The Normals | ✓

T H I R T Y - O N E

A R D E N

I’m ashamed to admit that I forget all about Arthemis as soon as I enter my room. I hadn’t eaten well during dinner and was too scared to ask if I could take the food back with me, so my stomach has been rumbling ever since then. Angelo gives me a small wrapped pastry he had swiped from the kitchens on his way back and I eat it hungrily. By the time we’ve turned off the lights and gone to our separate beds and I remember again, I’m pretty sure he’s already sleeping.

Although I do feel bad for Arthemis, I’m a little annoyed at her, to be honest. I listened to her and everything and she didn’t ask me once how I was feeling. It’s a difficult thing to be taken away from your family and friends without warning, and although I’ve made an effort to hide it, I still miss them a lot.

I wonder what my friends are going to do when my week of confinement ends and they come over and find I’m not there anymore. Maybe the people who took me away had the decency to go to their houses and tell them, although it probably won’t make much of a difference.

I find myself wondering if I’ll ever see them again. And my parents? What about them? I miss my family, even though I still can’t remember their names and I’ve been trying all day. I miss my friends, even if I can’t seem to conjure up their faces. I even miss--

No, don’t go there. She’s the reason you’re here. You don’t miss her, you miss the version you created in your head of her. The calm, sweet side. The one that would care for you and call you on the phone when you were sad. The one that would spend hours lying next to you because she didn’t want to leave you alone. That’s who you miss, not her.

I realize I’m crying the moment a quiet sob leaves my mouth. I clamp my hand over my face immediately, not wanting to wake Angelo up or to let him hear me cry, but I hear him stir and vaguely make out his form turning over to face me.

“You okay?” he asks softly.

“Yep,” I answer, but it does anything but sound convincing.

He shifts around again, and I can just see him getting out of his bed and walking over to me, crouching down in front of my face. “No you’re not.”

I let out an exasperated laugh. “There’s just a lot on my mind.”

“Tell me about it,” he says, sitting down on the end of my bed. “I could use a distraction.”

I sit upright, pushing the blankets down. “I don’t know. I just find it funny how I can’t even remember my family’s names and yet I miss them so much. And I just feel like the more I try to control things, the more out of control I feel.”

He nods his head. “I understand. I’ve changed so much and I haven’t even been here a week.”

Angelo then goes on to tell me about how he’s been doing here. He doesn’t remember if he had a sibling or not, and he barely remembers what area he used to live in, so when I ask him where his accent is from he doesn’t know. He tells me how when they were testing him the second day we got here, it went smoothly for him. He doesn’t know what they did, but when he opened his eyes after he felt fine. Calm, even. He tells me how they identified where the disease that sent him here is located. In one of his lungs, he says. They found it not long ago but he doesn’t know when, and was told it’s still in its early stages.

“In the Old Era, barely anyone with my disease would survive more than five years after they were diagnosed,” he says quietly. “Nineteen percent. Those aren’t very good odds.”

“But you’re here now,” I say. “They can fix people with diseases.”

“Not every time.”

We’re silent for a while, me giving him time to process it, and processing it myself. It must suck to have a timer on your life. But then I remember something I had overheard not long ago. It stands out among the rest of my blurred memories.

“There was a whole facility for people like me. They said we have a genetic mutation that makes us imperfect. Our whole point in life is to try to fix those mistakes before we’re twenty so we can live somewhere like, well… here.”

It’s Arthemis saying that. I don’t know who she’s talking to but the memory evokes a faint feeling of frustration. Maybe I had fought with her.

But the thing that I notice the most about what she says is the last sentence. What happens after we’re twenty? The sentence, plus the whole air about this place makes me uncomfortable. I may not know what happens after I turn twenty, but it’s even more of an incentive for me to leave before I get there.

Which, as my annoying mind reminds me, is in less than a year.

“How old are you?” I ask Angelo. He’s been quiet, staring out the window at the faintly lit courtyard.

He turns his head back to face me when I speak. “I’m not sure. I think I was close to some sort of big event in my life when I got here, but still a few months away.”

“Probably the same age as me then. Eighteen or nineteen.”

“That sounds about right.”

We talk for a while longer, telling each other everything we can remember about before we got here; whether it’s random memories or the first thing we had thought while waking up. He tells me about how he thinks he had lived in a different area of the world before ending up here but he can’t remember where or why he moved. I end up telling him anything I can remember about Arthemis, including the fact that I saw her earlier. I think I accidentally miss parts of her story and how we crossed paths (especially since I can’t, for the life of me, remember how we met) but I tell him anything that comes to mind and piece together a half-understandable story. By the time we remember we actually have stuff to do tomorrow, it’s already very late at night and Angelo goes back to his own bed quickly. We say goodnight and I let myself relax while feeling lighter and heavier at the same time. Some of the weight of my story has been transferred to Angelo’s shoulders, but some of his to mine. The bed feels harder than what I think I was used to, but I’m slowly getting the hang of things here.

In fact, it’s not as bad as I thought. There’s Angelo and there’s lots of other people like me who I can meet; I just need to find them. And it’s funny because I was feeling so lost these past few days, but now I feel like I could get accustomed to it.

This is my place. And I think it always has been.