Read Online As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott - Free Book Online Page B

here.
    How can I remember a world that isn’t mine? One that isn’t the one I wake up in every day now?
    “Girls, get to class,” a teacher passing by calls out, and I’m glad to turn away.
    Glad to walk away.

23.
     
    IN CHEMISTRY CLASS, I don’t understand why the teacher is going over the periodic table so slowly, or why he isn’t talking about the way each element can be used.
    I don’t know how I know the elements, or what they can do. Ava’s notes for this class are as empty as all her others. I doodle a little, copying Ava’s squares and spirals and then a few squiggles of my own, attaching letters and numbers to them that don’t mean anything but flow out of my pen anyway and then sigh, pull out my English textbook and hide it inside my Chemistry book.
    English, like Government, it’s another class I am lost in, startled by references to things everyone seems to know about but that I can’t remember. Today we talked about pastoral imagery, which seems to mean that sheep and grass are more than just sheep and grass.
    I look at the poem again, and manage to get about twenty lines in before my eyes start to feel heavy. I like the idea of green grass, of open spaces. It sounds so free.
    I wish I could see grass like that, green grass, I think, and wake up with a start, jerking up so hard my chair squeaks. I look around, but the attic is empty and I let out a sigh.
    Relief, I tell myself, relief, and rub my eyes, tell myself to stop dreaming and listen.
    Nothing.
    I adjust my headset, flex my fingers over the keyboard, and then type “56-412 watches television and eats chips.”
    After that lie—another one, already—I look at my own small foil packet. The bread is so heavy it’s poked through one corner, dense brown that can only be tamed through thick mustard.
    I wonder where Morgan is. I wish—
    No. I have got to stop doing this, I can’t drift away, I have to stay here. I’ve worked so hard. It has been all I ever wanted.
    Thought I wanted.
    “Ava,” he says quietly—he’s here, again—and I turn around, the chair wheezing protest. It was not meant to move so fast.
    “You have to stop coming up here,” I say, but I don’t mean it, watching as he pulls the attic door closed, and my heart is pounding from him, just from him, and I know, I know, I know him, it is the beating of my heart.
    But what if someone saw him come up here? I am in the attic and he is on the top floor, in his own apartment, an unheard of luxury, but there are SAT everywhere.
    I talk to the one low-level watcher who lives on the first floor every week and she tells me what Morgan bought at the grocery store because he always stops by to say “Hello” since they have to wait in the same line together. She is sure he always gets sausages when she never gets any. She thinks he must know someone, or that he is a thief. She wants to get proof so she can get him sent away and get an extra card for rations every month.
    Sometimes I think life outside the crèche is no better than life in it.
    “Why can’t I come up here?” he says and comes closer, moving so he is standing in front of me, then kneeling so I can see into his eyes, he can see into mine, I try to turn away but he puts his hands on my knees, not hard, not hard at all, his touch is so gentle, his thumbs moving in a slow circle. I feel myself sinking into the touch, into him.
    Into us, and that’s just it—I see him and I see me and him and we—I close my eyes.
    “I have to listen to you,” I say, trying to make my voice strong, and when I open my eyes he smiles, a small, crooked smile, and says, “But I’m right here.”
    “I can’t—” I say and my voice is cracking because I’m scared someone has seen us—him—that’s all, I’m not scared of him, I’m not scared of what I think when I see him. What I feel.
    Alive.
    “I think about you listening to me,” he says. “You hear everything, don’t you?”
    I bite my lip because I do, of course I