And there was a folder for Hilly Taylor and one for Samantha Barnes and that massive jerk AJ Picard, and, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen any of them around for a while. She had trained herself to ignore them for so long, but now it seemed crazy that she could go from class to class and sit there doodling in the margins of her notebooks without noticing the empty desks. And each photo had been altered in the same way, black bars slashed across their eyes, the letter D written in thick, black lines, and the same listing of symptoms.
Suddenly she had to pee so badly, she squeezed her legs together like a toddler. She kept rifling through the papers and there, almost at the bottom of the pile, was one marked “Lucy Holloway.” It was thicker than the rest. Seeing it made the latest needle hole in her arm twinge. They’d turned her into a pincushion these last few weeks. And there’d been no explanation. Just more tests following the first physical exam, when Mrs. Reynolds had run her fingers over the smooth skin of Lucy’s upper arms, looking for the puckered scar of a vaccination that wasn’t there.
“My parents didn’t believe in them,” Lucy had whispered when the nurse had finally thought to ask her and she’d begun to feel afraid that there was something really wrong with her. It was one of the only ways her straight parents deviated from the norm. She remembered when Maggie had told her, in a hushed voice, about their older brother, who’d died when he was barely two years old from an allergic reaction to a shot. “That’s when Mom and Dad moved out of New York to Sparta, here in New Jersey,” Maggie had said breathlessly, her eyes round with delicious horror. “Because it’s less crowded and people are healthier, so it doesn’t matter.” Then she’d added, “Alex’s face swelled up like a pumpkin, and his hands looked like shiny pink balloons, and then his tongue turned black.” And even though there was no way Maggie could have known all that, the image had given Lucy nightmares for years.
Now she opened the folder slowly, half-afraid she’d see the black bar and the D, but then thinking that if she did then that would indicate it meant something other than deceased. And that would be good, right? Her startled face looked back at her from the photo. It was a copy of the picture on the student ID she was supposed to wear clipped to her backpack but never did. Her thick, curly bangs obscured her left eye completely, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line that almost made her lips disappear, but there was no black bar, no letter D.
She’d picked up her folder and stumbled backward to the gurney, spilling pages covered in weird symbols, rows of numbers and decimal points, percentages and charts. Too much information for someone who had suffered many scraped knees and cuts and broken bones but had never contracted anything worse than a head cold. One thing you could say about Lucy Holloway was that she had near perfect attendance. She wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the science stuff, and her bladder had finally demanded that she do something about it. She peed in a blue plastic cup and then dropped it in the biohazard receptacle, trying not to tip it over. The can was filled with used syringes and marked with a yellow and black skull.
And then Mrs. Reynolds had come back; the clicking of the lock opening gave Lucy just enough time to stuff her folder back into the drawer and vault onto the examining table. The nurse had jotted down a few notes and then made the calls that brought a legion of white-coats in, their faces blank behind their masks, and the battery of testing had begun again, until finally her father had shown up. He’d seemed twelve feet tall standing in the doorway, swinging his briefcase like an axe, his face purple with rage. She had never seen him with his cuffs undone, his tie unknotted, his carefully combed hair bristling. Something stony in his face had stopped her from asking any questions when he’d dragged her out of the room. Afterward, there’d been no time. Lucy never went back to school. Missed final exams, never picked up her report card, and soon there had been no reason to think about school. She’d received her yearbook in the mail a month or so later, sent directly from the printer with a computer-generated mailing label affixed.
A few pages further and there Lucy was again, a shot of her hunched over her journal, her hair a tangled curtain drawn across her face, scribbling away furiously. All around her were people caught in the midst of laughing and talking, their hands a blur of motion, moving around her as if she weren’t there. And she kind of hadn’t been. In her mind she’d been traveling and thinking about the day she could escape, and she had written it all down in her journal. Even to herself, though, she had to admit she looked like a strange, dull girl. Lucy closed the book, thinking not for the first time that she should burn it or throw it away, and ended up stowing it safely in a fold of the orange tarp against the wall. She sat back down next to the fire and clasped her arms around her shins, resting her chin on one bony kneecap. Her body thrummed with exhaustion.
If Aidan had gone to her school, she wondered if he’d have talked to her or if he’d have gravitated toward the in crowd. She could picture him: confident, easy, and relaxed. She could see Julie and Hilly hanging on his muscular arms, imagine him in a letterman jacket or a numbered basketball jersey. What was his deal, anyway? He reminded her of the boys at school. He had that swagger, that confidence, which she could only suppose came from having things always go your way. And from looking like he did, like something out of a preppy sportswear catalog. But he was different, too, in a way she couldn’t put her finger on.
Two things bothered Lucy: One was that Aidan seemed to know quite a lot about her and where she lived. She wondered if he was spying on her after all. She’d felt as if she was being watched for a long time now. And if so, that begged the question why? And the other, far more important, was, what if he was right about the dogs? She could think of no reason why someone would be tracking her, but it made her feel unsafe for the first time since she’d found the hollow and the willow grove. She’d built her camp. It was as warm and dry as she could manage. It was comforting in a weird way, maybe because it was completely hers and proof that she could survive on her own, away from other people.
At first the thought of being alone had been terrifying. It was what had driven her to leave her family house and venture back into the city, searching for someone to tell her what to do next. She’d wandered blindly, attempting to mesh her memories of various streets with the rubble-strewn desolation around her, and eventually followed a cluster of scared-looking teenagers who seemed to be heading somewhere.
The shelters that had been organized after the first and second waves of the plague had passed were depressing and crowded with survivors looking for answers or authority figures that weren’t there. There were maybe five of them set up in gutted churches and schools and sports arenas around what remained of the city, and they all looked the same: long rows of camp beds, flickering tube lights, and huddled bodies under thin blankets. People bundled under the covers like they were children afraid of the dark. She couldn’t help but be reminded of the last time she’d seen her parents in the hospital, lying on gurneys side by side in the hallway with sheets pulled up over their faces.
It had been impossible to sleep. Every three hours there was the grinding roar of old generator-powered fans starting up and pushing around the warm air and the thick smell of unwashed clothing, unwashed skin, and instant noodles. And always, from one bed or another, a constant keening, like a wounded animal had crawled inside to die, and strangled sobs sometimes exploding into rage. The woman in the bed next to her, her gray face sagging with exhaustion, had never stopped crying and moaning, “The Sweepers took my boy away, the Sweepers took my boy away,” until it started to sound like the lyrics to a sad song. Lucy had slept in her clothes with her boots on and her backpack clasped to her chest, too scared even to visit the bathrooms at night, when grimy, wild-eyed people gathered for secret reasons of their own.