Cured
Authors: Bethany Wiggins
To my brother, Mattâchildhood playmate, nemesis,
and partner in crime. Once you even rescued me.
Chapter 1
A person can survive on sixty pounds of beans and three hundred pounds of rice a year. Dinner in the Bloom home tonight is beans and rice for the 365th night in a row. And we ran out of pepper yesterday.
I stare down at my plate of food and frown at the brown bean juice seeping past the scoop of white rice. My empty stomach doesn't even rumble.
“Eat up before it gets cold,” Dad says with forced enthusiasm. “And when you're done, you can bring a plate out to Uncle Rob.”
I open my mouth to complainâ
“And before you whine about the food, think of all the kids who are going to bed hungry tonight.”
I sigh and put a bite in my mouth. As I chew, I stare at the framed embroidery hanging on the wall across the table from
me:
Faith and Hope for the Future
. It is made with purple and red embroidery floss and has white needlepoint lilies with green stems sewn around the words. That's the first one Mom made.
I look at the empty chair below the framed embroidery saying, and my heart aches like it has a hole in it. The chair has been empty for almost a year and a half. Mom says time will make Dean's absence easier to bearâI'm surprised she hasn't embroidered
that
yet. Time hasn't helped. It has only made me miss my brother moreâmade the hole in my heart bigger.
I can feel Dad's eyes on me, and a wave of dread makes my hands cold. I set my fork down and look at him, wondering if he can tell that I am planning something dangerous. He wipes his mouth with a stained cloth napkin. “Your hair's getting too long, Jack. Maybe Mom should buzz it tomorrow.”
I force myself not to sigh with relief and run a hand over my head.
Too long
means my hair is finally long enough to hide my scalp when I am standing in sunlight. It means it is finally long enough to stick up a little bit in the morning when I get out of bed. It means I am a little less ugly than normal.
“She's . . .” Mom clears her throat. “
He
's still good for a few weeks.”
I gulp down another bite of beans and rice and stare at my plate. I won't be here in a few weeks. I won't be here
tomorrow
.
“Butâ”
“No one who looks at Jack will see anything but a boy,” Mom says, cutting off Dad. “Sometimes even
I
forget what Jack really is.”
“Yeah,” Chris says. “I don't remember you
ever
looking like a
you-know-what.” He's eight. I stopped looking like a girl when he was five.
Josh nudges my ribs with his elbow, and the smell of rancid fuel settles around me. He and Steve spent the afternoon siphoning gasoline from abandoned cars and filtering it so it will run the generator. “You've got being a boy down so good I almost expect you to start peeing standing up.” It is meant as a compliment, but my older brother's words flood me with shame. I bite my bottom lip and scowl.
It was the day Mom began embroidering things like
Faith and Hope for the Future
and
Speed Is Better Than Strength
onto spare pieces of fabric and framing them around the house. It was the day I, Jacqui Aislynn Bloom, was seen for the last time in the real world
.
I knew something was wrong before I woke up. The sound was part of my dreams. Muted popping. Distant cheering. It was like the Fourth of July, and I was hearing it from inside my house. Only it was October
.
I opened my eyes and the sounds didn't flit away like dream sounds do when you wake. The deep thump of an explosion rumbled my window pane. I looked out of it, at the pale outline of dawn shining down into the window well and lighting up the glass, and pulled my covers closer around me. I didn't have anything to wake up early for, since school had been canceled for nearly a year
.
Upstairs, feet pounded through the house. Dad yelled. Someone came barreling down the basement stairs and my bedroom door was thrown open. I sat up and blinked the sleep from my eyes
.
Dean, armed with Dad's Glock, stepped into my bedroom and closed
the door behind himself. His blue eyes flashed with worry. “Under the bed!” he ordered, dragging me from my covers by the arm
.
“Ouch! What are youâ”
“Now!” he yelled, making my ears ring. Dean never yelled at me
.
My bottom lip quivered and he glared. I fell to my stomach and clawed at the carpet, squeezing myself into the narrow space until I barely had room to take a full breath, with the bed pressing on me from above and the floor from below
.
“What's going on?” I asked, voice muffled by the dusty carpet squished against my cheek
.
“The gangs have finally made it to the suburbs. They are looting anything and everything. Some of the neighbors are joining forces with us, and we're going to try to keep them out of our neighborhood, to keep our families safe.”
“Why do I have to hide? I want to see what's going on.”
Something popped outside my window, followed by a woman wailing. Dean leaned his face down and looked at me. “Jacqui, they're looting things like food and guns. They're also taking women and girls. We love you too much to risk you getting taken, so just stay put. We're going to protect you. Even if we die trying.”
