Stepping From the Shadows by Patricia A McKillip

Author:Patricia A McKillip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

5 – WASTELAND

The school changed, but the pepper trees didn’t. They grew immense, impossibly gnarled, forming knots and boles and twisted roots to hide their inner scarring. They shed knife-thin leaves and berries down the sidewalk from the university library, past the science building to the men’s PE building, with its maze of corridors, stairways, and courts that I solved once a semester, following signs and painted arrows, doors, saying “No Entrance,” “Left only,” and “No Exit” when I registered for classes. The library, where Frances and the Stagman lived, was as complex, but she knew its stairs and stacks and dim, quiet places better than I wanted to. I lost her, somewhere, in front of a door saying “No Exit and No Entrance” or maybe down in the bottom of bookstacks, with concrete walls and no windows, among leather-bound books of early English shire maps, early California mining maps, records of court transactions, legal documents. I didn’t know where she was going those days. I could only follow her blindly, hoping and terrified.

The first thing she did, still half-dazed from figuring out the mysteries of class requirements, biology, philosophy, English lit, history books still unbedraggled in her arms, was to get me pulled into a packed current of bodies that snaked its way, chanting, through the placid university grounds. “On strike!” it rumbled. “On strike! On strike!”

“We can’t be on strike,” I said bewilderedly. “We’re in a university. We’re supposed to be learning how to think. That’s like our brains going on strike.”

Arms locked all around me, in solidarity, pulling me forward, and I grabbed at a volume of English poets that an elbow jostled out of my arms. Boys, I found, had changed alarmingly while I hadn’t been paying attention. They had acquired whiskers and brains, wire-rimmed glasses that winked with frosty certainty. “Stop the draft!” someone bellowed behind us, and the cry was passed down the line. “Stop the draft! Stop the draft!”

“I have to get to my English class,” Frances said desperately, trying to duck under an armpit.

“You don’t lay your life on the line, girl, someone will lay it down for you. In a box.”

“Huh?”

“I get drafted, I’m going to kill or be killed. I don’t want to kill.”

Something in the voice dragged her eyes up. The current had flung her against brown, sweating skin, smooth and muscular as oak. The face, above turquoise beads, was midway between greasy french fries and dignity. The eyes were dark, at once hard and gentle. An oak branch flared above his wild hair. “I don’t want to kill,” he said again, softly.

Frances swallowed. Something stirred in her face beneath its bonelessness, something not quite alive, moving in its blind sleep. Then there was another shout; the line surged forward, its deep voice charged, marching: “ROT-C. ROT-C.” We broke through a picket line—teachers or cafeteria workers, I wasn’t sure. The ROTC building loomed in front of us. Glass shattered. There were shouts. The line loosened, scattered. I ran with it, ducking between parked cars, through groups of students.

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