The Wire Hanger

Chapter Nine

I looked around in panic, trying to figure out where it was coming from, until I realized it was coming from the ID monitor right behind me. My school must have reported me missing – I’d been gone almost two hours – and now I’d been tracked. The other people on the train platform were looking around in confusion, and I saw two Protectors on each side of the platform start walking towards me. I tried to look as confused as everyone else – I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten out of those doors; there were maybe a hundred others – and slipped towards the stairs.

“Everyone stop,” shouted one of the Protectors, and there was some hesitance and some ignoring, while the sea of people jumbled itself around and the train stalled on the tracks. I wedged myself into the crowd, working my way towards the first stair step. When I took a step down I knew I was less visible to the Protectors, amidst the crowd’s shoulders. I took another step and then another, fighting the urge to take off running since I knew it would only make me stand out. But the stairs were long and I wasn’t sure I’d make it. Then I saw a gap in the bridge, where they’d tried to block it out – maybe to keep out the homeless, I’d heard in whispers that this was a problem in the city – but big enough for someone like me to slip through. They’d only been counting on fully grown people. I shoved my backpack though ahead of me – it wasn’t a particularly strong fence, mostly made out of black plastic netting – and squeezed through just in time. On the other side, leaning away from the hole, I heard footsteps thumping down the stairs, their steady rhythm clearly belonging to a Protector.

They sealed off the sidewalks, and it took an hour for them to check everyone’s ID badge. I held as still as I could in my tiny, dirt-packed hiding space. Vandals had clearly gotten in; there were broken bottles in one corner and what looked like a coat hanger spray-painted on the ceiling – the underside of the bridge. I’d seen one from the train’s windows as well, enormous and red, standing out on the wall they built to block out the sound.

Finally they declared it a glitch, and let the train go. “This happens all the time,” one man grumbled as he walked down the stairs. “Last week I was two hours late for work!” I waited until the last person had walked down the stairs, and then I waited another ten minutes just to be sure. I couldn’t quite believe my luck – somebody must have seen me slip down the stairs, and I was afraid they might be waiting for me. But when I finally emerged, there was nobody there, just a single pigeon that cocked its head at me in curiosity. If anyone had seen me, they hadn’t said a word.

I was beginning to think about food, and also the fact that I still didn’t have any idea what I was doing. But that question – along with the question of where I was going to sleep, or how I would ever get back home, and what exactly I would say when that happened – was too big to think about, so I focused on the first problem, which was solved within a block by a small café. The cashier barely glanced at me as she traded my cash for a sandwich, and I sat on a stool near the front window to eat it. The sidewalks weren’t as busy as I remembered them being, but I was in a different part of the city then I had been as a child. Any time a Protector walked by – there were three of them in the first ten minutes – I ducked my head and put my sandwich in front of my face, but then again I was anonymous in my school uniform and scarf.

Now that I’d eaten and gotten my bearings a little bit, I decided I had a plan, kind of. I was pretty sure I was in the general area I should be, and didn’t want to wander so far, so I started walking up and down every single residential street in order. I had always been good at maps, better than Esau who got lost all the time, and as I walked I started to form the grid in my head. Every time I walked under the bridge my heartbeat quickened, remembered the alarm shrieking out, but everything seemed to be going normally. The purpose of my wandering was to look for street signs – I thought maybe there could be a Mapleview street, and the number was the address. And also the stop. Okay, it wasn’t a perfect plan, but as long as I kept my feet moving, I felt like I was accomplishing something.