It was hunger. That was it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She looked up at the house and frowned.
Could she do it?
London was no stranger to stealing. Food, mostly. Sometimes clothes when she needed them. She wondered if that old man lived alone.
London crept back toward the house, keeping watch for any movement. She saw none. The old coot must have taken off to bring in a posse. London drew closer, the thought of food and water driving her through the trees like a lion stalking prey.
She reached the line of trees closest to the house. There were at least twenty yards of open land between herself and the back door. Had he locked it? Her stomach growled. If so, she’d just have to break the window.
Stepping out into the open was a little harder than she’d thought it would be. She hesitated for a good ten seconds, but there was no way around it, and out she darted. If he was in the house, her ham was smoked.
The door was unlocked!
She couldn’t believe her luck. It opened into a kitchen, messy but thankfully empty of an old geezer with a gun. London filled a dirty cup with water from the faucet and gulped it so fast, she got the hiccups. There was a pot of cannellini beans sitting on the stove, not her favorite, but she shoveled them into her mouth with her hand, not bothering to look for a spoon. She choked down the beans as she searched the room for more food.
There was a small piece of stale bread on the table. She rolled it up into her sleeve for later and drank down another cup of water. It was time to get the hell out of there.
London opened the back door, and there he was. Waiting. A single thought ran through her mind as the butt of his shotgun smacked her in the forehead.
People are crap.
Maxine could see a sliver of the front gate through the window in the wall to her right from where she sat on the bench. She was, of course, checking out every car, truck, or wagon that pulled through. From years of watching inmates run, she knew that if the girl was going to be caught, it would most likely be today. But she was also imagining that the wide iron gate was the entrance to her home—a large estate, somewhere far out from the city. An estate with grand gardens and fireplaces so massive, they took up entire walls. And dogs. There would be dogs, three of them. No, four. Four large dogs that slept with her in a giant bed every single night.
Motion caught her eye.
A maintenance truck rumbled through her sliver. Not a police vehicle.
She relaxed.
It wasn’t that Maxine rooted for the runners; more than anything, she wished they wouldn’t do it in the first place because she hated the aftermath. Watching them dragged back, dirty, often bloody, and always wild with hunger and fear, only to be tossed into Twenty-Two. Days later they would emerge, as gray and flat as the dingy sheets that Alice sent through the gas mangle one after another in the laundry building every afternoon during Manual Training.
And they always seemed to be dragged back.
Making it out obviously took more than “clams and a sandbar,” as the girls liked to say. It also took someone who cared about you. So when that truck or wagon pulled up, and the eloper was ripped from it, the world made its pronouncement. No one cared. And somehow, no one always wore the face of Maxine’s mother standing in a dirty alley in Somerville.
Maxine shivered and glanced at Alice’s profile without moving. They were not allowed to move. As heavily as the elopers who failed weighed on Maxine, she knew that Alice took their failure much, much harder.
Alice had never tried to run—at least, not in the four years that Maxine had been at the state school. Alice never even spoke of it. Whether this was because she never thought about it or because she understood that Maxine couldn’t run, Maxine didn’t know. But she hoped that Alice never thought about running, because it would mean leaving her.
An automobile caught Maxine’s eye. It wasn’t a police wagon, and she flicked her eyes forward, spotting Alice watching her face. Since Alice was closer to the window, making it impossible for her to see the gate or the driveway without completely turning her head, she’d been using Maxine’s expression to determine if the girl had been found.
Before Maxine could go back to deciding on the names of her four dogs, another auto slid through the gate. This time it was a police wagon.
Maxine stiffened, keeping her eyes trained forward, trying not to alert Alice. Maybe it was someone else being brought in for the first time. Maybe there’d been a fight in one of the Back Wards and the police were needed. Maybe… Maxine’s mind spun, dreaming up a host of reasons why that wagon would enter through the gate, other than the one she knew to be true. It was the girl. And not being able to change this hard fact, she let go of the maybes, allowing Alice to see it. She could never lie to Alice. Or at least, almost never.
Alice saw. So did Rose.
“If not this time, next time,” Rose whispered, echoing Alice’s own words back at her.
Maxine pushed her thigh against her sister’s. Rose always knew the right thing to say. Always. Even on that awful day when their mother had sent them away, and Maxine—sobbing so hard that she could barely speak—had tried to tell Rose she’d get them home. She’d fix it. Rose had simply said, “I believe you,” stopping the ache faster than if her little sister had been able to massage Maxine’s heart in her small, warm hands.
Maxine didn’t expect Alice to respond to Rose, and she didn’t. The first thing any one of them learned inside the institution was to hold on to yourself tightly because someone was always watching, and writing it down, creating a slippery path with no way to regain your footing. First they said you were nervous. Then they noted how you seemed agitated. If this upset you, they scribbled more—you were wild, unmanageable even. A menace.
It was enough to turn anyone into a headbanger, one of the little ones who banged their foreheads against the floor over and over again, tenderizing their tiny brains. The action made perfect sense to Maxine. What made no sense at all was a doctor who, when watching these tiny creatures attempting to feel something inside a place that forbade it, had casually told a visitor, “Idiots of the lowest grade seem to have no feelings at all.”
The girl hadn’t made it, but Alice wouldn’t bang her head over it. She would only blink.
It made Maxine want to reach out and touch her, really touch her… to place her whole palm against Alice’s cheek and feel the light brushing of Alice’s lashes against her fingers. Maybe even whisper into her ear that it would be okay. Because sometimes Maxine actually believed this—that eventually, just as she’d told Rose, she’d think up a way of fixing it. But Maxine did not reach out. Could not. This connection, it was impossible. Although, she often wondered what made it so—the strict rules of this place, or Alice?
There was now a ripple circulating around the day room. Everyone was discovering the news. With so many voices peppering the air, Ragno stepped in from the hallway.
“Quiet!”
The girls immediately shut their mouths.
Ragno had been around for many years, first as Miss Delgorio, and then as Mrs. Ragno, after she’d married one of the mathematics teachers. But under either name, she was serious trouble if her eye fell on you. Of course, anyone at the institution could be trouble for the girls—from the superintendent on down to the men who cut the grass. Maxine had once seen a girl toss a rock at a maintenance man in frustration and be carted off overnight to Twenty-Two, while an hour later when an inmate walking the circles had jumped another inmate and bitten her ear clean off, the biter had only been sent to sit on the very benches they now sat on until dinner.