“ My grandfather was taken to the Hospital,” I say.
Gonegonegone.
“Is he better now?” the girl asks.
“ He’s gone. ”
Gonegonegone.
“I ’m sorry,” the girl says. Her voice surprises me. She means it. She means that she’s sorry.
“ Why? ” I ask. “It was his time. ”
The girl stares at me for so long I think she’s done speaking. But then she says, “You’re crying. ”
I touch my face.
My fingers come away wet with salty tears.
“I have no reason to be sad,” I say.
It’s true.
I have no reason to be sad.
None at all.
2.
Seven Years before I Die
I suppose I should be upset that I’m crazy, but I’m actually quite pleased about it. Being crazy means I don’t have to work in the fields or the City. It means I get to stay here, in the Hospital. With my friends.
“ Selene,” Kayleigh drawls from the sofa in the common room. “Come sit with us. ”
Victria, who had been by the window staring at the open fields that separate the Hospital from the rest of the ship’s population in the City, plops down in the center seat of the orange sofa made of scratchy wool. She wiggles in closer to Kayleigh, and the two girls look almost like sisters, with the same shade of olive skin and same length of dark brown hair. Everyone on the ship has similar coloring, but I think Victria tries to make herself into a shadow of Kayleigh. She deigns to glance in my direction. She doesn’t mind me, exactly, she just likes to know the order of things.
And the order of things here is that Kayleigh comes first, and Victria is always beside her, and sometimes, trailing at the end, is me.
It’s almost time for lessons. Doc and the nurses like us all to take meds at the same time, just before the solar lamp in the metal ceiling clicks on.
“I hate the meds, ” Kayleigh says under her breath as Doc walks into the common room.
He and the nurses distribute the pills, and we all swallow them down obediently. Except Kayleigh.
She stares at the pill until Doc notices, and he doesn’t look away from her until she gulps it down with some water.
I don’t mind the Inhibitor pills, not like Kayleigh does. Swallowing one blue-and-white pi
ll a day is a small price to pay for life at the Hospital. So we’re loons. So we have to take mental meds. It’s not so bad that Eldest keeps us here, removed from the rest of the ship, on the other side of Godspeed, in the Hospital, away from the normal people. It’s not so bad being abnormal here, where everyone else is weird too.
But if that pill is supposed to keep me from being crazy, it doesn’t do a very good job.
Instead of making me less loons, sometimes I worry it makes me more. I’m different. We—all of us in the Hospital—are different. I didn’t have to see the way my parents’ glassy eyes would flicker with concern when I spoke to know that the things I said weren’t normal.
Doc says we’re special, but “special ” is just a nice way of saying “freak. ”
“ Sometimes,” Kayleigh whispers, “I think it’s everyone else who’s weird. ”