Kathleen Hale - No One Else Can Have You

I’m pretty sure I see a shadow pass on the other side of the door, but it might just be my eyes playing tricks.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, they do lights out in, like, ten minutes,” she says. “If you’re not in your bed by then, they’ll sound the alarm.”

There’re definitely footsteps in the hall. I guess Barb and Felicity are making their rounds? “Thanks, Mildred, see you at twelve,” I whisper quickly.

“I’ll leave if you aren’t there,” she warns.

“So how was—by George, you’re covered in dirt!” Albus says when she sees me. She’s brushing off my shoulders with her tiny hands. I look down at my pajamas and see my knees and shins and socked feet are all gray from crawling in the vents. “You really need to work on your incognito, you know that? Hey, you didn’t happen to grab my file while you were in there, did you?” She snatches the backpack from my grasp and slides it underneath her bed, then starts stacking up the crayon maps.

I shake my head. “I had to run back. The nurses’ station was empty when I passed it, thank God. I need to leave tonight, Sir Albus. I left it a mess in there. The minute they go in they’ll know it was me, based on what’s missing. . . . I got some information. I need to be outside by twelve.”

“Changing plans on me, eh?” Albus scowls at me. “Who exactly are you working for, Private?” My rank keeps dropping. Suddenly her ears perk up. “Hurry, get under your covers!” she says, scrambling under hers. “They’re incoming!”

I dive into my bed just as Barb knocks open the door with her hip. She and Felicity enter the room, holding trays of milk and cookies. My stomach yanks from side to side in jubilee. “Thank you,” I blurt, wiggling my fingers at them. I’ve got a niggling suspicion about drugs in the food, but these cookies look straight out of the box and I’m starving. Except for that one pill, I haven’t eaten all day. I pound the milk in one go and shove the cookie in my mouth. Albus eyes me, looking disappointed. As soon as the nurses look away she dumps the milk on her lap.

“Oopsies!” she squeals, and while the nurses are distracted, clucking around her with tissues from their apron pockets, she crushes up the cookies in her hair, making a loud nom nom nom sound, as if chewing.

“Oh, Adele! What a healthy appetite!” croons Barb, patting Albus on the head absentmindedly.

“Let’s get this off then,” says Felicity, unbuttoning the milk-splattered pajama top. Barb swoops in quickly with an identical replacement shirt, but not before I get a glimpse of Albus’s pale, flat chest.

“Seriously, how old are you?” I ask when they’ve gone.

“Forty-five, pretty near my pension,” she says, shaking crumbs out of her hair. She turns to me, all slanty-eyed again. “I can’t believe you ate the cookies, after all that effort. The milk, too.”

“What?”

“That stuff’s to help us sleep, you nincompoop. One last dose to keep us prostrate till breakfast.” She shakes her head. “I thought you wanted to get out of here.” She sighs. “I thought you were a soldier.”

“You could have told me!” I sit up quickly and sort of rotate my shoulders, blinking, trying to stay alert and limber. “You mean the last thing they do is give you cookies? You don’t even brush your teeth before bed?”

Albus beams at me, exposing two perfectly straight rows of bluish teeth. “British men don’t care about teeth. Plus, this is like a spa for big old Albus. Spending money on this place is the nicest thing my troops have ever done for me.”

I fight the urge to tell her that Cloudy Meadows is state funded, that the hippo pajamas she’s wearing were probably donated from the nearby department store.

My mind drifts toward Davey, who’s not pretend like Albus’s companions, but was my actual wingman. I guess all I can say in my defense is that I didn’t know how he felt. I mean, yeah, looking back, he wanted to spend all this time with me, and he never hung out with people from high school—even though a lot of his friends are still in the area—and he came over to my house and sat with my dad, who is weird, and who offers mental-health packets to strangers. And he kissed me.

But I was waiting for him to say it, I guess. Partly because it felt rude or immodest or presumptuous to assume. I guess I let myself think that being around him too much might make me transparent, that he’d see the hope I had inside and would get scared of me. And then I’d have all this love to give, again, and nowhere to put it.

“Albus, what do I do about Davey?” I murmur.

“Think less and act,” she snaps, reaching under her bed for the maps.

She’s right. I’ve got to stop self-psychologizing. The point is, I made a mistake, and there’s something awful about needing to apologize and feeling like everything is permanent because the person you hurt won’t talk to you. If I could, I’d tell Davey how the happy weight of secret love is just as heavy as sadness. It is jagged and diamond shaped, swells in your chest to the point of pain. And when there is no hope left, when you’ve ruined everything, this chunk of rock explodes, and there is shrapnel.

Unicorns are cool.

“Private?”

I jerk at the sound of her voice. My eyelids feel heavy. “Yeah?”

“Those drugs are kicking in, huh? Wake up! Time’s a-wasting, hop hop.” I hear her riffle through the maps.

“Five minutes.” I yawn and snuggle into the covers, moving my feet back and forth across the sheets for cold spots. There is the feeling of sinking, and then suddenly my face stings. I look up to see Albus leaning over me. She slaps me again, harder this time.

“Wake up, I said,” she snaps. “Now you listen to me—you’ve been moaning in your sleep all week about this girl, Ruth, and if she really mattered to you, then by George you show it! Friends stick together, and ladies need saving, even dead ones. Are you a man or a coward?”

“Uh . . .”

She raises a hand as if to slap me.

“Okay fine, I’m a man!” I say. “I’m a man, like you.” I sit up straight and shake her off my lap, then crawl across the floor looking for the crayon maps, which I spread across the linoleum. “Now tell me how all this works.” I sincerely hope these floor plans aren’t just another part of her fantasy.

“Easy,” she says. “All you gotta do is get to the basement. Barb let me help her with the laundry once and I found out it’s the only place where they don’t have alarms on the windows. So you get into the laundry slot and bam!” She runs her finger over a green square with some kind of zigzag across it. “There, it’s around the corner from the nurses’ station.”

“Is the laundry chute a vertical drop?”

“Don’t be such a pansy.”

“And what if they catch me?”

Albus groans as if I’m wasting time. “Act confused, say you’re looking for the bathroom. Pee on yourself if you have to! If they don’t believe you, they’ll take you for electroshock, so make it count.” Fear flashes across her face. “Electroshock hurts, Kippy. They say it doesn’t, but they’re wrong.”

I stare at her a second—just a weird little girl with big fantasies. She shouldn’t be here. She should be at a Montessori school, or something—sitting in homeroom with the kind of kids who have big vocabularies and wear fairy wings to class. “Why don’t you come with, Sir Albus?”

She shakes her head firmly, like she’s convincing herself. “I leave once my troops show up—and remember they prowl around like lions, those two, so the minute you find the hatch, throw your body in. Oh, and that cookie, it’ll probably make you hallucinate.” She tosses me my backpack from under the bed. “Good luck, soldier,” she adds, saluting me. I want to hug her—she’s just this little girl—but it would ruin her whole façade.