Iceling by Sasha Stephenson

Author:Sasha Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-11-02T11:40:40+00:00

WE’RE STILL ALIVE. We plan on staying that way. But we’ll still spend the rest of this drive making guesses about what that cop must have whispered in that guy’s ear and about what exactly is going on here and why, and I guarantee that no matter how sure we are of any of our explanations, we’ll still be 100 percent certain that we have no idea.

SEVENTEEN

WE’RE PAST THE checkpoint, headed north again.

Stan’s moving his lips like he’s muttering, but he isn’t making a sound. A glance in the rearview shows Callie and Ted staring straight ahead. In the other cars, the other Icelings are too. The Icelings in the other cars are all white, and relatively pale, with varying degrees of dirty blond hair, just like Callie and Ted and Greta.

As we drive amid this flock of Icelings, I start to notice that these kids don’t just have similar coloring and features. Some of these Icelings really, really look alike, like siblings. Could it be that some of them are brothers and sisters by blood rather than circumstance? What if Callie has a sister? A sister in a way I never was, or maybe never could be?

An image flashes in my mind of Callie lounging around with a girl who is pretty in that same chilly way that Callie’s so pretty. They’re communicating in that easy but complicated way that best friends do, where real language is secondary to a certain comfort able code that years and years of closeness has established and from which outsiders are totally excluded. And Callie’s telling her in this way about how sad she was to be stuck with me instead of her real sister, how sad she was that I prevented them from being together. And then I wonder, could that sister be in one of these cars surrounding us, hurtling us toward wherever?

Maybe it was always going to be like this: Callie would leave us for something greater someday. At least I got to have Callie, even if it was only for a little while, in the grand scheme of things. Or maybe this line of thinking is just me spinning my wheels, a kind of selfish distraction from the weird hellscape this highway is starting to feel like. Or maybe I’m just piling on another thing to worry about, to make the whole world feel even more impossible. I want to talk to Stan about this, but it seems like he’s in an even deeper existential crisis than I am. He’s still muttering silently, worrying away at the handle on the inside of his door, when suddenly he says something that I can’t quite make out.

“What?” I say. “Did you just say something about the meek being stuck in . . . squalor?”

“Like sheep to the slaughter,” he says clearly.

“Stan,” I say.

He shrugs. He says, “It is what it is, Lorna.”

And I don’t have anything to say to that, because take one look around us. Look at Callie and Ted in the backseat, asleep.

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