Pip rolled over and mumbled something in her sleep. I took the pair of pants I had from our exercises, and the silk pouch of my favorite things. It contained a tiny plastic bird I’d found years ago while digging in the mud. A gold wrapper from the first sucking candy Headmistress had ever given me; the small, tarnished silver bracelet saved from when I’d arrived at school at five; and finally the only letter I had from my mother, the paper yellow and tearing at every crease.
I zipped up the bag, wishing I had more time. Pip’s pale face was pressed against her pillow, her lips puttering with her breath. I had read once, in one of those pre-plague books in the library, that love was bearing witness. That it was the act of watching someone’s life, of simply being there to say: your life is worth seeing. If that is true then I have never loved anyone as much as I loved Pip, and no one has ever loved me that much either. For Pip was there when I twisted my wrist doing handstands on the lawn. She was the one who held me after I lost my favorite blue pin, which I was told belonged to my mother. And she was the one who sang with me in the shower, to the songs we’d discovered on the old records in the archives. Let it be, let it be! Pip would belt, with shampoo suds running down her face and a voice that was always a little out of tune. Whisper words of wisdom, let it beeeee.
I headed for the door, glancing at her one last time. Pip had heard me crying that first night at School and laid down in the bed beside me and let me bury my face in her neck. She’d waved to the ceiling and told me, in heaven, our mothers were watching. From heaven they loved us.
“I’ll come back for you,” I said. I nearly choked on the words. “I will,” I said again.
If I didn’t go then, though, I never would, so I ran through the hall, down the staircase and toward the doctor’s office, where I found Teacher waiting for me with a sack full of food.
She pulled the thorns from my palms with tweezers. Then she bandaged my hands, her eyes on the gauze as she wrapped it around, layer upon layer. It was a while before she spoke.
“It began with fertility doctors,” Teacher said. “The King believed the science was the key to repopulating the earth quickly, efficiently, without all the complications of families, marriage, and love. He thought if you were given an education, you would be occupied and content. He thought that if you feared men, you girls would breed willingly without them. And when the first Graduates went into that building, some of them did. But the process is extreme. And there are often complications with multiple births. In these last few years it’s gotten worse, and I’m worried it will get even worse still.”
I glanced again at the drawer where Dr. Hertz kept our weekly shots, the ones that made our breasts sore and had girls doubled over with cramps. The counter was covered in glass jars of vitamins, which were organized in our pillboxes according to the days. We swallowed them down morning, afternoon, and night, like colorful, sugarcoated poisons.
“So you’ve always known then—about the Graduates?” I asked.
Teacher peered out the blinds. When she was sure the guard had passed, she gestured for me to follow her out the back door and into the night. Feral dogs howled in the distance, a sound that sent my heart racing. We walked along the perimeter of the wall. Teacher turned around, making sure we were far enough in front of the guard that we wouldn’t be seen. When she spoke again, her voice was much lower than before.
“The plague came first,” she began, “and then the vaccine made it much worse. The world was consumed by death, Eve. There was no order; people were confused. Scared. The King took over and then you had to make a choice. Follow him or be in the wild alone.”
She didn’t look at me as she spoke, but I could see the tears brimming in her eyes. I thought of the annual speeches, how we’d crowd together in the dining hall and listen to the single radio set on the table in front of Headmistress. The King, Our Great Leader, The Only Man to be Respected, would call to us from those old speakers. He’d tell us of the progress made in the City of Sand, of the skyscrapers that were being built, of the wall that could keep armies, viruses, and the threats of the wilderness out. He said The New America started there, that there would only be one chance to rebuild. He said we would be safe.
“I was already fifty,” Teacher continued. “My family had died. I had no choice. I couldn’t survive on my own. But you have the chance I didn’t.”
We came to the apple tree that stretched its boughs in front of the wall. Pip and I had sat beneath it a hundred times before, eating its fruit and feeding the rotten apples to the squirrels. “Where will I go?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“If you continue straight for two miles you’ll come to a road.” Her thin lips moved slowly as she spoke, the skin flaky and chapped. “It will be dangerous. Find the signs marked eighty and go west, toward the setting sun. Stay near the road but not on it.”
“And then what?” I asked. She reached into the pocket of her nightgown and pulled out a key, cradling it in her wrinkled hands like a jewel.