Once We Were. Kat Zhang
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who stood beside us, as immobile as we were. Devon, who, even more than us, should not be seen by anyone. He was doing nothing wrong, breaking no laws, causing no trouble. It was not actually illegal to be foreign, much less look foreign, and a police officer ought to know that better than the average person. But still.
Someone took hold of our shoulder. Jackson.
“Something wrong?” he asked the officer. His voice was light. He took a few steps toward the man, pushing us along though everything in me screamed that we should be going in the opposite direction.
The officer lowered the flashlight beam so it wasn’t blinding us. The stars in our vision didn’t fade.
He frowned at Addie and me. “Bit late for you to be running around, isn’t it?”
Our lips couldn’t form a reply. Jackson’s hand tightened on our shoulder, but he laughed. “She’s fine; she’s with us.”
“You know about the curfew?”
“That doesn’t start until Monday,” Cordelia said. Without my noticing, she and Sabine had joined us. She grinned. “We’re running wild while we still can.”
The officer ran his eyes over her short, platinum hair, her red lips. “Well, don’t run too wild. It’s two in the morning. Be careful.”
“We were headed back anyway.” Sabine tilted her head at the milkshake in our hands. “Just came out for some food.”
<Smile> I hissed, and Addie obeyed.
We snuck a look at Devon, who wore a look of magnificent boredom. Our smile softened into something a bit more natural.
“It’s my birthday,” Addie said. Our voice came out quiet, almost shy. We sounded more like Kitty than ourself, which only made us more flustered. Heat crept up our neck, bloomed on our cheeks.
To their credit, no one looked surprised.
“All right,” the officer said finally. “Have a good night, then.”
We all stood quietly until the man was out of sight. Then Cordelia broke down into giggles. Jackson tried to shush her, but her laughter was making him laugh, too. Only Christoph looked as serious as Devon did. Sabine hustled everyone forward.
“That was a brilliant play by all involved,” Cordelia said as we hurried through the streets.
“That was a close call,” Jackson corrected, but there wasn’t any real warning in his tone, only an amused sort of exhilaration.
“Not really.” Cordelia skipped ahead of us, then turned to face Addie and me, walking backward. She grinned. “He was just worried we were corrupting your sweet fifteen-year-old mind. Gang initiation, maybe.”
“It’s not really your birthday, is it?” Sabine asked. Addie shook our head. “Good going, then. Nearly fooled me.”
“It’s my birthday,” Cordelia said in a surprisingly good imitation of our voice—only higher and breathier. Addie blushed, and Cordelia laughed. “You sounded like an angel, my darling. Nobody in a thousand years would ever suspect you of anything.”
The photography shop was marked by nothing more than a plain door and a wooden sign declaring Still Life in elegant, black script. A long display window stretched along the wall, but I only got a glimpse of picture frames and black-and-white photos before Cordelia moved to unlock the door.
A bell jingled as we entered. Photographs crowded the small shop’s limited wall space. Inside one silver frame, a little boy pressed his face against a set of slender, white stair railings. An enormous, broad-shouldered man with an equally enormous pumpkin-colored cat sat within the frame beside it.
Cordelia led us to a storage room at the back of the store, everyone crowding inside among the array of empty frames and dusty cardboard boxes. The ceiling here was surprisingly high. Even Jackson, tall as he was, needed a stool to get a good grip on the string hanging from a hatch door.
“The string used to be longer,” he explained. “It snapped about half a year back, so we have to use the stool.”
“Tie another string,” Devon said.
Jackson smiled as he pulled the trapdoor creakily open. “But the stool is more interesting. A longer string would also make the door more noticeable.” He stepped off the stool, still pulling on the door. A series of steps unfolded, groaning and creaking. “And this,” he said, yanking the steps so they clicked into place, “is a secret.”
Automatically, Addie took a step backward.
Once, when Addie and I were little and still lived in the city, our family was invited to a party thrown by one of Mom’s old friends. They’d moved to the suburbs, had a big house and a pool and a barbecue. It had been summer. Hot. The adults milled about outside, our parents busy as they mingled and looked after Lyle and Nathaniel, who’d been only two.
I don’t remember how many people were present. To seven-year-old me, it had seemed like a hundred or more. There were at least ten kids. That much I remember. We played hide-and-seek. A girl in a yellow dress was It.
I’d told Addie to follow the others into the house. Two boys had headed for the attic, one pausing halfway up the stairs to beckon us up with them. Addie had hesitated, but I’d said Go.
Because he’d beckoned. Because he’d picked us to go with him, and I’d been hopeful.
It had been sweltering inside the attic. A dead sort of heat, the kind that sucks all the air from a room. There had been an ornate, old-fashioned trunk. There had been more than one, probably. And I vaguely remembered boxes, too. But more than anything, I remembered the biggest trunk, because that boy, he’d said, No one will look in there.
So Addie and I crawled inside, curled up to fit in the darkness.
He’d lowered the heavy lid, his friend watching behind him.
He locked it so quietly we didn’t hear.
“Go on,” Jackson said, gesturing up the stairs. “You guys first. Guest courtesies and all.”
Having a panic attack here, in front of everyone, would be devastating.
<It’ll be fine.> I’d said as much back at Nornand, when we’d been forced to climb into a torturously small machine for testing. I’d been lying then. But an attic we could handle, especially if it had windows and wasn’t too cramped. We just had to relax.
Addie pressed our lips together and moved forward. The stairs—more ladder than stairs, really—shuddered and creaked with each step.
We emerged in that familiar attic warmth. The ceiling here was a dark, bare wood, sloped until it almost touched the equally bare wooden floors. Someone had pounded a series of heavy-duty nails all around the room, then tangled a string of fairy lights around them. The end of their cord lay near the top of the stairs, and Addie bent to plug it in.
The entire attic lit up with a soft glow. Two lumpy, faded couches slumped at angles to each other. The dark green one leaked yellow stuffing. At first I wondered how on earth anyone had managed to get them up here. Then I noticed the screws where the couch frames could be taken apart. A tall lamp stood in the corner, opposite a small window that looked out onto the street. We couldn’t see clearly through the curtain.
One by one, everyone climbed up to join us. Cordelia turned on the lamp, which brightened the attic further. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. There was only one room, but it was large enough to fit many more than our six bodies. The heat-heavy air was cloying, but bearable.
“So,” Sabine said once we’d all settled down. She sat cross-legged on the green couch, looking more dancerlike than ever in a pair of dark gray leggings and a