Free Dearly, Beloved by Lia Habel Page B

needed to avoid.
    After the Siege was over and my family had returned home, I’d been fine. For weeks I’d existed in a calm, capable state of super-heroineishness—a help to my parents, a guardian for Isambard, a shoulder for Nora to cry on via telephone. Every time I tried to reflect on what I’d been through, it was like I couldn’t even remember it.
    Then the nightmares started.
    It all came back to me in dreams—the flight through the city, the monsters hunting us, being unable to save my brother. The horrible things I’d had to do to survive—killing people, chopping up body parts. The nightmares always woke me, surges of irrational terror putting my body and senses on high alert, even though there was nothing around to be afraid of. Sometimes it felt as if I was having a heart attack at only sixteen years of age—my chest on fire, my breath short, my limbs tingling.
    I knew it was anxiety. I’d been anxious and prone to worry my entire life—about Nora’s math homework, about my mother’s plans for me, all things great and small. And so I hid it. I told no one. Because my brother was dead, and my parents were traumatized enough, and Nora had been through the wringer, too. There were a thousand reasons. But now all it seemed I did was remember. The memories and the fear were constantly with me, constantly intruding, turning my every thought into a heart-twisting regret or a terrible prophecy. I found that the only way to stop the worry, the only way to pop the bubble of building, nameless anxiety, was to force myself to pay attention to something else. Like schoolwork.
    Now I was on chapter thirty of this semester’s text; Nora was still on chapter two.
    Turning the pages of the digital book somewhat frantically, I started perusing a section detailing the science behind the new ice age, the many cataclysmic events that had led humanity to crowd around the Equator and form new tribes. Just holding a book, learning mundane facts, seemed oddly distant from my new reality. To think it had formed such an enormous part of my world before. Now, for all the time I put into my studies, they seemed so … pointless.
    Issy’s punctilious knock sounded on the door. I jerked in my seat before realizing what it was. “Come in.”
    My brother opened the door just wide enough to step inside, and bowed. I bobbed my head. Even now he insisted we genuflect to each other—though since dying he’d loosened up quite a bit. “You can’t come in unless you can curtsy like a big girl, Jenny,” he said, ducking his head around the door again. He was now frozen at fourteen, his brown hair forever short. His skin had taken on a purplish hue that almost hid the mole on his cheek. We were both of Indian descent, mostly through our mother’s side.
    “I can curtsy!” she insisted.
    “May she come in, Pam?”
    “Of course.”
    And thus in toddled the littlest zombie I’d yet met. Jenny Delgado had lost some grace and some words since the night I found her wandering the streets, but still had quite the personality. After making sure Isambard was watching her, she carefully spread out the skirt of her pink pinafore and curtsied. I couldn’t help but smile, and stood up to return the gesture, which made her wiggle with glee. She came running for me, and hugged me around the legs.
    “Very good! What’s up, Issy?” I carefully combed my fingers through Jenny’s baby-fine, dirty blond hair. She’d shed some of it already; I didn’t want to pull any more out. It wouldn’t grow back.
    “Mom’s starting dinner. She asked me to come get you.”
    “Great.” So much for avoiding worry. I plucked a ribbon out of the display of them on my vanity and waggled it at Jenny to get her attention. It drew her white-speckled eyes like a lodestone, and her chapped lips parted. “Look after Issy-monster for me, okay, Jenny-bear?”
    She let go of me and captured the ribbon, placing it over her head, as if it might stay there of its own