The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds #1)(81)

I didn’t really care about the birthday either way. It wasn’t like I had anyone left I really wanted to invite. What was more important to me was the fact that, at ten, I was suddenly old—or rather, would be old soon. I’d start to look like the girls in the magazines, be forced to wear dresses and high heels and makeup—go to high school.

“In ten years from tomorrow, I’ll be twenty.” I don’t know why I said it out loud. It was just this profound realization, and it had to be shared.

The silence that followed was actually painful. Mom sat straight up and pressed her napkin to her mouth. For a moment I thought she might stand up and leave, but Dad’s hand came down to rest on top of hers, settling her like an anchor.

Dad finished chewing on his barbecued chicken before giving me a smile that quivered at the edges. He leaned down a ways so our identical green eyes met. “That’s right, Little Bee. And how old will you be ten years after that?”

“Thirty,” I said. “And you’ll be…fifty-two!”

He chuckled. “That’s right! Halfway to the—”

Grave, my mind whispered. Halfway to the grave. Dad realized his mistake before the word fully left his mouth, but it didn’t matter. All three of us knew what he meant.

Grave.

I knew what death was. I knew what happened after you died. At school, they brought in special visitors to talk to the kids that came back. The one assigned to our room, Miss Finch, gave her presentation two weeks before Christmas, wearing a bright pink turtleneck and glasses that covered half of her face. She wrote everything out on the whiteboard, in thick, capital letters. DEATH IS NOT SLEEPING. IT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE. IT COULD HAPPEN AT ANY TIME. YOU DO NOT COME BACK.

When people die, she explained, they stop breathing. They do not have to eat, they no longer speak, and they cannot think or miss us like we miss them. They do not, ever, ever wake up. She kept giving us more examples, like we were too stupid or little to understand—like the six of us left hadn’t sat there and watched Grace’s lights go out. Dead cats cannot purr, and dead dogs cannot play. Dead flowers—Miss Finch pointed to the bundle of dried flowers on my teacher’s desk—do not grow or bloom anymore. Hours of this. Hours of being asked, Do you understand? But for all of her answers, she never got around to the one question I had wanted to ask.

“What does it feel like?”

Dad looked up sharply. “What does what feel like?”

I looked down at my plate. “To die. Do you feel it? I know that it’s not the same for everyone, and that you stop breathing and your heart stops beating, but what does that feel like?”

“Ruby!” I could hear the horror in Mom’s voice.

“It’s okay if it hurts,” I said, “but are you still in your body after things stop working? Do you know that you’ve died?”

“Ruby!”

Dad’s bushy eyebrows drew together as his shoulders slumped. “Well…”

“Don’t you dare,” Mom said, using her free hand to try to pry his big one off her other trembling fingers. “Jacob, don’t you dare—”

I kept my hands clenched together under the table, trying not to stare at Mom’s face as it paled from a deep red to a stark white.

“No one…” Dad began. “No one knows, sweetheart. I can’t give you an answer. Everyone finds out when it’s their time. I guess it probably depends—”

“Stop it!” Mom said, slapping her other hand down on the table. Our plates jumped in time with her palm. “Ruby, go to your room!”

“Calm down,” Dad told her in a stern voice. “This is important to talk about.”

“It is not! It absolutely is not! How dare you? First you cancel the party, and when I told you—” She strained against his grip. I watched, my lips parting, as she picked up her water glass and threw it at his head. In ducking, he lifted his hand from the table, just enough for her to wrench away and stand. Her chair clattered to the ground a second after the glass shattered against the wall behind Dad’s head.

I screamed—I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out. Mom came around to my side of the table and grabbed me by the elbow, hauling me up, nearly taking the tablecloth with me.

“Cut it out,” I heard Dad say. “Stop! We have to talk to her about it! The doctors said we needed to prepare her!”

“You’re hurting me,” I managed to choke out. Mom startled at the sound of my voice, looking down at where her nails were digging into the soft skin of my upper arm.

“Oh my God…” she said, but I was already in the hallway, flying up the stairs, slamming my bedroom door shut and locking it behind me, closing out the sound of my parents screaming at each other.

I dove under my heavy purple bedcovers, knocking the row of carefully arranged stuffed animals to the ground. I didn’t bother to change out of the clothes I had worn to school, or turn off the lights, not until I was sure my parents were still in the kitchen, and far away from me.

An hour later, breathing the same hot air under the comforter in and out, listening to the rattle of the air vent, I thought about the other significant thing about turning ten.

Grace had been ten. So had Frankie, and Peter, and Mario, and Ramona. So had half of my class, the half that never came back after Christmas. Ten is the most common age for IAAN to manifest, I had overheard a newscaster saying, but the affliction can claim anyone between the ages of eight and fourteen.