No Name Trilogy, Book I: No Name

Chapter 5- Jason

What I didn't put together was that Roxie had been planning to escape. She'd been figuring it out for some weeks when she finally attempted to do it. After everything happened, I saw the things I hadn't at first. When she'd been talking to me in the middle of the night, she'd been trying to tell me about her plans. She'd just decided to give it a go. And all of her exercising in the room—that had been her physical preparation for the actual event. It was hard for me to see earlier because I'd been so absorbed in my own thoughts, like my memory loss and Henry, what I'd heard in the office and my therapy session, and Jason's note. Everything was just clouding my own mind so much that I couldn't see what was happening with her. When I did catch what was going on, I wished I hadn't, because it made things even more tense.

It was about a week after my therapy session. I hadn't even looked at Jason since he'd given me that note—not like I'd ever looked at him anyway. I didn't go to any more therapy, but Roxie had to go to hers. So I was just sitting in my side of the room by myself again when something urged me to go to the window.

I'd noticed the barred window the first time I'd awoken. It was divided in half when the wall went down, so both the boys and us had one, and it was made of some sort of glass run through with a wire meshing in addition to the bars. I'd known it was there, but I'd never felt too inclined to look out of it, seeing as the only thing visible was a square of grass below surrounded by walls, which created a sort of courtyard nobody used. Perhaps had the days been sunny, I might have spent some time staring up into a blue sky, but it seemed gray was the only color ever surrounding Oliphant. In any case, I decided to look out of the window at that moment. It was kind of high up, so I had to pull my bed toward the wall in order to stand on top of it. Gripping the bars, I helped myself up to the pane. What I saw wasn't anything more than the other walls of Oliphant, though walls without windows. Could that be high security? It was the first time I'd wondered it.

While I was just standing there, staring at the other building walls and the dark green grass three stories below me, I saw something that shocked me so much I figured I had to be dreaming. It was late afternoon, so the sun wasn't shining high. Shadows were between the two wings of Oliphant. But that didn't keep me from making out the clear figure of a girl slinking along the wall opposite my window. Of course, she was on the ground, but how had she gotten out there? And she was very obviously not a worker--not in that gray sweatsuit. Then I noticed something that made me feel even more anxious: The person down there had a long brunette ponytail. It was Roxie.

I had no idea what she was doing at first. I wondered if maybe she was lost or had been sent outside to do some sort of chore. But as I watched her, I knew that she wasn't outside for either of those reasons. Nobody went outside. Not even the physical education classes. When I realized that, everything started sinking in.

She was trying to escape.

My stomach lurched. On one hand, I didn't care about Roxie at all. She was no sort of friend to me in her up and down moods. Still, she was not on Oliphant's side. She was on our side—the side of every one of us who was stuck in that awful place—and even if she wasn't a friend, I didn't exactly want anything bad to happen to her. There wasn't anything I could do, though. I just watched until she'd skimmed out of my sight, gone to who-knew-where, and then I started to wonder if I'd really seen her at all. Maybe she'd been an apparition, a daydream, a hallucination. For her sake, I hoped she was, because if they caught her, I had a feeling things wouldn't be pretty.

I figured that if Roxie really had been down there, I'd know soon enough; if she didn't return from her therapy, I'd know it. So I sat the next hour or so practically shaking with nerves. I didn't know what to do with myself. If Roxie didn't come back, my whole world as I knew it was shaken up again. I didn't want to be alone with the boys. I definitely didn't want to be around Jason without Roxie, whose volatile nature had kept him off my back more than once.