Right Behind Your Eyes

Whoever used to live in this apartment left behind beautiful things: a king-sized bed with sheets as soft as a mother's kiss, bottles that smell like mist and meadows and money arranged in the shower. A pillowy couch and huge tv without so much as a scratch, since this unit is one of the few with all its windows intact. But this just doesn't feel like the right place to wait for the storm that will probably kill us. I slide my hand into Arson's and lead him out onto the balcony.

Warm and cold winds fight each other around us, sounding like the traffic I used to hear outside my room at the custodial school. We sit on the concrete with our legs inches from the twisted-off iron railing, no doubt a casualty of some earlier storm.

"If I'd grown up in my family’s neighborhood…" Arson mumbles as he gazes down at the cars in the parking lot.

When we first explored this building with our group, we found seven sets of car keys. We were thinking about trying to meet up with another Defiant community we'd heard were camping a few days' ride to our south, a big group led by a guy named D.R. A car definitely would have been more comfortable than our four-wheelers for such a journey. But of those seven cars, four were missing their batteries. We tried jumping the other three batteries with our crank charger. Only two worked. Of those two cars, one revved and revved but refused to turn over. The other car started then stalled out as soon as we got to the edge of the parking lot. We laughed it off as just our luck and went back into the building to feast on the former residents' canned goods and dance to the songs on their left-behind cell phones.

Then we got a radio message from our friend Kevin, whose group included a former meteorology professor. And he told us that the storm headed our way was the exact kind of unsurvivable super-storm that the majority of mankind had moved to giant satellites to avoid.

Back when things on earth were just regular-bad, Arson used to sneak out at night and run drugs so he could bring his cousins back small luxuries like candy bars and bread without mold. The older guys in the crew showed him how to fix the four-wheelers they rode, and he learned quick.

If Arson had grown up in his neighborhood, where men like my uncle spent every day fixing someone's raggedy car, he would probably know how to put together enough working parts to get one car running by morning. One car that might give us a chance to escape. But Arson never lived in his family's neighborhood. His mother was in prison when she had him. He went to his first custodial school at three days old.

They didn't take me until I was six. The official reason was because I'd missed too many days of kindergarten, which wasn't exactly my parents' fault, because the teachers kept sending me home for coughing. I only coughed in the mornings, when my lungs were still full of the mold from the apartment the county wouldn't let us move out of, but the teachers didn't care. The judge who decided my case didn't care.

By the time I got moved from that first school to the custodial high school where I met Arson and the others, I had heard that the people who owned these places were bribing the judges with some of the money the government gave them for each kid. Still, I blamed my parents. It seemed that the judges rarely took kids who weren't poor. If only my mom and dad had tried a little harder to get promotions at their crappy jobs. If only they'd scrubbed the walls in my room a little more often and partied a little less. Maybe then all the terrible things that had happened to me would have had to find some other girl to happen to.

My parents were allowed to come visit once per year. The last time they came, they'd already been assigned an evacuation date and an apartment on one of the lower-budget residential satellites. The school was getting ready to move us, too, to the sky-version of a prison like this one.

We sat at a low, round table, under the gaze of a security guard. My mom said, "I had a dream last night that I was telling you the story I used to tell you when you were little. You know the story about the princess who didn't want to get married? Except in my dream, it wasn't a rabbit that taught her how to survive in the woods. It was a wizard called D.R. Isn't that funny?"

My father chimed in. "But now we're trying to remember. What was his name in the original story? The rabbit's name. Cincinnati, right? How silly.”

They'd told the same story every night up until the day I got taken, and the rabbit's name had always been Sir William.

I'd already had a hunch that my nature-loving parents might want to join one of the groups of people who were planning to resist leaving Earth. Now I knew they were following some guy named D.R. in Cincinnati and hoping I would join them.

"Silly. Right," I echoed, because I had to say something.

My mother took a tarnished locket off her neck and set it in my palm.

I pried the heart-shaped sides apart, expecting to see a photo of my parents, or maybe my mom with uncle Ray and my grandparents. But it was just me, as a toddler, staring solemnly into the camera.

"I've kept this on, the whole time, ever since…" my mother cleared her throat. Then she smiled. "Your eyes, they were always so bright."

