From somewhere behind her there comes a sudden thud, the sound of a duffel bag landing on the pavement. The crunch of quick footsteps. A sprint.
She has an idea who it is before looking: Matthew. There he is, sprinting away from the line. The sound of his footsteps is immediately drowned out by the shouting of two dozen police officers, now running, too. The other kids stop to watch as Matthew’s faded baseball cap flies off his head. There’s a kind of glory in it, or desperation—who can say?—in that boy’s legs pumping so quickly in the sunshine, the way he tears off his mask and how it floats to the ground behind him, as slowly as a petal.
A burst of envy comes into Mei as Matthew shrinks away in the distance. This is the kind of thing she would never do.
Matthew is young, and he is fast, and the rooflines of town are visible, just beyond the chapel and the library. He keeps running. What does it matter whether he has a destination in mind or not? A sense of possibility—that’s what they’ve been missing, and so they cheer for him, Mei and the others, as he runs.
But the police finally cut him off, surprising him from behind the dining hall. A synchronized gasp floats up from the throat of every kid in the line as they watch the police tackle Matthew to the pavement.
When they return him to the line, there is a long red scrape on his cheek. And in that scrape, and in the bits of asphalt that linger in the cut, something only suspected has been proven true: these kids have no say at all.
One of the boys behind Mei is talking.
“So?” he says. “Why don’t you?”
She realizes then that he is talking to her.
“What did you say?” she says.
“Why don’t you ever leave your room?” he says through his mask.
“I do leave my room,” she says. Her pulse is beginning to pound.
He looks at her, skeptical, as if she has told some kind of lie. At the edges of his mask there grow the beginnings of a mustache—some of the boys have stopped shaving.
“No offense,” he says, “but I forgot you even lived with us.”
She has heard somewhere of the bonds people sometimes form in times of crisis, but somehow she has gone the opposite way. A friendly face flashes in her mind: Jennifer from her English class—if only Jennifer were here with her now. She doesn’t know her that well, but they’ve had lunch a few times after class. The thought embarrasses her: this Jennifer is maybe her only friend at college.
She shifts her duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. It is something for her hands to do.
It’s a short walk to where they are going, and when they get there, a disappointment.
“The gym?” say the girls. “We have to live in the gym now?”
It’s only temporary, say the nurses, who seem newly jittery, in their latex gloves and green scrubs. The ventilation system in the dorm, it was decided, might have been contaminated.
The doors to the gym have been propped open so that no hand need touch the metal of the handle. Bacteria, they’ve been told, can live for up to five days on a surface. A virus, even longer.
“Maybe they’re not telling us the truth,” Matthew shouts as the police release him into the gym. “Maybe all the others from our floor are dead.”
“You’re not helping,” say the girls.
But Mei has wondered that same thing. It is hard to know what is happening. It is hard to know what is true.
Inside, green cots have been arranged on the basketball court in a configuration familiar from news coverage of hurricanes. The cots stretch from one basketball net to the other. A blue blanket, rolled tight, waits on each one.
“Are you okay?” Mei asks Matthew as he passes.
But he says nothing. He keeps walking.
As the others claim cots with their bags, voices echoing in that vast space, shoes squeaking on the polished floor, Mei climbs the bleachers until she reaches the top bench. From that high perch, she calls her mother.
“I’ve been calling you all morning,” says her mother. “I’m so scared I can’t eat.”
Mei is resting her feet on her duffel bag, the purple nylon thinning from years of tennis lessons. She speaks softly into the phone.
“I’ve been thinking,” says Mei.
She pauses. It is a hard thing to say. It was a big deal to come here, the scholarship and all, this expensive school. From where she sits, ten rows above the floor, the movements of the other kids look as mysterious as the scurrying of mice.
“Well,” Mei starts again. “When all this is over, I’ve been thinking about moving back home.”
Just the idea is a relief, like crawling back into her own bed.
But her mother is quiet. It’s a way she has of showing disapproval, a silence for when she doesn’t like what she is hearing.
“Maybe,” says Mei, “I could reapply to CalArts.”
Far below, there is a squeal of laughter from one of the girls. Things like that are still possible, bursts of laughter.
“Mom?” she says now. More silence.
She looks down at her phone: it’s dead.
And now someone is yelling. “Hey, you,” calls a voice from below. It’s one of the campus guards. “You, up in the bleachers.” The faces of the others all turn in Mei’s direction. “Get down from there,” he calls. “Everyone needs to stay down here on the floor.”
All the electrical outlets in the gym, she soon discovers, are already choked with other people’s phones.
It is hard to say whose idea it is. It seems somehow to rise spontaneously from the group, buoyed in part by the vodka that one of the boys has snuck in from the dorm. A certain excitement attaches itself to the idea right away, a bubbling up of three words: Truth or Dare.
Mei overhears all of this from her cot, where she lies curled with her sketchbook. She is good at it, this listening without seeming to listen. The soft slide of her pencil on paper. She is drawing a series of birds.
A shadow falls across her page. The baseball player, Ryan or Rob—she can’t remember his name—is standing over her. She can see the dark outline of his mouth through his mask.
“You have to play, too,” he says.
A mechanical breeze floats through the gym, some by-product of the ventilation system, rustling the banners that hang from the ceiling and spreading the smell of the pizza that has arrived from the dining hall for dinner.
“No thanks,” she says.
“You’re going to hear all our secrets,” he says. “So we should get to hear yours.”
From behind him comes the scrape of metal against wood—already the others are dragging their cots to the sides of the room so that they can sit in one wide circle at midcourt. She feels it immediately: the impossibility of saying no.
But someone else seems immune to it: Matthew. There he is, reading some kind of philosophy book in the corner. “You’re not seriously reading for class?” says the baseball player. Matthew says nothing. He now wears a butterfly bandage to the right of his mask.
One of the girls goes first.
“Truth or dare,” says the baseball player.
“Truth,” she says.
That first question from that boy’s mouth comes as slowly as a smoke ring, the enjoyment spreading across his face in advance of the words: “Have you ever kissed a girl?”
The group likes this question. Mei can feel it all around her, the way the boys shift in their places and the girls laugh softly behind their masks, the expectation. Touch of all kinds has turned hazardous. There is a kind of electricity in that room, a wanting.
“No,” the girl says, finally, smiling through her mask. “I’ve never kissed a girl.”
Next up is Caleb. He chooses dare.
“I dare you to moon us,” says the first girl.