She escaped to her room before her mom could look past her relief to wonder whether Becca meant what she had said.
Sometime around midnight, Becca’s mom answered the call from work after all. From behind her bedroom door, Becca assured her that it was fine for her to leave, that she didn’t need to talk anymore. After the apartment door closed behind her mom, she waited five minutes before she left the apartment herself.
She hadn’t ever gone to the playground this late before. Stepping away from the lighted parking lot and onto the dark road, she was reminded of the time she had walked to 117 to find Heather. The night that had started all this.
That night, she’d had a purpose. Find Heather. Help her. Tonight she didn’t know what she was looking for. She used to be able to escape her problems at the playground, but this time she carried the problem with her. Where could she go to escape her own mind?
Dissidents were dangerous. Becca knew that. She had known it all her life.
Becca thought like them. She talked like them. She acted like them. Was she dangerous?
Becca sped up, trying to outrun her thoughts.
Dissidents would destroy the government if Internal didn’t stop them. They would replace justice and order with chaos and corruption.
What did that even mean?
Did a world built on justice and order, the world her mom had taught her to believe in, involve people like Anna being arrested? People like Jake’s mom being tortured to death? People who said one wrong thing forced to confess to trying to overthrow the government?
She felt like she had run straight off a cliff. Her feet hit the solid pavement with every stride, but she could still feel herself falling.
She couldn’t start thinking like this. She had to stop this somehow.
She slowed as she reached the playground. At night, it looked downright sinister. Elongated shadows stretched out from the swing set poles and reached for her along the ground. The playhouse had transformed into a black hole ready to suck her in.
A shrill warble, too close to be a bird, cut through the silence.
Her heart nearly exploded out of her chest.
The noise came again, but this time she recognized it. Her phone. Right. Glad nobody was around to witness her moment of panic, she answered. “Hello?”
“Hey.” It was Jake, sounding more subdued than she had heard him since the day he’d told her about his past. “I know it’s late, but… I need to talk to you. Or just hang out. Or something.” His voice wavered. “Do you think you could meet me at the old playground by your building?”
She stopped walking. Jake never sounded like this when he called her. Ever since he had explained his history to her, they had kept their conversations almost obsessively casual. He never called her sounding upset, or asked her to come hang out this late at night. Something had to be wrong.
But with her mom’s explanation circling through her head, with her desperate denials no longer working, she had no room for talking to Jake, for forcing what her mom had said about him out of her mind.
Fighting her guilt, she opened her mouth to tell him she couldn’t make it.
A figure stepped out of the playhouse. He waved as he walked toward her.
Jake was already here. And now he knew she was here too.
At first he was only a vague shadow. As she got closer, his features resolved. His familiar face, minus his usual smile. The tears that glittered in his eyes.
The ring of bruises around his neck.
Becca started to reach her hand up toward them, then let it fall back to her side. “What happened?”
Jake shifted awkwardly on his feet. “It was a bad day. That’s all.”
She tried to keep her mind on Jake’s problems, tried to block out the questions that still wouldn’t leave her alone. “Bad days don’t usually involve someone trying to strangle you.”
Jake walked the few steps to the swings and sat down. The swing creaked under his weight. “It’s just my dad. Sometimes he’s almost normal, and sometimes he’s… not. Today when I got home from school, he thought I was from Internal.” He clutched the rusted chains and let the swing sway back and forth. “I managed to remind him who I was, but after that it was like I wasn’t there. He kept talking to my mom and Sarra, like they were there in the room with him. I stayed as long as I could, but I had to get out of there. And you were the only person I could go to.” He laughed. Something about his laugh didn’t sound quite sane.
Becca knew she should try to comfort him. but all she could think about was the name he had said. “Sarra. Your sister?”
He nodded.
His sister. She had existed after all. Which meant her mom had been right, at least about that part of his story. And if she had been right about that part, why not about all of it?
It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t told her. Not right now. He needed her.
But if she ignored this, it would mean she didn’t care that he might have been a dissident. That he might still be a dissident. And that would mean she was turning into somebody who could forgive dissident activity but not a few false confessions, somebody who hung around dissidents as if she were one of them.
Again she felt herself falling.
It was already too late.
No. She could stop this.
She took a step back. “You never told me about her.”
“I’m sorry.” He scuffed his foot along the ground. “I meant to.”
“You told me you weren’t actually dissidents.”
Now he looked up at her, his eyes wide, the moonlight lending them an eerie glow. “We weren’t. I explained what happened.”
“Mom told me there was nobody staying with you. She said your sister was involved with a dissident group. She said all of you were dissidents.”
Tell me she was wrong, she begged inside her mind, just like she had earlier during her mom’s explanation. Make me believe you.
It didn’t work any better now than it had then.
Jake didn’t speak. His swing stopped moving.
It was true. She knew it just looking at him, just listening to the silence between them.
“I didn’t know what else to do.” His words faded into the air. “You were going to leave unless I explained, but if I told you the truth…”
She wanted to forgive him. She wanted to tell him that it was all right, and that she understood, and that she was sorry for everything that had happened to him today and in all the time since his arrest.
But how, after hating her mom for lying about something Internal had ordered her to keep secret, could she forgive Jake for lying about this?
How could she justify that?
“I told you not to lie to me.” The coldness in her voice made her shudder. She sounded like her mom.
Better to sound like her mom than like a dissident. Right?
“What was I supposed to tell you?” His voice roughened. “Was I supposed to say they shot my sister on TV as some kind of lesson? Was I supposed to tell you how it was her fault all along for getting involved with those useless people who were willing to just throw us away afterwards?” He was yelling now. “Was I supposed to tell you how little it all meant to them, in the end? Everything we did for them, to expose this government for what it really is? Everything we went through? Was I supposed to tell you how they came to me after, and asked me to join them, when they weren’t willing to help us in the only way that mattered?”
His words hung in the air, coloring the silence that grew between them as they both realized what he had said.
No lies this time. Nothing getting in the way of the truth.
Jake was a dissident.
What would you do if someone admitted to having contact with a dissident group? She wasn’t sure if the voice in her mind was her mom’s or her own.