The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds #1)(15)

I waved her hands away, but Ashley pushed past the others and brushed my long, dark hair over my shoulder. At first I didn’t understand why she was looking at me like that—with wide eyes, rimmed with a raw pink. She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth.

“I really…thought you were…” We were still standing by the door, but I could feel the chill that had taken over the cabin. It settled over my skin like cold silk.

Ashley had been around these parts for far too long to really crack, but I was still surprised to see her so frazzled and at a loss for what to say. She and a few other girls were honorary leaders of our sad, mismatched group, nominated mostly because they hit certain bodily milestones before the rest of us, and could explain what was happening to us without laughing in our faces.

I offered a weak smile and a shrug, suddenly without words again. But she didn’t look convinced, and she didn’t let go of my arm. The cabin was dark and damp, the usual smell of mold clung to every surface, but I would have taken that over the Infirmary’s clean, sterile stench any day.

“Let me…” Ashley took a deep breath. “Let me know if you’re not, got it?”

And what would you be able to do about it? I wanted to ask. Instead, I turned to the back left corner of our cramped cabin. Whispers and stares followed my zigzagging path around the rows of bunk beds. The pills tucked tight against my chest felt like they were on fire.

“—she was gone,” I heard someone say.

Vanessa, who slept on the bottom bunk to the right of mine, had snuck up to Sam’s bed. When I came into view, they stopped mid-conversation to stare down at me. Eyes wide, mouths wider.

The sight of them together was still sickening to me, even after a year. How many days and nights had I spent perched up there with Sam, steadfastly ignoring Vanessa’s attempts to drag us into some stupid, pointless conversation?

Sam’s best-friend slot had been vacant for less than two hours when Vanessa had slithered in—and not a day went by that Vanessa didn’t remind me of that.

“What…” Sam leaned over the edge of her bed. She didn’t look haughty or hostile, the way she usually did. She looked…concerned? Curious? “What happened to you?”

I shook my head, my chest tight with all the things I wanted to say.

Vanessa let out a sharp laugh. “Nice, real nice. And you wonder why she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore?”

“I don’t…” Sam mumbled. “Whatever.”

Sometimes I wondered if there was a part of Sam that remembered not just me, but the person she used to be before I ruined her. Amazing how I had managed to erase every good part of Sam—or at least, all the parts I loved. One touch, and she was gone.

A few girls asked me what had happened between the two of us. Most, I think, assumed Sam was being cruel when she claimed that we had never, ever been friends and never would be. I tried to play it off with shrugs—but Sam was the only thing that had made Thurmond bearable. Without her, it was no life at all.

No life at all.

I fingered the packet of pills.

Our cabin was brown on brown on brown. The only color was the white of our sheets, and most of those had aged to an ugly yellow. There were no shelves of books, no posters, no pictures. Just us.

I crawled onto my low bunk, dropping face-first into the worn sheets. I breathed in their familiar scent—bleach, sweat, and something distinctly earthy—and tried not to listen to the conversation above me.

A part of me had been waiting, I think—desperate to see if I could fix what I had done to my friend. But it was done. It was over, and she was gone, and the only one to blame was me. The best thing I could do for her was disappear; even if Dr. Begbie was playing me and they really were going to get rid of me, they wouldn’t connect us. They wouldn’t question or punish Sam because they thought she had helped me hide, like they would if we had still been friends. There were over three thousand of us at Thurmond, and I was the last Orange—maybe in the entire world. Or one of two, if the boy in the Infirmary was like me. It had only been a matter of time before they found out the truth.

I was dangerous, and I knew what they did to the dangerous ones.

The camp routine ran itself through, as it always did, churning us through the Mess Hall for dinner, to the Washrooms, and back to the cabin for the night. The light was dim and fading outside, clinging to the first fringes of night.

“All right, kittens.” Ashley’s voice. “Ten minutes till lights-out. Whose turn is it?”

“Mine—should I just pick up from where we left off?” Rachel was on the other side of the room, but her squeaky voice carried well.

I could practically hear Ashley’s eyes rolling. “Yes, Rachel. Isn’t that what we always do?”

“Okay…so…so the princess? She was in her tower, and she was still really sad.”

“Girl,” Ashley cut in, “you’re going to have to spice this up, or I’m skipping your boring ass and going to the next person.”

“Okay,” Rachel squeaked. I rolled over onto my side, trying to get a glimpse of her through the rows of bunk beds. “The princess was in terrible pain—terrible, terrible pain—”

“Oh God,” was Ashley’s only comment. “Next?”

Macey picked up the loose story threads the best she could. “While the princess was locked away in her tower, all she could think about was the prince.”