You Never Know Who to Trust

Cabin 27

  I found out the name of the girl
who was next to Ruby, Samantha. Ruby, Samantha—Sam—and I were all assigned to Cabin 27, along with the rest of the girls from our bus that were classified as Green. Fifteen in all, though by the next day, there were twenty more. They capped the number at thirty a week later, and moved on to filling the next wooden structure along the camp’s perpetually soggy and trampled main trail.

Bunks were assigned based on alphabetical order, which put Sam directly above Ruby—a small mercy, seeing as the rest of the girls were nothing like her. I was across from Ruby. They spent the first night either stunned into silence or sobbing. I didn’t have time for tears anymore. I had questions. Sam basically took Ruby and me under her wing.

“What are they going to do with us?” Ruby whispered up to Sam.

We were at the far left end of the cabin, their bunk wedged in the corner. The walls of the structure had been thrown together so quickly that they weren’t completely sealed. Every now and then a freezing draft and sometimes a snowflake whistled in from the silent outdoors.

“I dunno,” she said quietly. A few beds over, one of the girls had finally dropped off into the oblivion of sleep, and her snores were helping to cover our conversation. When a PSF had escorted us to our new residence, it had been with several warnings: no talking after lights-out, no leaving, no use of freak abilities—intentional or accidental. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone refer to what we could do as “freak abilities” instead of the polite alternative, “symptoms.”
“I guess keep us here, until they figure out a cure,” Sam continued. “That’s what my dad said, at least, when the soldiers came to get me. What did your parents say?”

My hands hadn’t stopped shaking from earlier, and every time I tried shutting my eyes all I could see were the white coat’s blank ones staring right back into mine.

The mention of my parents only made the pounding in my head that much worse.

I don’t know why she lied. It was easier, I guess, than the truth—or maybe because some small part of it felt like it was the actual truth. “Our parents are dead.”

She sucked in a sharp breath between her teeth. “I wish mine were, too.”

“You don’t mean that!"

“They’re the ones that sent me here, aren’t they?” It was dangerous, how fast her voice was rising. “Obviously they wanted to get rid of me.”

“I don’t think—” Ruby began, only to stop herself. Hadn’t our parents wanted to get rid of us, too?
“Whatever; it’s fine,” she said, though it clearly wasn’t and it wasn’t ever going to be. “We’ll stay here and stick together, the three of us and when we get out, we can go wherever we want, and no one will stop us.”

My mom used to say that sometimes just saying something aloud was enough to make it true. I wasn’t so sure about that, but the way Sam said it, the low burn beneath her words, made me reconsider. It suddenly seemed possible that it could work out that way—that if we couldn’t go home, I would still be all right in the end if I could just stick with her and Ruby. It was like wherever Sam went, a path opened up behind her; all Ruby and I had to do was stay in her shadow, out of the PSFs’ line of sight, and avoid doing anything that would call attention to us.

It worked that way for five years.
Five years feels like a lifetime when one day bleeds into the next, and your world doesn’t stretch any farther than the gray electric fence surrounding two miles of shoddy buildings and mud. I was never happy at Thurmond, but it was bearable because Ruby and Sam were there to make it that way. Sam was there with the eye roll when Vanessa, one of our cabinmates, tried to cut her own hair with garden shears to look more “stylish” (“For who?” Sam had muttered. “Her reflection in the Washroom mirror?”); the silly cross-eyed face behind the back of the PSF lecturing her for speaking out of turn yet again; and the firm—but gentle—reality check when girls’ (me included) imaginations started running too wild, or rumors sprung up about the PSFs letting us go.