Dean stayed in my room all day, an armed guard standing in front of my bed. I lay wedged under there until sunset, until my stomach was so empty I thought I might die, until the neighborhood grew silent again. That's when Mom came into my room
.
“Quickly, Jacqui. Come here,” she said
.
I dragged my way out from under the bed like a beached walrus and screamed. Mom's long, thick hair was gone; her apron was gone, her wedding ring, her earrings, her nail polishâall gone. She wore men's clothing
that hung loose over her ample body, and she was armed with the electric clippers that she used to trim my brothers' hair
.
I stared at her peach-fuzz hair and stark scalp gleaming through. She plugged the clippers in and turned me so my back was to her. When the blade buzzed down on my forehead and into my hairline, I threw my hands in the way. The blade caught my skin and nicked it
.
“Mom! What are you doing?” I wailed
.
“Cutting your hair,” she said, yanking my hands out of the way. “It's the only way we know how to keep you safe, so don't fight me! If only you were a boy,” she added under her breath
.
I sucked the blood from my finger and stood stone-still as the clippers buzzed off row after row of my hair, until the thick, dark mass of it was spilled in a pile around my feet. When she finished, I was too stunned to move. All I could do was stare at the thick, glossy, deep-brown hair that curled in smooth ringlets on the floorâthe one thing I had that every girl covetedâand suck on my finger, even though it wasn't bleeding anymore. My head felt too light, and cold air breathed against my scalp. I had been stripped of the one thing that gave me the confidence to go out in the world and ignore the rude things people said about me. Now, I felt naked
.
“Dean,” Mom said, raking my hair up off the carpet with her fingers and stuffing it into the garbage can beside my bed. “Get the size-fourteen boys' clothes from the storage room.”
Dean did what she asked, setting a plastic storage tub onto my bed. Mom opened the container and started sorting through the clothing. She pressed a pair of well-used but clean tighty-whities at me, followed by a pair of jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She rifled through my underwear drawer until she found the sports bra that I had never worn
.
“Put those on,” she said. “Quickly!”
There was such panic in her voice that I didn't wait for Dean to leave. I pulled my purple nightshirt over my head, rolled my underwear over my thighs and down to the floor, and then put on the bra and pulled on my brother's old underwear and sweatshirt. I could hardly get the pants up over my thighs, and then had to suck in my stomach to button them
.
Mom crouched by my feet and rolled the hem of the pants one time. “Better.” She dumped the contents of the storage tote onto my white bedspread, and then took all the clothes out of my drawers and stuffed them into the storage tote. “From now on you are
Jack!
And you're a boy.”
I stared at her back as she hurried out of the bedroom. And then I ran my hands over my boot-camp hairdo and started to cry. Dean came back into my bedroom and wrapped his solid arms around me
.
“It's okay, Jack,” he said, his embrace strong and firm, his voice level. “But you've got to stop crying. Boys don't cry.”
He let go and I looked up in time to see him wipe the tears from his eyes
.
We use the generator for only two things. First, the hair clippers. Because me looking like a boy is my family's highest priority. Second, the treadmill. Because my physical endurance might be the only thing that saves my life one day. Hanging on the wall beside the treadmill is a recently completed embroidery saying,
When in Doubt, Run
.
I peer up the stairs, see no one, and then run past the zooming treadmill to Dean's old room. Josh sleeps here now. I move the small table beside his bed and fall to my knees. The carpet is cool against my fingers. I pinch the fibers and lift.
A manhole covers the cement beneath the carpet. I slide it aside and the smell of damp earth oozes out around me. Dropping down into the hole, I look at the food we have stored down here and my mouth waters. Several cans of dehydrated ground-beef
substitute and cornmeal are mixed in with countless barrels of beans and rice, but we are saving them for a special occasionâthe day my brother comes home. We used to have lentils and barley, too, but we've eaten all of that.
Peering at the entrance to the storage room, I pull three bottles off a shelf and take them out of the storage room. With trembling hands, I replace the manhole, cover it with the carpet, and put the table back on top of it. And then, with the three containers in my hands, I dart to my bedroom.
I drag my backpack out from under my bed and unzip it, cramming the three containers of calorie tablets inside, right on top of my spare pair of boys' underwear, size fourteen, my toothbrush, and toothpaste. Next, I put a water purifier attached to a two-liter bottle inside. When contaminated water is put into the purifier, it is filtered into the two-liter bottle and comes out clean enough to drink. One purifier can clean roughly ninety gallons of water. A person typically needs two liters of drinkable water a day. One purifier should give me clean water for 180 days. I hope that will be enough. Dying of thirst is supposed to be slow and painful.