“It’s all you’ve ever known.”
She rolled her eyes and grinned. “That’s a little melodramatic.”
The incinerator was a big rectangular machine, about eight feet tall, and it smelled terrible. Curtis had told me that I didn’t need to do anything to operate it—it was all automatic. A small sign indicated where to put the trash, and I tossed the first bag inside.
Skiver shouted, “Nice job at paintball yesterday.”
I lifted the next bag up and in, and then the third.
Skiver turned to goading Jane. “Did you know your little Benson wasn’t in his room last night? I think he’s cheating on you. But for some reason he was still in the boys’ dorm. I wonder what that means?”
I threw the last two bags in the incinerator and then turned to look at Skiver. He was smiling nastily. But the girl behind him had left.
I wanted to punch him in the teeth. Not for anything he’d said or even anything he’d done to me. I just felt like hitting him.
Jane took my hand in hers. “Come on.”
I nodded and inhaled deeply. Holding her hand felt comfortable, but I knew I was squeezing too tight—angry about Skiver.
We’d only taken a few steps when I noticed a small door in the side of the building. Judging by the slope of the grass, I figured it had to go into the basement, but I didn’t remember seeing any exterior doors while I was down there.
“Do you know where that goes?” I asked Jane. The image of the detention room was clear in my mind, and I knew there had to be more to the basement, something deeper down.
She shrugged.
We walked up to it but didn’t hear a buzz, and the knob was locked.
“What are you doing?” Skiver shouted.
I turned to him. “Do you know where this door goes?”
“What do I look like, an architect?”
“No, you definitely do not.”
He snarled and walked down to me. I listened for the buzz, but it didn’t happen for him either. So, the door wasn’t opened for maintenance or groundskeeping.
“Aren’t you supposed to get back inside and scrub toilets or something?” he said.
Jane’s fingers curled tightly around mine.
I breathed out, long and slow. “I guess we’d better.”
That night I went to talk to Curtis. He was lying on his bed, fiddling with his computer.
I knocked on the open door. “What’s up?”
He sat up. “Oh, hey, Benson. Just entering the contract bids.”
Curtis punched a few buttons, and then closed the computer with a click. “Speaking of which, we get paid tomorrow—you’ll have a few points.”
“Nice,” I said, and leaned against his wall. “Too bad I won’t be able to afford a fancy new ball gown for the dance.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. Most of the guys will just wear their uniforms. The girls can buy dresses if they want, but I doubt many guys will waste our points on it.”
“I was wondering if I could ask you something,” I said, looking toward his window. It was dark out now, and the moon was just over the horizon. There wasn’t any haze.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“How long have you been here?”
“Not as long as some, I guess. Maybe a year and a half. I’ve stopped paying attention.”
“Were there ever more students than there are now?”
He nodded, as if my questions weren’t surprising. He clasped his hands together and gazed at the floor. “You mean total numbers? Or do you mean, have people ever left?”
“Total numbers,” I said. “I already know people have left. Died.”
He glanced up at me. “I’ve never seen a body, you know. I mean, other than the war.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never seen a body of someone sent to detention. I always hold out hope. Maybe they’re alive.”
“But I heard about what happens with detention,” I said. “I heard about the blood.”
He stood up with a grim smile and moved to the window. “Wow. You really are more nosy than most of us. I’d been here a lot longer than you by the time I learned that.”
Curtis didn’t make much sense to me. He ran after Ms. Vaughn’s car. I thought that would mean he was trying to escape, like I was, but most of the time he didn’t seem like he was even interested.
“What about total numbers?” I asked.
“It’s never been very high.” He glanced at me over his shoulder. “You’re wondering why the school is so big?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. We’ve all wondered.”
On a corkboard above his desk were a dozen pencil drawings—the school building, still lifes, faces I didn’t recognize.
“You do these?” I said, leaning over for a better look.
“No. Carrie.”
“They’re good.”
“I’ll tell her.”
I stood back up and turned him. “Who’s the oldest here? I mean, who’s been here the longest?”
“That’s easy. Jane.”
“Really? But she said there were people here before her.”
“That’s the big mystery,” he said with a shrug. “She explained it to Carrie once. Fifteen were here before Jane came. One morning they were gone. I guess it was some kind of mass escape.”
“Did they get away?”
Curtis shook his head and lay down. “No one escapes. If any of us ever got out of here they’d tell the police and this place would get shut down. Anyway, those fifteen were the only link to the past, and none of them confided in her. She was all by herself until more students were brought in.”
I nodded, but my heart fell into my stomach. She would have been young—thirteen—going through all the same things I was going through now, only completely alone. She must have been scared all the time. It was no wonder she kept saying things weren’t so bad. They’d been so much worse.
Looking back up at Curtis, I tried to push thoughts of Jane away. “So,” I reasoned, “for all we know, this school’s been like this for years—decades.”
“Maybe. That’s why I’m not Society.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some people say that we need to just ride it out. Follow the rules and keep our heads low. I agree a little with that, I guess.” He smiled. “I mean, I don’t think we need to try crazy escapes and fall out of trees. But I do think that, sooner or later, we’re going to have to try something.”
“Right,” I said. “They’ll never just let us leave because we’d tell the police. So, what does the Society say about that?”
“I think they’re scared,” he said. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I think they’re just too afraid of punishment. Probably because they know better than any of us what the punishments are like.”
Curtis was right—it didn’t look like it. Maybe Becky was scared, but Dylan? Isaiah? They couldn’t be enforcing the rules just because they were too scared to break them.
I looked out the window, trying to guess where the wall was, but all I could see was trees.
“One last thing,” I said, touching the glass and peering into the dark. “Have you ever seen smoke in the woods?”
“The campfires, you mean?”
I turned my head enough to look at him with one eye.
He nodded. “You can see them from the girls’ dorm better than here. Just little trails of smoke—sometimes one and sometimes eight or ten. We think they might be guards.”
“Or a campground,” I said. Could help be that close?
Curtis laughed. “Campgrounds. Now that’s an optimist.”
Back in my room, I stayed up late on my little computer, scrolling through catalog pages of clothes, gear, jewelry, and games. There was nothing for sale that gave any insight into the outside world. No books, no magazines. Even the music we could buy for the dance was fifty or sixty years old.
“You know anything about computers?” I asked Mason, close to midnight.
“A little, but not really.”
“Anyone in here a hacker?”
He laughed tiredly. “People have been trying that for as long as I’ve been here. Oakland looked into it. He knows computers. He said there’s no consistent connection. The network is only up and running for a few seconds a day—that’s when the school downloads our purchases and records our bids. He says there’s just not enough time to hack it.”