The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

bullshit, but it was what they had. A month of planning to send out one broadcast that may not have been received. It cost them Rafa. It alerted the guards to a crack in security that now would be shut. If it didn’t work, they’d have to come up with something else. In the year they’ve been here, they haven’t come up with anything else.

“We wait,” says Carrie. She wants to be the kind of princess who rescues herself, but she’s done all she can. She’s leaped out into the dark, hoping there will be arms to catch her.

Avi watches as Shen pushes through the crowd of protesters in front of Bishop, Emmeline and Viola trailing in his wake. Avi can’t see them, but he knows they’re there. The protesters are here every day, sometimes a handful, sometimes a mob. Emmeline says the handful are the most dangerous. People dedicated enough to show up every day are the most likely to run at you, get in your face. Bishop students never leave the building alone. We travel in packs, for safety, Emmeline told him.

Once Shen’s through the crowd, Emmeline and Viola emerge from behind him. Emmeline’s wearing a new winter coat, slim and dark. Kay must have bought it for her. It makes him miss the puffy purple coat that made her look like some sort of confection. Emmeline spots Avi but keeps a steady pace. She wants to blend back into the city once she’s through, to distance herself from Bishop so she won’t be accosted. When they get near him, he falls into step along with them, waiting for Emmeline to signal that it’s okay to hug her. It happens as they turn the corner onto 59th and find a doorway they can step into. Emmeline squeezes him tight.

“You’re never in New York anymore,” she says.

“It’s hard getting around these days,” Avi says. He hasn’t talked with Emmeline about his break with the Bishop Academy, how it means he can no longer call up Kimani and appear in New York in an instant. Why he’s never the one to escort her out of the building, protect her from the crowds.

“Last week there were lots of them,” she says. “Miss Zavala came out front with us and pushed the crowd apart, like the Red Sea.” She laughs nervously, because she’s leaving out the part where one of the protesters threw a brick into the gap the teacher created and hit Vernon Lister, a second-year telekinetic, in the head. The cut took nine stitches at Mount Sinai. Avi had seen the police report. The cops dispersed the crowd but didn’t make any arrests. There was a bigger crowd the next day.

He never told Emmeline about the detention site, and his e-mails and phone calls to the Bishop staff went unanswered. Louis Hoffman cut him off after that late-night visit. The site was wiped clean by the time he got back there. No sign anyone had been in the warehouse in months. The Trib said they wouldn’t run with what he had, and the Reader said they’d put someone “from the community” on it. To the best of his knowledge, they hadn’t. It’s been over a year, and nothing about it has seen print.

The only person who listened to him was Kay, when he called on Christmas to share Louis’s advice that they get Emmeline out of the country.

“Do you think those people at that school can keep her safe?” she asked. She said things like those people and that school even as she spent her days arguing their personhood in court. Avi thought about the kid who got shot right in front of the academy on Public Day. He knew there was little Bishop or his staff could do to protect Emmeline. But they could, he and Kay. Her in the courts and him in the press, working together even though they were apart.

“Yes,” he said.

They had the same conversation after Kevin Bishop died. Avi was in Revere, covering the barricade standoff from the outside. Kay was in Boston, trying to get the National Guard pulled back by judge’s order. They met up in a bar in Logan Airport after the barricade had been bulldozed, the motions denied, and the stories filed. They both looked like shit and felt defeated. There was an intimacy in letting themselves be seen like that, a veneer of resolve and hope that they cast off only in front of each other. It was like their marriage, the safety in being naked without fear of judgment.

“Should we go?” she asked, staring blankly into her second glass of wine. “Should we just fucking go?” The powerful thing was that if he said yes, they’d leave together. The three of them could be a family again, elsewhere. All Avi had to do was give up.

“We can’t,” he said. He put his hand on hers, and she let it stay. It occurred to him that he should stand up, step around the table, and hold her. Then they called boarding for her flight to Cheyenne. She dropped twenty dollars on the table and was gone.

“You want to have lunch with us?” Emmeline asks Viola.

“I’m going to MoMA,” Viola says. “Now that I’m out, might as well do something normal.” Fourteen to Emmeline’s twelve, Viola is striding awkwardly into adolescence. She’s rail-skinny and newly tall, unaccustomed to the body she finds herself in, and her freckled cheeks are flurried with acne. None of this has diminished her bright demeanor, the positivity that radiates off her. “I’ll text you when I’m heading back. We can walk back in together.” She hugs Emmeline, a show of solidarity, and splices herself into pedestrian traffic.

“What’re you in the mood for, Leener?” Avi asks as they walk.

Emmeline shrugs. “Let’s go far away,” she says. “So far that I can’t see the academy anymore.”

“You having a tough time?”

“It feels like it’s my whole world,” she