Her bright, bloodred hair and black, tight dresses. She was a force of nature. She was a presence. Leading up to The Program she’d been acting differently, and yet, none of us said anything about it—maybe hoping it would go away. We all failed her.
The handlers had been waiting at Lacey’s house the night they came to take her to The Program. We were dropping her off, and I can still remember James joking about the unfamiliar car in her driveway, saying that it was pretty late for her parents to have friends over—maybe they were swingers. Lacey smiled but didn’t laugh. I just thought she was tired. I should have asked if she was okay.
But I didn’t. She gave Miller a quick kiss and climbed out, walking to her house. She’d barely gotten inside when we heard her scream. We all rushed to get out of the car, when her front door opened.
It’s a sight I’ll never get out of my head. On either side of her were the men in white coats holding her as she thrashed around, screaming that she’d kill them. She managed to get loose and tried crawling back into the house, calling for her mother as the handlers dragged her out. Tears streaked mascara down her cheeks, and she begged for them to let her go.
Miller started toward the house, but James grabbed him, wrapping his arm around his neck to hold him. “It’s too late,” James whispered. I looked back at him fiercely then, but I saw the devastation on his face. The fear. James met my eyes only to tell me to get in the car.
James pushed Miller and me into the backseat and then got behind the wheel, pulling away quickly. Miller was clutching my shirt, ripping it at the collar as we drove past. And the last thing we saw was Lacey getting Tasered by a handler, flopping to the floor like a dying fish.
I reach now for Miller, trying to pry his fingers off the steering wheel. When I finally do, he turns to me. “Do you think there’s a chance, Sloane?” he asks almost desperately. “Do you think there’s any chance she remembers me?”
The question chokes me, and I press my lips together to keep myself from crying. There is no chance—The Program is thorough. The Program works. But I can’t bear to tell him that, so I shrug. “You never know,” I say, fighting the feeling of loss. “And if not, you can always reintroduce yourself when her aftercare is over. Start again.”
Once she’s healed, Lacey’s allowed to carry on with her life without interference—at least that’s what The Program brochures have told us. But I’ve never seen a returner go back to their old life. Or even want to. Whole sections of their lives have been erased; past relationships mean nothing to them. In fact, I think the past might even scare them.
Miller sneers at the thought of this new Lacey, the hollowed-out one. He wants her to remember him, what they built together. Both Miller and James think The Program is a fate worse than death.
Lacey had thought the same. The reason her own parents turned her in was that they found a bottle of QuikDeath in her room. She’d been planning to kill herself and had bought the drug from some burnout after school. Miller hated himself for not knowing. James and I often wondered if he would have killed himself with her.
When Lacey was sent away, Miller broke into her bedroom because he knew he’d be erased from her life—that we all would be. But when he got there, her pictures were gone, and so was her clothing and personal items. The Program had wiped the space clean. All Miller had was a notepad that Lacey had left behind in his truck. He kept it, hoping it held some small piece of her.
We sat by the river one afternoon and looked through Lacey’s handwriting, laughing where she drew pictures of our teachers in the margins. But soon, the notepad changed. The math problems dissolved into black spirals scratched into the paper with pen. Her mind was infected, and it was apparent through the pages how quickly the depression had taken hold. It’d only been about two weeks.
I hate The Program and what it does to us, but I also know that I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to. Despite everything, our school district has the highest survival rate