My dad spoke in a slow, gravelly voice. "Any time you find yourself in a situation where you don't know what to do, I need you to remember these words exactly as I'm telling them to you. You have the knowledge of your whole family right behind your eyes. Okay?"

"Okay, dad," I said. But I was thinking, what knowledge? How to get all the neighbors to join in a line dance? The perfect joke to tell your coworkers when the boss was giving you a hard time?

"Well, this'll be our last visit here, I guess," my mother said when the guard was leading them out. "So we'll see you in the sky, right? Or maybe I'll see you in a dream again soon. A dream with a wizard named D.R. leading the princess to a forest in Cincinnati."

I'd heard a few kids here planning to run away and defy the evacuation orders, but my friends and I weren't among them.

So I nodded and thanked my parents for the gift and figured I would never see them again.

I was going to file onto the bus, onto the spaceship, onto the satellite, into the next school, gritting my teeth for two more miserable years before being shuffled into some menial job where I would earn just enough to pay the (literal) sky-high taxes we were all going to owe, thanks to the last-minute deal the world's governments had struck with the corporations that built the space projects. The day came, and I was ready to go along with it all.

But then a certain teacher got in line right behind me. The thought of sitting in a shuttle where I might die a fiery death with him pressed to my side had me sweating. And then I was running. Running with two, five, ten other kids whose faces I couldn't see because we were all moving so fast. When they chased us, we scattered. When we heard security tackling some of the runners, we didn't look back. We met up under an overpass and there were six of us. Twins from my tenth grade class named Alina and Ana. Ana's girlfriend Kim and Kim's big cousin Arson. Another older guy named Jay. And me.

For the past three years, we've stuck together. Sometimes we join up with other "defiant" bands, traveling between the places that are too hot in the summer and the places that are too cold in the winter, foraging for food and supplies and camping in abandoned homes. Sometimes, we go alone.

Alina and Jay got together the first week, which meant that by the end of the first summer, Arson and I were a couple because we had no one else to choose and no reason not to choose each other. I had no idea what love was, but I was sure this wasn't it.

And then one night, as we were laying together in the penthouse suite of some ransacked hotel, something about the way Arson touched me reminded me of what that teacher used to do. It felt like I was floating in an outer space made entirely of memories that I would never be able to escape.

Arson must have seen the void in my eyes. He didn't ask what was wrong. He helped me put my clothes on then he led me out onto the balcony.

"You hear those palm leaves?" He asked. "Can you smell that wind? Smell that salt in the air." He guided me down and spread my hand on the concrete. "Feel that. And just focus on where you are. You're here now, okay? You're free."

Free. I wasn't sure what that word even meant. But I could feel myself coming back to wherever here was.

We sat on that balcony until the sun came up, just talking. I told him about the necklace I always wore. He told me how the ladies at the prison had chosen his name because it sounded like "our son" and they all believed that he was gonna make them proud, that he'd 'set the world on fire' someday.

That morning, I decided that I loved this man. I decided that I was the luckiest girl in the world, (and after all this was a world with hundreds, maybe even a few thousand girls!) Over time I could see that he felt lucky to be with me, too. That made me feel more enchanting than any fairytale princess.

Such a shame, that the rare magic that is us will be gone soon.

"What are you thinking about?" Arson asks me.

"The night we talked about this." I slip my necklace off and hand it to him.

He grins, opening it. "What was it they said? 'Your ancestors live in your smile'?"

"No. 'You have the knowledge of your whole family right behind your eyes.'"

It takes me a moment to realize Arson is frowning. "You know what, it does look like there's something behind here…" He plucks the picture out, gently, and in the moonlight I can see a small chip on his finger. A memory card.

A smile bends my whole face, because if we're gonna die tomorrow, there couldn't be any better time for my parents' line dances and jokes.

We take the memory card inside, down to the basement where the group is keeping our communal supplies: some water, a cell phone, our crank charger, flashlights and tools. When we put the chip in the phone and open up the gallery, I expect to see videos of my mom and dad, or maybe my grandma.

But the very first clip starts with my uncle Ray squinting into the camera, shading his eyes with an oil-stained hand. "All right, so I might not know too much," he says. "But here's what to do if you ever got an engine that won't turn over…"