Even as I’m saying this I can’t believe I’m bothering. It’s not even like Blaze is my type of guy. In no way is he entertaining like Jasper or Drake. He isn’t fun to be around, at least not my version of fun. And I know he’s beautiful according to the Books, but in my opinion his hair’s too twisted and his skin’s too weathered to be the kind you want to brush up against. Maybe there was a moment back at the rocks … but it’s over now.
Very,
very
over. I swear to Dot, I’m not even sure that moment happened at all.
‘If that’s what you believe.’
From underneath my sheet I say, ‘I don’t believe it. I know it.’
Then I pull it back just a little bit to look at Blaze. He’s sort of staring at nothing, or maybe it’s the dust mites.
‘See you later.’
‘Right. Whatever.’
Does that sound enough like I don’t care? Because I
don’t
care. Really. Not even when he backs away, opens the door and leaves.
I pull the sheet off my face completely and lie there for ages. Outside my hut I can hear people talking. Who’s coming to the lagoon for an afternoon swim, who’s down at the orchard, who was slowest to finish filling their newfruit bag.
Only the thin wooden walls of my hut separate me from them. But you know what? That’s really not the way it feels. From where I’m lying, those people and their light, delicious conversations suddenly seem impossibly far away. Or it feels like I’m impossibly far away from them. Like I’m somewhere else, somewhere that shouldn’t exist.
I think of that small creature with the curls. I think of his soft round tummy.
‘Julius.’
It comes out suddenly. I realise I’ve only thought the word before. This is the first time I’ve ever said it aloud. For a simple collection of letters, it has a powerful effect. I am shaking. I don’t want to say the word again. But at the same time, I can’t stop myself.
‘Julius.’
There’s a loose thread on my sheet and I start flicking it back and forth with my fingertip as I lie there. Gradually, the thread works itself looser and looser until a whole row of the weave starts coming undone.
I know what I should do. Get up and stop being so prenormal. Stop talking to myself. Go hang out with Fern, maybe hook up with Drake or Jasper or whoever. Whatever would help me erase this whole little scene with Blaze, that’s what I should do. That would be dotly.
But guess what?
I just go on fiddling with that loose thread in my sheet, thinking things I don’t even want to put into words because once I do they’ll be out there in the air and I won’t ever be able to take them back. And the whole time I keep tugging at the thread even though I know if I don’t stop right now pretty soon the entire thing will unravel.
I
T’S THE PERFECT
late afternoon, the kind only Dot could create. Everyone’s either swimming or lazing in the huts or maybe, like Fern, picking flowers. Everyone except for me. The only place I want to be right now is in the gazebo, talking to Dot. You know, just watching my thoughts float away in a bubble the way they always have before.
When I arrive at the gazebo it’s not empty like I expected. Gil’s already there.
‘I didn’t know you came here twice a day,’ I say.
I’m working really hard to keep my voice all frothy light. There’s no way I want Gil asking me why
I’m
here for the second time (which, incidentally, would be a totally Gil-like thing to do).
If he did, I wouldn’t know how to answer. I mean, I’m here because I want to forget about the prenormal conversation I had with Blaze before. I want to stop thinking about the way it made me feel to say the word
Julius
. I’m here because I have to keep reminding myself Julius isn’t real and that Dot has her reasons for making me see him, which aren’t for me to know. There’s no way in creation I’m explaining all
that
to Gil. Even if I wanted to, I don’t know if I could.
But it ends up being beside the point because Gil never even turns around. There’s a whole lot of silver hair flopping over his eye, the one with the dotmark. He’s kneeling on a cushion staring up at the portrait of Dot on one lattice wall of the gazebo. And even though I kneel down right beside him, it doesn’t seem like he notices me.
‘So you’re pretty much going to ignore me. Am I right?’
Gil’s eyelids flutter. His lips close and he starts to hum. Not in time with the dottrack that’s playing in the gazebo or anything like that. No, Gil’s hum is one long, low continuous stream.
‘Ha! Okay. I’m going to take that as a yes.’
Underneath my knees, the cushion shivers. That would be because Gil’s entire body has started shaking. His silver hair falls across his face again but he doesn’t scoop it out of the way. All he does is kneel there while his shaking turns into rocking. Forwards and backwards, side-to-side, Gil lurches all over the place. His arms are circling now, his mouth drawn back in a sort of snarl.
