His question follows me into the kitchen. It hangs over my head like a cloud while I slap some cured deer meat onto some flat bread Evan must have baked in his outdoor oven like the Eagle Scout he is. It follows me as I hobble back into the great room and plop down on the sofa directly behind his head. I have this urge to kick him right between his broad shoulders. On the table beside me is a book entitled Love’s Desperate Desire. Based on the cover, I would have called it My Spectacular Washboard Abs.
That’s my big problem. That’s it! Before the Arrival, guys like Evan Walker never looked twice at me, much less shot wild game for me and washed my hair. They never grabbed me by the back of the neck like the airbrushed model on his mother’s paperback, abs a-clenching, pecs a-popping. My eyes have never been looked deeply into, or my chin raised to bring my lips within an inch of theirs. I was the girl in the background, the just-friend, or—worse—the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can’t-remember-her-name girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action figures had found me in that snowbank.
“What?” I ask the back of his head. “Now you’re giving me the silent treatment?”
His shoulders jiggle up and down. You know, one of those wry, silent chuckles, accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. Girls! So silly.
“I should have asked, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“What?”
He rotates around on his butt to face me. Me on the sofa, him on the floor, looking up. “That I was going with you.”
“What? We weren’t even talking about that! And why would you want to go with me, Evan? Since you think he’s dead?”
“I just don’t want you to be dead, Cassie.”
That does it.
I hurl my deer meat at his head. The plate glances off his cheek, and he’s up and in my face before I can blink. He leans in close, putting his hands on either side of me, boxing me in with his arms. Tears shine in his eyes.
“You’re not the only one,” he says through gritted teeth. “My twelve-year-old sister died in my arms. She choked to death on her own blood. And there was nothing I could do. It makes me sick, the way you act as if the worst disaster in human history somehow revolves around you. You’re not the only one who’s lost everything—not the only one who thinks they’ve found the one thing that makes any of this shit make sense. You have your promise to Sammy, and I have you.”
He stops. He’s gone too far, and he knows it.
“You don’t ‘have’ me, Evan,” I say.
“You know what I mean.” He’s looking intently at me, and it’s very hard to keep from turning away. “I can’t stop you from going. Well, I guess I could, but I also can’t let you go alone.”
“Alone is better. You know that. It’s the reason you’re still alive!” I poke my finger into his heaving chest.
He pulls away, and I fight the instinct to reach for him. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want him to pull away.
“But it’s not the reason you are,” he snaps. “You won’t last two minutes out there without me.”
I explode. I can’t help it. It was the perfectly wrong thing to say at the perfectly wrong time.
“Screw you!” I shout. “I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone! Well, I guess if I needed someone to wash my hair or slap a bandage on a boo-boo or bake me a cake, you’d be the guy!”
After two tries, I manage to get on my feet. Time for the angrily-storming-out-of-the-room part of the argument, while the guy folds his arms over his manly chest and pouts. I pause halfway up the stairs, telling myself I’m stopping to catch my breath, not to let him catch up. He’s not following me anyway. So I struggle up the remaining steps and into my bedroom.
No, not my bedroom. Val’s bedroom. I don’t have a bedroom anymore. Probably never will again.
Oh, screw self-pity. The world doesn’t revolve around you. And screw guilt. You aren’t the one who made Sammy get on that bus. And while you’re at it, screw grief. Evan’s crying over his baby sister won’t bring her back.
I have you. Well, Evan, the truth is it doesn’t matter whether there are two of us or two hundred of us. We don’t stand a chance. Not against an enemy like the Others. I’m making myself strong for…what? So when I go down, at least I go down strong? What difference does that make?
I slap Bear from his perch on the bed with an angry snarl. What the hell are you staring at? He flops over to his side, arm sticking up in the air like he’s raising his hand in class to ask a question.
Behind me, the door creaks on its rusty hinges.
“Get out,” I say without turning around.
Another creeeeak. Then a click. Then silence.
“Evan, are you standing outside that door?”
Pause. “Yes.”
“You’re kind of a lurker, you know that?”
If he answers, I don’t hear him. I’m hugging myself. Rubbing my hands up and down my arms. The little room is freezing. My knee aches like hell, but I bite my lip and remain stubbornly on my feet, my back to the door.
“Are you still there?” I say when I can’t take the silence anymore.
“If you leave without me, I’ll just follow you. You can’t stop me, Cassie. How are you going to stop me?”
I shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. “Shoot you, I guess.”
“Like you shot the Crucifix Soldier?”
The words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.
“How do you know about him?” Of course, there’s only one way he could know. “You read my diary.”
“I didn’t think you were going to live.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I guess I wanted to know what happened—”
“You’re lucky I left the gun downstairs or I would shoot you right now. Do you know how creepy that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?”
He lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.
“You read all of it, didn’t you?” I’m totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed. It’s ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val’s bed and realized he had seen me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.
I punch him in the stomach. There’s no give at all; it’s like I hit a slab of concrete.
“I can’t believe you,” I shout. “You sat there—just sat there—while I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and let me lie!”
He jams his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. Like a little boy busted for breaking his mother’s antique vase. “I didn’t think it mattered that much.”
“You didn’t think…?” I’m shaking my head. Who is this guy? All of a sudden I’ve got a bad case of the jitters. Something is seriously wrong here. Maybe it’s the fact that he lost his whole family and his girlfriend or fiancée or whatever she was and for months he’s been living alone pretending that doing really nothing is really doing something. Maybe he’s cocooned himself on this isolated patch of Ohio farmland as a way of dealing with all the shit the Others have ladled out, or maybe he’s just weird—weird before the Arrival and just as weird after—but whatever it is, something is seriously twisted about this Evan Walker. He’s too calm, too rational, too cool for it to be completely, well, cool.
“Why did you shoot him?” he asks quietly. “The soldier in the convenience store.”
“You know why,” I say. I’m about to burst into tears.
He’s nodding. “Because of Sammy.”
Now I’m really confused. “It had nothing to do with Sammy.”
He looks up at me. “Sammy took the soldier’s hand. Sammy got on that bus. Sammy trusted. And now, even though I saved you, you won’t let yourself trust me.”
He grabs my hand. Squeezes it hard. “I’m not the Crucifix Soldier, Cassie. And I’m not Vosch. I’m just like you. I’m scared and I’m angry and I’m confused and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do, but I do know you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you’re human in one breath and a cockroach in the next. You don’t believe you’re a cockroach. If you believed that, you wouldn’t have turned to face the sniper on the highway.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “It was just a metaphor.”
“You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Others. It’s always been that way. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.”
“What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense, you know that?” I feel myself leaning toward him, all the fight draining out of me. I can’t decide if he’s holding me back or holding me up.
“You’re the mayfly,” he murmurs.