Chương 7: Free Period

The feet came all the way down. Abe kept his eyes shut and his breathing on a four count and didn't move. A girl in the year below went past him on the stairs, glanced at him, and kept going. She thought he was a senior sitting on a step with his eyes shut, because that's exactly what he was. Nobody in this building had ever once looked at Abe Dolan and thought anything interesting. The door two floors down banged behind her. Abe let his shoulders come down. Then he got quiet again properly.

It took him about fifty seconds, and fifty seconds was becoming the ordinary number. The building stopped. He knew before he opened his eyes, because the sound went first. A school is never quiet. This one had gone so quiet that the silence was the loudest thing in it. Abe opened his eyes and looked down the west stairwell of his own school with nothing moving in it. There was dust in the light from the high window. It hung there.

He went down to the second floor and out into the main corridor, and that was where it got him. Four hundred people. The bell had gone about six minutes ago, so the corridor was full, and every single person in it was stopped mid-stride. A whole crowd of them, leaning into a walk, bags swinging out from their hips and staying there. There was a boy caught halfway through pushing another boy, and both of them laughing. There was a teacher with her mouth open and a stack of notebooks going sideways out of her arms.

Eleven of them hung in the air at different heights. Not one of them was falling. Somebody had dropped a pen. It was an inch off the floor. Abe walked down the middle of that corridor very slowly, on his toes, like somebody crossing a room where a baby is asleep. There was no possible way to wake any of them. He did it anyway. He looked at faces. He'd never once been able to do that, because if you stand in front of somebody in a corridor and study their face they ask you what you're looking at.

Nell Mott was frozen halfway through laughing at something. Ellis Naylor had his phone out and his thumb down. Nita Sowerby was carrying her marker, because of course she was. Miles Croft was standing by the window at the end of the corridor with his bag over one shoulder, halfway through saying something to Ellis Naylor. Abe stopped in front of him. Abe had never been able to look at Croft. Croft always looked back, and then you were the boy who had been staring.

Abe stood eighteen inches away from him and looked at his hands. They were ordinary hands with a bitten thumbnail. Abe had spent nine weeks assuming that Miles Croft was made out of something he himself wasn't made out of. Up close, Croft had somebody's hands. Five points of Body lived in them somewhere and didn't show at all. Abe felt ashamed of himself and went away. Abe went past the rest of them and out through the dinner hall. The smell of the day's food was hanging in the air and going nowhere.

Behind the music rooms he found an empty corridor with a radiator in it. Then he put his bag down and got to work. He did six hours. Every other still had been a wet yard behind some trash cans, and having a floor and a radiator turned out to matter more than he'd expected. It was warm. He wasn't soaked. Nothing hurt except the things that were supposed to hurt. He did the holds off page fourteen until they stopped being difficult, and then he did them slower, which made them difficult again.

By the fourth one his thighs were shaking hard enough that he could hear his own heel tapping the floor. He worked the squats. He did the standing sequence twice. He sat down against the radiator and read the manual for a while, because reading it counted and his legs needed the time. Mostly he worked on his head. Marek had said what was wrong with it in one sentence, on Sunday, and then spent the rest of the hour making him fix it. You carry your head like a man waiting to be hit.

An inch higher was the correction. It had taken Marek an hour to move Abe's chin that one inch, and Abe had felt stupid for most of it. Abe walked the corridor with his chin where Marek had put it, and turned at the wall, and walked it back, and did that four hundred times before lunch. Danforth had had his own hour on the same Sunday, and one afternoon this week to use it in. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 2 Foundation: 158 / 900 (Body Layer 3) A hundred and fifty-eight, and it wasn't even twelve o'clock.

Somewhere in the fourth hour he got hungry. There was half a roll in his bag, and he ate it standing up in an empty corridor, eight feet from four hundred people holding perfectly still. He was picking his bag up to go when he saw the cart. It was around the corner at the top of the corridor, and there was a man behind it, and the man was frozen mid-step with one foot off the ground and about nine feet of empty floor between him and Abe. Mr. Vane from the office. Coming this way.

