Chapter Thirteen

“Rise and shine, you unhygienic delinquent.” Gus leaned over Ben, grinning annoyingly into his bleary eyes. “Please count the number of days since you last bathed and feel my pain as I myself realized it was more than seven.”

Ben moaned and shut his eyes tight against the light coming in from the window. “I realize that a new day comes every twenty-four hours, but do you always have to be so happy about it?” He tried to turn over and put his back to his brother-in-lash, without realizing that Gus was pinning his shoulder to the bed. “Get off me,” he half yelled, half pleaded.

“Whoa there, Johnny Raincloud,” Gus said, smile fading. He straightened up and backed a few feet away from the bed. “What’s got your bonnet in a bundle?”

Ben stared up at the lightening ceiling. “Medias,” he said shortly.

Gus frowned. “The land or the—”

“The mushroom, Gus,” Ben snapped. “It’s a mushroom. Everything in these damnable hills is controlled by that damnable mushroom.” He covered his face with his palms, rubbing the sleep and frustration out of his eyes. “There’s no way to escape any of it.”

Gus was silent. Ben waited behind his hands for a witty comeback or a lazy retort, but he didn’t even hear him shift his weight. After a few quiet moments Ben sat up, swung his feet around to the floor, and stared at them. “Just when I thought things couldn’t go anywhere but up.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Gus asked seriously. It was the first time in Ben’s memory that he had ever said anything totally seriously.

Ben didn’t look at him. “I’m leaving, Gus,” he said. “I know…you don’t know what you’ll do without me and all that, but I have to go. I hope you can understand, maybe someday forgive me even. Or just forget me. That would work too.”

“Okay,” Gus said without hesitation. “Well, do you know where we’re going?”

Ben looked up at him. “What?”

“I mean, none of us has ever been There before; do we know where we’re going or how long it’s going to take to get—”

“What do you mean ‘we,’ Gus? I said I’m going.”

Gus sighed. “Ben. You’re delusional if you think you’re leaving us here. I guess if you want to operate under the illusion that you’re alone, Martha and I can walk a few paces behind you or something, but I really think that’s a little childish, don’t you?”

Ben felt his face heating up. “You want to come with me?”

“You don’t look like you’re in a position where I could convince you to stay, and like you said, I don’t know what I’d do without you, so it seems Martha and I have to go.”

The two boys looked at each other. Even though he was sitting and Gus was standing, looking down on him, it was the first time Ben realized that he was taller than his brother. Perhaps it was because this was the first time Ben had felt as if Gus was treating him as an equal. Gus and Martha were both sixteen, and though they had never treated Ben as inferior, or had lorded over him the fact that they were two years older than him, there had always been an unspoken hierarchy in their home. But here, in this moment where Ben was unwittingly, involuntarily calling the shots, he realized that it had been unspoken because it had been untrue. As much as Ben needed them, they needed him right back.

“So where are we going?” Gus asked after the long silence where Ben had been organizing his emotions. “Do we know a basic compass direction?”

“I don’t care too much at this point. I was thinking…maybe west.” For a split second, he thought he had felt the vines of paralysis creep up his legs and into his throat, but the feeling vanished so quickly he dismissed it.

“West. What’s west?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The sunset?”

“Okay, master navigator,” Gus said, saluting. “So when are we leaving, now that we’ve got our heading?”

Ben slouched. “I…I don’t…I can’t…” He looked up into Gus’ eyes, trying both to hide and divulge the pain he had clung to since his fight with Tess at the catfish pond the night before.

“Hang on,” Gus said, again with his foreign serious tone. “Have you talked to Tess about this yet?”

Ben’s eyes closed and his head bowed. “She…isn’t coming.”

Gus laughed shortly. “Okay. That’s a big load off,” he said jovially. “It would be so awkward with you two and Martha and I, I mean, us being lashed and all and you being…well, whatever you are.”

Sudden anger coursed through Ben. He shot death glares at Gus. “Oh, that’s just fine, make jokes; it’s not like we’re people with feelings or anything, Gus. It’s not like we had a catastrophic argument unlike any other argument we’ve ever had in the…who knows how many years we’ve known each other.” He had stood up and was about to go for Gus’ throat when he saw Gus shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

“Don’t be so thick, adrenaline junkie,” he said, taking a small step back despite his cool façade. “She’ll come.”

Ben cooled down at his tone. “But she—”

“She’ll come.”

“I told her last night—”

“She’ll come.”

“You don’t understand. I’m tearing her in two—”

“Is it just me or is there an echo in here?” Gus asked incredulously. “I’m telling you, Ben, she’s going to come. If you seriously leave she’ll seriously follow you.”

“How do you know that?” Ben asked. They were both standing awkwardly a few feet from each other now, Ben still retaining his fighting stance, and Gus almost falling backwards onto his bed in his attempt to look nonchalant.

“Come with me,” Gus said, turning and walking into the other room. Ben followed him and sat down at the table while Gus rummaged through the sparse cabinets looking for something delicious, or at least edible. “I know that she’ll follow you the same way I can say definitively that Martha will follow me once I tell her I’m going with you.”

“Gus,” Ben said painfully, “Tess and I aren’t lashed. It’s not the same.”

“It is the same,” Gus said. “You and I aren’t lashed, but I immediately said I was going to come with you, didn’t I?”

“You’re my brother,” Ben said. “I mean, you’re practically my brother. What would you do without me?”

“And what would Tess do without you? She’s as much your sister as Martha is, if not more,” Gus said. He had found some apples and begun slicing them thinly. “How many times have you two run into each other without planning it? You’ve told me the stories; I don’t my mediocre education prepared me to count the number of impromptu middle-of-nowhere meetings you’ve had together.”

“But she has a real family too,” Ben insisted. “I doubt they’re going to be as forgiving as you and Martha and allow her to leave by herself, let alone jump on this rapidly growing escape wagon with a bunch of people they’ve never met before.”

“If they’re anything like me, which,” he shined his finger nails on his shoulder, “everyone strives to be, they’ll understand. If Tess has shared half the number of stories about you with them as you have about her with us, they’ll get it.” He put the apple slices on the plate and brought them to the table, sitting down on the bench next to Ben.

“You’re saying, if I had told you back there,” Ben said, gesturing to the bedroom they had just left, “that Tess and her family was leaving and I was going to, you would have let me go?”

Gus bit into an apple, purposefully spraying juice into Ben’s face. “I’m not saying it would have been easy.”

Ben took a slice of apple and bit into it, chewing slowly. If asked last week to predict anything that had happened in the past two days, he certainly wouldn’t have come up with an accurate guess.

“So,” he said after a long pause and about five slices of apple, “do I go and find her and ask her again to come?”

“You could,” Gus said, swallowing his thirteenth apple slice and rolling off the bench onto the floor. “Or you could just leave. If the past ‘who-knows-how-many years’ are any indication,” he said, closing his eyes, “she’ll know you’re going and she’ll find someway to go too.”