Free As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott Page A

then drifts.
    Shifts.

25.
     
    WAKE UP.
    I sit up, startled and blinking, and realize I’ve slid off the orange chair again. I know it’s nothing but bad color and creaks and cracks, but to slide right off it?
    I’ve got to stop falling asleep. I’ve got to stop sitting up at night staring at my hands and thinking about what I’ve typed. About Morgan.
    I’ve got to stop wondering—wishing. I know what happens to people who do, poor Olivia with her heart in her eyes even as her brains were clubbed across the floor for not saying who she was sleeping with, Olivia dying as Greer stood next to me, shaking but watching without blinking.
    You don’t question what happens, not ever, and I don’t want to die.
    But he’s here. I know it, can hear him before I see him, and when I turn around Morgan is in the attic again. Sitting right next to me. Looking at me.
    I have to report this. Report him. I haven’t done it yet, but I will, I will.
    My fingers don’t move. Don’t type.
    “You must have fallen off the chair,” he says, and I see there is a shirt tucked under me, soft fabric wedged near the edge of my head, as if someone has tried to slip it under me. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
    “Yes, I sleep,” I say, and shove his shirt back at him, trying not to notice how soft the cloth is and failing. I have to stop this. I have to.
    Something is off with him. I can’t afford clothes like his. Even if I do well, I could serve the government for ten, fifteen years—a lifetime—before I would even be let into the stores that sell shirts like his.
    It takes a long time to move past being crèche. I was told that before I started training, reminded of it every day, in the years it took for me to make the few friends I have: Greer, Olivia, and Ethan. The three people who didn’t mind talking to me even though they came from where I want to be and I’m from where no one wants to go.
    “You look tired,” Morgan says, as if we are talking, as if he wants to talk, and I stare at him because we—he—can’t talk to me like this. I’m a listener now, I clawed my way out of a bed shared by four, in a hall shared by hundreds, to be someone. To be here. To listen to him, who has more than I can ever hope for and doesn’t seem to care that he’s so close to being lost. To disappearing.
    “Why are you here?” That is the one thing I can’t work out. I know there are always some who must test the government, that they can’t help themselves. But he does not organize protests in his apartment, doesn’t have dinners with careful conversations that will have to be picked apart. He goes to school, he reads, he eats. He lives.
    I don’t know why he is being watched. But then, I am not supposed to know. He just is, like most everyone is at one time or another, and I am not even supposed to think about it. I am just supposed to listen. To be invisible to him, and report on what I hear.
    I am not supposed to be sitting here watching him look at me. Watching him lean toward me.
    But I am.
    I am, and I wait, hoping for something I can’t even name but that I know. That I have been waiting for all my life.
    He touches me, a feather-light brush of his skin down my arm, a spark I feel even through the roughness of my shirt.
    I don’t mind being cold, or hungry, or sitting for hours and hours. It is familiar, it is the way things are. But this; the way he talks to me, looks at me, and now, the way he’s touching me—those things and the way they fill my heart—
    These things I do not know. I just want them.
    Want him.
    I touch him like he is touching me, tracing my fingers up his arms, resting my hands on his shoulders. His eyes widen, then flutter closed, as if I overwhelm him.
    He is so warm. He has steam heat in his rooms, I have heard their hiss and hum, and I can draw the layout of his apartment, his life there, in my sleep.
    I can’t draw anything now. I am lost, the two of us sliding together, as if the floor was part of