Next Gil starts up this high-pitched moaning. His arms stop circling. Instead they rise up and reach out for Dot’s portrait like he’s not even controlling them, like Dot’s literally pulling him to her. In the middle of his moaning he starts to talk but not in words I’ve ever heard before. It’s just a whole lot of garbled letters.
I want to ask him what’s happening but when I say Gil’s name it just gets lost in all the noise. Then his eyelids open. It’s like Gil can’t see me even though I’m right there next to him. His eyes are blank white. As in, no coloured parts whatsover. His head tips back. He’s really shrieking now, jerking and rolling and sweating and everything else. It’s like Dot’s portrait is watching him and only him, like Dot and Gil are joined by some invisible, unbreakable thread.
Then he says, ‘Yes, Dot, I understand.’
And suddenly, without any kind of warning, the whole thing is over. Gil flops sideways, all limp and wrung out. His head’s on the cushion, his hair’s brushing my leg and he’s breathing hard. I touch his forehead, brush away the damp silver ropes of his hair until he opens his eyes and gazes up at me.
‘Okay. Oh my Dot. Are you alright?’
Gil’s eyes are back in the proper place, pale as a wolf ’s with huge black circles in the centre.
‘No-one’s ever seen me like that, except Brook.’
‘Are you, like,
prehealthy
or something?’
‘No,’ Gil smiles, ‘the opposite. That’s just what happens when Dot’s inside me.’
He lets this sink in before he adds, ‘I can hear her, you know.’
Gil says this like it’s so ordinary there’s no reason for me to act surprised. But obviously I can’t help it. I’ve never seen anyone do anything like whatever it was that Gil just did. Not in a dream, and definitely not in real life.
‘At first I couldn’t understand her. I only felt her. But now I see her too. Now she talks through me.’
I feel this sharp stab of prehappiness.
Gil sees Dot. She
talks
to him. It’s obvious he’s been chosen, that he’ll be singled out on completion night. Whereas Dot shows
me
stuff that isn’t real and definitely isn’t dotly. I don’t know what it means, but I don’t think it’s anything good.
‘What does she say to you? I mean, is this how you knew about the signs?’
‘I see our lawn, washed in pale golden light. Dot steps out of the fringe and takes me in her arms. She always says the same thing. “Defend the dotly”.’
‘“Defend the dotly”? I don’t get it.’ A bubble drifts between me and Gil. He waits for me to fill in the gaps, to figure it out.
‘“Defend the dotly”’ I repeat. ‘Um …’
‘Come on,Wren. Dot created you intelligent.’
‘But everyone’s dotly. It says so in the Books.’
‘We’re
created
dotly. Dot’s saying we don’t all stay that way.’
Images whirl into my head and out again. Gil’s hands crushing that wren. Flames licking at the feathered body. Then those prenormal images inside my head. People who shouldn’t exist. Places that aren’t here. Can Gil tell just by looking at me? Does he know? Dot’s inside him so maybe …
I have to act like Gil’s conversation is having no effect on me. Gil has to think I’m normal.
So I say, ‘What other way is there to be?’
Gil gives me this smile like I couldn’t possibly understand.
‘There’s happiness and prehappiness. Calm and precalm. Why not dotly and predotly?’
‘
Pre
dotly? Is that a thing?’
It pops out of me in this little squeak before I have time to think or moderate in any way. So much for looking normal.
‘Dot wants us to defend the dotly,’ Gil says, all cool and pale. ‘It’s simple logic there has to be something to defend it against.’
‘Totally,’ I say in a rush, trying to recover as fast as I can. ‘It makes sense. Wow though.
Wow
. That’s major. Who’s predotly? I mean, is Dot going to give you names and everything?’
By now, I’m kind of babbling.
‘There are the signs,’ Gil says. ‘There’s a lot you can tell from behaviour too. Who does the dotly thing and who doesn’t.’
He crooks his finger in a come-here kind of way. Still on my knees, I shuffle across the cushion towards him. When I get close enough, he reaches out the same finger and touches my cheekbone.
‘We should all read our Books.’ Gil’s hand moves from my face to the top of my head. He strokes it like I’m a deer or something, with my head bent down, eating grass.
‘We should follow her instructions. Be kind. Have fun. Hook up.’
‘I do. I do those things.’