Abe stood very still, which is a stupid thing to do in a world that is already holding still, and he knew it and did it anyway. If he let go now, Mr. Vane's foot would come down, and Mr. Vane would find a boy standing in a corridor behind the music rooms where no boy had been half a second earlier. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Abe didn't know what that looked like from the outside. He'd never seen anybody do it, including himself.

He knew what it would cost, though. That part was easy. There was one dead corridor and one dead stairwell in this entire building, and they were dead because nobody came down them and nobody thought about them. A caretaker who started wondering what Abe Dolan was doing back here would end both of those in about a week. Twenty-one days. Every one of them needed somewhere to stand. So Abe picked up his bag and walked. He went past Mr. Vane close enough to read the list clipped to the cart.

Around the corner, and down the length of the science corridor. He held onto it all the way to the stairwell by the main hall, where forty people were stopped on the steps and one more boy among them meant nothing. Then he let it go. The noise came back like somebody dropping a tray. Forty people came unstuck around him and went on down the stairs, and Abe went down with them in the middle, and nobody looked at him twice. Behind him, three corridors away, a caretaker's foot came down on an empty floor.

Abe got to Biology two minutes late and Mrs. Ferrers didn't notice. He sat at the back and didn't hear one word of it. Starting was never the problem. He had to be calm and alone to start at all, so nobody was ever going to see him go under. Coming back was the other thing. Coming back happened wherever he happened to be standing, and he'd just decided to do it four or five times a day in a building with four hundred people in it. From now on he was going to have to look before he let go. Every single time.

At the end of the day he stopped at the board. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · He'd walked past that line every day for a week and it had been true every time. It was not true now. It had stopped being true on Saturday night, in a yard, behind some trash cans. The board did not know. The four hundred people going past it behind him did not know. There was no way on earth to tell one single person in that building. TOP 10 BY NOV 3, in the corner, in green. Twenty-one days.

Abe stood in front of a wall that said he was the smallest thing in the building. He knew exactly how wrong it was, and he found he was grinning at it like an idiot. Somebody bumped him from behind and told him to move. He moved. The apartment didn't smell like anything much when he got in, and it always smelled like something. June was at the table with her homework out and a complaint already running.

"... and she moved me. For nothing. Donna Petch hasn't stopped talking since September and she's still by the window, and I get moved for asking Donna Petch a question."

"That's an outrage," said Abe.

"It is an outrage. Don't do the voice." Peg was putting the shopping away. Abe went over to help, still being told about Donna Petch, and got about four things out of the bag before he saw it. The bread was the cheap one. It came in a thin bag off the bottom shelf, and Peg had bought it exactly twice in four years, and both of those times had been in January when the heating bill came.

"I'm eating too much," Abe said.

"You are eating what you need."

"Peg."

"You are eighteen and you have started training properly and you are eating what you need." Peg put the tins up without looking at him.

"It is bread, Abe. It is not a hospital bill." June hadn't said anything since the bread came out of the bag. She kept her eyes on her homework. Abe put the cheap bread in the bread box. Then he sat down and ate two plates of dinner, because he couldn't help it, and June watched him do it over the top of her book. When he'd finished, June looked at her plate for a while. Then she pushed it across the table at him without saying anything. There was most of a potato on it and about half her fish.

"I'm not hungry."

"June."

"I said I'm not hungry." She turned a page she hadn't read.

"Don't make it a thing, Abe." So he ate it, and he didn't make it a thing, and neither of them said anything else at that table for about ten minutes. Later he sat on the end of his bed and did the arithmetic properly, because he'd been carrying it around all day and it wouldn't go quiet. Six hours in one free period. There was another free period on Wednesdays. There was forty minutes of lunch every day, and twenty minutes of break, and the four minutes between every lesson if he could find somewhere with a door.

