Juliet

You never think the worst will happen until it happens.

Sure, people say they imagine the worst all the time, but the image of “the worst” that they have in their minds is a watered-down, Hollywood version, the world being ravaged by unrealistically mild climate change or blown to bits by a meteor or suffering from some other stereotypically apocalyptic scenario. Nothing they could dream up to mull over in the still hours before they fall asleep at night or the quiet length of their morning commute could ever compare to the real thing.

The real worst isn’t zombies or aliens, a virus or even a cruel dictator. It doesn’t need to be. No, the real worst is us, just like it always has been. Apparently the copious warnings we’ve received hinting toward this fact weren’t enough.

Most wars that have occurred in human history shouldn’t have even started. No one I know can remember how this one began. What we do know is that it lasted just a little too long. The threat of mutually assured destruction only works so long as both sides are more invested in preserving themselves than eliminating their enemy.

* * *

‘When a nuclear bomb explodes, you have two options. Hold your thumb up to the blast and close one eye. If you can’t see it around the finger, run like hell, as far away as you physically can. If you can see it, it’s already too late for you. Your best bet is to run toward it; you’ll die faster that way.’

I never expected my English teacher’s advice to have a practical application, but as I watch the missile arc down to Earth, toward my home, his words come back to me. Wind whips around me as I raise my thumb, tangling my hair and ripping grass right out of the field I stand in. It’s too bright to look at at first, burning my eyes through my eyelids. When I open them again, the world is bathed a sickly orange-yellow and the edges of the mushroom cloud are clearly visible around my thumbnail. I move toward the explosion, one step, two, before a hand around my bicep jerks me backward.

“Liza, what are you doing?” Juliet sounds small, scared. I turn to look at her as she tugs frantically at my arm. Fear is written into every line of her face, incongruous compared to her usual demeanor. It’s not a good look on her.

“Don’t you remember what Mr. Cassidy said? We’re too close.” My voice seems far away to my own ears, muffled by layers of water or despair.

Disbelief overtakes Juliet’s features for a brief moment. “Liza, we have a car.”

That’s enough to snap me out of my trance. We sprint to my father’s rusted pickup, Juliet maintaining her grip on me until we’re forced to separate to open the doors. My hands shake as I jam the key into the ignition, palms slick with sweat where they grip the steering wheel, but my toes are solid on the gas pedal. We shoot through the field, rattling around in the cabin as the truck jolts over ruts and stones hidden by the grass, but soon enough we’re on the gravel path that leads there, then the paved road that will take us away.

* * *

The sun is just beginning to set, the shadows between the trees lengthening into an early dusk, when I hear it. The snap of a twig, barely three yards from where I am. My knife is in my hand in an instant, the stone blade crude but effective. I’ve learned the hard way that you don’t pass up food when you get a chance at it.

It’s not food that appears slowly from behind a bush, though. It’s a girl, no more than six or seven, in a pair of tattered pajamas, hands clutched tightly to her chest. She stares at me with wide brown eyes, curly black hair falling out of pigtails on either side of her head. Streaks of pale dirt stand out on her face, and I’m struck with the urge to wipe them away. I take that urge and bury it deep within me.

“Are you alone?” I ask, my voice coming out raspier than I would like. She nods, eyes never leaving my face, words never leaving her mouth. “You hungry?” Another nod, and I shrug off my backpack, the books it once carried long since replaced with more useful materials. I crouch as I hold out a piece of cooked turtle meat, letting her approach me like a skittish stray. She does, slowly as if to make sure I’m not about to strike out at her, but stays within reach as she eats. Her hands, where they grip the tough piece of meat, are soft and round.

“You got a name, kid?”

She blinks owlishly at me before raising a hand between us, four fingers held up and her thumb curled across her palm. As I watch, she brings her fingers down behind her thumb, then moves it so it’s extended up the side. She then loops her index finger over her thumb, followed by crossing her index and middle fingers, then bringing them back down and lifting her pinkie, before closing with a “c” shape and the same fist with her thumb across it that she did before. Beatrice. Oh, God.

I don’t get up, but rest my hands on the ground in front of me for balance. “Beatrice?” She nods, still chewing slowly. “Beatrice, are you deaf?” She pauses before nodding again, eyeing me warily. With her free hand she points at me, and after a moment I realize she wants to know who I am. I search my brain for the relevant signs before clumsily spelling my name, L-i-z-a. She repeats the letters back to me, her mouth softening, although not quite smiling, when I nod an affirmative. I sigh heavily, gaze dropping to her feet, which I now see are bare. One of them is bleeding, the thick red liquid oozing slowly from a shallow wound, and the other one has plenty of scabs. Fuck. I must not have buried my desire as deeply as I’d hoped, because I reach up with one sleeve pulled tight over my palm and start scrubbing at the dirt on her face.

