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On the day she’d left for good, she’d run from room to room, breathless, crying jagged sobs that hurt her chest, careful not to look at too much, but becoming transfixed by the sights of her mother’s faded dressing gown still hanging on its hook on the bedroom door, her shawl draped on her favorite armchair, her father’s coffee mug on the draining board in the kitchen. She’d spent most of the time in her dad’s home office searching for she didn’t know what, catching the lingering scent of his aftershave, and finding the hunting knife and sheath in the bottom drawer of the desk.

Lucy had taken the knife not so much for defense. At that point everything was odd, surreal, but she had no notion of any physical danger to herself. She’d slipped it into her bag with her mother’s shawl, a box of assorted freeze-dried food, and a bottle of spring water, because it was so unlike her father to own a weapon. He was all about leather attachés and legal briefs and dark, perfectly pressed suits. It was a puzzle to be gnawed on.

And she had taken her tenth-grade yearbook, too, even though she’d hated school, never infiltrating the groups of popular kids. The yearbook was a superficial slice of high school life that completely ignored the pain and boredom of it. She couldn’t help thinking that Aidan would have fit in perfectly at her school, although she had to admit there was an edge to him that was different from the preppy, stuck-up boys she used to have classes with.

She opened the yearbook. The blank pages in front and back were empty of those insipid Have a great summer! messages. Inside she’d scrawled over pictures of the hair-sprayed, shiny lip-glossed, made-up girls in her class with a big, thick, black pen, giving them punk hairdos and raccoon eyes and thought bubbles that said stuff like “Do you think I’m pretty?” Somehow their deaths had changed it all. The yearbook touched on the life before. It had become something to remind her that things had been normal once.

Lucy flipped the pages with difficulty. They’d swollen from the damp and stuck together, and the red cover was warped. Past the graduating seniors’ portraits, where everyone was posed like they were selling wristwatches; carefully avoiding the formal photo of Maggie, who was smiling so widely, happy and secure in the knowledge that she had her pick of Ivy League schools; past Rob and the rest of the ninth graders who looked like little kids and always would be. She got to her class picture. Ran her eyes over the list of names: Julie, Scott, Chad, Angie—people who’d barely noticed she was alive even though they’d known one another since kindergarten. In the class roster she’d been marked absent, but she’d been there. It was like a bad joke that even her teachers seemed unaware of her existence. She stood at the end of the row toward the back, shoulders hunched and hair pulled forward across her pale face, which appeared to float like the moon above the unrelenting black of her combat boots, jeans, T-shirt, and zippered hoodie.

Chad was standing next to her, but he’d squeezed over so that there were at least a couple of feet between them. God, she had hated him! He’d always acted as if she were diseased or something.

Lucy chewed her thumbnail, remembering how strange life had been that spring. The flyers with the lists of symptoms had appeared, plastered all over school, and it seemed as if everyone visited the nurse’s office complaining of headaches and muscle cramping and fever. A few girls had fainted in class. Lucy had felt perfectly fine. She turned the pages of the yearbook slowly, flicking past photos of football teams and teachers and school staff. She paused at the picture of the nurse, Mrs. Reynolds, looking so neat and trim and motherly in her white outfit.

But she hadn’t been so calm the last time Lucy had seen her, when she was called into the health office for yet another blood test. Mrs. Reynolds had seemed distracted. Even her smooth blond hair, normally pinned in a neat bun, was messily tucked behind her ears, and she’d had dark circles under her eyes. There’d been none of the usual chatter, the casual questions about Lucy’s health or how the school year was going. She’d been nervous, preoccupied. And she’d flubbed the test somehow. Instead of blood squirting into the needle, it had dribbled all over Lucy’s arm and the black-and-white tiled linoleum floor, and quite a lot of it had spattered onto the woman’s white brogues. And although Lucy knew from sex ed class the previous year that the nurse could field the most embarrassing questions lobbed at her by Chad and his idiot posse, she had mumbled when Lucy asked her how many kids were sick and if it was contagious.

“What is it?” Lucy had said. “Strep? Or is it mono?” For some reason there was a coolness factor associated with mono. It meant you’d been kissing someone. Julie Reininger’s rep had been cemented by having mono and being out of school for a whole month last winter.

“Maybe that bird flu they were talking about on the news?” Lucy had continued, and she’d been almost mesmerized by the weird spasm that quivered across Mrs. Reynolds’s fingers and the way her eyes skittered away. And then she’d bitten her lip, as the nurse jabbed the needle into her arm again. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Reynolds had left the room, clasping the full tube of blood and closing the door firmly behind her. Lucy had heard the sound of the lock clicking shut. She had waited, until her sweaty thighs had stuck to the paper covering the gurney and she realized that she had to go to the bathroom. Finally, after looking at the closed door and the frosted glass window, she got up and walked around the small room, sliding drawers open and checking out the plastic-wrapped syringes, the tongue depressors flavored with cinnamon, the model of the female reproductive system all shiny purple and pink plastic—she’d wondered if the colors were anatomically accurate—and blowing balloons with a couple of powdery surgical gloves. She tried not to think about how full her bladder was. One of the bottom drawers held a thick stack of folders. Lucy was about to close it when she noticed Chad Grey’s name and casually flipped the cover open. Chad had been absent for the last few days, and Lucy couldn’t say she missed him. He always had some lame comment to make when she walked past his locker in the hallway, and he liked coming up with stupid words to rhyme with her name. Being called “Goosey” or “Moosey” might not have been exactly insulting, but it was almost impossible to walk to your desk with any kind of poise when a crew of boys was hissing it under their breaths. Maybe he had an STD or something….

A wallet-sized student photo was clipped to the top of the page. A black bar was slashed across his eyes in marker, and the letter D was carefully marked next to his name. Lucy would have liked to believe that it stood for dumb but even then she was afraid it meant something much more terminal. She read: “Student complains of abdominal pain, fever, headache, backache, nausea. No lesions. Subconjunctival bleeding, subcutaneous bleeding. Hemorrhagic variant suspected. Sent to Dr. Lessing/R. Island for confirmation.”