Page 4 of Ghost Ribbon

Marco’s laughter faded into a smaller smile. “Hiding.”

“From who?”

He shrugged with one shoulder, the oversized shirt slipping further down. “Everybody.”

I looked down at his hand, following an instinct I didn’t understand, and saw that he was holding something.

A needle.

Not the kind found in a sewing kit. It was a hospital needle, capped, with a small piece of tubing still attached to it that dangled against his wrist. His fingers curled around it.

“Are you sick?”

Marco followed my gaze to the needle, the bright thing in his face dimmed.

“A bit,” he said.

“How sick?”

“Only a bit,” he repeated quickly, the words tumbling over each other. “But I will get all better.” His English stumbled there, rushed and hopeful, as though saying it with enough conviction could make it true.

“I ran from the hospital.”

I studied him, cataloging details: the shadows under his eyes, the translucent quality of his skin, the way his breathing seemed slightly labored even sitting still.

“You ran from the hospital.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because hospitals smell bad.” He wrinkled his nose, his face scrunching with disgust. “And the blankets are bad. They scratch. And the nurses are nice, but they talk like I am already sleeping, even when I am awake. They say things when they think I can’t hear.”

He looked down at the needle in his hand, turning it so it caught the starlight.

“They put this here.” He touched the inside of his elbow where a small bruise bloomed beneath his skin, purple and yellow at the edges. “I took it out. Not very smart. It hurt.”

“That is stupid.”

Marco nodded, entirely unbothered by the assessment. “Yes, I know.”

I expected him to cry. Children his age cried over smaller things, but he didn’t.

“I wanted to see the garden. Papa told me about the lemon trees. He said rich people have trees that make food and they don’t even pick it. They just let the lemons fall and rot on the ground because they have so many they can’t eat them all.” His eyes widened with the injustice of it. “Can you imagine?”

I could imagine many things: the slow destruction of a mind, the exact pressure needed to make someone confess, the way fear looked different in every pair of eyes.

Marco leaned closer, lowering his voice as though sharing a crime, his hand cupping around his mouth. “I took one lemon.”

“You stole it.”

His eyes widened with mock offense. “No. The tree had too many. I helped.”

I looked at the lemon tree above us, its branches full with fruit, dozens of yellow globes glowing in the darkness. One fruit lay in the grass near his shoe, small and bright as a captured moon.

“Did you eat it?”

“I tried.”