“Beatrice,” I say as I slowly stand up. She’s finished the meat, but doesn’t move away even as I tower over her. “I don’t know if I can help you.” Somebody told me once that talking slowly and exaggerating syllables just makes it harder to read lips, so I try to speak as normally as I can. “But I would like to try. Do you want to stay with me?”

I don’t know how much of that she actually understood, but she nods without hesitation at the last part. I think, as I hoist her onto my shoulders, that a part of me always knew that I wouldn’t have left a scared little girl to fend for herself, but I can’t deny that Beatrice sits heavy up there, heavy and a little painful where her chubby hands grip my hair too tight, but I don’t tell her to let go.

Something hard presses into the back of my head when she leans forward to avoid branches. It’s too difficult to ask what it is now, so I tighten my grip on her ankles to ensure she doesn’t slip instead.

* * *

“It’s going to be hard to find you your Romeo now,” I joke. It’s completely inappropriate, given the situation, but the only weapon in my arsenal is humor and I’ll be damned before I give it up.

Juliet pauses where she’s twisting a stick determinedly on a log, looking up at me through her lashes. The truck gave up three days ago, but for better or worse, we didn’t. “I thought I told you to quit it with the Romeo jokes,” she says, fondness creeping into her exasperated tone. Juliet always found my fascination with Shakespeare bothersome. I find it ironic considering she’s the one named after his character, but she already knows that, so I don’t bother repeating it. Instead, I decide to continue digging my grave by beating the joke to death.

“We are in the midst of a tragedy, though. It would be fitting.”

Juliet doesn’t stop this time, and when she speaks her eyes are carefully trained on the stick in her hands. “Maybe I don’t want to find Romeo. Maybe I want to find Juliet.”

I know what she wants to hear, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say the words. What comes out is, “Does it really matter? They both die in the end anyway.” So not the right thing, but I’ve never even said the right thing to myself. In the moment, it’s all I’ve got.

Silence falls over us, the kind of silence that should be broken, ideally by me, ideally with something better than that. Juliet keeps twisting the stick, and eventually a thin curl of smoke rises from the log, dissipating in the chilly evening air. It’s followed by another ribbon, then a thicker tendril, until sparks flicker to life in the charred wood. She blows on them gently, encouraging their feeble attempts at growth.

“Do you?” I ask without preamble. “Want to find Juliet, I mean.”

Juliet sits back on her heels, the fire now self-sustaining, if not giving off much heat. She smiles at me, although her eyes look sad. But that might just be a trick of the wavering light. “I think I already have.”

Before I can ask what she means by that, she unfastens her necklace and loops it around my neck, leaning in to brush my hair out of the clasp. The locket knocks against my sternum, a familiar sight but an unfamiliar weight. I don’t have to open it to know what’s in there: on the left, a family portrait from before Juliet’s grandmother passed away, and on the right, a picture of us from one of our birthday parties, I can’t remember whose. That never seemed to matter as much as the fact that we were together.

Now, her cheek brushes mine as her fingers work at my nape. When I imagined it, the very few times I allowed myself to imagine it, this isn’t how it went, but then again, I’d hardly pictured my entire life going atomic. No point in waiting for what I’d imagined.

I turn my head to the side as she withdraws so I can catch her lips with mine. It’s brief, a test of the waters more than anything else. When Juliet pulls away, she’s looking at me like everything’s going to be okay, and I’m looking at her like I believe her.

Two days later, Juliet dies in my arms, my name the last word on her lips. Lizabeta. Nothing’s okay after that.

* * *

It’s a locket.

The piece of jewelry swings out when I lower Beatrice to the ground, nearly whacking me in the eye. Her hands move back to her chest and I realize she was holding onto it when I first saw her. I want to ask her about it, but something tells me I wouldn’t get a response, so instead I crouch in front of her and pinch the chain of my own—Juliet’s—locket, holding it out for her to see. Although hers is gold and mine is silver, with different detail work and different chains, they’re both heart-shaped.

“Look,” I say even though her eyes are already fixed on it. “We match.”

I know she doesn’t know that I’ve said anything, but as she relinquishes one hand’s grip on her necklace to reach for mine, I think she understands anyway.