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regulations.”
    “Oh, come on,” Mfumbe scoffed. “You just want to shut us down. Admit it.”
    Kayla noticed the bar code on Mrs. Harmon’s wrist as she continued, “I’ll be frank with you. I personally think your cause is ‘much ado about nothing,’ to quote Shakespeare. Credit cards have tracked our movements now for a half century. Our medical records have long been computerized.”
    “Yeah, but then you knew who had your information and you had access to it. Now you don’t even know what they’re saying about you,” Zekeal insisted.
    “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” Coach Duggan said confidently.
    Mrs. Harmon turned to Coach Duggan. “I assume you will speak to your players about our policies regarding fighting in the halls.”
    “Definitely,” he promised, though Kayla doubted he’d say anything to them.
    “Now, please leave those papers here in my office before you leave,” Mrs. Harmon demanded.
    Mfumbe and Zekeal placed their disheveled pile on the principal’s desk. She gave them passes and instructed them to go to the nurse.
    “It stinks that you lost all your ’zines,” Kayla said once they were away from the office.
    Zekeal and Mfumbe grinned at each other.
    “What?” Kayla asked.
    The two of them turned and lifted the backs of their shirts. They’d jammed copies of KnotU2 into their pant waistbands.
    “Final level!” she cheered. Mfumbe and Zekeal held out their hands to her and she slapped them both.
    For the first time in a long time, she had a sense she belonged to something.

“Happy birthday to me,” Kayla muttered as she opened her eyes on Saturday morning. This was it. Seventeen, the big day.
    The phone rang. “Kayla, it’s Amber!” her mother called from downstairs.
    “I’ll be right there,” she yelled. With a sigh, she swung out of bed and down the stairs. “Hi, Amber,” she said, taking the phone from her mother.
    Amber sang a few quick bars of “Happy Birthday to You,” then got right to it, as Kayla suspected she would. “Okay, don’t thank me. Your papers have been filed by moi . You are about to become a code-carrying member of the adult world!”
    “You filed a bar code application for me?”
    In reply, Amber shrieked, a high-pitched hoot of excitement that made Kayla cringe. “I’ll be waiting for you outside my house. Be there at nine sharp.”
    Kayla hung up and looked at her mother, who sat at the table staring vacantly into her coffee. Her blankness told Kayla that she’d already taken some of the heavy-duty tranquilizer, Propeace, she’d been stealing from the hospital. She’d lose her job if she got caught. But that wasn’t the main thingworrying Kayla. Was this zombie the person her mother intended to be from now on? Did she plan to live the rest of her life on Propeace?
    “What’s up for you today?” Mrs. Reed asked as she continued staring into her cup.
    “It’s my birthday,” she said.
    Mrs. Reed glanced up, her eyebrows raised with a rare show of interest. “Oh. Happy birthday. Sixteen, right?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Whoops,” Kayla’s mom said with a dull, embarrassed laugh. “Time flies.”
    “Yeah,” Kayla said.
    Back in her bedroom, Kayla examined the delicate blue veins at her wrist. She picked a titanium nail file from her dresser and scratched in a bar code, digging deeply into her skin. A dot of blood blossomed out of a vein, making her cringe. How could such a small wound hurt so much? She clutched her wrist, pressing on the veins.
    She’d seen a girl in school who had an attempted-suicide scar across her wrists. The bar code tattoo reminded her of that scar. It was practically in the same spot.
    Why couldn’t she just get the bar code and not worry about it? Mrs. Harmon had called it “much ado about nothing.” Was she really making too much of it?
    Images of Zekeal and Mfumbe appeared in her mind. They were so confident they were right.What if they weren’t right, though?