Foreverland Is Dead

be near her. Cyn walks her to the outhouse. She doesn’t trust the others.
    Be easier if Roc was dead .
    No other way to put it. She’s a threat, a waste of food. If she loosens her bindings, if she catches Cyn by surprise, the others will pay dearly. Cyn is comfortable with the idea of killing her. She could do it. She could cut her throat, this she knows.
    And she hates that. She hates that she could do it. Hates that she wants to.
    Hates that she remembers.
    She doesn’t like the memories. They feel foreign and wrong. She’d gotten used to a fresh start, even if it was a miserable one. Now she’s dragging the past with her, each step heavier than the last.
    Even when she doesn’t think, the gray dream returns at night to find her. She walks to the edge, the trees rustling behind her. She trembles, fearing what will come out of the fog, what heinous memory will force itself upon her. She stands frozen, toes over the ledge.
    Trembling.
    She wakes as if someone has their hands around her throat, as if she’s drowning. It takes all her effort to force down the sobs. The backpack is still on the hill with her knife. She reaches under the mattress for a spoon, puts a light scratch on the wall.
    Marks another day.
    Another day she hasn’t died.
    Do we die?

    Mad is the last one to sit down for breakfast.
    They bow their heads, allowing a moment of silence before plowing through eggs and pinto beans. Breakfast doesn’t last long. Hunger doesn’t go far away. They scrape their plates, listening to the wind.
    Cyn grips the edge of the table, staring at her plate while the others wipe their mouths, lick their fingers. The scabs are thick on her knuckles, the tendons popping up as she squeezes harder.
    It’s been days. No one asks about the trek, don’t want to know what happened to her, why she returned… different.
    They hardly talk to her.
    But she can’t hold it in. Closing her eyes, her tongue won’t work. Her lips clamp shut.
    Mad scoots her chair out from the table.
    “I remember who I am.”
    Silence.
    Mad sits back down. Cyn doesn’t look up. She can’t, not yet. But she started. Something she hasn’t been able to do yet.
    “How you know that?” Kat asks.
    Nervous energy constricts around her chest. She stands too quickly, knocking her chair over. The girls are staring.
    Waiting.
    Cyn paces back and forth, searching for the courage she had only moments ago, courage that has drained into a pool of quivering fear. Strange how easy it was to destroy Roc, how helpless she feels faced with emotions.
    Memories.
    She stops at the window, the glass cold. The brick house is shuttered and quiet.
    “The fence that’s out there—it’s different than the one around the brick house. When I fell into it, I just started remembering…things.”
    Long pause. “How did you get out?” Kat asks.
    “I crawled out.” Cyn shakes her head. “At least I think I did; it’s all a little cloudy.”
    There’s nervous shuffling. But she’s stuck again. She wishes she’d never started talking about this, just wishes they would eat and clean up and chop wood and go to sleep. Keep it simple. No need to dredge up these— “I want to remember,” Jen says.
    “No,” Cyn says. “No, you don’t. You don’t want to remember. I wish I could put the memories back in the gray. Wish I could forget them.”
    “Memories don’t make you who you are,” Kat says.
    Cyn steadies her hands on the windowsill so the girls don’t see them shaking.
    “But memories tell you what you’ve done.”
    Something drifts over the garden. Snowflakes are falling. Cyn feels them inside her, cold and drifting.
    What the hell is this place?
    “We’ve got names, too,” Kat says. “How can we go forward if we don’t look back?”
    “What if the memories drag you down?” Cyn says to the window. “Trap you in your past?”
    “I’ll take my chances.”
    “Really?”
    “Better than this. You said so yourself, just before you hiked off. You said it’s better to take a chance, to explore, than sit around waiting to die. You said that, Cyn. You regretting it?”
    Cyn presses her forehead to the cold window, snow spitting on the ground and resting on the brown grass. She involuntarily claws the windowsill. She can’t fight this, not the way she beat Roc.
    Can’t hide from it, either.
    Her throat knots up. The sadness just won’t go down this time.
    “You want to remember?” she asks.
    They agree.
    “I was raped,” she says.