Thieves Among Us

Clara didn't notice Noah at first. She was four years, six months, fourteen weeks, half a day, and fifteen hours old and her parents didn't know it, but she overheard their entire conversation on those aliens called communists and their wall the night before.

As her babysitter walked her to kindergarten the next day, Clara glared at every wall she saw. However, her day at kindergarten was going off without a hitch: Miss Bee read a lovely story about a fawn and her magic spots and there was applesauce at snack time. But the day unraveled when recess started and Noah built the Wall.

Clara saw the Wall first, and knew it was her duty to destroy it. It wasn't until she flew past him that she noticed Noah was even there, and it wasn't until she started flinging pieces of the dreaded Wall with her feet that Miss Bee noticed them at all.

She remembered that the boy stared at her with eyes wider than cereal bowls as Miss Bee was telling them the rules about playing nice, and she remembered narrowing her eyes at him and sticking out her tongue. Miss Bee started demanding Clara to apologize, and so Clara did.

However, "I'm sorry, stupid," did not seem to please Miss Bee, and Clara had to go in time-out.

When the day ended and Miss Bee stepped outside with Clara's babysitter to "discuss," Clara danced with her dolls.

After walking home and placing a bowl of apples in front of Clara, her babysitter told her that calling someone "stupid" wasn't very polite, especially in an apology.

"But it's true!" Clara protested. "He made it seem like he was a communist; he even made a Wall! How much more stupid could he be?"

Ophelia looked dumbstruck before answering, "Well, sometimes people can't handle the truth about themselves."

Clara kept that in mind over the next decade of school with Noah. In fifth grade, instead of telling him his mud pies were helpless against the cops, she showed him how to make the much more effective grass-and-butterfly bomb, and in ninth grade, when they were working together on grammar, she quietly pointed out his blatantly wrong possessive plural nouns.

When Clara was sixteen, her life began to spiral. It was the anniversary of the disappearance of a boy and a girl, and reporters, detectives, and cops covered Chenekovah, crawling over every surface trying to uncover the truth about the infamous couple. As her would-be friends became eyewitnesses and sold their rumors as "insider information" and as her parents drifted away, Clara couldn't help but feel anchored at a terrible moor.

Everything culminated into a horrendous August night when, after weeks buried upon weeks of nothing, Clara came home to find her room rampaged. The dye she was going to use on her hair splattered everywhere, her diary was ripped and tattered on the floor, and two very upset parents were in front of her window.

Her mother sobbed crocodile tears, her thoughts about what the neighbors would think and how in the world she was going to get dye out of the carpet clearly in the air. Her father was enraged, his screams and threats blowing through Clara like dust.

After they left, she quickly packed a knapsack with her favorite belongings and walked out the garage door. It wasn't until she was already on the train to the circus that her parents noticed she was gone.

She had a plan, a tentative and identity-changing plan that was put into play but shattered in the middle by the stupid Noah. She started making a new plan, started adding Noah into it, but then he scared her with his talk of security and togetherness, so she fled. She had to make a completely new plan after that; couldn't join the circus because Noah would be there, couldn't go back home, couldn't do anything she had thought before. So she made a new plan, a new identity, and fled to another middle-of-nowhere town to make a new job.

And then, she worked at a bank.