Finally I was covered up, which was much better than not being covered up. The fabric instantly began to stick to the places that were bleeding, and I pulled and plucked at it so it wouldn’t fuse to the scabs.
Bruiser leaned against the door and crossed his arms. “What’s your name?” he tried.
“What do you care?” Slowly I let myself slide down the wall until I was sitting. Bruiser did the same thing, sitting with his back to the door. Like I would even think about trying to get past him.
“Did you want to fight?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said wearily. “I get a kick out of it.”
“Well, I didn’t,” he said, looking away. “I hate fighting. My vocation was to be a house-builder. That’s what I wanted to do. But they took me and put me here and they make me fight.”
Now I looked at him. His brown hair was about a quarter of an inch long. He had brown eyes that seemed warm now, but in the ring they had been cold and hard. With pleasure I noticed a bruise on his cheek and a scrape on his face. I had done that.
“Congrats. You’re awfully good at it,” I said.
“I have to be,” he said. “I pay if I’m not. When I first came here, I refused to fight.” He held up his left hand. Two of his fingers had odd angles to them, as if they’d been broken and not set. “They convinced me.”
I didn’t know what to think. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he wasn’t. He could be a spy. Or he could be just a kid, like me, who was in the middle of a heinous situation through no fault of his own.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Four months.” He looked bitter. “I guess I’ve lasted so long because I’m entertainment in the ring. Most kids don’t last this long.”
“They really do execute people here?”
Now his eyes looked sad, almost haunted. “Yeah,” he said. “All the time.”
27
“BECCA!”
“Mmmph,” I mumbled.
“Becca! Wake up!”
“Five more minutes, Ma,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut.
“I’m not your ma,” someone said, and I opened my eyes. The ceiling above me was unpainted cinder blocks. In one horrible second, it all came back to me: I was sleeping on a floor in prison. My jaw ached where I’d lost a tooth to my pal Tim. Ma hadn’t woken me up for school in three years.
Right then I hated reality so much.
Blinking a couple more times, I focused on the friendly face above me. Robin. It was still dark in our prison block, and there were no sounds of movement or activity.
“Robin,” I whispered. “What’s up? What time is it?” It felt like only minutes since I had been escorted from the pen back to my prison room, where I had promptly passed out.
“It’s two thirty,” she said apologetically. “But they’re going to be coming for you soon, and I thought it’d be better if you were on your feet.”
“Who’s coming for me?” I said, scrambling to stand up. Pain after pain assaulted my sleep-deprived brain as every bruised muscle strained to hold me upright. I swallowed moans and groans and tried to control my breathing.
“You said you’d done badly on the tests,” Robin whispered, patting her bunk next to her. I shook my head; if I sat down, I’d never be able to get back up. Not without crying. “And you got beaten in the ring.”
It was a kindhearted understatement, and I nodded again.
“When that happens, they put the kid through lessons and training,” Robin went on. Her head turned involuntarily, as mine did, when we heard the doors at the end of our block screech open.
“More lessons, more training,” Robin went on in a whisper. “Starting now.” Quickly she lay down on her bunk and pretended to be asleep. Heavy footsteps marched toward me, getting louder and louder. When the guards reached my room, I was standing there, awake and clear-eyed, looking at them calmly.
They seemed startled, disappointed—no doubt they’d been looking forward to hauling me up from the floor and dragging me down the hall.
“Let’s go!” one guard said roughly, and she yanked my hands behind me to put handcuffs on my wrists.
I kept my balance, walking quickly between them, and amid the almost detached awareness I had of every single cell in my body screaming in agony, I thought: Thank you, Robin.
28
SCHOOL, FOR ME, WAS MOSTLY about seeing my friends. If any facts and figures filtered into my awareness, well, that was just a bonus.
School all by myself at 2:30 in the morning was not a situation guaranteed to bring out my good side.
“Sit!” A woman—not the Strepp, but definitely of the Strepp breed—frowned at me and pointed to the rows of desks. I chose one and sat down.
