I skipped over to the stairs and beckoned Harv over. I was careful about where I stepped. If I twisted a certain way, I could feel my stomach writhing in an attempt to fix itself. Ivan hadn’t come back yet, so Harv was scheduled to stay under my care. My father decided that I was too much of an insolent child to be raped. My mother concluded that if that were the case, it would have already happened. As I peered behind me to make sure that Harv was following, I saw that he was lugging up both packs of food. Guilt hit me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I learned that Harv was more stubborn than I was when he told me that I was not carrying anything in my condition.

‘Hardly can call it a “condition,”’ I thought to myself as I slid in through the all-too-familiar doorway.

When Harv huffed in, he gaped in wonder. “Books?...”

I beamed at him and nodded with vigor. “Yeah. Neat, huh? I rummaged them all myself.” I placed my hands on my hips and stood erect with pride. Then, I doubled over and coughed from the pain my stomach was exuding.

Harv frowned slightly as he laid the packs down on one of the scarce open areas of the floor. He then picked up a book (The Things They Carried) and held it sideways, letting the pages fall and dangle from the bind.

“Careful!” I snatched it from him and checked the pages and covers over for tears. “The glue isn't that strong…”

Harv tilted his head. He was quite clearly confused. “Why do you have all these?”

I opened my mouth to preach about the marvels of reading when a thought occurred to me: Can Harv read?

I voiced my inquiry out loud and was astonished when I saw his head shake a ‘no’. The thought of a man older than me not being able to read never crossed my mind. I saw his cheeks redden and immediately regretted my question. But it was amusing seeing his embarrassment. “Have you ever even had a story read to you?...” Again, a shake of the head ‘no’.

I sat down beside him and lifted up a book with a boat on the front of it. On the boat was a tiger and trailing behind it in a makeshift raft was a young Indian boy.

“Well, I can read. And it’s about time you heard a story…”

~

Hours later, I had read a few chapters to him. He kept interrupting to ask questions and each one was about something so bizarre, I found myself laughing numerous times.

“What’s an orangutan?” he’d ask. “How did he write this surrounded by water?” “Why is he writing while a tiger is jumping at him?!”

It took me a while to explain that stories are either fake or written after things happened. His long ‘ohhh’ led to me questioning how old he truly was.

Somehow, we got to talking. I learned a lot about Harv that night.

He didn't regret killing Al. He did hate that it came to that, and he knew the stains would forever haunt him, but he didn’t regret it. He told me that Al was a murderer. I learned how their father left them while they were traveling, living the nomadic life and scrounging around through the buildings for supplies in the storm. I learned that their mother disagreed with Al a lot. Al had wanted to kill a small, dying family they came across for their weapons. His mother told him, basically, that that was cruel. Al grew angry. The family managed to live due to their mother dragging them far away. But the mother paid their lives with her own. Al killed her in her sleep.

Well, not quite.

She was asleep as Al drove the metal skewer through her chest, but woke up not long after being impaled. Harv told me that her screams only seemed to encourage Al. The man laughed and spun the stake around to torture their beloved child-bearer. Al demanded that Harv watch or he’d be next. Harv’s last memory of his mother was her screaming out to him to look away and run. Harv was seven.

A year or so later, Al was pointing out a body whose face was half-mangled by animals. Maggots covered the destroyed face and flesh hung in tattered scraps against the skull. Al was laughing heartily and saying that the ‘fucker got what he deserved.’

Harv recognized the other half of the decaying face. It was their father.

Even worse, he was still alive, begging for help. Al kicked the man once upside the head and told Harv that there was nothing that they could do.

Harv grew silent here as if he were unsure of how to feel about the circumstances of his earlier years. He finally folded his hands in his lap and ended with saying that the last few years with Al were hell until a few months ago. When Harv had turned eighteen. He sniveled to himself and nodded.

“He was getting better…” Then he stared at the floor and spun his finger around in circles like he was designing images in the dust. He smiled sorrowfully back up at me and took off my beanie to tousle my hair around. “You’re hungry.” It wasn't a question.

My shoulders sagged at the memory of my punishment. Then Harv dragged the bags over. “They never frisked us. They don't realize that we have food up here. Let’s have a toast. Just you and me.” He pulled two cans of peaches out and laughed.

Harv had slid a pocket knife out of his pocket and cut the tops off the cans, handing the less serrated one to me. He sat there trying to fish the slimy peaches out one by one, but they would slip out of his fingers and back into the sugary water below. I laughed at his failure and simply tilted the can, letting the liquid dribble down my chin and a peach fall into my mouth. Harv laughed and shook his head at me. I didn't care. It worked better than his method.

A pounding of footsteps coming up the staircase caused me to freeze. I heard a gruff, “Holly!” screaming from the lips of my father. Harv leaned forward and snatched the can from me, concealing it behind him and stacks of books. I reached for it in vain as Harv wiped streaks of what remained on my face off with the sleeve of his jacket. His eyes demanded silence, and I was taken aback from this fierce, silent demand of authority. Amidst my confusion, my father burst in and Harv turned to look at him with a passive face.

My father nodded and mumbled something about ‘checking in on me.’ Once he was out of earshot, Harv asked me what he would have done if he caught me eating.

My stomach clenched and I gripped at it, lost in a tormenting nightmare.

Harv nodded and cautiously handed my can back to me. “We leave tomorrow.”