ATTACHMENT
by Julia (Wattpad username: afterlightt)
Mentor: Charlotte Huang, author of FOR THE RECORD, releasing Fall 2015 from Delacorte
***
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Before
It was a blisteringly cold December evening when Violet rushed to the forbidden rooftop. The rain stung like a warning on the tip of her tongue. She was afraid of many things, but the thought that she wouldn’t remember her best friend tomorrow was unbearable.
He stood at the opposite end of the roof by the railing, overlooking the city. This was their last night to break the rules together.
“We should do something no one has ever done before. To remind us. So we won’t forget each other,” she said as she approached him.
“But we will forget each other, no matter what we do,” he said. “That’s how they want it.”
“Give me your hand,” she said.
She uncapped a pen.
After
The first thing she saw when she woke up was a screen.
“Do not be alarmed,” it read. “This is standard procedure. For your safety, you have been relocated to CITY 2609 to begin YEAR TWELVE at SCHOOL 530910. To prevent dangerous attachments, your mind has been wiped of all names and faces from your past year of school. REPEAT: do not be alarmed . . .”
She sat up in the hospital-like bed, bewildered, looking at the other students around her. The room was white and plastic.
Suddenly, she understood.
#
She noticed the writing on her wrist that night when she took off her long-sleeved uniform.
The blue ink was smudged.
River?
Why would someone write that word on the back of her hand? If she couldn’t remember how the writing got there, that must have meant that someone she had forgotten wrote it.
She went to bed that night without trying to wash it off.
As she waited for sleep to steal her away from her bunk bed that night, she stared at the card in her hands, flipping it over and over in her fingers. The harsh red lines were visible even in the dim light of her dorm room.
Nine of Hearts. Red. Her new identity in the game.
After she’d woken up in the white room with the screen, a group of Reformers had taken Violet and the other students to another room, equally as white and blank. They had formed a line of students leading to a deck of cards on a table. From then, it was simple.
Pick a card. Any card.
It will hold your name, locked inside like a secret.
It was the one thing they let you keep, to remind you that there was more to lose.
#
Violet first saw him three days after Shuffle. Their assigned chore was washing dishes.
He handed her a fork, and she knew she was as good as dead. It was impossible for her to know, but she felt that he was the only person she’d ever seen who made her want to scream.
“What’s your name?” she asked under her breath as they stood drying utensils and throwing them into a bin.
“Three of Spades,” said the boy, keeping his eyes glued down at his hands.
“No. I mean your real name.”
The boy startled at her words. The fear in his eyes made her want to unwind herself until she was a pile of humiliated string on the floor.
It was frightening how badly she wanted to know this boy. She wanted to hear him laugh, to hear him say her name. Her real name. She wanted to know his hopes, dreams, and fears, his favorite food. And she had no idea why.
“I don’t think—” the boy started.
“I’m sorry,” Violet said, shaking her head. She was being stupid. It was forbidden to know a person’s real name. No wonder he thought she was out of her mind.
The boy twisted the towel in his hands. Violet took a deep breath. She wondered what he was thinking. She wanted to know what he thought about everything . . .
She was so frustrated with herself that her fingers tightened on the handle of the hot knife in her hands until the metal burned her skin.
Unwillingly, she winced. The boy, Three of Spades, turned toward her. “Did you burn yourself?” he asked stiffly, like he was required to, which he was, come to think of it.
“Yes,” answered Violet truthfully.
“Do you need—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You do know it’s illegal to interrupt, right? You’ve done it twice in a span of a minute.”
Violet was growing impatient. She must have been wrong about him. He was just another card in the deck.
“Yes, I know that. Are you going to report me, Three of Spades?” she said, irritable.
He shook his head vehemently before dropping the cluster of utensils into the bin in front of them. “I’m finished.” He stole a glance at Violet’s pile of wet spoons. “Have fun with that.”
And he left.
#
She didn’t see him again until the next night, when they were back in the washroom drying utensils together. Except tonight, the room wasn’t as quiet as it had been the night before. The students were abuzz with chatter concerning the party taking place later that night . . .
Violet couldn’t put her finger on it, but a voice in the back of her mind murmured that this happened every year. The first Friday after Shuffle, the students gathered in a secret place on the Outside when all the Reformers thought they were in bed.
“So,” she said as she handed Three of Spades another spoon to put away. “Are you going to the party tonight? We’re going to the Outside.”
“Of course not!” He snatched the spoon from her grasp.
“Why not?”
“Why would you? One day, you’re going to get caught, all of you.” He shook his head in dismay and his eyes acquired a faraway look that made Violet wonder what he remembered and what he didn’t.
She still couldn’t shake her desire to know more about him.
It was insane.