“Your math scores were abysmal!” she snapped, pacing at the front of the room. “Since your English scores were also bad, I’ll explain that abysmal means very low! As if they’d been found at the bottom of an abyss!”
I nodded, wondering how the hell I was going to stay awake through this.
“Now tell me,” she went on, “what kind of word is abysmal?”
This had “trick question” written all over it. “Um, depressing?” I guessed. “Or… embarrassing?”
A vein in her neck started throbbing, and her face got red. If she had a heart attack, it would definitely perk me up for several minutes.
“No!” she shouted, and threw a marker at me. It glanced off my shoulder and fell to the floor with a clatter. “What part of speech is it?”
Part of speech—I’d definitely heard something like this before. Verb? No. I tried to channel Cassie, who would be trotting out this info like there was no tomorrow. Verb, adverb, present perfect, no—
“Adjective!” I said.
The teacher nodded reluctantly, then started writing on the whiteboard, stuff about nouns and pronouns, blah blah blah. A couple of minutes later she must have noticed my eyelids drooping because she suddenly yelled, “Give me thirty!”
“Thirty what?” I asked.
“Thirty push-ups, right now!” she shouted, pointing to the floor. “Drop and give me thirty. That will help you stay awake.”
Well. Push-ups are actually really, really hard, even for a farm girl. Push-ups when every muscle was already close to its breaking point are just crazy. But she had a fervent, take-no-prisoners expression, and I got down on the chilly linoleum floor. My arms were shaking after ten. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I gritted my teeth as I somehow got out another five.
After twenty my arms felt like noodles, and at twenty-two I paused, panting.
Thwack! I yelped and bolted up as a thin wooden cane whipped the backs of my legs.
“You’re weak!” the teacher yelled in my face. “Let’s see if this will help.” She nodded at the guard, who kicked a board in front of me. A board covered with fine, sharp nails. Pointing up.
“Now finish those thirty, before I change my mind and ask for fifty.”
Oh, my God. Slowly I lowered myself right above the board. My arms shook and the sweat on my face was as cold as pond ice. If I fell, if my arms didn’t hold me, I would be a Becca-kabob in about two seconds. Shit.
Okay. Goddamnit. Goddamn this stupid freaking place to hell, I screamed inside my head as I grimly pushed back up. I hate these freaking assholes! I hope they all burn in hell forever! I hope they all get run over by a disk tiller!
I lowered myself carefully again and again, trying not to look at the sharp nails right below me. These assholes would get churned right into the ground! I would drive the disk tiller! I’d be laughing! I’d love to see their terrified faces getting sucked beneath the tiller’s churning blades! These scum-sucking goddamn sons of bitches, yellow-bellied shitwads, stupid douchebags!
Annnnnd, that was thirty. My chest heaving, I sat back on my heels and looked at the teacher. Her eyes narrowed, and all I wanted was to shoot the bird at her.
Without a word she turned back to the whiteboard. She wrote “Active Voice” and “Passi
ve Voice,” and drew a line beneath them. Determined not to cry, I practically crawled back to my desk and took my seat.
29
THAT WAS HOW IT WENT for the rest of the night. After the English teacher with anger issues, there was a guy, then another woman, then a guy. They had clearly been recruited from some asylum for the criminally insane, and lectured at me about various types of math, more language and writing, and a couple of different sciences. When I looked the slightest bit less rabidly alert, they made me do heinous physical training.
Math, then a hundred sit-ups. I almost threw up after those. Chemistry, then jumping rope for fifteen minutes. Again, nausea inducing. More push-ups, and let’s just say they did not end well. Physics, then punching a heavy bag, which was the most fun I’d had since I got here. I worked out a lot of aggression, slamming the bag again and again until my knuckles bled.
By 8:00 in the morning I was seriously fatigued and starving—but the fun really began when Ms. Strepp showed up. And by “fun” I mean a soul-crushing nightmare of pain and fear. Turned out those were all just practice classes, practice warm-ups. She had a whole program of her own, and she was eager to get started.
