A Broken Fence 2
“My mom’s gonna kill me,” Caleb said after a little while.
Sam flinched. “I could -“
“Oh, no, not literally,” Caleb said quickly. “She’ll just be mad I ran off.”
In her head, Sam moved the block that said “angry” away from the block that said “pain”.
“Are you okay?” Caleb asked. “Does using your magic make you tired or anything?”
Sam shook her head. The cave had been a bit of a puzzle, but once she’d figured it out it didn’t take much energy.
Caleb sighed, poking the fire with a stick. “Guess we lost Hamlet anyways.”
“Hamlet?”
“The horse. Hannah named it. It’s from an old play, I think.”
“Huh.”
An awkward silence followed. Now that the adrenaline passed, Sam was realizing that Quinn and Emily would probably be mad at her for running off.
“You sure you’re okay?” Caleb asked. He reached a hand towards her, and Sam instinctively flinched away.
“Sorry, I -“
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I should have asked.” He leaned back against the snow. “I don’t like when strangers touch me either. It’s just been a while since someone was a stranger.”
It wasn’t the reaction Sam was expecting, but then she’d rarely been right in her predictions about the people here. No one acted the way she was used to. It was confusing, and a little disturbing. Sometimes it made her angry, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.
Caleb seemed to interpret her silence as an invitation to keep talking. “You know, before things got really bad, we had a little school in the old elementary. Just one classroom, not a lot of kids went. But the ones that did decided that for some reason I was a problem. Not sure why, honestly. They never bothered Mariah. Never really got along with other kids after that, even when they were nice.”
He sighed, reaching out to lazily poke at the fire again. “You’d think the world falling apart would make people nicer to each other.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
He gave her a strange look. “Isn’t it easier to work together? You get to share the load.”
“But what if people don’t do what you want?”
“You talk it through, I guess. When we fight at home, Mom always makes us sit down and talk it out.”
“But what if they still won’t do it, and it’s really important that they do?”
Caleb shrugs. “Sucks to be them, I guess. I don’t know. You figure something else out.”
“Or you make them.” Sam watched Caleb’s expression very carefully.
He gave her that weird look again. “What, at gunpoint? That’s a sh- a crappy thing to do.”
“But it would be easier.”
“But it’s wrong, Sam.”
She felt the need to argue. “Why?”
Caleb frowned, closing his eyes for a moment. “It just is. Hurting other people is a bad thing to do.”
“Says who?”
“My mom? The Bible? Did nobody teach you morals, Sam?”
“No.” Sam didn’t know what morals were. It was one of those abstract words no one ever bothered to explain.
Caleb groaned, eyes closed once again. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
Sam wanted to snap back, but a distant rumble in the ground made her pause. She listened close. The sound was muffled by the snow, but she could just make out the grumble of an engine.
Sam ducked out of their makeshift shelter and peered over it. Coming around the corner was Paul March’s pickup truck.
“What is it?” Caleb asked.
“Your dad.” Sam climbed up the snowbank, sliding and sinking as she went. She waved one mittened hand at the truck.
It slowed to a stop in front of her as she waded through the deep snow to the road. She could hear from his footsteps and muttered curses that Caleb was just behind her.
“Saw your smoke!” Paul called as he got out of the truck. “Good thinking.”
“Don’t compliment them,” Emily grumbled, appearing from around the passenger side. “They’re in trouble.”
“We lost the horse,” Sam told them, looking down at her feet. “Sorry.”
Paul sighed, hand on the back of his neck. “We can get a new horse. We can’t get a new Sam.”
Sam blinked at him.
“Think before you run off, is what he meant to say,” Emily said. She wrapped another scarf around Sam’s shoulders. “You okay? You didn’t get too cold?” Sam shook her head.
“Sam dug a whole igloo into the snow,” Caleb said. Sam was surprised by his tone - it sounded a bit like he was bragging. “She dried out a bunch of firewood so we could actually light the fire.”
“Did you?” Emily said, looking at Sam. She pressed her gloves hands against Sam’s cheeks, and the warmth stung as Sam realized how frozen her face was.
“We can talk it all out at home,” Paul said. “Kids in the back.”
Sam huddled in Emily’s giant scarf as the pickup took them home. It wasn’t half as far as she expected, but then running in snow was a lot harder than on plain ground.
The Marches dropped her and Emily off at their doorstep, then continued across the cul-de-sac for home.
In a bewildering flurry of activity Sam was settled by the fire with a hot water bottle, covered in blankets and sipping hot tea. Quinn had judged her “not hypothermic”, to Emily’s great relief. Sam had only a vague idea of what hypothermia was, but she knew it was bad, and you were supposed to warm people up very slowly if they had it.
Quinn sat down in the armchair and crossed their arms. “Why’d you do that?” they asked.
“The horse ran away,” Sam said. It seemed fairly obvious.
“So you chased it four k?” Quinn sighed. “You could have frozen to death if Paul hadn’t found you.”
Sam looked out the window. As Caleb had predicted, the blizzard had gotten worse. All she could see was whirling snow. “Sorry,” she said.
Quinn and Emily looked at each other, before Emily sank into the couch beside Sam. “Just don’t do it again,” Em said. “You had me worried sick.”
Sam cocked her head, confused.
Emily sighed (why was Sam always making people sigh?). “Baby girl, I care about you. We care about you,” she said, gesturing at Quinn. “We don’t want you to get hurt.”
The look in Emily’s eyes and the feeling she was explained was so big it was overwhelming. Sam broke eye contact and turned towards the wall, burrowing into her blankets. She’d put that one away for later. When she wasn’t quite so tired. She felt Emily tuck the blankets around her as she drifted off to sleep.
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