“But it would be worth it,” Violet protested. The boy didn’t even glance at her. “I bet you’d remember it forever.”
This got his attention.
He looked at Violet. His irises were faint blue, like the color of the liquid in the needle she had been injected with five days ago. Like the color of the ink on her wrist.
“We’re meeting in the Hearts’ Lobby at midnight.” Then, as an afterthought, Violet added, “Be there or be square.”
She wasn’t sure where she had learned the phrase, but that part of what made saying it so thrilling.
#
The roses decorating the lobby of the Hearts’ Dorm gave the air a sickly sweet scent. Four suits of Hearts students lived here, one for each year. Fifty-two students in all. School had been monotonous over the past week, every teacher repeating the same speech over and over again about rules.
Violet could recite them perfectly.
You should never, under any circumstances, rely on someone else to live.
Attachments are forbidden.
With a shiver, she recalled a memory. It resurfaced with such intensity that the lights above her burned too bright for her eyes.
She was in a large, echoing room. An auditorium. There were two figures on stage. Their faces were blurred. A boy and a girl.
Three Reformers were on stage, next to the boy and the girl. They were talking, but Violet couldn’t hear them. All she could remember was her heart beating rapidly, rattling her eardrums. The spectacle went on as the Reformers lectured. Something about attachments. Illegal closeness.
She would never forget what came next, no matter how many needles poked her, no matter how many Shuffles she endured. The boy and the girl were instructed to hold hands.
Then a Reformer appeared in front of them.
And brought down a sharp-edged ruler on their entwined fingers. Again and again. Until the stage under their feet was crimson with blood.
Just before the memory faded, the faces of the two students came into focus. For a fleeting moment, a pair of brown eyes stared back at her. Violet saw them every time she looked in a mirror. The boy next to her was all too familiar. A hard, cold expression. Blue eyes.
She’d stared into them not five hours before, when she dared him to show up tonight.
Violet snapped back to the present and her feet almost slipped out from under her. She pulled down the sleeve of her uniform, even though the ink was now hardly visible.
Had what she just remembered truly happened? Or was seeing her face some kind of nightmare created by the fear the Reformers had instilled in her over the years? And Three of Spades had been beside her. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
For now, she took comfort in the crowd of students around her. The Reformers were unaware that nearly the whole deck of Year Twelve students was gathered in the lobby, about to escape to an unknown location.
“I never got your name,” sounded a voice behind her. Violet spun to see the boy—Three of Spades—standing next to her with a ghost of a smile on his face.
She took a second too long to answer. The boy was giving her an odd look by the time she finally overcame her surprise. The memory flashed behind her eyelids when she blinked, but it was dimmer this time, not as intense as it had been when she remembered it.
Who were the two students on the stage? Now that she thought of it, she couldn’t quite see their faces. They were only a blur. Had she known them? She shivered.
She refocused her attention on the boy standing in front of her, asking for her name.
“Nine,” she said hesitantly. “I’m Nine of Hearts.”
Violet could have imagined it, but he appeared crestfallen at her answer.
What had he expected? Violet didn’t know what to think. Just yesterday, he scolded her for wanting to attend this forbidden gathering. But now here he was, with a smile on his face and a fire in his eyes.
“Your real name?” he teased.
She could startle him by answering his question. But if she answered, the intrigue would be gone. The game would be over, the cards dealt, the final score decided.
She decided to keep the game going. What was wrong with a little fun? A game of wits, a test of willpower. A challenge proposed through the intimacy in knowing one’s name.
So she answered swiftly. “Nice try.”
He smiled.
His teeth were white stars on a summer night.
The buzzer sounded, signaling the beginning of what was sure to be a long and trying game of cards.
#
They were a swift and silent parade through the night. Invisible to the untrained eye, like a murder of ravens flying through a thunderstorm.
Violet was in the middle of the pack, guided by the movements of the students around her. Where they were going, nobody knew. As long as they got over the fence.
By now, the memory of the two students on the stage enduring their punishment had faded from her mind.
They walked along a river until they reached a towering bridge that none of them could ever even fathom crossing, and next to it, a fence. It was a pathetic fence, Violet thought as she followed the leader of the group, climbing up and over it. If the Reformers didn’t want them to leave the confines of the city, they obviously relied more heavily on the threatened punishments than the physical boundaries.
Throughout the journey, she felt as if she was forgetting something. Something about a ruler and pain and someone else . . . She couldn’t remember what it was.
She heard Three of Spades inhale sharply next to her. But he was still on the other side of the fence. She clung to a metal rung, pressing her nose against it. She wanted to be close to this boy, and the fence between them allowed her closeness without breaking any rules.
“Is it your first time sneaking out?” she whispered to him.
