All We Have Left (23 page)

“Do you want me to carry your purse for you?” he asks.

The exhausted woman gratefully gives him her purse. He slings it over his shoulder, and she continues down the stairs, going faster now.

I pull my shirt back over my nose, because the fumes are getting to me.

A few flights down, the woman begins to slow again. Travis had just checked a stairwell door—locked—and when he turns around, the woman sinks down so she is sitting on the stairs. Both Travis and I crowd around her as people begin moving by us. I see for the first time that she’s young, a lot younger than I thought. Her dark hair is pulled back into a messy braid and she has soft brown eyes and freckles on her nose. Even wrenched in pain, with mascara racooning her eyes, her face is pretty and wholesome.

“I have a heart condition. I’ve had it since I was a kid,” she gasps. “Crazy, huh? A twenty-two-year-old with a bad heart. It’s like some sort of cosmic joke. I’m not supposed to exert myself too much. I’m not sure—I’m not sure I can keep going.”

“Yes, you can,” Travis says. He grabs one of her arms and looks at me. I nod, and grab her other arm. We start back down the stairs, and she leans heavily on us.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, her teeth clenched, her wide eyes streaming with tears. “Just go on, leave me.”

We don’t though. Lia wouldn’t leave her, and I won’t either.

I walk home from Emi’s house smiling, because it feels so good to be back in with my friends. Emi is going to keep working on the message and save it to a flash drive for me. The biggest surprise is the girl. Alia. Who was she?

I turn onto Main Street and hear laughter. I look up to see Nick, Dave, and Hailey coming toward me.

My stomach plunges into the vicinity of my knees, and I force myself to breathe. I knew Nick must be out of juvenile detention—he only got ten days—but this is the first time I’ve seen him since he got out.

He’s got his hair shaved close to his scalp, and it’s dyed white blond. Another tattoo snakes up around his neck, and he looks different, harder, more dangerous. I wanted to believe those good moments between us weren’t just my
imagination. I’ve spent months trying to forget what he said to me the first time he saw me in the halls after we’d all been arrested—
You were just like the rest of them. I wanted to see how far a good girl would go.

“There’s our favorite bitch-squealer,” Hailey says in a sickly sweet voice as they get closer to me.

Dave’s face is red with anger, his fists clenched at his side.

Nick just stares at me with eyes glittering with hate.

How can someone go from caring about you to hating you, like flipping a page in a book? Or had he ever really cared about me at all?

I try to go past them, but Hailey steps in front of me. “You stupid, stupid bitch,” she hisses. “Don’t think we forgot about you.”

Instinctively I glance at Nick, to see whether he’s going to stand up for me, but he has that twisted smile on his face like when he talked about getting even with his brother.

Suddenly Dave is in my face. “You’re a worthless piece of human garbage. I wish you would just
die.
” His spit flies into my face.

“Nick’s dad kicked him out,” Hailey says. “Are you proud of yourself?”

I step back from them, and I want to say, “We did it to ourselves! We knew it was wrong, and we did it anyway. Why are you blaming me?”

But I don’t say anything.

Nick takes a step toward me, and then he has hold of my
arm. “You’re just like us,” he says in a hard voice, right in my face. “Nobody cares about you; you’re nothing, just like us. If you want to be someone, you have to
make
them notice you. Look at you. You’ve become like the rest of them, a stupid sheep that just wants to follow the herd.”

I know he’s wrong, know it bone deep.

“No,” I say, the word stuttering like an engine trying to get started. “
No
,” I say again, and it roars to life. “What we did was
wrong.
It was wrong to do the tagging, and it was wrong to write what I did on the side of the Peace Center. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway. So did you.”

But why did we do it? I still don’t know for sure, but I think I have an idea. Hate is just fear. Fear that we are powerless, ugly, small,
nothing
, so we hate people to make us feel better about ourselves, so we don’t have to be so scared all the time.

“We should have stopped one another,” I say quietly.

I am trembling, and suddenly Nick is shaking me. My head whips back and forth as I stare into his eyes and see the hate and rage in them.

“Let her go,” a cold voice says from behind me.

Nick’s face twists into a sneer.

I yank my arm away from Nick and back away from him. Adam gives me a quick glance, and then looks back at Nick, Dave, and Hailey.

“Stay the hell away from her,” Adam says to Nick, stepping forward so he’s almost chest to chest with him.

Nick stares at Adam, and you can tell he’s thinking about
taking a swing at him, but we’ve already attracted a small crowd, and he backs away with that creepy smile. I realize suddenly that Nick is a coward. I wanted so badly to see something better in him, but my wishful thinking was never going to make him a different person. He gave me something that felt so big and important at the time, but in the end it was all a fun-house mirror that reflected back the things I hated the most about myself. He pulls the strings of people’s emotions from behind the scenes, but he’ll never stand up for anything, for
anybody
, ever.

