Page 14 of We Are the Match
“Helen.” Paris is beside me, her voice soft, her eyes furious. She will not let me leave my body behind. “Looking away changes nothing.”
“How,” my father asks quietly. “Howam I to question a corpse?”
The guard is trembling.
He is so young, and he is so terrified. And someone so young and so terrified should not die here.
But I cannot stop them from dying. I can never stop them from dying. I look out toward the storm. I beg it to drown out the noise, but even the storm’s rage is dying, rain slackening at the blown-open gap in the window.
The boy does not answer my father.
There is a crack. Ringed fingers against bone. Cartilage and bone breaking.
There is more blood on the marble.
There is Mama’s blood on the ground, and the girl’s, and they have bold, furious green eyes, and they are afraid like the boy and they are all dying, they are all dying—
Paris’s hand closes over my arm, so hard her fingers dig into my skin. “No,” she says.
Tommy is watching her carefully, but he is not moving, not driving her backward or holding a weapon to her face. He appears, for half a minute, strangely hopeful as he looks back and forth between us.
Another crack, and a low moan, and beyond Tommy and Paris the guard is kneeling before my father.
The others in the room are kneeling, too. They are all kneeling.
Just not me or Tommy.
Or Paris.
“How,” my father repeats, his voice a snarl now. “Am I. To question. A corpse?”
“I—” the guard attempts, finally, too late, too late. “I am—sorry—”
“No one dies unless Isaythey do.” And then my father crouches, and it is over, it is over, and I am a coward, so I do not watch.
If I were braver, I would choose this moment. I would walk to the edge of the wound in the wall and I would sayI doand step off.
But instead, I am frozen, and Paris is holding me fast.
I look at her, look at the sharp angles of her face, and I tremble on Tommy’s arm, and Tommy and Paris, who are not cowards, watch my father and the knife and the boy.
They watch the slash of his blade as it opens the boy from his diaphragm down to his abdomen, and they watch as the boy tries, just briefly, to hold his intestines inside his body, and then. Then they watch him die.
Paris releases my arm and steps back, and the instant she is no longer touching me, no longer holding me here with the ferocity of her grip, I—I leave.
The noise is muted. The colors are blurry. The red of the blood is not quite so violently bright. Not quite so harsh.
My father strides toward us, the body behind him inconsequential already.
“Why are you here?” he asks Paris, that dangerous edge still at the forefront.
If I were here, if I were in my body, I would feel the fear churning inside me.
The guards shift, ready for the command to take Paris, to put a bullet in her, or to hold her while my father guts her.
And I, I may be nothing, I may be unable to stop anything, but I—I make another choice. I chose not to jump. And now I choose—
Paris.
