Kneeling, Nathaniel quickly wired the pieces of fence back together. “So it won’t be noticed in a quick inspection,” he said.
I got my moped and wheeled it onto the ring road.
“I’m so sorry about Becca,” he said.
I pushed the ignition on my moped, but kept its headlight off.
“Now what?” Nathaniel asked, one hand on my handlebar.
“I really don’t know,” I said politely, and headed for the empty house that would never feel like home again.
46
AT SCHOOL, STEPH, MY BEST friend, was waiting at my locker.
“I heard that Mr. Harrison had a heart attack,” she murmured. “But now they say someone shot him!” She looked up and down the hallway. “I bet it was some girl’s dad.”
I looked at her. “Some girl’s dad?”
Steph wrinkled her nose. “You know how he was. All handsy. Wouldn’t surprise me if someone’s dad decided to put a stop to it.”
I’d known about Mr. Harrison molesting me and Becca. I hadn’t heard about anyone else. I wondered if Steph was right.
“Cassandra Greenfield, please report to the principal’s office.”
Steph raised her eyebrows. “What have you done now?” she teased, because of course I never broke rules or did anything wrong, and all the teachers loved me. Good thing they didn’t know about my sneaking past the Boundary. Or did they?
I rolled my eyes. “Must have been that fire I set.”
In Ms. Ashworth’s office I sat in a hard chair in front of her desk, as I had done—was it only last week? This time we were joined by Mr. Lewis, the guidance counselor, who usually picked vocations for the students. Was he going to change my vocation? Should I remind him that I’d wanted to be a teacher?
“Cassie,” Ms. Ashworth said abruptly, “this isn’t going to work.”
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“You speak when we tell you!” Mr. Lewis almost shouted, and I jumped in my seat.
Eyes wide, I turned back to Ms. Ashworth, whose face was stern.
“We tried to make an exception for you,” she said, and my eyes widened further. “But there was your mother, who never did fit in. Your father, and his shameful action a few months ago.”
My face started to burn.
“Didn’t have the decency to die!” Mr. Lewis said. “That’s what the SAS is for! But no—Greenfields always have to do it their own way.”
“And Becca. An Outsider,” Ms. Ashworth said.
“You Greenfields think you’re above everybody else!” Mr. Lewis snapped. “Like the rules of the United don’t apply to you!”
My jaw dropped open.
“You’re setting a bad example for the other kids,” Ms. Ashworth went on. “You lied about Becca being sick, didn’t you? You know this isn’t tolerated in the system. I have no choice but to expel you.”
“Wh—expel? What do you mean?”
“It means you leave here and don’t come back,” Ms. Ashworth said in a voice like steel. “We won’t take the risk of you infecting the other kids—good kids—with the Greenfield attitude.”
“Leave school?” I was dumbfounded. Sure, kids had been kicked out before, but they’d done extremely bad citizen–type stuff. What had I done?
“As for your vocation, forget it!” said Mr. Lewis, a vein in his neck starting to throb. “No one will hire a Greenfield anyway! You can kiss that good-bye!”
I stared at them both, back and forth. In our cell, almost everyone graduated high school. And almost everyone had a vocation. Without a vocation, you couldn’t do much. You ended up like the losers that Becca had played chicken with.
“I’ve done nothing wrong!” I exclaimed. “You can’t expel me, or take away my vocation!”
“It’s not only our decision,” said Ms. Ashworth. “Though of course we support it. But you’ve been stirring up trouble. You’ve gotten a bad name for yourself. That kind of thing gets noticed.”
The idea was so unbelievable that it was hard to take in. “But… what will I do?” I asked, wanting to argue but too shocked to put coherent thoughts together.
“You should have thought of that before!” Mr. Lewis said.
“Before what?” I asked. “Before I was a Greenfield?”
“You’re dismissed, Cassie,” Ms. Ashworth said as Mr. Lewis began to gather steam for another attack. “Go home. And don’t come back.”
47
PEOPLE IN THE HALLWAY LOOKED at me and whispered as I slammed open my locker. I grabbed whatever was mine, stuffed it into my backpack, and slammed the locker door shut. They can’t do this! I fumed. This has to be illegal!
But who would I turn to? The Provost’s office? Ha!
In the parking lot I strapped my backpack to my moped. Glancing up, I saw Steph staring at me through a window. She mouthed, “What happened?” but all I could do was shrug, get on the moped, and putt-putt furiously away.
What had just happened to me? My world was turned on its head. Even without Ma, even without Pa, and yes, even without Becca, I’d still had me. I’d still had school. I’d still had my vocation. I’d had a future, a life. Now what did I have?
This mother-lovin’ moped and an old, broken-down farmhouse. A dying farm that was too much for me to keep up. I couldn’t harvest what little crops we had all by myself. Did I even have friends? Would Steph’s parents forbid her to see me—one of the disgraced Greenfields? Everything was crazy!
As I drove by our nearest neighbors’ house, my eye caught something black and shiny. The System-Assisted Suicide van. Mr. Preston had retired recently—the system always contacted retirees about making their retirement permanent.
You know who else they contacted? People who had no vocation. Maybe not today, but soon I would be getting a visit from a facilitator, someone who would pat my hand sympathetically and listen to all my woes. And then, at a lull in the conversation, their eyes full of understanding, they would murmur something about other options. About making way so a new life could be born.
Our house seemed twice as shabby as it had this morning, and I gritted my teeth as I slammed the door so hard I almost broke the glass. In the kitchen I stared into the almost empty fridge—I hadn’t been to work at the All-Ways in days and there was damn little to eat. I was probably fired.
What had happened to me? I was Cassie Greenfield, candidate for a President’s Star! I’d been my class representative three times!
Upstairs I stomped past Pa’s closed door and Becca’s closed door. Then I threw myself on my bed, waiting for the major tears to come, knowing that they wouldn’t end for a long while.
But they didn’t come. Not even my tears knew what to do anymore.
On my bed, I closed my eyes in case this was all a bad dream. Maybe even Ma and Pa had been just a bad dream. Maybe I would wake up and hear Ma making breakfast downstairs, hear Pa getting ready to head out to the fields. Hear Becca’s horrible singing in the shower.
I popped my eyes open hopefully and listened.