Page 71 of Raven

“Right.” She goes quiet again as if deciding whether to share more of herself with me. “Maddy, the actual Maddy Wise and her family took me with them to the Sierra Nevada mountains on a camping trip my junior year in college. There was no reception there. Her parents talked to my dad, and they agreed that two of my bodyguards would camp out a mile away from us and use drones to check on me twice a day. That week in the Sierra Nevadas was the most fun I’ve had in years. I felt so free. Sitting on the rocks. Overlooking the running river. No care in the world… That was the first time I thought that… It’s messed up, really…” I hear a smile and nostalgia in her voice. “I thought… If I was ever dropped off in the middle of nowhere, I would’ve probably been happy living on my own. For a nineteen-year-old with my history, it was a pretty cathartic revelation.”

She goes quiet, and right away, the dirty world around me comes alive when her sweet voice disappears.

I wish we had a chance at something else. In a different lifetime, we could. I wish I could talk, tell her about Mac, though I won’t tell anyone about Emily or what happened to us back then.

“Why are you so good, Maddy?” I ask on reflex and right away regret it. It’s the thought of Emily that brought that question.

“What do you mean by good, Raven?”

I love the way she says my name. “After all you ran away from. After being raised the way you were. Rich girls don’t turn into Mother Theresas. Mafia princesses don’t become nurses. Party girls don’t go celibate.”

She laughs quietly through her nose. “Occasionally, they do. We all have a reason for what we do. Why do you read so much?”

How would she know? Unless she asks around about me, and the one person who knows me best on this island is probably Archer.

“I like it.”

“No,” she says sharply. “You give me a simple answer. There’s always a deeper reason.”

Sure, there is. Because Mac got me into that habit. Because he didn’t have TV. Because I looked up to Mac so much after he picked me up that I would’ve eaten cyanide if he told me it was good for me. Because I needed to find a reason why some people get the best lives and others are constantly dealt shitty hands.

What I tell her sums it up. “Because it helps me understand why people are the way they are. Reasons for bad things happening, I guess.”

“And the good ones?”

“Not really. We don’t need the reasons for the good. Good is always taken for granted.”

“It is.”

It’s the first time we are discussing something other than me and her and our deal.

“But you didn’t answer my question, Maddy,” I say.

“I thought you didn’t need a reason for the good. Why ask me?”

Touché. I smile but don’t answer, waiting for her to talk first.

She sighs a little into the phone. “I did enough selfish things in my life. I was young. I had everything handed to me on a gold platter. I rebelled and got away with it anyway. Because I could. Because I thought I would always get what I wanted. Until someone told me my time was up, and I had to pay it back. When the Change happened, people around me were in shock. Grieving, you know. Or trying to kill themselves. Or drowning in guilt because they survived the event that killed their entire families. And I didn’t.”

She goes quiet again for a moment, and I don’t interrupt. Her words resonate with my own history and tug at my heart.

“While everyone’s lives were broken and families lost, I intentionally lost my family and for the first time felt like I got my own life back.”

This sounds achingly familiar. It’s hard to boast about thriving during the world war while others fall apart. You can’t admit it to others because they’ll hate you. They’ll think you are a monster because you are not grieving with everyone else. Though they don’t understand that before, when the world was happy, it didn’t exactly give a single fuck about your broken life as a kid or your sadistic foster father beating you senseless while drunk. Nor did that world grieve for your foster sister who was repeatedly raped by that same sick fuck.

“You know why I help others?” Maddy’s soft voice is almost angelic. “Why I really enjoy doing something good? Even if it’s simply patching someone’s wounds?”

“To patch up your karma?” I offer the easiest explanation.

She laughs, the trickle of it tingling in my heart, but her voice is serious and soft when she says, “Wishful kindness.”

I’m not sure I heard it right. “What is that?”

“Wishful kindness,” she repeats. “Like that ‘free hugs’ guy. Like the ‘if you don’t have money to pay for a meal, grab the paid ticket at the front desk.’ Like tying your mittens during a cold winter to a public fence for the homeless. Like arranging for a mass shelter for the homeless when the temperatures drop dangerously low in cities. Did you know they do that? That sort of thing. You do something good, hoping it will have enough effect on others for them to pass it forward. You simply hope they do.”

She sounds like Mac with her soft, non-deliberate wisdom. It’s uncanny for a twenty-two-year-old.

“Do you know what a group of ravens is called?” she asks softly.

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