This is what happens when the president sees in real time what it looks like when a young man spontaneously combusts. You stay put. You don’t leave those tents under any circumstances. You do as you’re told because you’re the problem, and the doctors and the men with guns are your only salvation.
That night we slept in cots in a tent marked DORMITORY. Clear orders stated that there was to be no “romantic canoodling,” but we were allowed to bunk down in coed configurations. So Tess was on one side of me and Dylan was on the other, and I held a hand each.
“How many times have they tested your blood?” Tess asked.
“At least four now,” I said. “Along with a CAT scan, an MRI, some X-rays. Then whatever the hell that thing was that they used on us today after . . . Harper.”
“What else can they find?” Tess asked. “What else can they do?”
“I didn’t get a close look at the waivers our parents signed,” I said. “Did it grant the doctors full and unfettered use of medieval torture devices on us?”
“The three of us are seventeen, right?” Tess said. “But there are eighteen-year-olds here. Their parents didn’t have the authority to sign them away like that.”
Dylan had been relatively quiet up to this point. “I suspect the waivers were bogus,” he finally said. “To make the parents feel like they have even a little bit of control over this situation. Which they don’t. The president is involved. That’s all we need to know.”
That’s when I lost it, giggling and making my cot rumble. “Did you see her face? Oh my God, that was priceless.”
“Shut up,” Tess whispered.
“What? Why? It was funny. The president said ‘oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Granted, it was quite a thing to witness, but—”
“Don’t you realize that Harper was my first?” Tess said.
“You slept with Harper Wie?” I asked.
“No, you idiot,” she said. “This was the first time I actually saw it happen.”
“I didn’t even see it because he was sitting behind me,” Dylan said. “Technically, I didn’t see Perry either. Just the commotion and the videos later.”
I didn’t really count Perry myself, but that still made this my fifth time. I’d seen more of these than anyone. I’d forgotten that. As much as this was a shared experience, I was the reigning champ of spontaneous-combustion-witnessing.
“Am I a horrible person?” I asked, because it was and still is a perfectly valid question.
“No,” Dylan said immediately.
It took Tess a bit longer to respond, but she finally said, “No.”
Which was quickly countered by a shouted “Yes! You are all horrible. And horribly loud. We are trying to sleep here!”
I knew that voice. It was Claire Hanlon, still the most annoying of my pre-calc compatriots. A fight with her could last all night and she did have a point. It had been an exhausting and emotional day.
After losing Harper, we’d all been whisked off to the HYGIENE tent, where we showered and put on clean robes—like a hotel, they seemed to have an endless supply. Then SEALs led us to the EXAMINATION tent, where five separate doctors asked us to list our sexual partners, to detail our daily diets and the consistency of our stool over the last few days, and then to go ahead and declare if we’d been bitten by any skunks, bats, or monkeys lately. Then the doctors told us to strip down—in privacy, thankfully—and step into a glass chamber that looked like the ones on game shows that blow tornadoes of cash around giggling contestants, only this one assaulted our body with strobe lights and a fine pink powder before smacking us with a blast of air that smelled vaguely of maple syrup. Next they covered us with electrodes, plopped us down on treadmills, and told us to walk for three hours, or fifteen kilometers, or until we collapsed. Whatever came first.
When the day was through, did the doctors tell us what they were looking for? Come on, don’t be so naive. They simply served us dinner, which consisted of pizza and a blue sludgy drink that was called a smoothie but tasted more medicinal than fruity. Then, in a fresh new communications tent, they showed us streaming video of our parents relaying their love and words of encouragement at a candlelight vigil that was being held along the electric fence.
Before lights out, the head doctor, a lanky woman known to us only as Doc Ramirez, assured the group. “We’re making progress. You’ll be home before you know it.”
So, yeah. Exhausting and emotional and Claire was right to be mad. We shut up and tried to sleep.