Hide

by Kiersten White

What didn’t crumble rusted, and what didn’t rust leaned, and what didn’t lean sagged under the weight of ivy and neglect.

He also once said Come out, come out, wherever you are, dragging the knife along the wall as music to accompany the dying gasps of her sister.

The voice is animated, but the eyes remain untouched by the sentiments or the smile. Expressionless. Like they’re hidden behind something. Mack feels an odd affinity for this woman, alongside an instinctive wariness. But she disagrees. The point of a shelter isn’t progress. It’s shelter.

Mack's thoughts

The woman laughs, a single dismissive burst. “I know it seems silly. The Olly Olly Oxen Free Hide-and-Seek Tournament. It’s a children’s game, for god’s sake. But it’s a chance to win fifty thousand dollars, Mackenzie. You could use that to actually move up in the world. You’re young. You’re intelligent. You’re not a thief, you’re not an addict. You shouldn’t be here.”

No one should be here. They all still are.

Mack lies on her stomach all day, three beams over from Bert, just existing. Patient and empty like the nest. And then when it’s four p.m., she shimmies down and joins the weary throng claiming a cot that will never be their own.

But nothing is ever free.

The last time they spoke—a year ago, maybe?—her father accused her of being lazy, of not working, but the truth is, like everyone her age she knows, she’s always working. She’s just not making a living doing any of it. Yet.

One of her foster families had a daughter who was into meditation. She taught Mack. They’d find Mack at all hours, sitting, eyes closed, perfectly still. “I’m pretending I’m dead,” she’d say. “I like it.” They didn’t. They passed her along soon after.

She expected ATVs. Boisterous shouts. Not near-silent searching. It makes her feel…hunted. She’s not. She can leave at any time. Get up and walk out the gate. No one cares. She’s not hiding because she has to. She’s hiding because it’s the one skill that’s ever done anything for her. “Fuck you, Dad,” she whispers. And she waits.

Ava isn’t a miser with kindness. Mack is. Today, though, she can still afford to be generous. Today she will repay Ava with sleep, so they can be even. That’s all. She just wants to be out of Ava’s debt.

Mack has some issue with owing people. Not sure if that has a purpose or if it's just random info on Mack

“Do you think three people got out today?” Brandon asks, clearing his throat nervously. He looks shyly over at Mack. “I’m glad you’re still in.” She doesn’t respond, and he feels guilty for what he knows about her now. He wishes he didn’t know, because it makes him sad, and it also makes him a little scared, and he doesn’t like feeling either of those things.

Brandon is a delusional whackjob

He’s in his forties, his firm jaw already softened with age, his hairline abandoning his forehead just like his hopes for a bigger life outside of Asterion abandoned him when he was inducted into the inner circle.

I snorted when I read this as it gave me a pitcure perfect image in my mind of said character

Maddie hated spiders. She’d scream bloody murder whenever she found one. But Mack didn’t like killing spiders—the way they shrank in on themselves, legs curling up, sinister beauty reduced to small, tangled waste—so she’d have to painstakingly capture them, carry them outside, and release them. It got to the point where, as soon as Mack heard Maddie shriek, she’d immediately go for a glass jar and a sheet of paper. But the time Maddie screamed when it mattered was just like the scream yesterday. Mack stayed hidden, and her sister was reduced to small, tangled waste.

There was a smell. And it was not the cow; the wind was wrong for that. I have been in trenches. I have crawled through mud churned with the gore of the living turned dead. I know the smell of death. It was everywhere.

It’s the wrong suspicion, but it feels deserved. Everyone should suspect her, all the time. But it hurts, because she wants Ava to believe her. No. She wants to be free of them all. To release Ava to the night, to walk away, to sever the ties and be nothing and no one and just…hide. Hide and never stop hiding. Like the bird in the shelter, up in the dusty rafters, isolated and hidden and safe. She wants that life.

Does she really want to remember her mother’s laugh, if it means remembering everything else? If it means remembering Maddie’s angry face looking up accusingly at her as she took Maddie’s hiding spot? If it means remembering the glimpses she saw as the officers rushed her out of the house? But shouldn’t she remember those things? And the things that came before the blood and the endings? If the people we love live on in us after they die, Mack has kept them buried, and she can’t think about that, can’t wonder what that means about her that her father might have killed her family, but she buried them again and again, every moment of every day.

Ava’s afraid, and Mack wants to hide from it, because holding someone else’s fear means opening her shell even more. Letting her own fear out.

At least he doesn’t have to worry about that with LeGrand. Maybe LeGrand will become his best friend. It doesn’t seem likely—LeGrand hasn’t really been friendly, even if he hasn’t been unfriendly—but there’s a chance. Brandon can imagine it. Becoming roommates. Staying up late playing his secondhand Xbox. Pooling their money for new games. Inviting the girls over for pizza. Sharing the out-of-date snacks he brings home from the gas station.

He is definitely delusional. all these scenarios he is thinking up. it's bananas.

In his head, LeGrand is already his roommate. LeGrand’s weird, sure, but he’s nice-weird. Not mean-weird, like Atrius and Ian.

People pretend things aren’t wrong, even when they can feel the truth, because they’re too afraid of what it means to look right at the horror, right at the wrongness, to face the truth in all its terrible glory.

The presence of an actual monster behind them doesn’t factor into his internal wrestling. He was raised in a world of angels and devils, of gods and prophets and miracles. Why shouldn’t there also be monsters?

He hit their mother, and he hit them, not because he was strong, but because he wasn’t. No one who is strong hits a child. No one who is strong does anything he did.

Ava is so tired of being strong. It hadn’t saved Maria, and it hadn’t saved her own soul, and why should she have to be so strong? The world demanded constant strength from women like her, displays of infinite grace and patience, proof of why they deserved to—