“I’m pretty sure it is,” he said. “Would I remember if I had?”
“I remember doing this before . . . just not who was with me.”
“Then I’ve never done this before,” he said as he placed his right foot in a gap between the bars.
Violet liked his bravery.
She pressed a thumb to the inside of her wrist.
#
They explored the Outside for the better part of an hour.
Violet loved it. No electricity. No white, plastic rooms. Instead, there were boarded-up buildings. Graffiti on the walls. Caved-in roofs and cracked sidewalks. The Outside was unpredictable, but that was what made it so wonderful.
It made her wonder what the Reformers were hiding.
The unanimously chosen upon place was unlike anything Violet had ever seen. Where a parking lot might have normally been in front of the building, instead was a towering, immense structure that reminded her of the playgrounds she used to play on when she was little before the Reformers banned them. Except this was enormous. This structure was made of twisted wires, tubes of metal and steps upon steps. If Violet squinted, she could see the outline of an old airplane held up by a netted metal tube against the moon.
“Let’s go up there,” Violet said to Three of Spades. She could tell that he was not afraid. For the first time since she met him, Violet thought he was happy.
She didn’t know why—or even that it was possible—that your heart could beat so fast just from looking at someone. She didn’t understand, but she loved it.
When she looked at Three of Spades, she wanted to know his name.
He took her hand cautiously, as if he expected her to pull away, but she didn’t. Together, they climbed the steps to the first structure. Together, they helped each other climb up walls and complicated wires.
When they were almost to the airplane, they had to climb through a spiral tube of metal bars. They were halfway across when Violet stopped crawling.
“We’re on top of the world,” she whispered to him.
#
Violet and Three of Spades finally reached the airplane. He climbed in first, grabbing her hand to pull her up. She was grateful for an excuse to touch him again. They explored the insides of the plane while the party raged below. Someone had turned on music.
“Come here,” she said from the front of the plane. There, they looked over the city, past the river to where another city began. Moonlight danced on the water and illuminated the night. Illuminated the skin on Three of Spade’s hands to a golden shade of brown.
A flash of something on his wrist caught Violet’s eye.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What?”
“On your—” She reached down, tugging his arm by the sleeve so that his wrist was in the light. She choked on thin air.
Violet was written on his skin in her own neat script. Her heartbeat gained speed as she recalled the name written on her own wrist. How was this possible?
Wordlessly, she pulled back her own sleeve to reveal the writing under it. “Your real name?” The boy’s eyes widened to the size of moons again, but this time there was fire in them too. And with fire always came curiosity. This boy was not just another card in the deck. He was like her. He wanted to know everything about her.
“I’m Violet,” she said in a shaking voice. She was shaking.
“I’m River,” he whispered.
She blinked, wracking her memory for anything, anything that could explain this. Why had they written their names on each other’s wrists? Had they known each other before they were Shuffled?
An image flashed through her mind. Of a rooftop, a single thought of rebellion. A pen.
And suddenly, she understood.
#
They stared at each other for a long time.
Violet didn’t know what to do, but her hands seemed to work on their own accord when they reached out to cup his face. Her lip was quivering.
She didn’t know who leaned first, but soon their faces were only inches apart. Something whispered to Violet that they had done this before. Something told her to touch her lips to his.
She didn’t understand why this had been kept from her until now. Why were the Reformers so determined to ignore all of the emotions that Violet was feeling right now, next to this boy? Because this was violent and dangerous and so . . . familiar.
Down below, the happy shouting turned into screaming. Violet and River broke apart and looked down between the bars of the floor. She didn’t know what the sounds were coming from, but she sensed that she had heard them before . . . No, she had felt them before.
She saw lights.
The students hadn’t brought lights with them.
Then the loudest sound she had ever heard exploded through the night, rattling the ground and drowning all of the happiness Violet had been feeling just seconds before. River wrapped his arms around her. She could feel his heart racing against her cheek.
Another deafening sound came, then another. Violet shivered in fear, but she wanted to stay silent, stay hidden.
“We’ll be all right,” River murmured against her hair. In that second, she remembered another night, another time, when she held his hands in her own.
Bang.
River. Smiling at her from the other side of the classroom. Her heart raced when she looked at him, and she now remembered why.
Bang.
River. Laughing, throwing his head back.
Bang.
River. Kissing her.
Bang.
Herself. Uncapping a pen.
Bang.
#
Suddenly, the thin air was silent.
And they knew they were alone.
The End
Thank you for reading this COMMON ROOM anthology short story. If you liked it, consider showing your support by giving it a vote, leaving a comment, and checking out the writer's other works and the mentor's upcoming 2015 debut YA novel. Much thanks on behalf of @LoriGoldstein and the Freshman Fifteens!