Endgame Novella #1 by James Frey

understands now. When he says beautiful , he means strong . Where he finds strength, he sees beauty.
    In this, most of all, they are the same.
    “I was afraid you wouldn’t want this,” he whispers. “Me.”
    She is afraid of how much she wants it.
    Him.
    Their kisses are urgent, their embrace furious, hands and lips exploring uncharted territory, skin warming to the touch, burning with contact, with need.
    Kala has always wondered what it would feel like, the connection to another person, the thing called love, but she has never really understood it.
    Somehow, her body knows what to do.
    After, they talk.
    Not like before, when they talked like everyone else, about nothing. Now, it is like a door has been thrown open. Kala has never even realized that she wanted to talk, to give voice to all her carefully hidden thoughts. She’s never seen the point. But she must have wanted it, because talking with him is almost as satisfying as being with him. Every word is a release.
    They meet every night, and lie together under the stars.
    Everything Kala knows about love she learned from the movies. Or at least from the movies they are allowed to stream on their computers—and the ones the minders don’t know they stream. The minders consider some movies to be good practice for learning foreign languages; the Players-in-training consider it good practice for the life they will someday live beyond the barbed wire of this encampment.
    In the movies, when a boy and a girl lie together beneath a jewel-studded sky, the boy charts the constellations for the girl and awes her with his understanding of the cosmos. Kala and Alad memorized the map of the sky when they were children. For those who know what is to come, there is no beauty in the stars, only danger.
    He cannot awe her. Everything he knows, she knows, and vice versa.
    So they talk about what they don’t know.
    “What do you think it’s like, growing up in a family?” she asks him.
    “Total hassle,” he says. “You’re always trying to make curfew or getting grounded, you have to do the dishes and take out the trash, and I bet you’d get in real trouble if you set off a grenade in the backyard.”
    Kala sighs happily, thinking of the homemade explosives she tested yesterday, which turned an old equipment shed to a heap of ash. “I would miss grenades,” she admits.
    “Besides, they’re sort of like family,” he says. “The minders.”
    She laughs. “They’re nothing like family.”
    “And how would you know?”
    “You remember the day your first minder left?” she asks, and she can feel his muscles tense beneath her fingers. “That’s how I know.”
    By this point, they have been through dozens of minders, some lovable and some forgettable, some who changed their lives and some who seemed determined to ruin them. No minder stays with them for more than a few months—it’s the best way to prevent personal attachments from forming—and eventually their faces begin to blur together. But no one forgets their first.
    When the children are brought to the camp at age four, each one is assigned a minder. Kala’s was a round woman with a stern voice but a ready smile: Hebat, which means “lady of the skies” in the ancient language of their people. Alad’s was Kingu, “the great emissary.” Kala barely remembers this time, but she remembers feeling frightened and alone, clinging to Hebat’s skirt with chubby toddler fists. She remembers how Hebat wiped her tears when she cried and helped her blow her nose when she was ill. Hebat taught her how to speak Persian and Sanskrit, to dress herself and tie her shoes, to brush her teeth and wrap her hair into braids. Hebat read her to sleep at night, and by eagerly looking over her burly shoulder, Kala taught herself to read too. Hebat was her entire world—and then, one day, Hebat was gone.
    Gone without saying good-bye.
    Gone without leaving any word of how to contact her.
    Gone for good.
    Everyone’s first