The Girl in Red

The two of them had their arms wrapped around each other, and Red noticed those arms were very thin. They weren’t wearing jackets or hats, only thin T-shirts, and they must have been cold even with the blankets. She wondered how long they’d been out here, and what they’d been eating besides granola bars, if anything.

“I won’t hurt you,” Red said, and then winced. What a stupid frigging thing to say. It was the first thing the bad guys always said in the movies when they were about to hurt you.

The mystery kids seemed to think so too, for they inched farther away from her.

“Sorry, that was dumb. Let’s try again. My name is Red. Fancy meeting you out here in the middle of nowhere,” she said, and smiled, and hoped they thought her lame joke was funny and nonthreatening.

“Your name’s Red?” one of them asked, ignoring the lame joke altogether. “How can your name be Red? Nobody is named after a color.”

The other one shushed him/her.

“Don’t talk to her,” the second one whispered, trying not to move his/her mouth too much.

“Well, my name’s not really Red,” she said. “That’s the name that I go by. My real name is too awful to contemplate.”

“Contemplate?” asked the kid who’d spoken first. That one seemed chatty.

“Shush,” the second one said, again attempting to pitch his/her voice low enough so Red wouldn’t hear. Unfortunately, it was so quiet out in the middle of nowhere that any sound, however tiny, seemed like the clash of cymbals. “Don’t you remember that we agreed not to talk to strangers?”

“Contemplate means to think about something, or to look at it,” Red said, pretending she hadn’t heard that last bit.

“It’s a word that means two things? I know about those words. I learned some of them in Language Arts at school.”

“Riley!” the second child said, clearly fed up with the other child’s persistent chatter.

Well, that didn’t help narrow down whether it was a boy or a girl. Riley was one of those names that could go either way.

“Riley is a cool name,” Red said. “A lot cooler than mine.”

Riley had unclenched from the tight embrace of the other child and inched toward the opening where Red’s face peered into their shelter. This kid clearly had the friendly gene. Red bet the other kid had to stop Riley from telling their life story to any stranger they encountered. The second child hung back, gazing suspiciously at Red.

“What is your real name?” Riley asked.

“It’s . . . Cordelia,” Red said, with a dramatic pause between the two words.

Riley laughed, a high joyous sound that seemed like it didn’t belong in that terrible world. It cut through the oppressive air of the forest and hung there like a magic spell. “That’s not so bad. We have a great-aunt Hilda, and I think Hilda is much worse than Cordelia. Cordelia is kind of pretty.”

“Mama certainly thought so, although she usually just called me Delia. She was a Shakespeare professor and she named me after a character in one of his plays.”

“Our mama worked at the Walmart,” Riley said. “But then she got killed by a man who was mad that there was no more medicine in the store.”

This was stated with a bald matter-of-factness, as if the child were a news anchor reading off the day’s tragedies at six p.m.

“I’m sorry to hear that. What about your dad?” Red asked.

“Riley!” the other child said, but the admonition didn’t stop Riley from continuing. Red bet if she stayed still long enough Riley would tell her all about his/her favorite movie, pet, the last time he/she had pizza . . . the kid just had that kind of vibe.

“He got the Cough and then he died. At first I thought it was better that Daddy wasn’t killed like Mama, because that was terrible, thinking Mama would come home and then she didn’t because some crazy person shot her over something that wasn’t even her fault,” Riley said. “But then Daddy got the Cough and there was so much blood. We couldn’t even go near him because there was so much blood, and that made me sad because I wanted to at least kiss him good-bye but we couldn’t go near him, we might have got the infection. Where’s your mama and daddy?”

“My mama got the Cough, too,” Red said.

She hesitated, wondering if she should tell them the rest of the truth. Her mama had gotten the Cough, it was true, and it probably would have killed her if that pack of jackals hadn’t come along. It might be enough just to tell them that.

Then she realized that protecting little kids from the truth was a relic from an old world, and that these kids had surely seen just how bad people could be since the Crisis started. Their mother was killed for no damn reason whatsoever. They knew the world wasn’t a shiny cotton-candy fair ride. There was no reason to lie.

“My mama got the Cough,” Red said again. “And probably my dad would have gotten it too, and they both would have died from it. But before that happened some men came along to our house and attacked them.”