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personal. “What really happened with your brother?” he asked.
    â€œThey broke him,” I breathed out. “He was with the first group that got tested. They took him a little over two years ago. Same testing facility, same series of tests.”
    There were only six of them at the Bake Shop then. They’d kept three of the guys for further evaluation, and three they’d sent home. I’d looked up the other two after Tyler died. I wanted to see how they were doing, if they were as messed-up as my brother. They were alive, but neither of them was still in school. Neither of them had a job. As far as I could tell, they were barely existing.
    â€œWhat was he like when he came home?” Chris asked.
    â€œDifferent,” I replied. “Angry. Closed off. Isolated. Take your pick.”
    â€œWhat about his friends? His girlfriend? Yesterday, back at that stupid therapy session, you said everybody would turn on us once we got home. Did they turn on him?” Chris asked, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was his biggest fear. Not failing these tests. Not have to register as a MAOA-L carrier. Rather, that the people he’d grown to love would all reject him.
    I smiled as I recalled Olivia. She was one person who’d never turned her back on Tyler, the only one who could get him to talk. “His girlfriend didn’t turn on him. Neither did his best friend, Nick. Olivia was waiting for Tyler the day he got home.” She’s with him now , I silently added.
    â€œSo then you knew,” Chis said, a few minutes later. “I mean, you knew that if your brother tested positive, chances were you would too.”
    â€œYup.” I’d known my days were numbered when Sheriff Watts first showed up for Tyler. The fact that I’d also tested positive wasn’t coincidental. The gene was hereditary, passed from one generation to the next.
    â€œSo why didn’t you run?” Chris asked. “Why didn’t you take off the day before your seventeenth birthday?”
    â€œI thought about it.” I’d actually done more than just think about it—I’d completely mapped it out, had even started stashing supplies in the shed behind our house. Plan was to toss all my belongings into my Bronco and head for the Canadian border, but I didn’t have a passport or any real money to speak of. Plus, in my mind, running was like letting them win, admitting that I was scared of failing their tests. And scared or not, I wasn’t about to let them win.
    â€œI had nowhere to go,” I finally admitted. “It’s not like anyone was going to help me. Most of our friends wanted nothing to do with me after Tyler, and it’s not like people are overly excited to help a teenager with sociopath potential. So I figured, why put off the inevitable. Why let them see my fear and win?”
    â€œThey won’t break us.” There was an edge of defiance in Chris’s tone, one that had me chuckling. He was as determined as I was to prove Ms. Tremblay and every last guard in that place wrong. To prove to the world that we weren’t hardwired to kill.
    â€œI would have run,” Chris mumbled under his breath.
    I couldn’t say I blamed him. Looking back on it, I probably should have.

SIX
    I’d forgotten how long it could take to go forty miles on snow-covered roads, let alone in an oversized, top-heavy van. What should’ve been a quick one-hour drive was painfully dragging on, the boredom of the trip bordering on psychological torture. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window. How the other guys in the van had managed to fall asleep was beyond me. Every few minutes, we’d hit a bump in the road and my head would bounce off the glass, painfully jarring me awake.
    â€œWhat time is it?” Chris asked as he stretched beside me. He hadn’t been able to sleep either and had taken to picking at the small tear in the