I never said anything about her it was only because I never thought about her long enough to even consider mentioning it.”
“But you were together for two years—”
He shakes his head before he says, “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t two years of anything serious. It wasn’t even two years of continuous communication.” He sighs. “She lives in Europe, love. We saw each other briefly and infrequently. It was purely physical. It wasn’t a real relationship—”
“Purely physical,” I say, stunned. I rock backward, nearly tripping over my own feet and I feel his words tear through my flesh with a searing physical pain I wasn’t expecting. “Wow. Wow.”
And now I can think of nothing but his body and hers, the two of them entwined, the two years he spent naked in her arms—
“No—please,” he says, the urgency in his words jolting me back to the present. “That’s not what I meant. I’m just—I’m—I don’t know how to explain this,” he says, frustrated like I’ve never seen him before. He shakes his head, hard. “Everything in my life was different before I met you,” he says. “I was lost and all alone. I never cared for anyone. I never wanted to get close to anyone. I’ve never—you were the first person to ever—”
“Stop,” I say, shaking my head. “Just stop, okay? I’m so tired. My head is killing me and I don’t have the energy to hear any more of this.”
“Juliette—”
“How many more secrets do you have?” I ask. “How much more am I going to learn about you? About me? My family? My history? The Reestablishment and the details of my real life?”
“I swear I never meant to hurt you like this,” he says. “And I don’t want to keep things from you. But this is all so new for me, love. This kind of relationship is so new for me and I don’t—I don’t know how to—”
“You’ve already kept so much from me,” I say to him, feeling my strength falter, feeling the weight of this throbbing headache unclench my armor, feeling too much, too much all at once when I say “There’s so much I don’t know about you. There’s so much I don’t know about your past. Our present. And I have no idea what to believe anymore.”
“Ask me anything,” he says. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know—”
“Except the truth about me? My parents?”
Warner looks suddenly pale.
“You were going to keep that from me forever,” I say to him. “You had no plan to tell me the truth. That I was adopted. Did you?”
His eyes are wild, bright with feeling.
“Answer the question,” I say. “Just tell me this much.” I step forward, so close I can feel his breath on my face; so close I can almost hear his heart racing in his chest. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Honestly, love,” he says, shaking his head. “In all likelihood, I would have.” And suddenly he sighs. The action seems to exhaust him. “I don’t know how to convince you that I believed I was sparing you the pain of that particular truth. I really thought your biological parents were dead. I see now that keeping this from you wasn’t the right thing to do, but then, I don’t always do the right thing,” he says quietly. “But you have to believe that my intention was never to hurt you. I never intended to lie to you or to purposely withhold information from you. And I do think that I would have, in time, told you what I knew to be the truth. I was just searching for the right moment.”
Suddenly, I’m not sure what to feel.
I stare at him, his downcast eyes, the movement in his throat as he swallows against a swell of emotion. And something breaks apart inside of me. Some measure of resistance begins to crumble.
He looks so vulnerable. So young.
I take a deep breath and let it go, slowly, and then I look up, look into his face once more and I see it, I see the moment he senses the change in my feelings. Something comes alive in his eyes. He takes a step forward and now we’re standing so close I’m afraid to speak. My heart is beating too hard in my chest and I don’t have to do anything at all to be reminded of everything, every moment, every touch we’ve ever shared. His scent is all around me. His heat. His exhalations. Gold eyelashes and green eyes. I touch his face, almost without meaning to, gently, like he might be a ghost, like this might be a dream and the tips of my fingers graze his cheek, trail the line of his jaw and I stop when his breath catches, when his body shakes almost imperceptibly
and we lean in as if by memory
eyes closing
lips just touching
“Give me another chance,” he whispers, resting his forehead against mine.
My heart aches, throbs in my chest.
“Please,” he says softly, and he’s somehow closer now, his lips touching mine as he speaks and I feel pinned in place by emotion, unable to move as he presses the words against my mouth, his hands soft and hesitant around my face and he says, “I swear on my life,” he says, “I won’t disappoint you”
and he kisses me
Kisses me
right here, in the middle of everything, in front of everyone and I’m flooded, overrun with feeling, my head spinning as he presses me against the hard line of his body and I can’t save myself from myself, can’t stop the sound I make when he parts my lips and I’m lost, lost in the taste of him, lost in his heat, wrapped up in his arms and
I have to tear myself away
pulling back so quickl
y I nearly stumble. I’m breathing too hard, my face flushed, my feelings panicked
And he can only look at me, his chest rising and falling with an intensity I feel from here, from two feet away, and I can’t think of anything right or reasonable to say about what just happened or what I’m feeling except
“This isn’t fair,” I whisper. Tears threaten, sting my eyes. “This isn’t fair.”
And I don’t wait to hear his response before I tear down the hall, bolting the rest of the way back to my rooms.
WARNER
“Trouble in paradise, Mr Warner?”
I’ve got him by the throat in seconds, shock disfiguring his expression as I slam his body against the wall. “You,” I say angrily. “You forced me into this impossible position. Why?”
Castle tries to swallow but can’t, his eyes wide but unafraid. When he speaks his words are raspy, suffocated. “You had to do it,” he chokes out. “It had to happen. She needed to be warned, and it had to come from you.”
“I don’t believe you,” I shout, shoving him harder against the wall. “And I don’t know why I ever trusted you.”
“Please, son. Put me down.”
I ease up, only a little, and he takes in several lungfuls of air before saying, “I haven’t lied to you, Mr Warner. She had to hear the truth. And if she’d heard this from anyone else she’d never forgive you. But at least now”—he coughs—“with time, she might. It’s your only chance at happiness.”
“What?” I drop my hand. Drop him. “Since when have you cared about my happiness?”
He’s quiet for too long, massaging his throat as he stares at me. Finally, he says, “You think I don’t know what your father did to you? What he put you through?”
And now I take a step back.
“You think I don’t know your story, son? You think I’d let you into my world—offer you sanctuary among my people—if I really thought you were going to hurt us?”
I’m breathing hard. Suddenly confused. Feeling exposed.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say, feeling the lie even as I say it.
