then
The first time I saw Rachel and Lena’s father I knew: knew I would marry him, knew I would fall in love with him. Knew he would never love me back, and I wo Neuldn’t care.
Picture me: seventeen, skinny, scared. Wearing a too-big, beat-up denim jacket I’d bought from a thrift store and a hand-knitted scarf, not even close to warm enough to immunize me from the frigid December wind, which came howling across the Charles River, blew the snow sideways, stripped people in the streets of all their color so they walked, white as ghosts, heads bowed against the fury.
That was the night Misha took me to see the cousin of a friend of a friend, Rawls, who ran a Brain Shop down on Ninth.
That’s what we called the dingy centers that sprang up in the decade after the cure became law: Brain Shops. Some of them pretended to be at least half-legit, with waiting rooms like at a regular doctor’s office and tables for lying down. In others, it was just some guy with a knife, ready to take your money and give you a scar, hopefully one that looked realistic enough.
Rawls’s shop was the second kind. A low basement room, painted black for God knows what reason; a sagging leather couch, a small TV, a stiff-backed wooden chair, and a space heater—and that was pretty much it, except for the smell of blood, a few buckets, and a little curtained-off area, too, where he actually did his work.
I remember I nearly threw up coming in, I was so nervous. A couple of kids were ahead of me. There was no space on the couch, and I had to stand. I kept thinking the walls were contracting; I was terrified they would collapse entirely, burying us there.
I’d run away from home almost a month earlier and in that time had been scraping and saving money for a fake.
In those days it was easier to travel; a decade after the cure was perfected, the walls were still going up, and regulations weren’t as stringent. Still, I’d never been more than twenty miles from home, and I spent practically the whole bus ride down to Boston either with my nose pressed up against the window, watching the bleak blur of starved winter trees and shivering landscapes and guard towers, new and in construction—or in the bathroom, sick with nerves, trying to hold my breath against the sharp stink of pee.
The last commercial flight: that’s what I watched on TV, at Rawls’s shop, while I waited my turn. The news crews packing the runway, the roar of the plane down the strip, and then the lift: an impossible lift, like a bird’s, so beautiful and easy it made you want to cry. I’d never been on an airplane, and now I never would. The airstrips would be dismantled and airports abandoned. Too little gas, too much risk of contagion.
I remember my heart was in my throat, and I couldn’t look away from the TV, from the image of the plane as it morphed, grew smaller, turned into a small black bird against the clouds.
That’s when they came: soldiers, young recruits, fresh out of boot camp. Uniforms crisp and new, boots shining like oil. People were trying to run out the exit in the back, and everyone was shouting. The curtains got torn down; I saw a flimsy folding table covered by a sheet, and a girl stretched out on it, bleeding from her neck. Rawls must have been halfway through her procedure.
The back door was thrown open, and I made it out and into an alley slick with ice, heaped with dirty snow and trash. I fell, cut my hand on the ice, kept going. I knew if I was caught, that was the end—I’d be hauled back to my parents, chucked into the labs, probably ranked a zero.
That was the first year that a national system of ranking was established, made consistent across the country. Pairing was taking off. Regulatory councils were springing up everywhere, and little kids talked about becoming evaluators when they grew up.
And no one would choose the girl with the record.
It was at the corner of Linden and Adams that I saw him. Ran into him, actually—saw him step out in front of me, hands up, shouting, “Wait!” Tried to dodge, lost my footing, stumbled directly into his arms. I was so close, I could see the snow caught in his lashes, smell the damp wool of his coat and the sharpness of aftershave, see where he’d missed the stubble on his jaw. So close that the procedural scar on his neck looked like a tiny white starburst.
I’d never been that close to a boy before.
The soldiers behind me were still shouting—“Stop!” and “Hold her!” and “Don’t let her get away!” I’ll never forget the way he looked at me—curiously, almost amused, as though I were a strange species of animal in a zoo.
Then: He let me go.