The truck bumped down the dirt road and disappeared into the dark woods. The gate closed slowly behind it. I listened to the lock click, unable to believe what I’d just seen. Arden had left School. Escaped. She had gone beyond the wall, into the wild, with nothing and no one to protect her.
I didn’t believe what she’d said. I couldn’t. Maybe Arden would return in a few hours, on the Jeep. Maybe this was her craziest prank yet. But as I turned back to the windowless building on the other side of the compound, I couldn’t stop my hands from trembling, or the bitter vomit of jungle berries from spewing out of my mouth. I got sick there, in the dirt, a single thought consuming me: What if Arden was right?
Chapter Two
AFTER WE’D BRUSHED OUR HAIR AND TEETH, WASHED our faces, and dressed in the identical white nightgowns that came down to our ankles, I lay in bed, pretending to be tired. The dormitory was buzzing with the news of Arden’s disappearance. Girls poked their heads into each room to deliver the latest gossip: a barrette found in the bushes, Headmistress questioning a guard near the gate. Through it all, I wanted one of the hardest things to find at School, something so strange it was impossible to even request.
I wanted to be alone.
“Noelle thinks Arden’s hiding out in the doctor’s quarters,” Ruby told Pip. She surveyed the cards in her hand. “Go fish.” They were sitting on Pip’s narrow twin bed, playing a game they’d checked out of the School library. The old Finding Nemo cards were faded and ripped, some stuck together with dried fig juice.
“I bet she’s just trying to get out of the ceremony,” Pip added. The freckled skin on her face was dotted with dried toothpaste, which she called her “miracle blemish remover.” She kept glancing at me, expecting me to speculate about Arden’s whereabouts or comment on the packs of guards outside who were searching the grounds with flashlights. I didn’t say a word.
I thought about what Arden had said. In the last months, Headmistress Burns had become increasingly concerned with our diets, making sure we were eating enough. She appeared at our weekly blood tests and weigh-ins and saw that we were all taking our vitamins. She’d even sent Ruby to Dr. Hertz when she got her period a week later than everyone else at School.
I pulled the thin white blanket up to my neck. Ever since I was small, I had been told there was a plan for me—a plan for all of us. Complete twelve years at School, then move across the compound and learn a trade for four years. Then onto the City of Sand, where life and freedom awaited us. We would work and live there, under the rule of the King. I had always listened to the Teachers, had no reason not to. Even now, Arden’s theory made no sense. Why would we be taught to fear men when we’d ultimately have children and families of our own? Why would we be educated if we were only going to breed? The emphasis they’d put on our studies, the way we were encouraged to pursue—
“Eve? Did you hear what I said?” Pip interrupted my thoughts. She and Ruby were staring at me.
“No, what?”
Ruby gathered up the cards in her hand, her thick black hair still short and uneven from where Arden had cut it. “We want a preview of your speech before we go to bed.”
My throat tightened as I thought of my final address, the three scrawled pages crumpled inside my nightstand drawer. “It’s supposed to be a surprise,” I said, after a moment. I had written about the power of imagination in building The New America. The words I had chosen, the future I’d described, seemed so uncertain now.
Ruby and Pip stared at me, but I turned away, unable to look them in the eye. I couldn’t tell them what Arden had suggested: that the freedom of graduation was just an illusion, something created to keep us calm and content.
“Fine, suit yourself.” Pip blew out the candle on her night table. I blinked a few times, adjusting my eyes to the dark. Slowly, her round face became visible in the gray moonlight streaming in from the window. “But we are your best friends.”