Free This Is the Night by Jonah C. Sirott Page B

here. She’d know. Her mom was actually Homeland Indigenous, you know.”
    “Yeah,” Lance mumbled. “If only Terry were here.” Lance had never met what he considered a real Homeland Indigenous, and he doubted Lorrie had, either. He distinctly remembered Terry telling him it was not her mother who had been Homeland Indigenous but her grandmother. Maybe half.
    “But why now?” Lorrie said. “I mean, look at these numbers.” She pointed to a paragraph near the bottom of the article. “Why would they sign up now, twenty-two years in, with higher casualties than ever before? It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
    Lance agreed with her, but all her wondering convinced him that she couldn’t even put her thoughts in the right order anymore. They were, he saw, truly breaking apart. She had invisible bugs—he had seen her sneak three furtive scratches in the last four minutes—and with the afternoon character of the water blue and calm, all she wanted to talk about were Homeland Indigenous. In front of them, the tide pushed lower, leaving a pale white film on the sand. This, Lance knew, was a brush with the worst kind of trouble: Lorrie could wonder at the problems of people she had never met, but she could not look down at the scabs on her arms and the mutilated skin on her ankles to wonder why the marks were there, and then think further and recognize that they shouldn’t be there at all.
    All the Foreign books stayed in Lance’s bag.
    Lorrie checked her watch.
    “What is it?” Lance asked.
    “The laundromat, the hot one, last wash is at eight. I thought maybe we could get a load in.”
    “After coming all this way, you want to leave so we can get a last load of already clean sheets in?”
    Turning away, Lorrie edged to her side of the blanket.
    “Are you serious?”
    Lorrie shrugged.
    A low, heavy quiver spun and hissed its way through his body before exploding in an outburst of indignation. “We washed a load yesterday and the day before that! I drove us all the way out here, to our favorite place, I packed us a fucking picnic, and still you can’t think about anything else but those stupid sheets.”
    “Forget it,” Lorrie said softly.
    “No, no. That’s what you want?” Lance sprang to his feet. What did she know about trouble? He was in the crosshairs, he was the one who would be gathered up to die. Couldn’t she see that? Of course not. She was too worried about herself, her imaginary fucking bugs.
    “I said never mind,” Lorrie said.
    “No, no. It’s me.” Above them, a stack of clouds traveled through the air, blotting out the sun. “I’m sorry for trying to make you feel better. For navigating the craters in the road, for making us sandwiches, for bringing some books I thought you might want to read. Please, by all means. Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed their bag of blankets, books, and sandwiches and tossed it toward her, a little harder than he knew was necessary. He had thought Lorrie was facing him, but as the bag sailed through the air, he saw that she had turned away. With his mind simmering, Lance said nothing, called out no warning, instead watching as time slowed down and the abundantly beautiful face of Lorrie spun once again toward him, the bag slamming into her cheek as she did so.
    On the drive back, Lance accelerated past Veterans Beach as fast as he could—potholes be damned—and as his foot pressed down against the hanging pedal, he saw Lorrie make the smallest flick on the tip of her nose. Just the beginning. In two minutes, he knew, she would be pawing at it furiously with her fingernails. It was the first time Lance started to wonder about her parents. Who were they, and what did they need to know?

5.
    The blackout is over, and the lights have come back on in Alan’s cell. How many more hours until they release him? Four years ago, the first thing he noticed upon arriving at the School was how far it was from everything, so private and lonely that not