I’d report him, of course.
Jake and his family hadn’t been arrested by accident. They hadn’t just said the wrong things in front of the wrong people, either. They had actively worked against the government. And even after Internal had let him go, Jake had been in contact with dissidents, and hadn’t reported them. That alone meant he wasn’t as harmless as Internal thought, wasn’t harmless enough to be released. Becca tried to make herself see that, to make herself understand that he and his family had deserved everything that had happened. That turning him in, now that she knew he’d had contact with the group just like his sister, was the only right thing to do.
She couldn’t.
He stood, trembling. “You’re going to turn me in now.” He said it flatly, like it was an undisputed fact.
“No,” she said, and felt herself hit bottom. “I won’t.”
“I can’t let that happen.” He took a step toward her. “I told my dad I would protect him.”
“I won’t turn you in,” she repeated, backing away. The sound of her heartbeat filled her ears.
He kept advancing on her. “Why should I believe you?”
She had thought it would be difficult to say the words. Instead they fell from her mouth easily, almost eagerly. “Because I’m a dissident too.”
He crossed the final distance to her.
And wrapped his arms around her as she collapsed in silent tears.
Chapter Eleven
“You may think dissidents don’t care about schools,” said Mr. Adams as he shut the classroom door. “After all, why would a bunch of kids matter to them? But if you think that, you’re wrong.”
The Citizenship classroom smelled like chalk and sweat. The breeze coming through the window wasn’t enough to dispel the stale air. Around Becca, her classmates fidgeted at their desks—except for Heather, who was already scribbling down notes.
Failing to report dissidents is a crime, warned the poster that hung beside the blackboard. Becca squirmed until she remembered no one could see how she had changed.
“I don’t know how many of you remember what happened eight years ago,” Mr. Adams continued. “Internal discovered that across the country, dissidents had infiltrated the school system by becoming teachers and were using their influence to pass their ideology on to their students.”
Becca did remember that. Her third-grade teacher had disappeared, and for the rest of the year they’d had a series of incompetent substitutes, from the one who kept forgetting the times tables to the one who burst into tears when someone threw a wadded-up piece of paper at her. Now, of course, Becca knew the truth. Internal had almost certainly manufactured the supposed dissident conspiracy. Had Becca’s teacher even been a dissident, or had Internal started arresting innocent people?
She turned the thought around in her mind for a moment, waiting for the accusing voice. It didn’t come.
Dissident. The word didn’t scare her anymore.
“Yesterday, Internal learned that the same thing has started happening again. In more than a hundred schools—including many elementary schools—dissidents have been teaching anti-government sentiments to their students, and in some cases even recruiting students into dissident groups.”
How many people had Internal framed to make this conspiracy look real? How many false confessions had they gotten? Anger boiled up in her again, but this time, it felt good. It felt honest. She wasn’t using it to block out the truth anymore.
She mouthed the word, testing it out. Dissident.
A smile threatened at the corners of her lips. She forced her face to stay neutral, knowing how it would look if she smiled at the mention of a dissident conspiracy.
“These dissidents saw schools as places full of young impressionable minds. They looked at people like you and saw potential recruits, naïve kids whose minds they could poison with their lies.”
No, that was how Internal saw them. That was why they had classes like this in the first place—to get them to believe whatever Internal wanted them to believe. Becca twitched her legs, suddenly restless. Now that she understood, how could she keep sitting here as though nothing had changed?
“But they underestimated you.” The teacher struck the chalk against the blackboard for emphasis, leaving a single white dot. “Do you know who brought this conspiracy to Internal’s attention? It was the students in the schools that had been infiltrated.”
There hadn’t even been a conspiracy. It was all a lie.
Next to Becca, some boy she didn’t know spun his pencil on his desk. Over by the window, Laine passed a note to another girl, who covered her mouth to hide her giggles. Somebody scraped his chair back and forth along the floor. The clock above the door ticked out the seconds until the final bell.
Just like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
Mr. Adams stopped in the middle of his speech about watching other teachers for signs of dissident sympathies. “Becca? Are you paying attention?”
Becca brought her gaze back to the front of the room. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“What’s the first thing you should do if you suspect a teacher of having dissident sympathies?”
Hope that they do. Hope that they really can convince everybody here of the truth. “Report them.”
“What if you’re not sure whether a teacher is a dissident or not?”
“Report them. Internal will be able to figure it out better than I can.” The same answer she would have given yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.
Mr. Adams, satisfied, nodded and returned to his lecture.
The clock ticked away another few seconds.
She was a dissident… and it didn’t mean a thing.
For the rest of the week, Becca sat in class like always, and stayed quiet like always. She and Jake ate together at lunch and talked about nothing, their secret hovering unspoken in the background. She sat at home alone over the weekend, hoping her mom wouldn’t get back from 117 before she went to bed, then fighting nausea as she remembered just what her mom was doing at work all day. She paced back and forth in her room; it did nothing to dispel her growing restlessness. At school on Monday, her teachers kept telling her to pay attention.
Monday night after dinner, she watched executions, listened to the dissidents recite their meaningless confessions. Tuesday and Wednesday she left the TV off. She could still hear them.
On Thursday, two teachers disappeared.
They probably hadn’t even been dissidents. Or if they were, they hadn’t been part of this giant conspiracy like everyone was saying.
What did it matter? Knowing the truth hadn’t let Becca save them.
“Thanks for inviting me over,” said Heather as she walked into Becca’s room. “I’ve missed you. It feels like I haven’t been here in ages.”
No hint that she remembered their argument. It was as if it had never happened. Becca paced from the door to the bed and back again. “I need to talk to you.”
Heather fingered her Monitor pin. “Is it about what happened at school? The teachers who were arrested?”
For the first time in a week, Becca felt something approximating hope. Maybe she was going to be able to do this after all. Maybe it would even be easier than she had thought. She couldn’t save those teachers, or anyone else in 117, or the dissidents on TV, but maybe she could save Heather.
“I was hoping you’d come to me,” said Heather.
“You were?” Maybe her attempts to get Heather to acknowledge what they had found hadn’t been futile after all. Maybe Heather had finally realized what a mistake this Monitor thing was.