“I heard that Mr. Harrison had a heart attack,” she murmured. “But now they say someone shot him!” She looked up and down the hallway. “I bet it was some girl’s dad.”
I looked at her. “Some girl’s dad?”
Steph wrinkled her nose. “You know how he was. All handsy. Wouldn’t surprise me if someone’s dad decided to put a stop to it.”
I’d known about Mr. Harrison molesting me and Becca. I hadn’t heard about anyone else. I wondered if Steph was right.
“Cassandra Greenfield, please report to the principal’s office.”
Steph raised her eyebrows. “What have you done now?” she teased, because of course I never broke rules or did anything wrong, and all the teachers loved me. Good thing they didn’t know about my sneaking past the Boundary. Or did they?
I rolled my eyes. “Must have been that fire I set.”
In Ms. Ashworth’s office I sat in a hard chair in front of her desk, as I had done—was it only last week? This time we were joined by Mr. Lewis, the guidance counselor, who usually picked vocations for the students. Was he going to change my vocation? Should I remind him that I’d wanted to be a teacher?
“Cassie,” Ms. Ashworth said abruptly, “this isn’t going to work.”
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“You speak when we tell you!” Mr. Lewis almost shouted, and I jumped in my seat.
Eyes wide, I turned back to Ms. Ashworth, whose face was stern.
“We tried to make an exception for you,” she said, and my eyes widened further. “But there was your mother, who never did fit in. Your father, and his shameful action a few months ago.”
My face started to burn.
“Didn’t have the decency to die!” Mr. Lewis said. “That’s what the SAS is for! But no—Greenfields always have to do it their own way.”
“And Becca. An Outsider,” Ms. Ashworth said.
“You Greenfields think you’re above everybody else!” Mr. Lewis snapped. “Like the rules of the United don’t apply to you!”
My jaw dropped open.
“You’re setting a bad example for the other kids,” Ms. Ashworth went on. “You lied about Becca being sick, didn’t you? You know this isn’t tolerated in the system. I have no choice but to expel you.”
“Wh—expel? What do you mean?”
“It means you leave here and don’t come back,” Ms. As
hworth said in a voice like steel. “We won’t take the risk of you infecting the other kids—good kids—with the Greenfield attitude.”
“Leave school?” I was dumbfounded. Sure, kids had been kicked out before, but they’d done extremely bad citizen–type stuff. What had I done?
“As for your vocation, forget it!” said Mr. Lewis, a vein in his neck starting to throb. “No one will hire a Greenfield anyway! You can kiss that good-bye!”
I stared at them both, back and forth. In our cell, almost everyone graduated high school. And almost everyone had a vocation. Without a vocation, you couldn’t do much. You ended up like the losers that Becca had played chicken with.
“I’ve done nothing wrong!” I exclaimed. “You can’t expel me, or take away my vocation!”
“It’s not only our decision,” said Ms. Ashworth. “Though of course we support it. But you’ve been stirring up trouble. You’ve gotten a bad name for yourself. That kind of thing gets noticed.”
The idea was so unbelievable that it was hard to take in. “But… what will I do?” I asked, wanting to argue but too shocked to put coherent thoughts together.
“You should have thought of that before!” Mr. Lewis said.
“Before what?” I asked. “Before I was a Greenfield?”