I ONCE THOUGHT that we could all be saved, that maybe we could escape or be liberated.
But I was wrong.
I was wrong about August, about the Doctors, and about The Choice. We had never had a choice, and never would have had a choice. It was all planned, every last event. Perhaps meeting August was planned, another move on the chessboard. The name for our home was ironic—Amenity. I once read that the word means "a desirable place." Nothing about that was desirable, we never signed up for that and we surely did not enjoy any of it.
I was brought on a bus to what looked to be a former Air Force base and instructed to wait in a room to be met by a doctor.
I wish I had know that the moment she walked in was the last time I would see Amenity, my friends, and in an odd, manipulative way, what had become my home.
The pain came next. Burning, aching, feeling like my ribs and heart were on fire. Then came screams, she had provided me with a mouth guard to bite down on, but I thought that was sick, so I endured it. I had heard the screams of other patients; children, the youngest being eight. Kids, teenagers, young adults. None of us deserved it, all we did was be born.
They say that all things happen for a reason, and I used to believe that, until reason had lost its meaning. The Doctors had thrown around the word like it was some badge of honor, like it meant something to be genetically impure. They had called us fighters, but not in the way that your parent does when you skin your knee, or you go through surgery and hospitalization, no.
In the way that frightened them. They had been afraid of how a bunch of kids could feel so much pain, physical and mental, and not give up. Perhaps it was that pain that fueled the rebellion, that fueled August,
That fueled me.
Everything they did to us was so inhumane and unfathomable that it was almost funny. The framework for our lives sounded like pages that had been ripped out of a horror novel, something my younger self would have laughed at it she heard it.
But that was our lives, and in the end, in some strange way, they had been worth living.
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Faultless: A Utopian Love Story
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