Margaret Haddix: Among the Brave

Great, Trey thought. I do one brave thing in my entire life, and now it’s like, ‘Got anything dangerous to do? Send Trey. He can handle it.’ Doesn’t anyone remember that Cowardice is my middle name?

Actually, only two other people in the entire world had ever known Trey’s real name, and one of them was dead. But Trey didn’t have time to think about that He had a crisis on his hands. He’d just seen two people killed, and others in danger. Maybe he’d been in danger too. Maybe he still was. He and his friends had left the scene of all that death and destruction and total confusion, jumped into a car with an absolute stranger, and rushed off in search of help. They’d driven all night, and now the car had stopped in front of a strange house in a strange place Trey had never been before.

And Trey’s friends actually expected him to take control of the situation.

“What are you waiting for?” his friend Nina asked. “Just go knock on the door.

Why don’t you?” Trey asked, which was as good as admitting that he wasn’t as brave as a girl. No courage, no pride. Translate that into Latin and it’d be a good personal motto for him. Nulla fortitudo nulla superbia, maybe? Trey allowed himself a moment to drift into nostalgia for the days when his biggest challenges had been figuring out how to translate Latin phrases.

“Because,” Nina said. “You know. Mr. Talbot and I — well, let’s just say I’ve got a lot of bad memories.

“Oh,” Trey said. And, if he could manage to turn down his fear a notch or two, he did understand. Mr. Talbot, the man they had come to see, had once put Nina through an extreme test of her loyalties. It had been necessary, everyone agreed — even Nina said so. But it hadn’t been pleasant. Mr. Talbot had kept her in prison; he’d threatened her with death.

Trey was glad he’d never been put through a test like that He knew: He’d fail.

Trey glanced up again at the hulking monstrosity of a house where Mr. Talbot lived. He wasn’t dangerous, Trey reminded himself. Mr. Talbot was going to be their salvation. Trey and Nina and a few of their other friends had come to Mr. Talbot’s so they could dump all their bad news and confusion on him. So he would handle everything, and they wouldn’t have to.

Trey peered toward the front of the car, where his friends Joel and John sat with the driver. Or, technically, the “chauffeur,” a word derived from the French. Only the original French word — chauffer? — didn’t mean “to drive.” It meant “to warm” or “to heat” or something like that, because chauffeurs used to drive steam automobiles.

Not that it mattered. Why was he wasting time thinking about foreign verbs? Knowing French wasn’t going to help They in the least right now. It couldn’t tell him, for example, whether he could trust the driver. Everything would be so easy if he could know, just from one word, whether he could send the driver to knock on Mr. Talbot’s door while Trey safely cowered in the car.

Or how about Joel or John? Granted, they were younger than Trey, and maybe even bigger cowards. They’d never done anything brave. Still—

“Trey?” Nina said. “Go!”

She reached around him and jerked open the door. Then she gave him a little shove on the back, so suddenly that he was surprised to find himself outside the car, standing on his own two feet.

Nina shut the door behind him.

Trey took a deep breath. He started to clench his fists out of habit and fear — a habit of fear, a fear-filled habit— and only stopped when pain reminded him that he was still clutching the sheaf of papers he’d taken from a dead man’s desk. He glanced down and saw a thin line of fresh blood, stark and frightening on the bright white paper.

Trey’s next breath was sharp and panicked. Had someone shot him? Was he in even greater danger than he’d imagined? His ears buzzed, and he thought he might pass out from terror. But nothing else happened, and after a few moments his mind cleared a little.

He looked at the blood again. It was barely more than a single drop.

Okay, Trey steadied himself. You just had a panic attack over a paper cut. Let’s not be telling anybody about that, all right?

A paper cut indoors would have been no big deal. But outdoors — outdoors, the need to breathe was enough to panic him.

He forced himself to breathe anyway. And, by sheer dint of will, Trey made himself take a single step forward. And then another. And another.

Mr. Talbot had a long, long walkway between the street and his house, and the chauffeur had inconveniently parked off to the side, under a clump of trees that practically hid the car from the house. They considered turning around, getting back into the car, and telling the chauffeur to pull up closer — say, onto the Talbots’ front porch. But that would mean retracing his steps, and Trey felt like he’d already come so far.

Maybe even all of three feet.

With part of his mind, Trey knew he was being foolish — a total baby, a chicken, a fear-addled idiot.

It’s not my fault, Trey defended himself. It’s all… conditioning. I can’t help the way I was raised. And that was the understatement of the year. For most of his thirteen years, Trey hadn’t had control over any aspect of his life.

He was an illegal third child — the entire Government thought he had no right to exist. So he’d had to hide, from birth until age twelve, in a single room. And then, when he was almost thirteen, when his father died…

You don’t have time to think about that now, Trey told himself sternly. Walk.

He took a few more steps forward, propelled now by a burning anger that he’d never managed to escape. His mind slipped back to a multiple-choice test question he’d been asking himself for more than a year: Whom do you hate? A) Him; B) Her; C) Yourself? It never worked to add extra choices: (D) All of the above; E) A and B; F) A and C; or C) B and C? Because then the question just became, Whom do you hate the most?

Stop it! Trey commanded himself. Just pretend you’re Lee.

Trey’s friend Lee had been an illegal third child like Trey, but Lee had grown up out in the country, on an isolated farm, so he’d been able to spend plenty of time outdoors. He’d almost, They thought, grown up normal. As much as Trey feared and hated being outdoors, Lee craved it.

“How can you stand it?” Trey had asked Lee once. “Why aren’t you terrified? Don’t you ever think about the danger?”

“I guess not,” Lee had said, shrugging. “When I’m outdoors I look at the sky and the grass and the trees, and I guess that’s all I think about”.

Trey looked at the sky and the grass and the trees around him, and all he could think was, Lee should be here, walking up to Mr. Talbot’s door, instead of me. Lee had been in the car with Trey and Nina and Joel and John until just about ten minutes earlier. But Lee had had the chauffeur drop him and another boy, Smits, off at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere because, Lee had said, “I have to get Smits to safety.”

Trey suspected that Lee was taking Smits home, to Lee’s parents’ house, but Trey was trying very hard not to think that It was too dangerous. Even thinking about it was dangerous.

And thinking about it made Trey jealous, because Lee still had a home he could go to, and parents who loved him, and Trey didn’t.

But Lee would be dead right now if it weren’t for me, They thought with a strange emotion he barely recognized well enough to name. Pride. He felt proud. And, cowardly Latin motto or no, he had a right to that pride.