Page 79 of Wonder

“What’d you get?” Buck’s voice is quiet as he appears next to me. He stares at the bag as if a snake might pop out at any moment.

After this evening, it’s not entirely unlikely.

I reach my hand in and tug the bottle out.

“Anticlimactic,” Buck mutters. But his face darkens as I pull out the note. Even folded over, we can both see the scrawl of my name. “Shestillsent it to you, even though we’re in here?”

Of course, he knows what it is. I even shared some with him once, during a bad withdrawal episode.

“Who?” Both of us look up at Alyss.

I sigh. “Red.”

They all make their way over, then. Everyone stares at the bottle.

I shake it, listening to the liquid inside. “Red would give me some of this after an… episode. To make me sleep it off.”

“She still cares about you,” Buck murmurs. “I wonder if she’s fiddling with these games. If she regrets putting you in.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I shove the bottle back inside. Alyss is watching me when I look her way. I reach out for her hand. “I would choose to be here a hundred times over rather than be with her.”

Truth.

I wonder what she sees on my face. I draw her to me, my grip loose enough that she could pull away if she wanted to. But she doesn’t. She settles by my side on the bed.

The others disperse, giving us some semblance of privacy.

Her other hand traces a circle on her knee. Her dress is ruined again, ripped and tattered. “I wonder if we’ll get new clothes for tomorrow night?”

“Alyss.”

She looks up at me then. “I… I don’t want to pry. I know what it feels like when you don’t want to share, because it hurts too much.”

My throat feels tight as I swallow. “There is… a lot that I haven’t told you. This is just one thing.”

“It’s easier to start with one thing than many.” She hesitates. “If you want to tell me.”

I search her face. “I do.”

But it’s difficult – painful - to know where to start. “I… I was like Buck. I made a bargain with Red.”

Alyss waits patiently, not saying anything.

“I married Myra when we were nineteen. Thirteen years ago. We were young, and foolish, and we thought we were in love. Both of our parents had passed, and we just – we connected.”

Naïve and innocent. “As the years passed, I think we both realized that it wasn’t going to work. We were too different. But we still cared about each other. And then Erin came along.”

I stare down at my hands. “She was… unexpected. But we loved her.”

A copper-haired little girl with deep brown eyes. The words begin to stick in my throat. “Myra and I decided to try to make it work. We were doing okay. I was training to be a carpenter and she was an English tutor. We didn’t have much, but we were… happy, for a time. And then Erin got sick.”

Her hand slips into mine. “Oh, Hatter.”

“Leukaemia,” I force out around the lump in my throat. “It was aggressive, and our insurance… it barely covered anything of what we needed. There were things the doctors said we could try, but it all cost so muchmoney. Myra earned more money than I did, so I quit my apprenticeship and stayed home. I picked up any jobs I could around the neighborhood in between.”

I shake my head. “That was the worst part, almost. To know there were treatments out there she could try, but we were barred from them because of the amount sitting in our bank accounts.”

“So you went to Red,” Alyss says softly.