The Revival by Chris Weitz

Author:Chris Weitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories, Juvenile Fiction / Dystopian
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2016-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

The twins race ahead of us up Central Park West, laughing and hollering.

“Mommy! Look! Mommy! Look! I can run right over a car!” The girl does just that, jumping onto the back of a BMW, clomping right over it, springing to the car parked in front without touching the ground.

“Cut that out!” shouts Kath. “If you break an ankle, I’m going to have to put you down.” She seems serious about it.

“Aw, you’re zero fun!” shouts Abel, the boy.

“I’m not here to be fun,” says Kath, curiously mom-ish annoyance on her face. She’s been in a foul mood since we decided to head up to Harlem.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I’m fine,” she says.

I should know better. I always find myself asking a girl if she’s okay when she clearly isn’t, and then I fail to understand I’m fine for what it means, which is Leave me alone.

I silently keep pace with her for a little while. Then I go ahead and say, “We never talked about what it was actually like in Uptown, did we?”

“Nope,” she says. Strike two.

“So—were there friends of yours that they made, you know, slaves?”

“If by ‘slave,’ you mean someone over whom you have the power of life and death, who is required to do your bidding, then yes.”

“What else would I mean?”

“I used to have this discussion with Theo,” Kath says. “He kind of objected to the use of the term, in an American context, because it had its own specific resonance. I think that was how he put it. He said that to accuse the Uptowners of slavery was to devalue the term, since to him it referred to a carefully maintained economic and governmental system by which the United States as we knew it was brought into being. Whereas what my brother and the rest were doing in the Bazaar was nothing more than a bunch of armed psychotics indulging themselves.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“Well, he didn’t like that I thought I was in the same boat as his ancestors just because I got treated like shit, too. I told him he just didn’t want to care because it was a bunch of white chicks getting exploited.”

“Sounds like you guys didn’t get along too well. Are you worried about seeing him?”

Kath ponders the imminent possibility for a moment.

“Actually,” she says, “we got on just fine. Just because we didn’t see eye to eye didn’t mean he stopped treating me like a person. I hope he hasn’t kicked the bucket.”

“Wow,” I say. “Sentimental of you.” We walk a little farther, the middle-class conveniences of the Upper West Side starting to give way to bodegas and dorms of the old Columbia University precincts.

I observe her a moment—her powder-blue eyes following the pranks of her little wards. Something has changed about her. I think back to long ago, under the ground, when we met—at gunpoint, then grappling. Somehow it ended in kissing. An impromptu bout of making out that was all the more surprising since I was convinced at the time that I was in love with Donna.

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