The Boy From the Drawing

He's not real. He’s not real. He’s not real. I repeat over and over in my head. I close my eyes, and once I open them, I don’t expect him to be there. He can’t be real. He can’t be real. He can’t be real.

“Lily?” His voice is soft and calm and sweet and gentle and when I open my eyes again, he somehow still exists. It’s him. The fiery, strange, but beautiful boy from my father’s drawing.

“Lily, I –“

“You can’t be real,” I finally manage to say, barely breaking into a whisper. I lift my hand to touch his face, to touch the scars and the stubble that I not too long ago had only seen drawn on a piece of paper. He feels real. His big, crystal blue eyes search my face. He looks as fascinated as I am. He looks real.

“I am, real, Lily,” he says, and when I feel the warmth of his breath as he speaks, I realise just how close we are. I take a step back.

“You know my name. How do you know my name? And how do you know that it’s me, that I’m Lily?”

“Well, firstly, this is your house,” he smirks slightly and closes the gap I made between us before continuing, “and, secondly, your father said that if anyone else saw me, well, they’d scream. They’d run away. But you haven’t. You’re curious. You’re Lily,” his face turns serious again when he mentions my father. I flinch when he says my name this time, because he says it as if he knows me. But there I was a second ago, touching him like I knew him, too.

“I need a minute,” I say, then realise I probably shouldn’t let him out of my sight. I move to the other side of the hallway and take out the drawing again. I look between the version of him on the paper, and the version of him in front of me.

“Your hair. It’s, like, red-ish?”

“It’s ginger.”

“Ginger?”

“That’s what it’s called. Your hair is blonde. My hair is ginger.”

“It’s like it’s on fire.”

“Mhm,” he looks like he’s trying not to laugh and suddenly I feel like I’m the alien. I go back to looking between him and the drawing. I’m unsure what it is I’m looking for, but more unsure on what to say to him.

“Your clothes,” I begin to say, “they’re the same,” I turn the drawing round for him to see. He moves closer to me and takes the drawing in his hand but doesn’t take it from me.

“Yeah, they are,” He smiles initially as he scans the drawing, but then his face drops as if he’s remembering something sad, or important.

“Lily, your father?” He looks at me waveringly. There’s hope in his eyes, as if I’m going to say anything different to what I had before. 

“I told you he’s gone. He’s dead.” He releases the drawing and stares at the floor. I watch his face and realise that this is the first person who seems genuinely upset to hear that he’s gone. As upset as I have been.

“How do you – did you – know him?” I ask. I had been putting this question off, unsure of what kind of answer he could possibly give. He doesn’t answer straight away. I can imagine that this is something he came here knowing he’d have to answer, but now I feel as though I’ve thrown him off guard.

“Lily, I – I’m so sorry about your father. But if he’s gone I – I need to go.”

“No,” I put my hand on his chest as if that would do anything to stop him leaving, “I have a lot of questions, and it seems as if you have a lot of answers. How did you know my father?” I ask again.

“Lily, this is a lot bigger than the two of us.”

“How did you know my father?” I ask, again, and he sighs.

“I think we should sit down for this.”

I walk him through to the sitting room. It’s a small room at the back of the house with one window that he immediately walks to and pulls down the blinds. There are two sofas against each of the longer walls and a small coffee table in the centre of them. I sit myself on one and he sits himself on the other, and I realise that this is the furthest away from him that I’ve been since we met. I do, for some reason, feel comfortable around him. I don’t want him to know that, so I position myself seated upright, with both feet on the floor, and my hands in my lap. I feel like my mother. He lies across his sofa facing up at the wall as if he's come to a confessional.

“Your name, do you have one?” I ask, realising he really could be an alien, and not have a name at all.

“Yes, it’s Noah,” He laughs, and his smile lingers on me. It’s contagious, but I remind myself not to get distracted.

“Okay, Noah, how did you know my father?” I ask again. Instead of answering, he sighs, kicks his legs off the sofa, and pulls something out from the back pocket of his jeans. It’s a stack of folded photographs. He throws them on the coffee table and returns to his relaxed position, looking up at the wall again.

