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“Thanks,” Connor says, glad that he didn’t tranq the guy—although he’s still furious at Beau for switching guns.
Connor slips out, and the tech gets to cleaning the mess of broken vials on the floor, happily whistling to himself.
“A lot of people want to stop unwinding,” the lab tech said. It’s not the first time Connor has heard that. Maybe if he hears it enough, he might begin to believe it.
21 • Risa
The ride home from the hospital is a triumphant one. They play music that makes them feel cocooned in normality. Even though it’s an illusion, Risa’s happy for a respite from being “the one and only Risa Ward.”
Connor tells her and Beau about the fanboy lab tech. Connor seems to preen a bit in the light of it, but Risa has always found herself painfully out of her element when faced with such adulation. She never wanted to be some sort of counterculture heroine. All she wanted was to survive. She would have been happy to stay at Ohio State Home 23 playing piano, graduating with unremarkable grades, and then being dumped at eighteen into the grand mosh pit of mediocre mankind, like all other state wards. Maybe she could have gotten herself into community college, working her way through with some service job. She could have eventually become a concert pianist, or, more realistically, a keyboardist in some bar band. It wouldn’t be ideal, but at least it would be a life. She could have eventually married the unremarkable guitar player and had some unremarkable kids, whom she would love dearly and would never even think of storking. But her unwind order severed all ties Risa had to the hope of a normal future.
Thoughts of a guitar player bring her musings around to Cam. Where is he now that Proactive Citizenry has him in their clutches again? Does she care? Should she care? What a mixed bag of connections she has. . . . It’s as if her whole life has been rewound with the strangest bits and pieces of humanity, from Connor, to Cam, to Sonia, to Grace and all the odd acquaintances in between.
There’s no telling what her life will be like a day from now, much less a year from now. That’s the best argument for living in the moment, but how can you live in the moment when all you want is for the moment to end?
“You look sad,” Connor comments. “You should be happy—for once we did something right.”
Risa smiles. “We do a lot right,” she tells him. “Why else would random people want to shake our hands?” Or, she thinks, kiss us, and she throws a chilly glance back to Beau in the backseat, who plays the air drums, completely oblivious. Connor hasn’t asked about Beau’s black eye. Either he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t want to know. Risa wonders how many girls have thrown themselves at Connor in a similar way, and finds herself pleasantly jealous at the very idea. Pleasantly, because Risa has what those nameless girls could only grasp at: the Akron AWOL all to herself.
Maybe this is better than her dream of normal. Living a high-octane, on-the-edge sort of life has its perks. Namely, Connor.
“Hey, you know that Upchurch dude, right?” Beau asks between drum solos.
“Who?” asks Risa, having no clue what he’s talking about.
“You know—Hayden Upchurch. The guy who gave the news a mouthful when he got caught at the Graveyard.”
“Oh,” says Risa. “Hayden.” She had never known his last name—and by the look on Connor’s face, he never had either. A lot of Unwinds tried to erase their last name in defiance of parents who tried to unwind them. In Hayden’s case, he probably avoided it because it was so easily made fun of.
“What about him? Risa asks, looking nervously to Connor. “Did something happen to him?”
“No—he’s just shooting off his mouth again.”
The next song starts, and Connor turns the volume down. “How do you know that?”
“Back in the basement, Jake was fiddling with that old computer Sonia lets us use down there, and he says there was something up on the Web. He tried to find it again to show me, but it was gone. He said Upchurch was calling for a teen uprising, like he did when he got caught. I’m thinking it might happen.” Beau considers it for a moment more. “If it does, I know a whole lot of kids—not just the kids at Sonia’s, but kids back home, too—who’d follow me into battle.”
“More likely off a cliff, like lemmings,” Connor says.
“Careful,” Beau warns, and he pulls out the pistol he had taken from Connor, “or I might tranq you with your own gun, like you did to that Nelson guy.”
Risa sees Connor’s face go stony, and his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. She touches Connor’s leg to get him to relax. To remind him it’s not worth it.
“Put that thing away,” Risa orders Beau, “before you accidentally shoot yourself.”
“Best thing that could happen,” says Connor, with a deadpan delivery that could take the bounce out of a basketball. Then he softens. “But I’m glad to hear that Hayden’s okay. That is, if it’s true.”
If Hayden’s really AWOL again, hiding out somewhere and calling for kids to take matters into their own hands, Risa wonders how many will be moved to action. There are stories about the first uprising. “Feral” kids took violently to the streets after the school failures. They wreaked havoc coast to coast, spreading terror and fear enough to make unwinding sound like an answer to all their problems. Anger with no direction.
Once the Heartland War ended, no one really spoke about the days leading up to the Unwind Accord. Risa suspects it’s more than just bad memories. If people don’t think about it, then they can deny their complicity in ongoing institutional murder. Well, thinks Risa, we’ll make people remember . . . and we’ll give them a path to penance.
It’s as they reach the outlying neighborhoods of Columbus that Connor veers out of their lane, nearly slamming into a pickup truck next to them. The guy leans on his horn, gives them the finger, and shouts curses at them that they can’t hear but that are easily read on his lips.
“What was that about?” Risa asks, realizing that Connor was distracted when he veered out of their lane.
“Nothing!” snaps Connor. “Why does it have to be about anything?”
“I told you I should be the one driving,” says Beau.
