The tall grass came up around my body, but it was not enough cover. I pulled my damp gown back over my head and ran around to the corner of the building. It did have windows, about five feet off the ground, just not on the side facing School.
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.