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By Root 888 0

knew my name—whenever she’s talking to Hana her eyes have always skated past me, like I’m not worth focusing on. I go anyway. I’ve always been curious about her house, and it turns out to be as spectacular as I imagined. Her family has a car, too, and electric appliances everywhere that obviously get used every day, washers and dryers and huge chandeliers filled with dozens and dozens of lightbulbs. Harlowe has invited most of the graduating class—there are sixty-seven of us in total and probably fifty at the party—which makes me feel less special, but it’s still fun. We sit in the backyard while the housekeeper runs in and out of the house with plates and plates of food—coleslaw and potato salad and other barbecue stuff—and her father turns out spare ribs and hamburgers on the enormous smoking grill. I eat until I feel like I’m about to burst and have to roll backward onto the blanket I’m sharing with Hana. We stay there until almost curfew, when the stars are peeking through a curtain of dark blue and the mosquitoes rise up all at once and we all go shrieking and laughing back into the house, slapping them away. Afterward I think it’s one of the nicest days I’ve had in a long time.

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.