As soon as she wrote, “I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it, when everyone else walks off and leaves it.” - Margaret Thatcher, I knew I was in for a rough time. Who asked this Margaret Thatcher, anyway?
Finally, at dinnertime, Strepp let me go. “You’re a disgrace,” she said sharply. “You’re one of the worst kids I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot.”
It was amazing, but I managed not to scream back at her. Somehow I staggered toward the mess hall, almost delirious. A tiny buzzing sound filled my ears and I shook my head to clear it. The buzzing was still there. Blinking wearily, I looked up and saw evidence that the outside world still existed: a dragonfly. My dragonfly. It was a tiny harbinger of freedom, and I suddenly loved it fiercely—this insect who could come and go at will.
“Hope,” I murmured to it. “Your name is Hope.” I smiled as it flitted away.
“Becca!” It was Vijay, looking concerned. It was the first instance of empathy I’d seen all day, and it almost destroyed me. “Go sit down,” he said. “I’ll bring your tray.”
Diego pulled out a chair for me. I sat down so hard I almost tipped over. Robin and Merry were already eating their watery bean soup and wilted vegetables, and gave me furtive, understanding smiles. Nobody said a word about the hundreds of pinpricks in the front of my jumpsuit, each one outlined by blood.
I was too tired to eat, could barely feel my hands. My four friends—and they had become my friends—took turns carefully pushing food into my mouth, funneling water into me. Amazingly, the food and water revived me, and after a while I took my own spoon and finished the meal myself.
“Thanks, guys,” I managed.
Robin looked apologetic. “I wish you could go back and just sleep,” she said. “But we have to read this tonight—all of us.” She held up a battered paperback book. It was called The Beautiful Struggle by someone named Ta-Nehisi Coates.
“Oh, just kill me now,” I moaned.
Merry shook her head. “If only it were that easy.”
30
“LET’S GO OVER THE PLOT again.” Diego’s voice was barely audible—his face was buried in his arms as he stretched out on his bunk.
Robin made a fist and punched his leg.
“Ow!” he said, raising his head.
“I told you not to lie down!” she said. “You can’t fall asleep now!”
“I’m paying attention!” he protested.
The rest of us—Merry, Vijay, and me—watched this play out. It was late; we were all wiped. I, in particular, was a quivering mass of sore muscles and mental exhaustion.
But Robin said this book was important. She said we’d be tested on it. In two short days, I’d learned not to doubt Robin—not ever.
“We’ve read this book before,” she explained to me. “When we talked about it in class, Strepp exploded. She said we’d misunderstood everything, that we’d missed the whole point of it. So we’re rereading it. Trying to figure it out.”
I leaned back against the cool cinder-block wall. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It’s written like it really happened, and it says ‘Memoir’ on it. But it’s like, totally made-up. A totally made-up world.”
Robin nodded. “I know. That’s what we said. Strepp says we’re wrong.”
“Where’s his cell?” I demanded. “What was his vocation? Not a single person in that whole book was contributing to the United! And what kind of cell name is Bal-ti-more? It’s ridiculous!”
For a second I flashed on my twin calling me Ridiculous Rebecca, and my throat closed up. Cassie. Would I ever see her again?
“Maybe it took place in the past,” Vijay suggested. “Just… somewhere else.”
I looked at him, seeing the intelligence in his dark-brown eyes. It hit me: All these kids were smart. Every one of them would be assigned higher schooling, or some brainy kind of vocation. Why were they here? Why were any of us here?
“Maybe it’s a cell just for bad citizens,” Merry said.
“Oh, God, who knows?” I almost wailed, and closed my eyes just for a moment.
“Uh-oh—sorry, guys,” said Diego, lunging to our one open toilet.
“No, Diego, no!” we all yelled, but it was too late. There was a horrible squishing sound, like a hog rolling in mud, and then our small space was filled with a noxious stench much worse than when Cassie and I found Mrs. Simpson’s dead cow. So much worse.
