As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott

you know what I am. Where I come from.”
    “I wasn’t going to talk to you,” he says. “At least, that was my plan. I was going to say hello, then grab your equipment and toss it into the street.”
    I stare at him, horrified. He would die for that and I—well, death would have been a sweet dream for me. “You—”
    “I hate what this—” He moves one hand out slightly, just slightly, indicating everything, the park, the whole world. “I hate what all this is. But then—” He shrugs.
    “But then what?”
    “You said hello back,” he says. “I didn’t think you would do that.” He looks away and then looks back at me, his grin showing again, but slightly bigger this time. “I don’t mind you watching me.”
    I feel my face heat. “I’m not—I don’t see you. I’m just listen.”
    “Is anyone . . .” He trails off, and circles an index finger around slowly.
    “No,” I say. “No one is listening now.”
    “So if I asked you to tell me your real name, would you do it?”
    “No,” I say, and look straight ahead, at the shriveled grass.
    “What if I asked you if you like oranges? Could you tell me that?”
    “Yes.”
    He grins again. “So there’s one thing I can ask you, then.”
    I stand up, and he does too.
    “I don’t have a name,” I say. “I’ve always been Ava.”
    “And if there’s more than one Ava in the room?”
    “There never is,” I say. “Ava is a crèche name. As soon as you are given permission to change it, you do.”
    “You didn’t.”
    “No,” I say, “I didn’t.”
    When I walk away, he does not follow me, but when I look back he is still there, looking after me.
    The next time I go to the attic—to work, I remind myself on the way there, to work—he is silent for a long time after I get there. I think he is reading, although I am not sure. I report that he is anyway.
    “You never asked for permission to change your name, did you?” he says, breaking the silence, and hearing his voice in my ears is a surprise. He almost sounds like he is here, with me.
    As if he is talking to me, and I know that he is.
    I do not write anything down, and I rewind the last few moments of the recording, noting a glitch, and replace that question with silence.
    Later, the attic door opens, and I turn toward it.
    “I never asked,” I say. “Ava is my crèche name, but it’s also my real name. My mother must have—I guess she knew I’d end up there, and so she called me that. It’s all . . . it’s all I have of her.”
    He walks toward me, not looking at the equipment, or the papers. He is looking just at me and when he reaches me he sits on the floor, and holds out both hands, curled into fists and facing down.
    “Pick one,” he says, and as if we are playing a child’s game, I do.
    He turns the hand I tap over, and opens it. Inside is an orange, small and slightly shriveled, but still bright even in the attic gloom. My vision blurs, eyes burning, and I see Morgan waiting for me, sitting on top of a wall, wearing some strange pants that end at the knees, an orange in hand, a smile on his face. I see him handing me one in the desert, his face gleaming in the sun.
    “I—I saw . . . I don’t know how to explain it.”
    “The weird pants? And the desert, with all the sun?”
    I nod. “What—what is that?”
    “I don’t know.” But I think we both do and there is a deep, charged silence for a moment. For how we are. For how we see each other and it—we see each other all the way through . . . I don’t know.
    He clears his throat. “Anyway, I hoped the yes meant yes, you like them,” he says, and that’s when I know nothing will ever be the same again.
    And that I don’t care.

30.
     
    WAKE UP.
    Everything is gone; the room, the orange, Morgan, and a moment I know. That I remember.
    That changed me.
    Greer is leaning over me, frowning.
    “Wake up,” she says and Sophy says, “Her eyes are open, Greer. I don’t think you have to keep saying