Page 61 of The Compound

“So you’ve been faking how you feel about me?”

“No, Lily, no. But, this—the way we communicate, the way we got to know each other—that hasn’t been real. I didn’t know what your second name was for a month. And now that we can talk without punishment, I don’t know if I want to. I want to talk on the outside, when we’re not on display.”

I never even thought about the viewers anymore. Obviously, I knew in some distant way that they were there, watching. When you were beautiful, really beautiful, you moved through your day with an exquisite self-consciousness. Now that I didn’t put an effort in, and wore my dressing gown every day, that feeling was dulled. It seemed absurd, in a way, that people could be watchingme.

“It’ll be easier to talk when the others are gone,” I said.

We walked on in silence for a brief while. I could almost feel him thinking deeply. Sam was the type to turn over conversations in his mind, to consider things from different perspectives. It was one of the qualities I liked most about him, and one of the things that made me feel inadequate. I lived in constant fear that he’d find out how shallow I was, how little time I spent considering the ways of the world.

“Lily,” he said suddenly. “I’ve been putting this off. I don’t know why. I really don’t. But I think we should go. Today. Let’s just pack our bags and go.”

I tried not to react. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam—why would we leave now?”

“Because it’s all fucking—fake! How can you go on living like this? Pretending that everything is okay?”

“Isn’t that what we were doing before, on the outside?”

“But on the outside it was real! It mattered what we did—we weren’t just…entertainment! There’s no point,” he said. “No point in being here.”

I didn’t want to say it out loud: the prizes. “We’ve almost won,” I said.

“Won what? What is there here that you want?”

“Look, I know you think that I’m being superficial—but the better we do here, the easier things will be on the outside. We’ll have more prizes, more opportunities, more fame…” I paused, trying to decide how much I wanted to admit to. “But even besides that, why would you want to go back to that, what we had before?”

I could see that my words hadn’t fully landed with him. He didn’t get it. He was silent again, for a long time. We were walking very slowly now.

“Ask me something,” I said. “It’ll make it easier.”

I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, and we’d remain locked in silence for the evening. But he said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” I said. “I’m an only child. What about you?”

“I had two brothers. They’re both dead.”

He still wasn’t looking at me. In the sky, birds idly circled.

“I’m so sorry, Sam. What happened?”

“They died in the war,” he said. “My father was a veteran, and when the war broke out, he encouraged us to enlist. My brothers died within a year, two months apart. My father still wanted me to join up, even after we’d buried them both. I wouldn’t. We fought about it—we never agreed on politics—and eventually I moved to a different city, and we cut ties. I got a job that I had thought that I wanted, and I met new people, and explored a new place, but I was terribly, horribly lonely. I hated my life, but I didn’t know how to fix it. It felt like it was out of my hands.”

I looked at him. Wasn’t that how I felt, too?

“I didn’t want to go home, but I hated where I was. I went back and forth constantly in my head between the two places, until it felt like I was nowhere at all.”

“What did you decide to do?”

“I came here,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why did you decide to do it?”

“Why? Because everyone wants to do it, and I got the chance.”

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