I clapped my hand over my nose and mouth. Vijay desperately pressed his face to the metal bars, trying to suck in clean air from the hall. It was too late: the kids across from us were now shrieking, pulling their jumpsuits up over their heads, pressing their faces into threadbare blankets. The nuclear cloud of evil and beans rolled down the hallway, and the cries of horror grew as it traveled.
“Whew!” Diego said cheerfully, flushing for the third time. “That was intense! Sorry, guys! Wow! When you gotta go, you gotta go!”
We glared at him in mute protest, unwilling to uncover our noses and mouths to speak.
Then his face fell, and he jiggled the handle of the toilet. “Hm,” he said. “Think it’s clogged.”
31
CASSIE
HAVING TO GO TO SCHOOL again was awful, but with Pa at Healthcare United and Becca missing, there was no one to write me an absent note. Could I write myself one?
The bell rang right as I was grabbing my social studies book out of my locker, and I almost jumped when I shut the locker door and saw Nathaniel Allen standing there.
“Jeezum! What do you want?” I asked, pushing past him to get to class.
He took hold of my arm, and I stared at him. “Let. Me. Go.”
“I just need to talk to you,” he said.
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” I snapped, and jerked my arm away.
“You don’t understand,” he began, but I cut him off.
“You don’t understand that you need to leave me alone!” I said. “You’re the son of the Provost! You don’t talk to me! You don’t even look at me! Got it?” Leaving him standing in the hallway, I spun and hurried to my last class. I’d never spoken to anyone like that in my life, but I was walking on the edge, my emotions getting frayed like the end of a wheat stalk.
Like I said, having to go to school while Becca was still missing was awful, but you know what real torture was? Having to sit in Mr. Harrison’s class. I’d tried to get Mrs. Woodrow for history, but she’d left midterm. So every day, I had to sit in a classroom while that jerk stood at the front of the room and lectured.
Now I had to talk to him on purpose, to ask about Becca. So instead of leaping up the instant the bell sounded, I lingered by my desk while the rest of the class filed out. “Mr. Harrison? Can I talk to you?”
“Of course, Cassie. What is it?”
“Becca is… missing,” I said, and watched as his smarmy face turned to concern. “I was wondering if you’d heard from her.”
“Why would I have heard from Becca?”
I crossed my arms. “You know why.”
Mr. Harrison frowned. “Now, Cassie, that’s no way to talk to a teacher,” he said sternly. “You better watch your attitude—you know what happens to citizens with bad attitudes.”
I froze, my eyes wide.
“They go away for a mood-adjust,” he said smugly.
I actually felt the blood draining from my face. “Don’t you talk about my ma,” I said in a low, shaking voice. Something inside me came undone and I went on, not sounding like myself at all. “You’re not the only one who can make threats. Remember when you pushed me into the supply closet? Remember shoving your tongue down my throat?”
Mr. Harrison got red, his eyes narrowing.
“I’m sure you do, because I bit the heck out of it,” I went on. “But Becca wasn’t so lucky, was she? No, you actually got her alone that time. And you forced yourself on her! You’re just a rapist! Not any kind of teacher.”
“You listen here,” Mr. Harrison began, striding toward me angrily. “That girl had it coming to her! Just like you!” He was reaching out to grab me when pure, adrenaline-laced fear shot me into autopilot. As if from a distance I saw myself take a step back to grab my backpack from my desk. This new, braver Cassie took another step back and swung the bag as hard as I could. It connected, snapping Mr. Harrison’s head sideways. Arms flailing, eyes rolling up into his head, he staggered backward and fell over several desks, where he lay, out cold.
Panting, I stared at him in horror. What had I done? Had I killed a teacher?
The classroom door burst open, and who should come in but Nathaniel. He took in my pale face, my white-knuckle grip on my backpack, and then Mr. Harrison lying like a lox on the floor.