Even girls I don’t really like—like Shelly Pierson, who has hated me since sixth grade, when I won the science fair and she took second place—start being nice. I guess it’s because we all know the end is close. Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We’ll be different. We’ll be adults—cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.
Theresa Grass turns eighteen before school ends and gets cured; so does Morgan Dell. They’re absent for a few days and come back to school just before graduation. The change is amazing. They seem peaceful now, mature and somehow remote, like they’re encased in a thin layer of ice. Only two weeks ago Theresa’s nickname was Theresa Gross, and everyone made fun of her for slouching and chewing on the ends of her hair and generally being a mess, but now she walks straight and tall with her eyes fixed straight in front of her, her lips barely curled in a smile, and everyone shifts a little in the halls so she can pass easily. Same thing goes for Morgan. It’s like all their anxiety and self-consciousness has been removed along with the disease. Even Morgan’s legs have stopped trembling. Whenever she used to have to speak in class, the trembling would get so bad it would rock the desk. But after the procedure, just like that—whoosh! The shaking stops. Of course they’re not the first girls in our class to get cured—Eleanor Rana and Annie Hahn were both cured way back in the fall, and half a dozen other girls have had the procedure this past semester—but in them the difference is somehow more pronounced.
I keep going with my countdown. Eighty-one days, then eighty, then seventy-nine.
Willow Marks never comes back to school. Rumors filter back to us—that she had her procedure and it turned out fine; that she had her procedure and now her brain is going haywire, and they’re talking about committing her to the Crypts, Portland’s combo prison-and-mental-ward; that she ran away to the Wilds. Only one thing is for sure: The whole Marks family is under constant surveillance now. The regulators are blaming Mr. and Mrs. Marks—and the whole extended
family—for not instilling in her a proper education, and only a few days after she was supposedly found in Deering Oaks Park, I overhear my aunt and uncle whispering that both of Willow’s parents have been fired from their jobs. A week later we hear that they’ve had to move in with a distant relative. Apparently people kept throwing rocks at their windows, and a whole side of their house was written over with a single word: SYMPATHIZERS. It makes no sense, because Mr. and Mrs. Marks were on record insisting that their daughter have the procedure early, despite the risks, but as my aunt says, people get like that when they’re scared. Everyone is terrified that the deliria will somehow find its way into Portland on a large scale. Everyone wants to prevent an epidemic.
I feel bad for the Marks family, of course, but that’s the way things are. It’s like the regulators: You may not like the patrols and the identity checks, but since you know it’s all done for your protection, it’s impossible not to cooperate. And it may sound awful, but I don’t think about Willow’s family for long. There’s just too much end-of-high-school paperwork to file, and nervous energy, and lockers to clean out and final exams to take and people to say good-bye to.
Hana and I can barely find time to run together. When we do, we stick to our old routes by silent agreement. She never mentions the afternoon at the labs again, to my surprise. But Hana’s mind has a tendency to skip around, and her new obsession is a collapse at the northern end of the border that people are saying might have been caused by Invalids. I don’t even consider going down to the labs again, not for one single solitary second. I focus on everything and anything besides my lingering questions about Alex—which isn’t too hard, considering that I now can’t believe I spent an evening biking up and down the streets of Portland, lying to Carol and the regulators, just to meet up with him. The very next day it felt like a dream, or a delusion. I tell myself I must have gone temporarily insane: brain scramble, from running in the heat.