‘Of course,Wren. No-one said you didn’t.’
Gil’s hand goes on smoothing my hair and his fingertips start to circle their way downwards until they’re edging under the neck of my sungarb. Is it dotly to do this in the gazebo? If it were
pre
dotly, Gil would know, I tell myself. He’s the one who found out about predotliness in the first place. If he wants this, then Dot wants it too. That’d be right, wouldn’t it? I don’t want to do anything predotly.
Then somewhere behind us, this voice says, ‘Gil? You ready to go?’
I do more than just jump. I swear to Dot, my entire body leaves the cushion and hovers in mid-air before crashing back down again. Gil’s the same. I whip around and there’s Brook over by the door of the gazebo, half-hidden by the late afternoon shadows streaking the ground.
‘Have you been there this whole time?’
Brook rolls his shoulders and gives me this single nod.
Gil laughs. ‘He’s never far away.’
Brook’s as tall as Blaze but twice as lean. It’s like, when Dot created Brook she didn’t waste a single speck of her materials. There’s almost not enough skin on him. What’s there is stretched so tight you can see the bones underneath.
Not that Brook isn’t strong. He is. He’s powerful, especially with the coconut knife in his hand. On his ankle, there’s a prenormal dotmark. A little coloured circle, right there on his skin. I’ve often thought of asking him what it is, but Brook has this way of discouraging questions.
Gil’s hand clamps around one of my shoulders like a claw or something.
‘I hang around when Gil’s talking to Dot,’ Brook says.
He’s looking at Gil’s hand on my shoulder.
‘It’s quite a draining process,’ says Gil. ‘Emotionally and physically.’
Brook says, ‘I’ll take you back to your hut.’
But Gil goes all crisp and tells him, ‘I’m fine for now.’
‘Yeah? Because I can …’
‘Now Wren has seen this, I want to share it with her.’
Brook turns to me. ‘What are you doing here anyway? Didn’t you come earlier?’
I flick my eyes from the bubbles to the billowing banners to Dot’s portrait on the lattice wall. I swallow. I force out a laugh.
‘What, are you following me or something?’
Brook’s face is blank as a hut wall.
‘Anyway, who said you can’t come twice a day? The gazebo is sort of awesome, you know.’
Then Gil goes, ‘Let’s walk.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ There’s a prehappy edge to Brook’s voice. He looks at me. ‘Do you want to?’
‘Thank you, Brook.’ Gil’s sharper than ever. ‘I think Wren knows what Dot wants her to do.’
He gets to his feet and holds his hand out to me.
Brook folds his arms across his chest and there’s a loud huff as he breathes out. Gil kind of steers me past him and out through the doorway. Before we go, Gil turns back around to Brook and says, ‘You know what would be useful? Collect me some fruit.’
He turns to me and adds, ‘I’m ravenous. I always am when she’s been inside me.’
For a moment, Brook blocks the doorway, not saying yes and not saying no.
‘Meet me back at my hut in a little bit? We’ll spend some time together, I’ll tell you what Dot shared with me.’
‘You want cherries?’
‘And apricots.’ Gil smiles. ‘Please.’
Brook shoots me one more look before wheeling around and disappearing in the direction of the orchard.
____________________
Obviously me and Gil aren’t just walking. He has something particular in mind, so he takes me somewhere special, to a bunch of magnolia trees with glossy green leaves and a pond in the middle. Blaze’s pond, which in the late afternoon isn’t glowing yet.
‘How did you know about this place?’
‘I looked for it, after Blaze mentioned it.’ Gil smiles. ‘At least, Brook looked for it. We like to know everything that goes on.’
We bash through the trees and Gil says over his shoulder, ‘Dot’s definitely created more spectacular things.’
From which I figure out Gil hasn’t seen the pond glowing. As in, he’s missed the point of it completely.
‘You took one today, I assume.’
A capsule, Gil means. And by asking that Gil is telling me that what I thought was going to happen really
is
going to happen.
‘As if I wouldn’t!’
The capsules are what makes it safe for us to hook up all the time. I keep my bottle beside my bed. The bottle’s green but the capsules inside are see-through, filled with multicoloured balls that rattle around when you shake them. I take mine as soon as I wake up, the same way I’ve done ever since I was created. The bottle’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes – if I spend the night in my own hut, that is.