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my bunk and fell across it, throwing my arm across my eyes and trying to forget that I was locked in a small room with no way out.

    Quarantine, day three
    The first two days of quarantine I’d concentrated on my little room, my memories, my fears. The world beyond my little cell hadn’t really registered. But on day three I spent time looking out at the world outside the glass walls.
    I sat on the cold tile floor at the front of my observation room, watching the people in the other cells. When the girl across the hall met my eyes, I grabbed my notepad. In big letters I wrote my name across a page. I flattened it against the glass so the girl across the hall could read it. I saw her smile. She motioned for me to wait and ran to her bunk. She wrote across what looked like the back of a page from the briefing booklet, holding it up so I could read it.
    “Kelly.”
    Finally. Someone to communicate with—sort of.
    By the time the day ended I knew everyone’s name in the rooms around mine. We’d even managed to play a game of charades. It was fun, and for a little while I forgot where I was and why.

    Quarantine, day five
    I jerked awake, sitting up in bed. My heart hammered in my chest, echoing the banging in my head. I strained to hear over the blood rushing behind my ears. Was it just a dream? No. No, I could definitely hear someone—a male voice.
    “I’m not. The test is wrong!” The thick glass surrounding me muffled his pleading voice.
    I couldn’t tell where he was. Noises bounced around the quarantine facility’s cement and glass walls. I peered into the hall. The yellow glow of the security lights shining on the green hallway floor gave the room an odd, yellowish-green haze.
    The guy was still yelling, and the sound was getting louder. Shadows moved in the hallway, and my heart beat faster.
    “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. I’m not sick. The test is wrong. It’s wrong.” He was crying now.
    I jumped back from the glass, sucking in a breath, as a person moved out of the shadows. Another person came into view; three people followed. Two of the three were medical personnel. The third, a guy about my age, was being wheeled down the hall inside a Plexiglas container. He sobbed, his feet flailing against the sides. I recognized him—his observation room had been four rooms to the right of mine on the same side of the hall.
    The members of the medical team wore hazmat suits and breathing apparatuses. My hand flew to my mouth and I stumbled backward toward my bunk. He’d failed. His test results must have come back positive for the virus.
    Someone else in a hazmat suit moved to the glass of my isolation room, staring at me through the unreadable facemask. I instinctively took another step backward, tripping and falling onto my bunk with a grunt. Once they moved beyond the end of the row, I couldn’t see where they took the crying guy. His sobs grew fainter until I heard nothing but my own breathing.
    I sat on the edge of my bed, my heart beating so fast it hurt my ribs. I pushed my hair out of my eyes with shaking hands. I shoved them under my thighs on the mattress and forced myself to take deep, cleansing breaths.
    I sat on the bed for a few seconds, listening to my own overloud breathing and wondering what was happening to the boy, terrified that I’d be the next to be wheeled out in a plastic box. I ran into the bathroom, falling on my knees and sliding to the toilet before puking up the “tuna surprise” I’d forced myself to eat for dinner.
    Hanging over the toilet bowl, I said a silent prayer that my blood tests were clear and I wouldn’t be pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and hauled away to suffer God only knew what.
    And then I said a prayer for the guy who had been.

    Later that morning I was waiting at the glass wall when Kelly woke. She sat down across from me, dark circles ringing her eyes.
    The boy? I wrote.
    She nodded, her gaze darting to the room to the right of me.