it matters more than anything else that I do here!” I said.
“But what if it didn’t?”
I know the work I’m going to do will be important, and the lives I’ll change will be immeasurable, and my family will get to live in a house with both a pool and a sauna inside it. I know exactly what the future is supposed to look like, if I just give myself to it completely.
But what if I didn’t?
Is there a version of myself who isn’t obsessed with her work, a girl I’ve never met, who laughs with her friends in the lunchroom and hangs a wall full of pictures behind her bed? Is there something further down inside me, a plane of existence where accolades and trophies melt away into perfectly normal, golden days of nothing to do and no one to please? Have I been squinting so hard in a single direction, at a distant future, that I’ve made myself blind?
I don’t know why you guys moved me from the C-School to the Human dorms. Probably to mess with my head. I definitely don’t know why Emma put a photo of us on her wall.
It seems like it’s all happening for a reason. Maybe one day I’ll learn what that reason is.
Neesha.
TO BE SAFE, Neesha made the walk up and back to the stone well twice, to make sure the envelope hadn’t fallen out. The woods were creepy at this time of night, full of foreign sounds, animal noises; the wall of fog created a separation between the world of the school and the world of the unknown around it. At one point, she felt something creeping up on her, and spun just in time to catch a branch, swinging harmlessly back and forth.
She hurried back to the dorms, empty-handed. If she was quick, she might be able to get to Zaza before the sweep and get her money back. She couldn’t stand the idea of going to Emma with nothing, spending an entire sweep locked in their room in bitter disappointment. Emma had trusted her with this; she wasn’t going to fail so spectacularly on her first try.
As her footsteps crunched along the path, she noticed a shuffling noise, like the swish of plastic against plastic. It got louder as she got closer, but it wasn’t coming from the school; it was coming from in front of her, across the lawn. The sound began to morph, hiccuping like human laughter, human voices, and then footsteps.
She froze in the middle of the path, staring at it. A flashlight clicked on; a tiny, solitary beam, shooting toward the school. Another flashlight clicked on. Then another. Then three more. Then an entire army, too many to count, at least fifty beams, moving and circling and scanning in all directions.
In one unified motion, the flashlights began to advance. The siren shifted up a pitch, and the school’s intercom system ripped out once more across the grounds.
“All students must presently be in their dorms. The maintenance sweep is beginning.”
She stood frozen for a moment, watching them. She’d never seen a sweep from the outside before. Usually they were just drills or extra precautions during storms when there were serious electricity problems. One time, in her Year Two, a boy named Yasmani fell asleep in the forest, and they called a sweep for the two hours it took to find him.
She started to walk back toward her dorm. It’s not worth it. That’s what Zaza had said in the forest. Of course it was worth it—the work was incredible, far more revolutionary than anyone else’s at Redemption in her four years. But, she realized, she’d never actually pictured the consequences. Every time she brought it up with Emma, Emma told her not to worry, people got away with breaking the rules all the time. But that wasn’t entirely true. Emma got away with breaking the rules all the time. And Emma wasn’t here anymore.
Neesha walked faster, down a separate, wider path, around the march of the flashlights. You’re all of us now, that’s what her mother had told her, with a kiss on the forehead at the drop-off for the bus. We’re all with you. She meant it as a promise that the family would support her and watch over her. But as the tape had played back in her head over the years, warped from repetition, it started to sound more like a threat. You’re responsible for all of us now. We’re all counting on