Chương 101: The Notebook

By Tuesday afternoon the story had been around the school twice and come back changed. What Ottley had actually heard was close enough. What came back had Abe knowing about the water a week before it came. By lunch a boy in the year below asked him, in front of the line, whether it was true he had told the guards and the guards had ignored him, and he said no, and the boy looked disappointed.

Croft caught him at the end of the day and walked him out to the yard gate, and he was serious the whole way, which took Abe a few steps to notice.

"Don't answer any of them. You answer one and then you're in it." He shifted his bag.

"And it's in the lower years now. I heard two of them doing it at the bike racks." Abe stopped walking.

"Which years."

"All of them, Dolan, that's what I'm telling you." Croft looked at him, and then worked out what he was actually asking, and his face changed.

"Ah. Yes. Hers as well." June's year had heard it by lunch, then. She had gone home at half past three like everyone else, except home was a kitchen forty feet from where Abe was standing.

"Right," said Abe.

"Don't-" Croft started, and gave up on whatever it was, and went off up the hill toward a house with a top floor in it. Abe went back across the yard toward the kitchens, because that was where he lived now. June had the back of the school kitchens to herself when he came in that evening, and she had moved the table. The table was the first thing he noticed.

It had stood against the shelves at the back, in among the flour sacks, since the day they arrived, and now it was out in the middle of the floor with the light over it and two chairs pulled up. Peg was on a late shift up at the hall. The little stove was off. Under the middle cot, the core the shed had given him was still wrapped in its canvas where he had pushed it on Sunday. The notebook was open in the middle of the table, and there was a second one beside it that Abe had never seen.

"Sit down," said June.

"June-""Please sit down. I've been getting this ready for two weeks and if you talk first I'll lose it." He sat down.

"Peg's out on the serving counter until nine," she said.

"They're still feeding the ones with no houses to go back to and she signed up for the late half of it. I looked at the sheet on Friday. That's why it's tonight and not any of the other nights." Forty feet away, through the swinging door, the night staff were stacking trays for the morning.

"You planned this."

"Obviously I planned it." She lined the two notebooks up against the edge of the table.

"One more thing and then I'll start. I know what they're saying at school. Ellis Naylor's sister told me at lunch and then two more people told me on the way out, so I've had it four times today and I don't want it in this room."

"June-""I'm not asking you about any of that. I don't care what Piers Danforth thinks and I'm not doing his homework for him." She put her hand flat on the second notebook.

"This is mine. I started it the same week as the other one and I never told you. Tonight was happening anyway." She turned the first notebook around so it faced him, which she had done once before, in October, and it had gone badly for him then too.

"This is the one you know about," she said.

"Dates down the left. One line each. I started it on the fifth of December because you kept asking me the same things and not knowing you'd already asked." She put one finger on the page.

"That's the eleventh of December. That's the fourth of January. That's the ninth of February, which is the last one before the bells."

"I know what it is."

"You don't, actually." She said it without any heat.

"Because there's another one." She opened the other notebook. It was the same dates. It was the same small even handwriting. What was next to each one was not what happened to June. 11 Dec. Cut on his right thumb, first joint. Deep one. 20 Dec. Thumb healed. Nine days. Peg's took three weeks. 4 Jan. Doesn't hold his fork the way he used to. Started sometime around the New Year. 22 Jan. Hair. He got it cut on the ninth. Abe went down the page and stopped reading and started again from the top.

"That's two months," said June.

"There's four months of it in the back if you want it, but two is enough."

"June."

"I want you to look at the twenty-second of January." She reached across and put her finger on it.

"You had your hair cut on the ninth. Thirteen days. I measured it against the door frame on the twenty-second because I measure everything, and it was more than mine had done since October." Abe looked at his own hands lying on the table, and then at the entry, and then back at his hands.

"Now I'm going to do the other thing," said June, "and you're going to hate it." She turned to a page near the back and put her hand flat over the top half of it. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"What did you say to me about the ferry."

"What ferry?"

"That's the first one. Keep going." She did not move her hand.

"Sixteenth of December. In the kitchen, doing the plates. You told me a thing about the ferry and I wrote it down because it was funny." Abe went and looked for it, and what he found was a December, a sink and a stack of plates, with no ferry anywhere in it.

"I don't remember," he said.

"Second one. What did you call Mrs. Ellery's cart."

"The-" And he had it. He had the shape of the word and the sound of the end of it and the fact that it had made June laugh so hard on a stairwell that she had to sit down on the step. The word itself was not there.

"I know this one," he said.

"You don't, though."

"Third one, and this is the one I'd have bet the house on you having." She had to stop and start that sentence again.

"New Year's Eve, about half past eleven at night. You said one sentence to me on the front step and I have thought about it every week since and I would like you to say it back to me." Abe sat with his hands on the table and could not find New Year's Eve. He could find the front step. He could find the cold.

Behind those two things were all the nights he had spent since, in stopped rooms and stopped streets and on a stopped road forty miles from here, and the sentence was somewhere down under all of that, and he could not get to it.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't." It came out of her far too loud for a room that size, and it startled both of them, and she put her hand over her mouth for a second like she had broken something.

"Sorry," she said, through it.

"Not you. Me. Don't say sorry to me, that's the-" She stopped and pressed the heels of both hands hard into her eyes and held them there, and Abe sat still and let her. He wanted to put a hand on her arm and he did not, because he was the reason she was crying, and it would have been him asking her to say it was all right.