“You better watch your back,” Dave says to Adam. “We know where you live. You
and
your sister.”

“I’m petrified.” Adam sounds bored. “Does that make you feel better?”

Dave is so angry that he’s shaking, but the three of them walk away, real slow, as if they haven’t just been chased away.

“Are you okay?” Adam’s voice is expressionless, but there is a flash of something hot and angry in his eyes.

I nod.

“Come on. I better walk you home,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say in a small voice. Now that the confrontation is over, I’m trembling like crazy. But there’s a small glow of … something. Pride? Because for once I said what I needed to say.

If only I could do the same thing with my dad.

“Would you have fought all three of them?” I ask. “They could have hurt you.”

“With
both
hands tied behind my back,” Adam says. “You don’t look this good and not have to fight every once in a while.”

He says it deadpan, and I sneak a look at his face, but he doesn’t smile. I think that Adam probably
does
know how to fight, not because he’s handsome, but because there are so many people like Nick, Dave, and Hailey in the world.

He walks me all the way to the shop, and waits as I go inside.

I turn to look at him, leaning against the rail at the bottom of the steps, his dark hair blowing across his face. He stares at me for a long moment and then walks away without speaking.

That evening, I spend hours combing the Internet. I find a list of names of people who died in the towers, and even though they are in alphabetical order by last name, I don’t know Alia’s last name, or even how to spell her first name, really. I read each name, almost three thousand of them, one by one.

It takes a long time.

When I get to the
M
’s, I read slower and slower, my stomach clenching with dread. When I finally see Travis’s name, I feel dizzy. It’s not like I didn’t know he died that day, but somehow seeing his name listed with all those other people makes it feel too real.

When I get to the end, I sit back in my chair.

Her name is not on the list.

Whoever Alia was, she didn’t die in the towers.

Travis and I help the woman through a stairwell door into a corridor. The lights are working on this floor, and everything looks almost normal, though the alarms are still blaring nonstop overhead. I see a sign for a bathroom and rush toward it. It feels stupid to be thinking about something as ordinary as going to the bathroom right now, but people still have to pee, still have to cry, still have to be human, no matter what else is happening.

As I reach the door, I remember that in my father’s office, at least, you need a key to get into the restroom, but the door frame is twisted and the bathroom door is open an inch. When I’m done, the toilet won’t flush and the sink won’t turn on when I try to wash my hands.

“Come on!” I cry, because I’m so, so thirsty.

When I come out, the dark-haired woman is sitting in a rolling office chair in the middle of the hall. Her purse is in her lap.

“Thank you,” she says wearily. “Thank you for helping me. My name’s Julia.”

“I’m Alia,” I say.

She nods, and then pauses a moment to put her hand to her chest. Then she continues. “I got separated from my coworkers in the stairwell. We were all holding hands to stay together, but somehow when I looked up, I didn’t see anybody I knew. I appreciate your helping me, but you need to go now. I’ll rest here and keep going in a bit.”

I shake my head,
no, we’re not leaving you,
but I
want
to leave her. I want to run down the stairs as fast as I can, pushing people out of the way if I have to. I want to get out of this building.

I want it so bad, I start walking in circles between the stairwell door and her, just pacing. This feels like life-and-death. Do I really have the time to think about anybody but myself? If staying means I die, do I really want to stay with some woman I only met five minutes ago?

I need to get out.

“Where did Travis go?” I say, suddenly realizing I haven’t seen him since I came out of the bathroom.

Julia shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says, her voice coming out in gasps. “He was just here …”

Did he leave? Abandon us? I was just thinking about it,
and now he’s gone,
and maybe Travis was thinking the same thing I was.

While I’ve only known Julia for five minutes, I’ve barely known Travis much longer. Why should he stay with us?

But the thought of him leaving me opens up a yawning gulf of fear so big I almost fall into it.

“I’m going to go see if I can find him,” I announce.

“Be careful,” Julia murmurs, her eyes closed.

I hear voices shouting nearby and run down the hallway. Around a corner I see several men standing in front of a bank of elevators.

The elevators look like something exploded inside. The thick green marble walls are buckled and black, and the elevator doors are bulging outward. And inside I can hear people calling for help.

“Something’s jamming it shut up top,” one of the men says, peering up at the elevator door. “We gotta find something to pry it open.”

“Let me go see what I can find,” a younger guy says and takes off down the hall.

“Just hold on!” the third man, in a royal blue shirt, cups his hands and yells into the elevator doors.

When he steps back to exchange a worried look with the other man, I hear the desperate calls and see the fingers.