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“God, if you knew what was going on in my head, you’d run so fast. . . . ”
“No.”
“Yes, you would.”
“No,” he said firmly, leaning all his weight into the word, “I wouldn’t. You can tell me anything.”
She continued to shake her head.
So Benny said, “I hear voices.”
He dropped it on her, and for a moment she stopped crying, stopped shaking her head, and stared at him. A twisted half smile kept trying to form on her lips.
“Yup,” said Benny, tapping his temple. “Sometimes I have a real party in here.”
“This isn’t a joke. . . . ”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?” He did smile, though, and he knew that smile was probably every bit as crooked as hers.
“Why haven’t you said anything?”
“Why haven’t you?” Benny sighed. “It’s not like we’ve been communicating that well lately, Nix.”
She sighed. “A lot’s happened.”
“I know, but we haven’t talked about it. I think that’s the whole problem.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Okay, so if it’s not the whole problem, then it’s the doorway to the problem. C’mon, Nix, it’s been a month since Gameland. Since then, what have we talked about? Hunting for food. Cooking. Routes on the map. Which leaves are safe to use as toilet paper. Jeez, Nix, we talk about stuff that just gets us through the day, but we don’t talk about what happened.”
Nix said nothing.
“We killed people, Nix.”
“I know. We killed people seven months ago at Charlie’s camp, too.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t really talk about it. Not in any way that made sense of it, or cleared it. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
She shrugged. “Everything’s weird.”
“After everything that’s happened, Nix, I really don’t think either of us has a chance of being totally sane. I guess ‘normal’ was last year.”
She thought about that and gave a grudging nod.
“Okay,” Benny continued, “but it can’t be good that we don’t talk about this stuff. We never really talked about your mom and what happened.”
Nix turned away.
“And . . . that’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “I even start to mention it and you lock up. That can’t be the best way of dealing with—”
“What kind of voices?” Nix interrupted.
“It . . . used to be what I guess you could call my ‘inner voice,’” he began slowly. “It was like me, but not me. It was smarter, you know? It knew about stuff. It’s hard to explain.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“All kinds of stuff. Even how to talk to you.”
