PART
ONE
1
CASSIE
THANK GOD FOR PROGRAMMABLE COFFEEMAKERS, that’s all I want to say. Actually, that’s about all I can say until I’ve had that first cup. Right on time, 5:45 a.m., life’s precious fluid starts seeping down to the carafe.
And thank God for coffee. Last year when we’d heard that a lot of coffee crops had failed, I thought the bottom of my life had dropped out. But this year coffee is back on the shelves at United All-Ways, and I for one am grateful.
Leaning back against the kitchen counter with my first hot cup, I looked out the torn window screen to see the barest hint of pink coming up over the tops of the trees by the Boundary. I guess people who live in cells by the ocean get to see the sun coming up over the water.
Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if any people live near any ocean.
I felt the coffee igniting nerves throughout my body as I sipped and watched the sun come up. It was partly blocked by the carport where I kept my—
I bolted upright and peered through the ragged screen.
“No, she didn’t!” I shrieked, wanting to hurl my coffee cup right out the window. It would have hit my truck if my truck had been there. Which it wasn’t!
“Damnation, Rebecca!” I shouted, then wheeled and headed upstairs just to double-check. Just in case. Just in case my twin, Ridiculous Rebecca, was in fact still snoring in bed instead of joyriding in my truck.
I slammed open her bedroom door, adrenaline making jumpy friends with all the caffeine in my system.
Becca’s bed was empty.
Seething, I hurried to my room at the end of the hall, passing the door to our parents’ room, which we kept shut all the time nowadays. In my room I threw on yesterday’s jeans and a plaid shirt that I’d been too hasty in assigning to the dirty clothes pile. Jamming my feet into my perfectly worn cowboy boots, I started rehearsing what I would say to my sister when I caught up with her.
And I would catch up with her.
There was zero doubt about that. Our cell was barely four miles across, a nice big crop circle. Becca had no place to run, no place to hide.
2
I PUSHED OPEN OUR SCREEN door so hard that one of the hinges busted, making it tilt crazily. Watch it, idiot. Anything I broke, I had to fix. It wasn’t like there was anyone else to do it.
Halfway around the side of the house, I remembered to look at my watch. 5:55. Silently I mouthed Crap! I turned around, stomped up the steps, across the porch, through the broken screen door, and into our living room. Curfew wasn’t over till 6:00 a.m., and I’d seen what happened to people who didn’t think the Provost meant what he said about curfew. He really, really meant it. He meant inside your house from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Not in your yard. Not under your carport. Not leaning against your fence, enjoying the breeze. And he always, always knew.
My jaw was so tight it was starting to hurt. Since I had four—no, three—minutes left to kill, I went back into the kitchen and cut myself a couple slices of bread. I had a PB & J in my hand by 6:01, and I hurried out to the carport where Ma’s dinky purple moped was leaning against a pole.
Just looking at it bummed me out. For one thing it reminded me of Ma, which, obviously: bad. For another thing it reminded me of Becca, because she’s the one who used the moped now, and I was ready to skin her alive. Third, it had a top speed of twelve miles an hour. Twelve. Miles. An. Hour. And that was on a full charge, which it had only if Becca remembered to plug it in the night before. Fourth, the pickup had been Pa’s, and he’d left me in charge of it. There were only a few pickup trucks left in the entire cell. We’d only been allowed to keep it because it was so ancient that I practically had to push-start it. But I still loved it, I was still the one who used it, and now Becca had taken it, had left before curfew, and was probably already getting high with her loser doper friends.
And who would have to come up with some lame excuse about her tardiness or absence at school? Me. Who had to hope that somehow she hadn’t already been seen out before curfew? Me. As mad as I was, I didn’t want to see her go through that. I never wanted to see her go through that.
Ma’s moped started easily enough and I wheeled it around, then got on and steered through our gate with my non-sandwich-holding hand. The more I heard the gentle hum of its little engine pushing us down the road, the madder I got.
My sandwich was gone by the time I reached Murphy’s crossroads—not that there are any Murphys anymore. I guess “Forty-seven’s crossroads” didn’t have the same ring. At the big Healthier United sign I turned left to take the road to town, all the time searching the crop fields for the curved red roof of the pickup poking out above the wheat. Becca had several usual hangouts, and I circled down to the gully where kids went to smoke and generally be bad citizens. No one was there, and the tire tracks in the rutted mud looked a couple days old, at least.
By 7:30 I had puttered to all of Becca’s lairs. Though I’d found several of her red-eyed friends, none of them admitted seeing Ridiculous, and no one had seen my truck. She’d done an excellent job of disappearing. Damnation!
3
IT ALMOST KILLED ME TO chug up to school on Ma’s moped, but of course I did it because I’m not the twin who breaks rules. I’m not the twin who makes things harder for everyone. I’m the twin who shows up for school every day on time, rain or shine, and I’m the twin who then goes to my after-school job at United All-Ways because our family needs money. Ma was gone, Da was… gone-ish, and who kept Ridiculous from starving her skinny butt off?
That would be me.
School was school. We studied farming, mostly: planting patterns, current approved crops, harvesting tips ’n’ tricks. Our cell was an ag cell, but of course there were other vocations, too. I’d hoped to be assigned to higher schooling, but at sixteen they had labeled Becca an electrician and me a mechanic. The irony there was that Becca had clearly learned to hot-wire my truck, but she wouldn’t know how to put the alternator belt back on once it slipped off its pulley, which it tended to do every couple hundred miles.
Becca wasn’t at school. My truck was not in the parking lot. My anger flamed—not only would Becca risk getting herself into serious trouble, but she was dragging my truck down with her!
“Cassie Greenfield, please come to the principal’s office.”
I was so busy fuming that I didn’t hear the first announcement.
“Cassandra Greenfield, please report to the principal’s office.”
Heads turned to look at me, and our teacher quit lecturing, her hand frozen on the slide that showed less-wasteful irrigation methods.
Slowly I got up, grabbed my backpack, and left the class.
Standing awkwardly in the outer office, I told the secretary that I’d been called. I’d never been in here before—one of the few kids who had never, ever done anything to warrant getting called to the principal’s office.