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Hope bloomed inside me, a lightness that made each movement easier. I found a rusty spigot along the wall, with a bucket beside it. I turned the bucket over, using it as a stepstool, and hoisted myself up to get a better look. Inside was my future, and as I reached for the window ledge I wanted it to be the one I had imagined, not the one Arden was running from. I prayed I’d see a room filled with girls in their beds, the walls decorated with oil paintings of wild dogs sprinting across the plains. I prayed for drafting tables covered in blueprints and books piled high on each nightstand. I prayed that I was not wrong, that tomorrow I would graduate and the future I had imagined would open up before me like a morning glory in the sun.
My hands clung to the ledge as I pulled myself closer. I pressed my nose against the window. There, on the other side of the glass, was a girl on a narrow bed, her abdomen covered with bloodied gauze. Her blond hair was matted. Her arms were strapped down with leather restraints.
Beside her was another girl, her giant stomach stretching nearly three feet over her body, the thinned skin covered with purple veins. Then the girl opened her deep green eyes and stared at me for a moment, until they rolled back in her head. It was Sophia. Sophia, who’d given her own valedictory speech three years ago, about becoming a doctor.
I covered my mouth to suppress a scream.
There were rows of girls in cots, most with massive stomachs beneath the white sheets. A few had their middles bandaged. One had scars that snaked over her side, deep pink and puffy. Across the room, another girl writhed in pain, trying to free her wrists. Her mouth was open, yelling something I couldn’t hear beyond the glass.
The nurses appeared, entering from doors that lined the long, factory-like room. Dr. Hertz followed right behind them, her wiry gray hair impossible to miss. She was the one who determined the vitamin recipes we consumed every day and met with us each month to check our health. She was the one who put us on the table and prodded us with cold instruments, never answering our questions, never meeting our gaze.
The girl’s neck whipped back and forth as the doctor approached her, pressing a hand down on her forehead. The girl continued yelling, and a few sleeping patients awoke from the sound. They pulled at their restraints, cried out, the faint chorus barely audible. Then, in one swift motion, the doctor jabbed a needle into the girl’s arm and she went horribly still. Dr. Hertz held it up to the others—a threat—and the shouting stopped.
I lost my grip on the window ledge and fell backward, the bucket coming out from underneath me. I curled up on the hard earth, my insides choked. It all made sense now. The injections given by Dr. Hertz—the ones that made us nauseated, irritable, and sore. Headmistress petting my hair as I took my vitamins. The empty stare Teacher Agnes gave me when I spoke of my future as a muralist.
There would be no trade, no city, no apartment with a queen-sized bed and a window overlooking the street. No eating at the restaurants with the polished silverware and crisp, white tablecloths. There would only be that room, the putrid stink of old bedpans, skin stretched until it cracked. There would only be babies cut out of my womb, ripped from my arms and shuttled somewhere beyond these walls. I’d be left screaming, bleeding, alone, and then plunged back into a dreamless, drug-induced sleep.
I struggled to my feet and started toward the shore. The night was darker, the air colder, and the lake much wider and deeper than before. Still, I didn’t look back. I had to get away from that building, that room, those girls with the dead eyes.
I had to get away.
Chapter Three
WHEN I GOT BACK TO SCHOOL I WAS SOAKING WET, WITH blood dripping from my hands. I hadn’t even bothered to wrap my socks around my palms as I crossed the lake, I was so focused on simply putting distance between myself and that building. I had let the thorns dig into my skin, my eyes locked on my bedroom window, numb to the pain.
As the guard circled the back of the dormitories I ran up the shore, my nightgown heavy with water. A few torches were still lit, but the lawn was dark, and I could hear the owls in the trees, like great cheerleaders, urging me on. Before that night I had never broken a rule. I was seated before every class started, my books open on my desk. I studied two extra hours every evening. I even cut my food carefully, as instructed, my pointer finger pressing on the back of the knife. But only one rule mattered now. Never go beyond the wall, Teacher Agnes had said, in the Dangers of Boys and Men seminar when she’d explained the act of rape. She’d stared at us with her watery, red-rimmed eyes until we repeated it back to her, our voices a coaxed monotone.
Never go beyond the wall.
But no gang of men or hungry wolf den beyond the wall could be worse than the fate I faced locked within it. In the wild there would be choice—however dangerous, however frightening. I would decide what I wanted to eat, where I wanted to go. The sun would still warm my skin.
Maybe I could get out the gate, like Arden had. Wait until morning, when the last shipment of supplies came in for the celebration. A window would be harder. The one by the library was close to the wall, but it was a fifty-foot drop and I would need rope, a plan, some way to lower myself down.
Inside, I crept toward the narrow, dimly lit staircase, careful not to make a sound. It would be impossible for me to save everyone. But I had to get to my bedroom and wake Pip. Maybe we could bring Ruby, too. There wouldn’t be much time to explain, but we’d pack a bag with some clothes and figs and the gold-wrapped candies Pip loved. We’d leave tonight, forever. There would be no looking back.
I bounded up to the second floor and down the hall, past room after room of girls tucked neatly into their beds. Through a doorway I could see Violet curled up, smiling in her sleep, oblivious to what awaited her the next day. I was steps from my bedroom when the hallway glowed with an eerie light.
“Who’s there?” a gravelly voice asked.
I turned slowly, the blood cooling in my veins. Teacher Florence stood at the end of the hall, holding a kerosene lantern. It threw black, looming shadows on the wall behind her.
“I was only . . . ” I trailed off. The lake water was dripping from the hem of my skirt, forming a puddle around my feet.
Teacher Florence came toward me, her sun-spotted face grimacing in displeasure. “You went across the lake,” she said. “You saw the Graduates. ”
I nodded, thinking again of Sophia in her hospital bed, how her eyes retreated into the blue-ringed hollows of her face. The bruising on her wrists and ankles, where she pulled against the leather straps. The pressure was building inside me, like a kettle just before the boil. I wanted to scream. To jolt everyone upright in bed. To grab this frail woman by the shoulders and bury my fingers into her arms until she understood the pain that I understood then, the panic and confusion. The betrayal.
But all those years of quietly sitting, my hands folded neatly in my lap, of listening and speaking only when spoken to, kept me in practiced obedience. What if I yelled now, into the silent night? There was nothing I could say that would convince the other girls. They would never believe the trades were a lie. They’d think I’d gone mad. Eve, the girl who broke under the stress of graduation. Eve, the lunatic who ranted about pregnant Graduates. Pregnant Graduates! They’d laugh. I’d be sent to that building a day earlier than everyone else, forced into permanent silence.
“I’m sorry,” I offered, “I was just . . . ” The tears slipped from my eyes.