"I wanted to be wrong," she said, to the table.

"I've had it all written down for two weeks and I kept it in the bag and I did not want to be right about any of it. I want that written down somewhere."

"June-""Shut up. I'm doing this." She took her hand off the page.

"That's eleven. Eleven things you said to me, October to February, gone, and I picked the three easiest ones on purpose. You don't forget things. You've never forgotten anything in your life. You used to do Dad's book at me in the bath, page numbers and all, and you were seven."

"People forget things."

"People forget last Tuesday." Her voice went up again and she brought it down.

"You've lost Christmas." She turned back to the first page of the second notebook.

"This one I put in later, out of my own head, because it's where it all starts. Eighth of October. You stood in that doorway and told me eleven minutes on the kitchen clock was hours in there. I wrote the word down. Hours." She looked up.

"So I've been doing hours ever since. Four hours a night, five, call it six, every night since October, and that's a lot, and I made myself be all right about it."

"June-""It isn't hours." She put her hand flat on the second notebook.

"Six hours a night doesn't do the thumb. It doesn't do the hair, I checked the hair against mine and mine's the same as it's always been. And it really doesn't do eleven things I said to you going straight out of your head. Hours would be, I don't know, you being tired all the time and a bit quicker at stuff. That's what I was expecting. This isn't that. This is miles off that." Then she went at the rest of it fast, faster than she had meant to, straight down the page in the order she had written it.

"Cuts. Cuts are the big one. Cuts and the calluses, and those came up in two weeks and they never went again. The night in November you ate four plates and couldn't tell me what you'd been doing all day." She turned the page without looking up.

"And you stopped saying I don't know how. About anything. That one took me until January, because I was listening for the wrong thing."

"And then the week the water came," she said. She turned a page.

"Thursday you carried me up a hill. Friday you ran messages across four hundred streets and came back and did it again. Saturday you fought a thing the size of a building in front of the whole city and you drowned and you got up. Sunday you cleared houses all night. Nobody does that. I don't mean nobody your age. I mean I watched them carry grown men off that wall on the Saturday who did about a fifth of what you did."

"They were tired," said Abe.

"I'm-""You're built for it, I know, Peg's said that nine times. She said it twice on Sunday." June put her pen down flat on the page.

"Strong doesn't shut a cut in nine days though. Peg's took three weeks and there's nothing wrong with Peg. And strong definitely doesn't take Christmas off you. So it's two things and they're not the same thing, and I've been stuck on that since October." The stove ticked as it cooled.

"So here's what I think," she said.

"You go somewhere. You've been going since your birthday. You come back the same afternoon, on the same day, and your hands are different. Which can't happen. I've written it down eleven times now and it still can't happen." Abe kept his eyes on the notebook in front of him and read the same line four times.

"I've never asked you for the rest of it," said June.

"Not once since October, because you looked like you'd been sick when you told me. So I did it the other way and worked it out myself."

"June."

"How much," she said. Abe opened his mouth to answer her, and then went looking for the answer, and it was not there. The only time he had ever counted was one night back in October. There had been a hundred chances since then and he had walked past every one of them. He tried to do it now at the table with his sister watching him do it, and he lost it before he got anywhere near Christmas. June waited him out. Then she wrote one word in the margin of the second notebook and turned it around so he could see it.

It said won't. Then she put the pen down.

"Right," she said.

"Last bit. You can stop me." He let her.

"You've been getting years. Actual years, not hours." Her hands were shaking and she let them.

"And it's not free, is it, it comes off you, I can see it on your hands and I can tell every time you go looking for something and it isn't there. You're older than eighteen. You've been getting older since October and it hasn't stopped and I don't think it's going to." She let that sit for a second.

"Tell me I've got it wrong and I'll drop it. Right now, tonight. You've never lied to me and I'd believe you." Abe thought about the third of October, four minutes after midnight, sitting on the end of his bed telling her the Weave had given him a training one.

"You're not wrong," he said. June stayed where she was and went very white. She put both hands flat on the table and left them there. He had braced for crying, and he had braced for her telling him it was all right, and what he got instead was his sister sitting very still and working something out.

"How much," she said again.

"I don't know." She looked up.

"I'm not being clever with you," said Abe.

"I've never added it up. It never came up."

"Then don't do the number." Her voice had gone careful.

"Give me one true thing. Any one. I'll take a small one." Abe looked at the table.

"Christmas," he said.

"For you that was nine weeks ago."

"Ten," said June.

"Ten." He kept his eyes on the table.

"For me it was ages ago. It's further back than last summer is for you." June sat with that. She had one more question after that one. She got as far as opening her mouth and then closed it again, and Abe found that he wanted her to ask it.

"I'm keeping these," she said, later, when the plates were done and the second notebook was shut and it was nearly nine.

"All right."

"And I'm not telling you what I do with them." She stacked the two of them neatly on the table.

"You've had four months of not telling me things. I'm having some." Abe had been waiting all evening for her to say it was all right. She capped her pen and put it in her pocket instead, and he watched her decide, and she did not say it.

"That's fair," he said.

"I know it's fair." The calendar hung on its nail by the door with March showing, and neither of them looked at it, and the water in the pipes went on knocking somewhere under the floor of a school that was not their house. June stood up and pushed her chair in and picked her notebooks up off the table, one in each hand. Then she stopped at the end of the table.

"You don't have to tell me tonight," she said.

"But I'm going to ask you the question, and then you can take as long as you want." Abe waited.

"How old are you?"