Chapter 24 At the Rec Center
BIRDIE was refilling the industrial coffee urn in the rec center kitchen on a Thursday night, resenting it in the ordinary way you resent volunteering, when the smell walked in the room ahead of the trouble.
The Halford Community Rec Center is a converted elementary school held together by bake sales and the sheer stubbornness of about eleven women over sixty, and on Thursday nights it runs the after-school program late for the working parents, which means the gym full of kids, which means Theo, and about fifteen other kids between eight and thirteen, playing a shrieking form of dodgeball that has no rules I’ve ever been able to identify.
Ren was on shift. Marcy was supposed to be helping me and was instead in the parking lot arguing with her fiancé on the phone.
I was alone in the kitchen with a coffee urn and, it turned out, a problem.
I’d almost skipped the shift. That’s the thing that keeps me up.
Marcy had offered to cover it so I could rest, because I’d looked “peaky” all week, which is Marcy for “you look like you haven’t slept, honey,” which was accurate, because I hadn’t, because I’d been patrolling.
And I’d almost said yes. I’d almost gone home and lain in the dark being useless on purpose, and if I had, there’d have been no one in that building who could read a smell, and I make myself sit with that some nights the way you press on a bruise to check it’s still there.
I want to tell this part carefully, because I’ve had to tell it carefully in my own head a hundred times since, deciding what I actually did versus what it felt like.
The smell was faint, and it came from the direction of the old boiler room off the back hall, the one the kids aren’t supposed to go in and therefore all know how to get into, and it was not the honest smell of an old building.
It had the wrong high note. It had the note from Larch and Delaney and the note from the box behind Ren’s, and my whole body went cold and clean and quiet before I had finished the thought, and the flutter did not just fall off me, it was never in the room.
There wasn’t time for a costume. There was a hallway, and a smell, and forty feet away a gym full of children.
Here is what I will say about what happened, and no more, because there are things I will not write down even now and method is one of them.
I went and I looked. And it was real. It was the realest thing I’d found yet, a genuine device, cruder than the box but bigger and meaner and set where a lot of small bodies were, and for one second the old failure came up my throat like river water, Ellis, the secondary, the captain in a hurry, the leg, and then the second passed the way it always used to pass, because there was a job in front of me and the job does not care about the water in your throat.
The voice in my head went to the checklist. Time.
Distance. People first, always people first, the thing before the thing.
I got the kids out. I did it without a single one of them knowing anything had happened, which is a skill of its own, and if I ever tell you it was a fire drill I invented on the spot with a lot of “who wants a snack outside” in a bright fake voice, that is because it was, and Theo, my Theo, took one look at my face, the real one, the one I never let him see, and did not argue and did not ask and got the little ones moving with me like he’d been trained, because God help me he had.
He walked, he didn’t run. He counted heads at the door.
He looked back at me once, and I will spend a while forgetting that look.
Then I sent them across the lot to the fence with a college-kid volunteer named Ashley who thought we were having a very spontaneous stargazing event, and I gave Ashley the count and told her twice, calm and bright, do not let anyone back inside for any reason, not a phone, not a jacket, nothing is worth coming back for, keep counting them, and Ashley, bless her, heard the thing under the bright voice and nodded like it was the most important job she’d ever been given, which it was.
And then I went back inside alone, and I did what I know how to do, quiet, in order, hands steady, terrified the entire time, which is the only way I’ve ever done any of it.
Time and distance and people first, the thing before the thing, and the flat voice running the list, and my own heart going somewhere far off where I could hear it but didn’t have to listen.
There’s a particular loneliness to it that I’d forgotten, or made myself forget.
You are the only person in the building who understands what’s in the building with you.
Everyone else gets to be somewhere else. You get to be there.