Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,2
morning. “‘To be or not to be?’” I once asked the dark and snowy sky. I hadn’t merely said the words. I’d stood at the edge of the roof and meant them.
In late July, a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday, I heard back.
Dear Mr. Noah Falls,
We are pleased to extend to you an offer of admission to Westing Academy as a junior for the fall of the upcoming school year. We reviewed thousands of applications for admission, many submitted by very qualified and talented young individuals from a variety of unique and diverse backgrounds. Unfortunately, offers of admission could be made only to a select few of these applicants. You have been chosen for your extraordinary academic and extracurricular achievements, which reveal you to be a dedicated young person capable of representing the Academy well. As one of the only institutions of our kind in the world, and the only such institution in the United States, we take pride in our mission here at Westing, a mission that can only be carried out through the continued success and diligence of our pupils. We hope you will be joining us this fall as a student, as a representative, and as a soldier willing to do his part in the battle for improved conditions for all youths in recovery. Once again, congratulations.
Sincerely,
Adam B. Colters
Dean of Admissions
Westing Academy
We spent my last night at Richmond on the roof, looking out at the fields beyond Richmond’s walls. It was a brisk night in early September, one of the first autumn nights, and what I wouldn’t have given for a five-minute run through the surrounding countryside, a chance to dash headlong into that wind. Just thinking about it made me dizzy with excitement—I could hardly remember a time I wasn’t surrounded by walls. I said so to Alex.
“I mean, sure, I’d probably trip and fall on my face, but up to that point it would be sweet.”
He didn’t respond at first. “I wonder why they don’t round us all up and shoot us. Instead of sticking us in centers. Burn the bodies. Stop PPV from spreading once and for all. That would be best.”
When I didn’t answer, he added, “Better than being some alien lab experiment.”
“If I was an alien and you were my lab experiment, I would send a probe to Uranus.”
“Stop,” he said, pretending to be annoyed, but he couldn’t keep from laughing.
At Richmond, we had little connection with the outside—no Internet, no cable, a bin of old movies to watch on a TV more ancient than our parents. But we could see that despite our being “in recovery,” more kids kept showing up at Richmond, red-eyed and fresh from their diagnoses. These fresh faces brought news of the government’s billion-dollar National Recovery Program, recovery centers like Richmond cropping up all over the country. There were whispers of medication shortages and internment camps—sorry, improvised mass recovery clinics—at the same time that the government was reportedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Westing. A kid named Jeremy Bertram claimed his dad was a tertiary care researcher who had pioneered a medical procedure that had cured several infected kids of PPV, whereas Jason Waters maintained tertiary care clinics were slaughterhouses in which infected kids rolled down an assembly line until a man in a rubber suit shot them in the forehead. Sanjeev Kapoor told us about how in Mumbai, parents wouldn’t let children outside—those who had money sent their kids into the country, away from the cities. A devout Catholic boy appropriately named Christian wouldn’t shut up about an attempt on Pope John Paul III’s life; despite the fact that the gates of heaven were cracked wide for His Holiness, Pope John Paul apparently proved remarkably resilient to assassination, because the would-be assassin—Marco Rinaldi—had the distinction of being the only man in history to have been head-butted repeatedly in the face by Christ’s acting representative on Earth.
Alex studied my face, my silence. “You know I’m right.”
“I think I’ll pass,” I said. I didn’t want him to be right. “You said you missed your parents’ lake house.”
“More than my parents. Mom was always working and Dad was always mad that Mom was always working.”
“But you remember them?” I could hardly remember mine. We weren’t allowed direct contact with them, in light of past incidents, which was government speak for kidnappings, runaway attempts, highway chases, terrorist attacks, contamination alerts. Seven years ago, a few months before I got sick, the entire city of Houston was