Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,16
of thing. We have the whole library. Look—if we work together, divide the labor, we can figure out how to live out there. But the point of Polo isn’t escape. Escape is a last resort. The point of Polo is to figure out what happens. Westing’s not perfect, but we’re happier here than we would be out there—”
“Without meds we wouldn’t last long,” Marty said, quietly.
“The escape plan is about giving us a choice,” Zach said, his shoulders, his whole body tense. He massaged his temples with one hand, as if the novelty of this business had worn off and it was now all giving him a headache. “For our entire lives we’ve never been given a choice. I’m not talking about living in some city, exposing other people. What I’m saying is—we can’t talk or visit friends at other recovery centers. Our news is filtered through AwayWeGo, even our news about why we only get news from AwayWeGo is filtered through AwayWeGo. And nobody tells us exactly what happens when they take us away, just stuff about tertiary clinics, those terrible flyers, spacious rooms and bright windows—you guys don’t actually believe the flyers? You guys don’t actually believe, palliative support and grooming and bathroom aid and then that’s it?”
The kids in the room looked unconvinced, so I spoke up. “We’ve all heard things. We never hear from anyone who’s taken away. Why? Haven’t you guys wondered?”
Zach’s features softened. He shot me a look of thanks.
“Yo, what I heard?” an extra-large-sized boy in a polo shirt piped up, between sips of orange soda. I was pretty sure his name was Nigel. He was so white he glowed in the dark and had an IQ of 157, or so he claimed. In our first week at Westing he drank half a liter of vodka, then got into a naked brawl with a door, which, incidentally, the door won. “I heard they get meds tested on them at those tertiary places. Experimentals. Probably half the time the cure’s what croaks you up.”
“Apes will only get you so far,” Melanie, an Asian girl who dressed all in black and bit the last guy who tried to kiss her, said. “Their immune systems are much stronger than ours. If you’re going to find a cure, human trials are a necessity.” I was pretty sure she’d described the general plot of The Cure, an AwayWeWatch Top Ten Thrillers of the Year pick, but that didn’t make me any less excited.
“Something’s off,” Zach said, summoning everyone’s attention. “It’s up to us to figure out what. And if we need to escape. . .”
Escape.
Zach and I could escape together.
We could go home.
I held on to the thought.
AWAY WE KNOW
WESTING PROFILES
Katrina Mackey:
The Girl Whose Death Transformed Westing
Former lacrosse star Katrina Mackey was diagnosed with PPV at the age of fourteen, the summer before her sophomore year of high school at Elford High in Albany, New York. She was admitted to Westing but took her own life a mere month and a half after matriculation, following a campaign of cyber-bullying that continued post-mortem, with vicious comments from former classmates at Elford High accumulating on a tribute page set up by her friends at Westing. The comments referenced the events of the Houston quarantine, which had taken place several weeks prior.
“I’m sorry for what happened down in Houston, that I am, but it doesn’t have a thing to do with our daughter, no, it doesn’t,” Mr. Mackey told Good Morning America shortly after his daughter’s death.
The Mackeys have since divorced, but almost a decade later, they still do not know how anyone could have done such a thing.
“What kind of a person bullies a sick child? I don’t care if they had family in Houston. They should know better,” Mrs. Mackey said.
Katrina Mackey had been suffering from depression even before her PPV diagnosis, but her parents reported she’d made friends at Westing and was looking forward to trying out for the Westing lacrosse team in the spring. The Mackeys believe the taunts from former classmates pushed her over the edge.
In response to the events in Houston and the death of Katrina Mackey, Congress passed the Safe Recovery Act, which reformed contact between youths in recovery and the uninfected.
After Polo’s first meeting, Zach demanded to know how he’d done. We sat together on a bench next to the library while students played Frisbee in the academic quad beneath a purple-orange sky. I tried to put into words how happy I was,