Thirty seconds later I was putt-putting out of the school yard. Of course I really went to United Drugs and actually bought bicarb; Ms. Ashworth would know if I hadn’t. But then I headed home, hoping against hope that Becca had come to her senses. And that she had brought my truck back.
She hadn’t. Now I had to wait until 3:30 to leave the house again, thankful that today was one of my days off from United All-Ways.
By 5:00 I started to actually be concerned. I’d made the rounds again, asking Becca’s friends to give her up, but they seemed sincere when they said they hadn’t seen her today. One of them was even mad because Becca had promised to help him rewire his burned-out soldering iron, and she hadn’t shown.
Dinnertime came and went. At 7:00 I was pacing the floors, looking through our windows to the darkness outside, praying I would see headlights bumping over the worn track to our house.
When the numbers on the oven clock changed to 8:00, I was sitting at the kitchen table, more afraid than I’d ever been. Becca wasn’t playing hooky. Becca hadn’t taken my truck to piss me off. Becca was missing. And Becca was the ninth kid to go missing this year. None of them had ever come back.
5
BECCA
WAS IT MORNING? AFTERNOON? NIGHT? No clue. They’d gotten me at 3:00 this morning. How much time had passed? I didn’t know.
“Goddamnit!” I muttered, and tried to yank my hands apart for the hundredth time. They didn’t budge, and the zip tie dug more sharply into my skin. I felt the slight, warm stickiness of blood seeping down my hand. “Goddamnit to hell!”
“You!” said a woman’s voice, and my head swiveled blindly toward the sound—I couldn’t see anything through the black hood. I hadn’t seen anything since 3:12 a.m. “You! Swearing is forbidden!”
“Bite a scythe, asshole!” I snapped, and something big and solid slammed against my head. Sparks exploded inside my eyes as I gasped and fell sideways onto a cold concrete floor. “Oof!” I swallowed, tasting blood, trying to stave off a sudden urge to puke my guts up.
Someone leaned over me. “Swearing. Is. Forbidden,” said the woman’s icy voice. “Repeat that after me: Swearing is…”
“The only appropriate response to this shitty sitch!” I wanted to spit blood out but it would have just hit the hood.
A hard, pointed shoe kicked me then, right in my gut, and I almost screamed. Acid rose in my throat as a heavy, burning pain filled my insides. I quickly coiled up as best as I could with my hands tied behind me and my ankles lashed together. What in holy hell was going on? For about a minute this morning, I’d thought it was a prank, at best, and at worst, a warning from Big Ted, who I owed a measly thirty-two bucks. But after the first punch that had knocked my lights out, it became clear that this was some other shit altogether.
Rough hands scrabbled at my neck and I promised myself to bite the hell out of the next asshole who got too close. They untied the hood and yanked it off, making my head snap against the concrete again.
My eyes blinked painfully against the sudden, too-bright light. I wanted to throw up, then get my hands on the strongest painkillers I could find. A shadow blotted out the light, and I glanced up warily. A woman frowned down at me, but all I could do was gape at her. I’d never seen anything like her. Her brown hair was coiled on top of her head, like braided Easter bread. Her eyes had thin dark lines drawn around them, reminding me of those Egypt people who had failed because their system was bad. Her mouth was painted with barn-red paint, and I wondered how she could stand it. Wouldn’t the paint dry and crack? Didn’t it taste terrible?
Shifting a bit more onto my shoulders, I simply looked her up and down, not even caring if this got me kicked again. She was wearing a navy-blue suit, like a man’s suit, but with a skirt. Her shoes were… thin, totally useless for walking in fields. Her shirt was white and almost shiny—not cotton, not linen, not wool. I wanted to touch it.
“My name,” she said in a voice like an icicle, “is Helen Strepp. You may call me Ms. Strepp.”
My mouth has gotten me in trouble my whole life, and it didn’t stop now. “As long as I don’t call you late for dinner!” I said, remembering when my pa had laughed at that.
Ms. Strepp nodded at someone behind me; there was a slight sound, and then a rocklike boot kicked me in the back.
I couldn’t help sucking in breath with almost a whimper. My eyes squeezed shut against the pain and I realized that every part of me felt bruised and broken. If I’d been home by myself with no one to see, I would have cried. But I hadn’t cried in front of Careful Cassie in years, and I sure wasn’t going to give these assholes a show.
“Now,” said the woman, “what is my name?”
“Ms. Strepp,” I mumbled, not opening my eyes.
“Good,” she said, and I hated the satisfaction in her voice. Well, I hated everything about this, no doubt about that.
“Now you know my name, the fact that swearing is forbidden here, and you’ve gotten just a slight taste of what happens when you disobey the rules,” Ms. Strepp said. “The last thing you need to know right now is that you’re in prison. A maximum security prison for enemies of our system.”
That made my eyes pop open again, and I stared at her in disbelief.
“Are you shittin’ me?” I blurted, and was rewarded by a kick so hard I passed out.
6
A POEM by Rebecca Greenfield
Yellow is the color of the sun