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it. Pretty soon this will feel like home, but better. Like summer camp.”
    When I realized she wasn’t joking, I swallowed hard.
    Rebecca led me into a dorm room. Something about being around her made me feel grimy. My school uniform was still stained with grass and dirt from yesterday.
    “This will be your side.” She pointed to the twin bed nearest to the door. The mattress was thin as cardboard, covered by the thin pink blankets you see in hospitals, and flanked by matching furniture: a dresser on one side, a desk on the other. Atop the desk was a small aluminum reading light, a few thin notebooks, and a Bible. Rebecca’s bed was pressed against the far wall under the window. Just as mine had been at home.
    Tears stung my eyes, and I turned toward the wall so that Rebecca wouldn’t see.
    “I went ahead and got your uniform,” Rebecca told me helpfully. She handed me a neatly folded blue ensemble and a gray wool sweater. “And I brought you up some breakfast. We’re not supposed to have food in our rooms, but they made an exception because I’m the SA.”
    Whether Rebecca was human or not, I was grateful for the food.
    “You’ve really been here three years?” I said between ravenous bites of granola.
    “Oh, yes,” she said in a sugary voice. “I love it here.”
    I felt as if I were in a science fiction story. The kind where they make you take pills that control your mind.
    Rebecca had been dropped off by her parents before President Scarboro had instituted the Moral Statutes. They were missionaries and had gone to serve God overseas before international travel had been banned.
    As Rebecca told me more, my shock wore off and turned into pity. Her parents hadn’t contacted her since leaving the country, and though she adamantly defended that they were alive, I was doubtful. There was a lot of anti-American sentiment abroad during the War.
    I couldn’t help thinking what terrible parents they were to abandon their child, especially in a place like this. I questioned again if I had tried hard enough to reason with the soldiers who’d taken me, but though I swallowed the guilt, it weighed down my stomach like a rock.
    Rebecca sat on the end of my bed and braided her yellow hair over her shoulder while I changed. She prattled on about how excited she was to have a new roommate and how we were going to be best friends, which put a halt to any questions I’d been thinking I might ask her about Ms. Brock and the Sisters of Salvation. Because the conversation seemed so superficial it had to be fake, and because I was pretty sure it wasn’t fake, I blocked out her voice and checked my reflection in the mirror.
    I’d never been conventionally pretty: My eyes were big and brown and I had long black lashes, but my eyebrows didn’t arch right and my nose was slightly crooked. Now my complexion was ghoulish—not entirely unlike the girl the soldiers had escorted back into the building—and my cheekbones appeared too prominent, like the last hours had added ten hungry years to my life. The navy uniform was even worse than my school uniform, probably because I resented it a hundred times more.
    I forced a deep breath. My hair smelled like the synthetic seat of a school bus. I quickly combed out the kinks with my fingers and tied it back into a ragged knot.
    “Time for class,” Rebecca chimed, catching my attention.
    My brain began flipping through my options. I needed to find a phone. I’d try home first, just in case the MM had released my mother. If not, I’d call Beth to see if she’d heard anything about where they’d taken the Article violators.
    When I glanced down at Rebecca, I found her overly excited at the prospect of showing me around. She had a position of some power here as a Student Assistant and could potentially tell on me if I got out of line. She looked like the type.
    I was going to have to be covert.
    A few minutes later we were walking to the pavilion, just across from the cafeteria,