“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” she told him, the tiny boy whose name she didn’t even know, and heard the words clumsy and insensitive and terribly adult from her own lips. Didn’t she remember what it was like to be a frightened child? How useless and lonely it had felt when adults told her there was nothing to be afraid of?
She couldn’t even tell him that. The world blurred by outside the train’s windows. The world stretched out to lines of speed and colour looked like nothing she recognized from the route they were supposed to be travelling.
No conductor, no crackling voice over the speakers, had come to tell them what was happening. She had never seen a train move so sickly fast before, streaks of light outside reflected in the boy’s wide brown eyes.
“Where’s Mom?” he asked. As if he hadn’t watched, same as her, as his mother had disappeared through the door to the next car. Maybe he figured that, if she was going to be an adult with an adult’s stupid, insensitive answers, she should at least know more about the situation than he did.
“She’s looking for your brother,” she reminded him. And maybe she shouldn’t have, maybe it would just upset him more to remember his brother somewhere out there in the string of cars, but she hadn’t needed to be enough of an adult to think of that sort of thing just an hour ago. She’d been sleeping on a bench to herself when a bump and the boy’s high, short, startled scream had woken her, and the music she’d drifted off to hadn’t been able to drown out the moan of the train picking up speed.
Now here she was, sitting beside a boy whose name she didn’t know. Holding her phone like the only real thing in the world, while he squirmed up to kneel on the bench and stare out the window.
If he asked where they were, what was she supposed to say? Would honesty be best, I don’t know, or would that just scare him more?
“I think we’re almost home,” he said, small fingers pressed to the glass, and a shudder ran through her before the rest of the train, before it began to roar faster still.