And the bus. Twenty-five minutes each way on the bus, in the back seat, with his eyes shut, looking like every other tired kid on the 41. He added it up twice. Both times it came to more than forty hours inside a single school day, before he even got home. He waited to feel good about it. What he thought about instead was the loaf of cheap bread downstairs, and how much faster it was going to run out now. The more hours he trained, the more he ate. The more he ate, the faster the money went.

Downstairs on the kitchen wall, June's two columns had not moved. Abe lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Riddell paid him fourteen marks a shift, three shifts a week. He'd known that number for two years, and tonight was the first time it had ever looked small. He was still working out how many shifts a week it would take just to keep eating when June knocked on the door frame with one knuckle.

"Stop it," she said.

"I'm thinking."

"You've been thinking since Friday and you look like somebody's grandfather." June stayed in the doorway with her arms folded.

"Whatever it is, don't do it on your own." Then she went to bed. Abe lay in the dark for a while and could not stop doing sums. So he got up, took what was left of the cheap loaf, and went down to the yard. The loaf was gone by about two, and after that there was no point going on. He could not do six hours of holds on nothing. So he got quiet, and the world stopped, and he went for a walk in it instead. Walking in a stopped city was free, and it took his mind off being hungry.

That was how he ended up at the top of Marley Street, standing in front of the little grocer's with the whole street holding still around him. The back door was open. Not much. Somebody had pulled it to at closing and the latch was broken, and it had swung itself back off the frame at some point in the night. Abe walked in, because there was nothing in the world to stop him. He stood in a dark storeroom that smelled of cardboard and onions. There were shelves on three sides of him.

Nobody in Calder knew he was there, and nobody was going to find out. Through the doorway, next to the counter, there was a rack of bread going stale. It had been marked down once already. Tomorrow it would be marked down again, and then it would be the kind Peg bought. Abe put his hand out toward it and stopped with his fingers an inch short. Because that was the problem, and he'd known it since the first night. The bread was part of the stopped world.

The second he closed his hand on it, the world would start again. So he stood in the dark and worked out what taking it would actually cost him. Let the world back in. Pick the bread up in real time, in a live shop, in the dark. Then stand there holding it and get quiet again, which took him about fifty seconds on a good day. Fifty seconds was a very long time to be standing in a room he had broken into. That was all.

Fifty seconds of being calm, and then he could walk out through a stopped city with it and no living person would ever know. Abe thought about June pushing half her fish across the table at him. Then he let the world in. The shop came alive around him all at once. A fridge somewhere started humming. A car went along the Corn Road. The cold got in through his coat, and the room was suddenly a real room, and he was suddenly a boy standing in it who had no business being there. He picked up a loaf.

It was lighter than he expected. He had it in both hands and he was going to do it. He was absolutely going to do it. Then a floorboard creaked over his head. Somebody lived up there. Somebody who came down at six every morning and counted the money in the till, and who had pulled that broken door shut before he went up to bed, because it was the best he could do about it. Abe stood in the dark holding somebody's bread and knew, all at once, that he was never going to get calm now. Not in fifty seconds.

Not if he stood there until morning. He put the loaf back on the rack, in the same place, the right way round. Then he went out the way he'd come in and pulled the door closed behind him, because anybody could have walked in. He couldn't get quiet again the whole way home. So he went past the top of Salt Row in real time, with the wind off the water going through his coat. The chain was off its post, same as always, and eight steps went down into the dark.

At the bottom of them was something a core buyer would pay real money for. Nobody had come. It was five days now. Abe stood at the top and looked down at it, and the difference between the two doors got very simple in his head. There was a man asleep over that shop. There was nobody at all at the bottom of these steps. Nothing down there belonged to anyone, and nobody was going to come downstairs in the morning and find it gone. He got home at four and worked in the yard until Peg's alarm went off.

He thought about the bread for a while. Then he stopped thinking about the bread and started thinking about the eight steps, and that was what he was still thinking about when the sun came up.