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to what I’m seeing. The photos are grainy and old looking, but I realise that they can’t be that old when I lay my eyes on my father, with his arm draped around Noah, who doesn’t look much younger than he does now. They’re surrounded by a group of about twenty people, all smiling at the camera. I run my fingers over my father’s smile. This is the version of him that I want to remember. I turn my attention to the others in the photo who, like Noah, I have never seen before. I take my time analysing each of their faces. The gruff, long-haired, tall man stood near my father. The small young girl with hair braided down to the floor. The round-faced women with her arms wrapped around her.

They all look completely different, and they all look truly happy. I feel a pinch of envy, but who and what am I even jealous of? There are a few more photos in the stack, most of them are smaller group photos. Almost all of them include my father, and almost all of them are taken in front of a sea of green backgrounds. I was ready to start getting some answers out of Noah, but now my list of questions is only growing. Who are these ‘people’ and where were these photos taken?

“What is this?” I ask, throwing the photos back down on the coffee table.

“My home, my people,” Noah sighs.

“They can’t be people. You really are an alien, aren’t you?” I shake my head in disbelief. It’s starting to throb and I’m starting to think that maybe all those studies we looked at in school on the impossibility of life on other planets had been false and now I, Lily Dean, am sat across from a real-life alien. But, as I’m thinking this, Noah just laughs as if I’ve come to the most absurd conclusion I possibly could have.

“Lily, if either one of us are closer to being an alien, then it’s you.” There’s something in his words that stings slightly, like there’s some underlying resentment behind what he just said. I go quiet again, quiet enough for him to notice. He sits up so that he is facing me, leaning forward with something etched into his face that resembles pity.

“Look, I’m sorry. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. It was always your father that was meant to have this conversation with you and now he’s gone and I’m a complete stranger who you, quite rightly, think is an alien, so you have no reason to trust me or anything I have to say,” he says with a heaviness to his voice. He picks up the photo where my father has his arm draped around his shoulders.

“Your father was always going to have this conversation with you once you were ready. I’m sorry that they got to him before he could.” Anger flashes through me and I stand.

“Who did? These people? Your people?” I spit. Any comfort I felt around him disappears and everything that made no sense starts to make a tiny little bit of sense and as I think I need to find my mother and turn to leave, his hand clutches my arm and once again his closeness brings everything in me to a sudden halt.

“Lily, what if I told you that I’m completely, utterly, truly, and naturally, a human?”

I shake my head aggressively.

“No. I know you’re not. No one has been for over two hundred and fifty years.”

“No, Lily, that’s what they wanted you to believe. Think about it for a second. Have you ever been outside of the Compound? Do you have any idea what really goes on outside the walls?” He spins me around so I’m facing him.

“Look at me. Really look at me. You know deep down that somehow, I’m as real as you are. But I’m not one of you, I’m not some genetic copy. So tell me, Lily, how can that be? How can I be real?” He brushes my hair behind my ear and looks at me pleadingly.

“But you can’t be. You can’t really be human. Because if you are, that means – that means that there’s no plague out there. That means that this isn’t the only way to survive.”

Suddenly everything that added up in my mind starts to unravel. Every puzzle I thought I had pieced together begins to fall apart as if I had been forcing the wrong pieces into the wrong places this entire time. For my entire life. I think about my father’s storybooks because it feels like I’ve stepped right into one. I think about my father and how he taught me art and how to think differently and how this whole time he knew about these other people and wanted me to know one day, too.

“Noah, how did you know my father?”

“Your father found us. He was meant to kill us, but he kept us a secret, and he helped us,” he says, looking at the floor, “and I think that’s what got him killed.”

There is so much going on inside my head that I don’t even have time to process the click of the front door unlocking down the hallway and the voice of my mother as she shouts,

“Lily? Are you home?” By the time I do process my mother’s voice she has walked the length of the hallway and is now stood in the sitting room doorway, staring at me and Noah. I feel him tense behind me.

“Mother, I – I think I know why father died. I need to tell you some things, but they might be hard to hear.” I study her face while I wait for her to say something. She’s never been as open-minded as my father or me. I got the feeling that she always resented that we shared that between the two of us, and not with her. But stood here, staring at me and the stranger behind me, she doesn’t look surprised. She doesn’t even flinch. Then, she pulls out a walkie-talkie from her back pocket, lifts it to her mouth and says flatly,

“He’s here. The boys here. Send back up to my residence. Over.”