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❝ Do we ever really get to go beyond the story we were born to? ❞ —Jane Mead, To the Wren
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I was speaking out of survival instinct when I agreed to Joseph's suggestion to avoid Showering Day. Which was easy to do when a fatal disease had just broken out. But when your scalp was itchy and your skin hadn't seen soap or clean water in two weeks, the temptation to go shower was harder to resist.
I counted the days by using Zoë's date of execution as reference point. It was the topic we both avoided talking about most, but an impossible one to ignore. She woke up every morning and used a nail and a rock to cross out one more day on the calendar she'd carved on her wall. As the number of dates uncrossed grew smaller than those marked with an X, my panic intensified.
Zoë insisted we kept Stella in the dark about the date, but somehow, she still managed to find out.
"Polly, is it true?" she had asked me one night. It was late, probably past midnight. The hallway was quiet as a cemetary, everybody snoring or talking in their sleep, and Zoë was thrashing in bed as she did every night. "That she's going to be . . . you know . . . on March 7th?"
My heart had sunk in horror. "Did Zoë tell you that?"
"No. That's what my guard Terence said."
"Listen, Stella—"
"You don't have to lie. I know that's the fate we're all going to meet someday. She just happens to be the first."
She'd shed no tears shed that night. The way Stella had talked about the execution had been unnervingly calm, the horror only an undertone to her voice, and I couldn't tell whether she was hiding how scared she really was or still thought of death as this distant reality. I had refused to believe the more disturbing possibility, that she knew how real our chance of dying was, and had grimly accepted it.
She's putting on an act, I had tried to console myself. Playing it tough. Doesn't want you to be scared.
But I could see into her brain. She didn't know how to hide her thoughts yet. The way she talked was artless, naive even. It bothered me. A twelve year older being unfazed about her death at the hands of an executioner was wrong in many ways.
