No one looked up now. The others because they were bored. Addie because we never again wanted to see.
Addie’s friend had abandoned her for someone who could still laugh. Addie should have gone after her, should have forced a smile and a joke and complained along with everyone else about having to come to the museum yet again, but she didn’t. She just drifted to the back of the group so we didn’t have to hear the guide begin our tour.
I said nothing, as if by being silent I could pretend I didn’t exist. As if Addie could pretend, for an hour, that I wasn’t there, that the hybrid enemies the guide kept talking about as we entered the Hall of Revolutionaries weren’t the same as us.
A hand closed around our shoulder. Addie whirled to fling it off, then flinched as she realized what she’d done.
“Sorry, sorry—” Hally put her hands up in the air, fingers spread, in peace. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” She gave us a tentative smile. We only had this one class with her, so it hadn’t been difficult for Addie to avoid her since last night.
“You surprised me,” Addie said, shoving our hair away from our face. “That’s all.”
The rest of the class was leaving us behind, but when Addie moved to catch up, Hally touched our shoulder again. She snatched her hand back when Addie spun around, but asked quickly, “Are you all right?”
A flush of heat shot through us. “Yes, of course,” Addie said.
We stood silently in that hall a moment longer, flanked by portraits of all the greatest heroes of the Revolution, the founders of our country. These men had been dead for nearly 150 years, but they still stared out at Addie and me with that fire in their eyes, that accusation, that hatred that had burned in every non-hybrid soul all through those first terrible warring years, when the edict of the day was the extermination of all those who had once been in power—all the hybrid men, women, and children.
They said that zest had died over the decades, as the country grew lax and trusting, forgetting the past. Hybrid children were permitted to grow old. Immigrants were allowed to step foot on American soil again, to move into our land and call it their own.
The attempted foreign invasion at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the start of the Great Wars, had put a stop to that. Suddenly, the old flame burned brighter than ever, along with the new vow to never forget—never, ever forget again.
Hally must have seen our gaze flicker toward the oil paintings. She grinned, her dimples showing, and said, “Can you imagine if guys still went around wearing those stupid hats? God, I’d never get done making fun of my brother.”
Addie managed a thin-lipped smile. In seventh grade, when we’d had to write an essay on the men framed in these paintings, she’d tried to convince the teacher to let her write about the depictions from an artistic viewpoint instead. It hadn’t worked. “We should get back to the group.”
No one noticed as Addie and Hally slipped into place at the edge of our class. They’d already made it to the room I hated most of all, and Addie kept our eyes on our hands, our shoes—anywhere but on the pictures hanging around us. But I could still remember them from last year, when our class had studied early American history and we’d spent the entire trip in this section of the museum instead of just passing through, as we were now.
There aren’t a lot of photographs salvaged from back then, of course. But the reconstructionist artists had spared no detail, no grimace of pain or patch of peeling, sunburned skin. And the photos that did exist hung heavily on the walls. Their grainy black-and-white quality didn’t hide the misery of the fields. The pain of the workers, little more than slaves, who were all our ancestors. Immigrants from the Old World who’d suffered back there for so many thousands of years before being shipped across a turbulent ocean to suffer anew in another land. Until the Revolution, when the hybrids finally fell.
The room was small, with only one entrance and exit. The crush of the other students made Addie hold our breath. Our heart thumped against our ribs. Everywhere she turned, we bumped into more bodies, all moving, some shoving each other back and forth, some laughing, the teacher scolding, threatening to start taking down names if they didn’t show a little more respect.
Addie shouldered our way through the room, for once not caring what the others might think. We were one of the first to get through the door. And we were going so fast, lurching past the others, that we were the first to hit the water.
“What the hell?” someone said as Addie scrambled back onto our feet, our knees and elbow aching from taking the brunt of our fall.
The water barely reached our ankles now, but there was no saving our shirt, though Addie hurried to wring it out. No one was paying attention anyway; everyone stared openmouthed at the flooded exhibit hall. This was one of the largest rooms in the museum, filled with artifacts from Revolutionary times encased under glass and period paintings on the walls. Now it was also filled with several inches of murky water.
The guide whipped out a walkie-talkie and sputtered something. Ms. Stimp tried her best to usher everyone back into the room we’d just left, which was connected by a low step and remained dry—for now. Wherever the water was coming from, it was getting worse, spilling over the ground, soaking people’s socks—dirty water that would surely stain the white walls.
The lights flickered. People screamed—some sounding genuinely terrified, others with almost a laugh in it, like this was more excitement than they could have hoped for.
“It’s those pipes,” the guide growled under her breath, stalking past us. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes so bright they seemed almost wild. “How many times have we said to get those pipes fixed?” She clipped her walkie-talkie back to her skirt, then raised her voice and said, “Please, if everyone would just come back around through this room—”
The lights went out, cloaking everything in darkness. This time, they didn’t come back on. But something else did—the sprinklers. And with them, the earsplitting blare of an alarm. Addie clapped our hands over our ears as water sprayed down into our hair and ran over our face. Somewhere in the museum, something had caught on fire.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to get everyone back onto the bus. There weren’t too many other visitors at the museum on a hot Friday afternoon, but enough to form a sizable crowd as everyone poured out of the museum doors, confused and still clutching ticket stubs in their hands, mothers herding small children before them as they went, men with dark stains on their pant legs where they’d dragged in the water. Some of them were soaked through. All of them were complaining or demanding answers or refunds or just staring dumbly at the museum.
“Electrical fire,” I heard a woman say as Addie made our way back to the bus. “We could have all gotten electrocuted!”
By the time we got back to the school, our blouse was still damp and no longer completely white, but talk had turned from the museum flood to the end-of-year dance, still more than a month away. And when Ms. Stimp, frazzled and irritated, turned off the lights in the classroom and popped in a video, a quarter of our class went surreptitiously to sleep, even though we were supposed to be taking notes.
<I hope there’s irreparable damage> I said as Addie stared blankly at the screen. Bessimir was proud of so many things in that museum—those paintings; sabers and revolvers salvaged from the Revolution; an authentic war poster from the beginning of the