The Before by Emily McKay Page A

channel was airing the same crap monster movie.
    “Lily, honey, why don’t you sit down?”
    I looked back at Mel, who was staring at the TV, her head cocked to the side, her expression puzzled. She stood and came over to me, taking the remote from my hand. I let her. Maybe she would have more luck.
    Uncle Rodney was still talking, his voice pitched low, like he was trying to talk someone off a ledge. “You girls there alone?”
    “Yeah,” I said. Hadn’t I already told him that Mom wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours? His attempt to soothe me had me more freaked out. Rodney was the reactionary one in the family. Yeah, he was twenty-plus years older than my seventeen years, but I was the one who usually did the calming, not him.
    “Did you lock the doors when you got home?”
    “Yes. Always.” Mom worked late, but she’d drilled basic safety measures into our heads since we were toddlers.
    “You’d best stay in that den where no one can see you from the street. Better yet, your momma still have that TV in her dressing room?”
    “Yes.”
    “You girls gather up some bottled water, some snacks, and some pillows. You go sit in there and watch the TV in there. Lock the doors on your way in.”
    Panic was eating away at my reserve now. I snatched the remote back from Mel. She hadn’t had any more luck than I had had. I flipped through the channels quickly. They were all showing that same footage.
    She looked up at me, confusion written in her expression. “The British are coming. The British are coming.”
    My breath caught in my throat as I turned to stare at her.
    When Mel was young, she didn’t hit all her milestones when I did. That’s how Mom and Dad knew there was something up with her. When she hit three and still hadn’t uttered a peep, that’s when they knew it was serious. A year of occupational therapy later and she was finally talking, but she’d only repeat things other people said to her. Then she finally started talking on her own, but only in nursery rhymes. I put up with years of “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” and “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick” before I ever had a real conversation with my sister. Her mutterings always meant something, but figuring out what was a pain. And, yeah, “The British are coming” wasn’t a nursery rhyme, but it was enough to make my pulse race. The last time Mel did this nursery rhyme thing was when our dad left.
    I wasn’t ready for another five months of nursery rhymes. In those few seconds I’d been focused on Mel I’d let my hand drop to my side; now I raised the phone back to my ear.
    “What’s going on?” I asked Uncle Rodney.
    “There’s been some kind of outbreak,” Uncle Rodney answered. “Some virus or something. It’s bad.”
    I chuckled and the sound was nervous and edgy. I fooled no one. “This can’t be real. Those special effects don’t even look good. This has to be some sort of prank.”
    Uncle Rodney was silent for a minute. When he talked, there was regret in his voice. “If it was a prank, it wouldn’t be on all the stations. It’s real.”
    And it was.

Chapter Two
     
    Mel
     
    Too many people think quiet means dumb, as if saying a lot of thoughts is the same as thinking them. People are always talking at me, trying to make me understand their point of view or their agenda. No one ever understands that their words are all just noise to me. And that their sounds tell me more about them than their words ever could. I’ve stopped trying to explain it.
    That’s okay. I understand. Understand that I’m different from everyone else. Different, not less, my mother always says, trying to make me feel better about being on the spectrum. Different, not better, my father used to whisper, before he left, because he understood—like no one else has—just how different I’ve always been. It’s called the autism spectrum because we spectrum kids are like a many-colored rainbow. Some people only see the rainbow.